I don’t understand when American medicine became so accusatory.
“We HAVE to get answers to these questions legally.”
I’ve been trying to schedule today’s mammogram for awhile. Not a long while. I haven’t had insurance for a long while. Only six months. I make the mistake of volunteering this, my term of coverage.
“Why didn’t you get a mammogram before now?”
Please don’t @ me about resources for low income women like the tech did. As a former and always potentially low-income woman, I am abreast of the lip service services, community radiography and once-a-month take-all-comers. Like all former and always potentially low income women, I stay sharply aware of how few women who work for a living can afford-financially, temporally, existentially, personally- to spend a third Saturday of one-syllable-months queued up in a latter-day cosplay of Jackson’s The Lottery.
This contested appointment follows an order (written on papers which I brought with me) (also digitally submitted appropriately) for two forms of prophylactic diagnostic imaging: one mammogram (bilateral), and one ultrasound (bilateral).
I am forty-six. My last scan was ten years ago. The exact details can be found by stalking my Facebook, as it turns out. This isn’t that. This is just because I need to start having my tits scanned. Now that I live in this state. Now that I’m a wife. Responsible to a family. Now that my life matters beyond the extent to which someone else resents it.
Well, when has that not been true?
I have been to the gynecologist five times since I moved here in 2021. That is how bad I am at asking for preventive care. This May, I finally got a referral from Kaiser to go to a gynecologist. I got this scan referral at the same time.
One thing I don’t get in America is why my medical records aren’t effortlessly collated around my social security number, because my financial history sure is. Once upon a time claiming “technical impossibility” around this desperately needed feature flew. In the age of doxxing, it is less than literal garbage.
I got a phone call about this appointment last week. “Why are you getting a mammogram?” My gynecologist ordered one and my insurance approved it. “Yes but why?” I have breasts? “Is your doctor aware of your pain?”
My pain?
I was truly floored by this questioning. I had not reported pain. I understand the function of mammograms to be finding problems in the absence of pain. Hence their importance.
I suppose I sure have had some nerple sensitivity if you wanna know, as my menopause pads her way past peri into full fledge. I don’t think this tit test has much to tell me about menopause, however, and I cannot fathom why I’m being asked about pain I haven’t reported relative to a prophylactic exam.
Increasingly incapable of understanding the medical “tone du jour,” I hastily scan my potential responses and choose “Yes,” as being most likely to get me to the next stage of this labyrinthine, fucked fucking process. “Yes, he is.” I won’t belabor description because I guarantee if you are an American woman seeking care you get it.
I am wrong! They still want details. So I say it’s both nipples, five years.
They then harangue me for proof of my order, like, girl, you called ME! How do you think I got on your list? I send moar pictures. I bring the order in anyway.
It’s for a mammogram and ultrasound, since I have fibrous breasts. “You said you had pain!” You said I had to to get the scan!
“You said your last scan was 2013!” I am not looking at whatever answers I gave to your intrusive and mandatory software app because they are verifiable as opposed to anecdotally accurate bitch I don’t fucking remember!
Whatever. I don’t even care. I wouldn’t even treat it anyway.
That’s true. I do this test because the people in my life care and have their own ideas about what is sacred and what is tolerable and what is worth surviving.
I love my breasts. If they suffer some incontrovertible gaffe of production and seek to replicate themselves a la corrupt gene, I mean….they’ve earned it. As of today I remain profoundly and historically disinterested in mastectomy, chemotherapy, radiation, or really any other surgical or chemical resection of my oxytocin pouches.
Even if they’re gonna kill me.
Thanks tho.
Why can’t I say that? Why is that outcome totally prohibited in nasty, busybody, inexpert, money grubbing American medicine? My woman bits are so valuable. If only we could agree why.
As images indicate, I was in this place for two scans. One of which I asked about during my surly tech’s intro:”I’ll be performing your mammogram.”
And will you be performing my ultrasound too? “We will ask the radiologist if you need an ultrasound.”
My doctor ordered an ultrasound. “But if you don’t have pain they don’t know what to look for.” Absolute triumph gleaming in her eyes.
She leaves me in the room in the chair not sure what to pray for. That there’s a problem and she’ll have to start taking me seriously, or she won’t because there isn’t.
Spoiler alert I’m fine, or at least my three loosely clamped breast snappies are. Until next year. I guess. They didn’t do the ultrasound.
They make you lock your valuables in this programmable locker which of course would not open when I returned to it. There’s a hinge on the keypad over the hashtag I left unhung. When I came back to the locker, that switch was engaged. Therefore my pre chosen code did not work.
I flagged a passing radiologist. Her ease with fixing the problem says to me y’all need a better system.
. . . .oxytocin pouches. . . that is so sexy!