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Last week I had my first mammogram (routine for age 35, if you had a family member with breast cancer–maternal grandFATHER for me, oddly enough). Now I know why women all over the world have to be encouraged so hard to get them done.

I’m not terrifically well endowed in that area to begin with. It’s the one part of me that hasn’t gained significant weight since high school. Then, apparently, I got scheduled for exactly the wrong time of the month. I avoided caffeine for the two weeks prior, but I don’t see how it could possibly have been that much more painful had I been taking it. I think it’s an old wives tale, personally, that caffeine makes mammograms more painful…I think it has far more to do with size and time of the month.

Now picture taking some soft part of your body and clamping it in a vice, tightening it down until the pain is such that, had you done such a thing accidentally, you probably would have headed straight for the emergency room. Which was ironic, since I was about two doors down from one. Now repeat three times. Good thing for guys they don’t use this method for testicular cancer (I hope, anyway. ;)

The one bit of good news, the booby prize, as it were, is that they can now release the machine remotely as soon as they’re done taking the image. Must have sucked when you had to stand there while they walked back and uncranked the machine.

I don’t want to discourage people from having mammograms, because prevention has saved a lot of lives. But damn! I wish some other method were as cheap and effective, but not as painful. I’m glad I’m not due for another one until age 40.

BTW, it was negative. Negative in the sense of lack of bad stuff, not in the sense of being sick. It’s almost like a double negative (I don’t got no cancer). I’m reading Guy Deutscher’s ” The Unfolding of Language: An Evolutionary Tour of Mankind’s Greatest Invention”, which is making me more sensitive to why we say things certain ways.

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