Had my first mammogram today. Apparently when you reach 'that certain age' one of the rights of passage is to have your tits squashed by a rotating machine in a cold room. I personally think that the Sweet Sixteen party is a helluva lot better, but hey, aging ain't for sissies. I've been told that if you take a boob and close a door on it a few times, that approximates the mammogram experience, so I wasn't really looking forward to it at all.
Anyhow, it was a strange strange experience. I was invited from the busy waiting room into a tiny dressing room with doors on either side by a guy and told to 'take off everything above the waist'. The guy left, and I commenced disrobing and then went through the second door (not the one into the hallway, obviously). It's a very strange, disorienting and slightly dreamlike feeling to walk through a door into an unknown and previously unseen space with no shirt on. I mean, who knows what is on the other side? There could be an auditorium full of people, or it could be a door to the outside that locks behind me and there I am, holding my boobs in my hands, wondering what the hell happened? As it is, it was freaky enough to walk through a door into this unknown room knowing that there was probably a guy in there and here I was, half naked and with my clothes in the other room.
Well, I 'nutted up' and went through the door to be met by that guy, and there in front of me was the mammogram machine I had heard so much about. It didn't look too threatening. I mean, there weren't any severed boobs laying around, no lost nipples, no blood, no passed out or hyperventilating women. Nope, just a silvery machine and me. So I approached it and the guy gently grabbed a boob and hoisted it onto the metal plate for the first of four mammograms.
Now, really. What kind of job is that? Boob lifter. All day long, you grab boobs and hoist them onto a tray and then squash them. You either have to really LOVE boobs or really HATE boobs to do that all day long. The only job that is worse would have to be being a gyno or a proctologist/urologist. Seriously. Boobs. Boobs boobs boobs all day long.
Anyhow, he had a very gentle touch, and I didn't find the exam to be at all uncomfortable, in fact, I wonder if he squashed hard enough, actually. It was kind of funny to look down and see my tit through the clear plastic 'boob smasher plate' all elongated and pointy, and I remember thinking that this was just not dignified at all, really.
Anyhow, my girls got squooshed vertically and then horizontally, and then he told me I could go. I was all, "Hey, that's not bad at all", and then he said "You'll get the results in a week or so".
OH, yeah. I forgot what this was all about. Breast cancer. Shit. Not really a humorous experience at all, but rather a dead serious and possibly life saving exam. Fuck.
I hope the results come back ok. I mean, I don't have any reason to think they won't, but then, some of my friends didn't either, did they?
Umbrellas outside the Vatican, Rome. We went to Rome last May (has it almost been a year already?) and I loved loved loved Rome and so want to go back. I will, however, avoid the Vatican next time. Once is enough. WAY too crowded. It was also raining like a motherfucker when we went, and I have never stood outside in rain for that long, ever.
The Grim Reaper outside the Castello in Rome. I tried not to take it as an omen. Anyhow, I'm still here..... so far so good. His plastic kiddy pitchfork didn't exactly instill fear.
Play of light on the organ pipes at Sagrada Familia in Barcelona. The colors were so beautiful they way they played off the metal and the windows.
Some joker thought it would be cool to carve the Texas A&M logo on a pillar at the Coliseum, Rome. Seriously? Jeez. That pillar has been there thousands of years, seen untold history and horrors and joys, and some yutz had to add the AGGIE symbol to the marks of yore?
