Dial 'M' for Mammogram

By Jenny Ryan - 25/02/2008

I have recently been the lucky recipient of a mammogram.  This is not an upmarket kissogram involving a hard-up student dressed as our sovereign lady - or her late mother, may she rest in peace.  No, not quite as much fun as that.  But nearly.

The letter offering an appointment at my local hospital arrived a few weeks back - like a passport to all the pitfalls of being past it.  I feel I should now be examining the latest research on HRT and the possible health benefits of oil of evening primrose.  I should be developing an interest in the maintenance of bone density, be able to converse on any from a broad raft of ailments in waiting rooms of one kind or another and be fond of Alan Titchmarsh and Daniel O’Donnell.

As we all know, we are programmed, in the face of adversity, either to fight or flee.  My first instinct, in the case of the proffered mammogram, was to flee.  I searched the Internet for evidence that these scans were positively dangerous.  Alas, I found none.

So, spurred on by plucky Pat in the office who had “been there and done that” and pronounced it a piece of cake but, on the other hand, somewhat swayed by sister who had chickened out of her appointment, convinced the experience would be worthy of the urgent attention of Amnesty International, I presented myself at the appointed hour: 10.36 - which was odd in itself.

Notwithstanding the suggestion here that there would be a very fast-moving conveyor belt system through which dozens of bare-chested women would pass per hour, like so many lumps of dough being flattened into factory produced pizza bases, I suspected I would nonetheless have to wait for hours.  So, having recently finished my latest read, I went to select a new book from the shelves.  Private Eye’s Bumper Book of Boobs suggested itself as being the most appropriate for the occasion.  However, on reflection, I chose instead a Virago edition of Vita Sackville-West’s All Passion Spent – which I felt might be even more so.

The other ladies present were immaculately made-up, with hair exquisitely sculpted.  I had opted for the following “look”: a Sandy Shaw hair-do (fringe in eyes), fraying denim skirt with colourful scarf round waist (suggesting wearer shopped in souk in Marrakesh), leggings, knitted-these-myself-from-Peruvian-vicuña-wool socks, a distressed blue sweatshirt, and no make-up, revealing in full technicolour a blotchy acne-like condition sadly returned, as it does at times of hormonal upheaval or stress, to do an impression of the Indonesian archipelago all over my face, my message to the world being, “I’m an ageing hippy Earthmother type, free from artificial additives – give me a tofu burger with seaweed and brown rice, hold the egg-free mayo and save the whales”.

Confronted by this vision, the receptionist remained impassive, decidedly unimpressed, sizing me up as I extracted my 10.36 appointment letter from between the conifer green covers of All Passion Spent.  She confirmed my birth date, in tones loud and shrill, with a look that said: “Get your sagging Saga holiday ass over there with the others and wait.  By the way, they sunk the Rainbow Warrior.  Did no-one tell you?”

“Mrs or Miss?” she enquired, with cool professionalism.

“Ms” I replied, in a last gesture of defiance.

I took a seat.  Two ladies next to me were already bonding in menopausal sisterly solidarity and within about a minute and a half had covered hysterectomy, prostate cancer and lesions on the bladder.  Piped music, of a non-descript, Sofa World Superstore type seeped insidiously through the walls.  But then, seemingly as a sop to those of us reluctant to leave our youth behind, we were treated to Van Morrison’s Brown-Eyed Girl.  

 

I did so feel like doing a mad tarantella around the waiting room tables - tables liberally supplied with piles of leaflets on loss of libido, mild urinary incontinence and hot flushes.  Everything you never wanted to know and hadn’t the slightest desire to ask.

Before long, Mrs Harvey and Mrs Ryan were called.  Two women got up and advanced towards the inner sanctum.  I stayed where I was - being Ms.  It occurred to me that the chances of my test results being my own had suddenly severely diminished.  After all, at the hospital where the firstborn first drew breath, he once spent a night in the baby dormitory.  When they brought him back in the morning he had changed sex and was later identified as Jessica Ryan. 

 

Had Jessica’s mother given birth to a boy and neither of us got round to selecting a name, they would both, no doubt, have been labelled “Baby Ryan” and I would quite possibly have spent the last eighteen years bringing up a changeling, since the babes, in their hospital tops, did actually look very alike.  Come to think of it, with the exception of the Indonesian archipelago, with which we are both afflicted, we don’t look at all alike, myself and the lad.  But I digress.

When it was the turn of Ms Ryan, immediately after Mrs, I am pleased to report that any fears about pain and suffering were to prove needless, not to say wimpish.  You simply present your assets to a business-like, no nonsense nurse who efficiently positions them on a sort of baconslicer-like piece of equipment, instructs you to avert your gaze and then brings down part C to meet part A while you, part B, are sandwiched in the middle. 

 

The sensation this produces, however, is no more severe than you would get in a huddle of commuters during a rush-hour on the London Underground from Liverpool Street to Euston Square when you are crushed between the doors and eight times more commuters than the Health and Safety Executive would deem acceptable – the only difference being that the mammogram lasts ten seconds rather than ten minutes and it doesn’t hang around at King’s Cross.

Jenny Ryan