PRESS ON | Rebecca Efroymson
I arrive for my fall mammogram and Pap. The leaves smear across the parking lot, the same happy color as the blood-orange building. The technician calls my name and is back down the hall before I’ve risen to follow. She is brusque and rehearsed and offers fewer than a dozen words about changing into the gown, wiping off deodorant and avoiding x-rays if pregnant. Then she's calling me into the room and raising the platform so I won’t have to hunch over. And she’s saying push your shoulder down and she starts and stops and takes a half minute to change the platform to a smaller size paddle. And I know it's due to there not being much to grab hold of because my chest never extruded itself into a real breast.
Then she's asking if I care which side is first, and I wonder why anyone would care, and she is not used to anyone pausing to consider the question. Then she's asking me to take my arm out of the gown, and everything is hanging out because with two limbs down at my sides there’s not even an elbow left to hold the gown closed. And she is shoving me onto the platform as a baker might fit that one last half roll at the edge of the pan. And then I steel myself as the machine whirrs and the paddle comes down and down. But it never clamps because there’s a clunk and silence and blackness. And then a few lights. She is asking me if I am OK, and I am asking her if she is OK, irrationally.
She says it must be the squirrels again.
Again. How often do those squirrels travel along the wire to hide the red oak nuts? How often do they climb onto transformers or capacitors? How often does the power fail when the paddle is coming down like a trash compactor in the movies? How often do the paddles clamp on and on like a vicious dog? How close was I to losing a breast?
I ask if the clamp would have disengaged, and she says there must be a release. A few minutes later she mumbles there must be a release. She says she will check.
A few days later I arrive for my mammogram and Pap. The leaves smear across the parking lot, the same color of the blood-orange building. The technician is friendly, handing me the gown. If I don’t wipe off the deodorant, she says, the radiologist may think I have calcifications. She does not ask about the x-rays or pregnancy; she asks my age instead. Then she's calling me into the room and raising the platform and saying hunch over, that she’ll do the left side first. And she starts and stops and makes eye contact with me and points to the platform and says Dolly Parton before detaching it and screwing on the small one.
Then she's asking me to take my arm out of the gown, and she's bringing the clamp down gently, but she can’t get the view. Hunching usually works she says, but not for you, so she turns the platform diagonally to the side. And then I steel myself for the clamp coming across and across and there’s a whirring and pressure and, finally, relief.
***
Three years later I’m there and the building is painted gray and I drive right by it. I don’t see the season. But I can see the artwork in the inner waiting room even before I enter. It’s in my head. The painting of three women with turbans and no hair. Pencil-thin eyebrows or maybe just pencil. They stare at me with necks narrow and ostrich-like and longer than their heads. A smidge of lipstick sits on their tiny, pursed lips with dark red double curves on the upper ones. They are expressionless. Their necks broaden slightly into shoulders, no shadows of bones, no cleavage. The painting ends too high on the torsos to tell if breasts remain or what they look like. In the changing room are four framed pictures of paper doll outfits, all on tiny wire hangers. All are curvy and bodyless.
The technician calls me into the room. She is friendly. She reads her notes and uses the smaller paddle. The machine is going to go up, she says. Point your feet toward the machine. Relax the death grip, she says. Are you OK? Breathe normally, she says. Turn your head to the left. Are you OK? Hold your breath. I really like your boots, she says.
It should take half as long as it used to. I have half as many breasts. But she wants more views of the one I have left so the time and effort and breaths are sort of the same as they were.
I get through it. I feel it all. Nothing is crushed for long.
Rebecca Efroymson, a writer of creative nonfiction, is based in Asheville, North Carolina. She lives a double life, clinging to her federal environmental science career, with its wonderful people, in these challenging times. She has been in the care of physicians and physical therapists on many occasions and incorporates science in much of her work. She received the Leslie Garrett Award for Literary Fiction from the Knoxville Writer’s Guild. She grew up in Philadelphia and its suburbs and has a BA in biology and English from La Salle University and an MS and PhD in environmental toxicology from Cornell University.