June 11, 2022 And They Don’t Stay Like Pancakes

We all go about our day, juggling personal and professional obligations; popping on and off Zoom calls, all the while doing laundry EVERY SINGLE WEEK😱 (ever notice that before you even turn around, the hamper is full???!!—has it been a week already?) shopping for food; answering emails; cutting cats’ toenails; buying birthday cards; killing the mealy bugs on plants with Q-tips soaked in rubbing alcohol; vacuuming hair balls… you get my drift. And unless we have a tooth problem, a headache or backache, we don’t spend much time thinking about our health – until

We go for our annual mammogram.

I’m not to riff about how insane a mammogram is— how people will look back in a hundred years, (the way we look back at trepanation — the drilling of a hole into the skull to release demons) and think the idea of placing a breast on a platform and lowering a plastic plate on it to press down and spread the tissue, was utterly insane, The definition of torture.  Putting that aside, every year, on the day of my scheduled mammogram/sonogram, I start thinking about how I’ve taken life for granted. That in the bat of an eye, one can go from “happily” running around dealing with the day-to-day hullabaloo, to having that all fall away, like the portrait filter on an iPhone.

Especially if you have “dense breasts.”

Thankfully, I got through another year with no problems. But for those minutes when either I have to wait for a result; or they call me back in to do another exam because my breasts are so dense; or when I have the “easier” part, the sonogram of my breasts, and the technician goes over one spot repeatedly and for too long and I know she’s found something; I wish I incorporated gratitude in my life even more than I have. Because everything can change in less than a moment. So, I guess, we must be grateful even for mammograms. Though torturous, they help us stay alive.

This has been a public service reminder to take time to be grateful. However tough some days may be, truly they are the best of our lives. And our breasts don’t stay like pancakes.