Tag: mammography

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An October Reminder

get your mammogram

{{Breast Cancer Awareness Month}}

~reminding my friends~

I finally got my cycle of mammograms to October, the most popular month to get a mammogram! I took a half day, and at first didn’t make the connection – – I wondered why the lobby was more crowded than I’d ever seen it. Then I remembered: it’s Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Everybody’s here for the squeeze.

But I’m completing the whole triathlon. I’m getting bloodwork, having the mammogram, and having a colonoscopy all in the first two weeks of the last quarter of the year.

When I finished my annual screening with close to 30 pounds of pressure on each side top to bottom and sideways (according to the digital readout), I had the strangest urge to go celebrate with a pancake breakfast. Instead, I thought about my recent bloodwork and the results that my sugar should be considered before making any spontaneous breakfast moves. Once I’d removed the gown and gotten my girls repositioned and safely strapped back into their carseats under my shirt for their travels through the day, the mammographer thanked me for coming, giving me a pink cup to help me carry the message.

This coming week, I’ll take the table for the other end and take a nice nap while the nature walk for polyps commences. I’ll try not to dwell on last year’s trip along Route 66, where we stopped in Missouri at the Uranus Fudge Factory. I’ll think instead on the first time I had a colonoscopy and decorated my @$$. And at all costs, I’ll resist the urge to stop for fudge on the way home. (And for the record, I do not want a brown mug from the Colonoscopy Department to match the pink one from the Mammography Department in the picture above).

To all my friends and readers: get your tests done, and try to find a way to make the dreaded medical visits we put off a sparkly checklist accomplishment.

Onward!

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Mammogram Day! Pick Up the Phone to Schedule Yours!

Yesterday I shared about switching veterinarians to avoid having to drive out of our own county to get shots for our dogs. Mammograms, though, still require a drive. We don’t have a mammography facility in our county.

The Squeeze

So once a year, I drive a half hour one county to our south and plop the girls on the cold machine to be pressed flat like hot paninis in an iron press at 90 and 45 degree angles – top to bottom and side to side -and imaged for a health inspection. And the drive isn’t bad. It’s not all that ironic that I drive across two large hills to get there, and one is so tall that no one on a cell phone can get over it without dropping the call. I park and enter the hospital, where I already have my driver’s license and insurance card in hand for the paperwork. I get my plastic ID bracelet and then go down to Radiation and Imaging, where I check in and change into a flowery cape that opens in the front.

When I’m changed, I step into the next room for the procedure. This is the reason I always switch to decaf coffee two weeks before coming, and the reason I take Evening Primrose – – to lessen the pain of the fibrocystic tissue that is aggravated by caffeine and eased by the primrose capsules.

I always leave wanting pancakes after this procedure, simply because that’s what comes to mind. I think that IHOP should e-hop on board and partner with preventive breast screening marketing by giving women a free pancake breakfast once a year after enduring the double-digit pounds of compression. Surely they could come up with a new pancake to help support breast cancer research. We could scan our hospital bracelets for the free pancakes and sit in silence, sopping them around in the syrup as we recover from the stress of it all, sipping decaf.

Have you had your mammogram this year? If not, it’s time to schedule it!