The Great Mammogram Festival of 2012

I went for my first ever mammogram this week, and my first reaction was "Meh - not so bad." The center was a nice place, kind of soft woods and pink and mellow with new agey music playing. If you aren't weirded out by an elderly-ish woman man handling your boobs a lot you'll probably live.
I can see why some people say it hurts. It didn't hurt ME but I think my boobs were mightier than the machine. There is simply only so flat boobs this big will go. So they said they'd contact me in about 10 days and were very nice, even though they had to take EXTRA pics to get all of my boobs in the machine.
I chalked that up to awesome.

However, they called me the next day. And wanted to see me TODAY.

So today I went and learned that they weren't entirely happy with my mammogram as I had an area in my left breast that was so dense they couldn't quite see what was happening. They showed me the mammogram and I totally wanted to snap a pic of it for you guys but that seemed uncool, and when they left the room - they took i off the monitor so I couldn't do it then either.

But, looking at the mammogram, my first reaction was WELL YOU HAVE TO CUT ALL OF THAT OUT because it looked like some hideous, soon to kill me sort of mass. But she explained that serious density looks white like bone and not to freak (too late).

So we did some different kind of ultrasound that wasn't as easy peasy as the first one, more squishy and slightly hurty.

After that, they sent me out to this sort of waiting room area with lots of other ladies in pink robes, also waiting. I learned from them that if "the radiologist comes in, it's bad news." Right about that point, the radiologist came from one of them and she burst into tears.

Everyone in the room was in a weird sort of freak out. It was so odd. There was tea and snacks and coffee, and we're all wearing these pink robes like a cult, waiting to hear if we've got cancer or what is up. Strange sisterhood for sure. Some of them had cancer before, and now were back because something new had shown up. I felt a lot better at that point, the unknown seemed less scary than being pretty sure the bad thing was there.

Then a new lady came in and called my name to come back for an ultrasound because they STILL couldn't see. The ultrasound lasted over an hour. They found two spots, round and small - less than 1cm (I watched them measure) and lots of nothing otherwise. I swear to you, they took like 50 pictures. Eventually my back started to ache and the arm over my head was going numb. When she let me let me be done and sit up, I sat and again wished she'd left the images up so I could snap one. But she didn't so I just sat there and read email.

She came back, WITH THE RADIOLOGIST.

This was the scary bit, because the conversations around me were "This is the first one, this is the second one, here is the first one, here is the second one." I lay there while they did the ultrasounds starting all over again, looking at everything again with him watching the machine live instead of looking at stills.

After they got done, he told me that he felt like it was a duct, or a fatty deposit or a cyst and didn't look worrisome as they didn't see blood going to it. However, I have to go back in six months to make sure "nothing changes".

That's kind of disconcerting.

My diagnosis "probably benign."

That is just shy of "not benign and will in fact kill you" so, I am going to give my doctor a couple of days to get the results and then I want to talk to him. Probably benign isn't really good enough to me. I want to hear THIS IS BENIGN AND WILL NOT KILL YOU WE PROMISE which is not what they said.

So, I guess they're going to have to find a way to say that.

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