Cymbalic

What would you do if you had flippers coming out the front of your chest, about the size and shape of the head of a tennis racquet? How might you use these flippers if you could?

These are some of the thoughts I had as my boobs were squished beneath a piece of plexiglass, flattened and stretched beyond recognition, making them appear alien and surreal. Unfortunately, they haven’t any muscles or bones with which to move them around, otherwise, I might have had two interesting rudders coming out of my chest.

Boobs kind of feel like water balloons to me, and water balloons are a bit fragile, so for the last two weeks I’ve been having nightmares that the mammogram would rupture my girlies. I envisioned my nipple and areola ripping off and shooting across the room, essentially springing a leak, and booby water pouring out until it was completely drained and flaccid. It’s rather weird that somewhat the opposite happened. Instead, they seemed to inflate. I had no idea that when you press them that thin, they’d keep expanding like dough and turn into something from a sci-fi movie.

I asked Boyfriend Extraordinaire which direction he would prefer my squished boobs to be: horizontal or vertical. He voted for vertical. I thought that was interesting, but then I realized it was more practical. With two fleshy cymbals coming out of my chest, I could clap or press them together. If they were horizontal, they’d just flap up and down independently. From a man’s perspective, I can see his point.





(Boyfriend Extraordinaire suggests that these doodles should be submitted to Boob Overload, which was a joke and a parody of Cute Overload so I didn't think it existed, but evidently it does.)

The good news is that the mammogram revealed that the nodule had nothing concerning in it, so they did an ultrasound, which revealed that the nodule had some kind of membrane, but was composed of the same tissue that the rest of the area is made from. What does this mean? Well, after an hour of people squeezing, stretching, flopping, and rubbing lubricant on my boob and armpit, they decided that whatever it is, it’s not a tumor and I should go home and be grateful. Given the amount of pain that this little nodule causes, I was not pleased with this outcome. Pain is an indicator of something being wrong. Now I have to figure out where to go with this lack of information.

I’m wondering something, too. Why is it when something goes wrong with our health, the tests and treatments are always painful and humiliating? Why is it no one gets sick and the cure is to eat lots of dessert while getting a foot massage, your hair washed, and your ears Q-tipped? No, that’s never going to cure anything. You’re going to have to strip naked and wear a wrap dress made of cheap napkins. Then you have to flash private parts at people who will treat your exposed areas as if they are some kind of scientific experiment. (Why can’t someone just say, “Hey, nice rack!” and make me feel a little better?) Then you have to take medications that will give you symptoms of other problems. All the while it will cost you a fortune in medical bills for office visits, tests and medications. You don’t want me to remind you of all that I had to go through with my hemorrhagic periods, poly-cystic ovaries, and the ovarian tumor, because that set of humiliations was simply horrific. Nothing involving illness ever ends up making you feel good about yourself or your situation. Medicine sucks.

Speaking of which, my wonderful, brilliant rheumatologist wants to do what the very bad rheumatologist I used to have wanted to do, which is start me on a chemotherapy medication to shut off my immune system. Long-term use of this medication can actually cause cancer, specifically lymphomas, in addition to making the user dangerously susceptible to all infections around due to the lack of immune defense. I have the prescription in my purse, but I can’t bring myself to fill it. Tomorrow I’ll give her a call and see if she will change my therapy. I just can’t do this to myself, particularly with some kind of growth in my breast that no one can identify. Cells mutate, fact of life, I know. I don’t want to be the perfect environment for them to grow into big, healthy tumors, like some kind of human Petri dish to incubate monsters. Why I feel guilty about this, I don’t know. It’s as if I feel compelled to obey my doctor, to be a compliant patient who does what she’s told and doesn’t question those who are more knowledgeable. But I’m not going to take that medication, and I don’t care if that makes me a bad patient.

Particularly because I have something in my booby! When you have something in your booby, it changes things.

Maybe it’s a creature.

Maybe it’s some kind of alien tracking device.

Maybe I’m growing a third boob. Maybe I’ll grow boobs all around my ribcage! I’ll have a veritable hoop of boobage going all the way around me! Excellent! Then I can get mammograms on all of them so that they get squeezed into vertical cymbals and I’ll clap them all together and sound like an applauding audience all by myself.

DUDE! Imagine the possibilities if I did porn! I could make a bloody fortune! With six or eight boobs, I’d be like the female version of Ron Jeremy.

Someone get me an agent! Someone get me a manager!

Someone get me a seamstress.

Symantics

Lump. It’s sounds like a silly word, doesn’t it? You could say the word “lump” in front of a 4-year-old, who would waste no time repeating it, to test the effect of uttering the weird, new word, and only about three utterances would lead to it sounding completely nonsensical in your own ears. It just doesn’t add up to its meaning.

Now nodule sounds so much more compelling. It’s almost science-fiction-esque and requires much more effort to enunciate correctly, with your lips moving all over when you say it. It has a certain panache about it, above a layman’s term, but not so highbrow that you don’t use it when necessary. It befits its meaning.

Which is to say that having a nodule in my left breast is a little science-fiction-esque and requires effort to say aloud, but I can say it because it carries the appropriate weight.

We (my doctor and I) have comfortably accepted that it is likely a swollen lymph node or a cyst, but the diagnostic mammogram in two weeks will tell us more. There’s no history of breast cancer in my family and I’m much younger than any doctor would even start to test. This is compiled on top of the fact that it’s actually located about six inches down from the center of my armpit, technically on the side of my breast, and not only is it extremely painful to the touch, but it’s shaped like a soft grape. Each menstrual cycle sees a small increase in size and discomfort, which means it’s being effected by hormone levels. Yeah, well, what isn’t?

I’m not afraid of the nodule, but I am afraid of what they’re going to do with it.

First they’re going to stretch my tit across a plexiglass surface, compress it in a vice grip, and take fucked-up black and white pictures of it. If that doesn’t sound like some warped fetish shit, I don’t know what does. I have D-cups, and during certain days of the month, my D-cups runneth over. I have a feeling that this exercise in body contortion is not going to be pretty for me. My girls are not accustomed to this kind of abuse, and I fear for their recoverability.

According to the radiology center’s website, depending on what they see at the time of the mammogram, they could actually do a biopsy or aspiration right there, at the same time, if they felt it was prudent.

Lovely.

Grab a big, fat needle, shove it into this extremely tender growth in my boob, and suck stuff out. I’m thinking I’m going to take some of my Vicodin-ES pills leftover from my dental work while I’m in the waiting room.

Then what? What’s really scaring me here?

What I can’t seem to stop thinking about is if this has to be surgically removed, then I’ll have this painful stitching at the backside of my boob, where the side of my bra wraps around my ribs. What if they tell me I can’t wear a bra for a while? What if I am not allowed to use deodorant until it heals completely? What if I have to stop shaving my pits temporarily?

DEAR FLYING SPAGHETTI MONSTER, I will be just like one of my stinky, braless, hairy patrons!

*runs screaming around in circles*

At least I’ll fit in then.

Nodules: the great equilizers.