Mammography for the size challenged!

I was reading an article somewhere a day or two back about one woman's difficulties in having her routine mammogram performed and it reminded me of a painful but hilarious experience of my own some years ago!

I have to begin here by explaining that I am somewhat 'challenged' in the breast department. I have run the gamut of 'fried egg' and 'pimple' jokes ever since the days in my adolescence when I kept waiting hopefully for my chest to expand to the impressive proportions of my contemporaries, but as the result of my being a gymnast it became patently obvious I would be waiting forever!

So, at age about thirty and being in a high risk group for a particular type of breast cancer - which seems somewhat unfair considering their lack of proportion - when I developed a lump the NHS swung into diagnostic action and off I was sent for a mammogram poste haste.

Now for those of you who are not familiar with this carry on, one is required to stand in front of a rather large (well it was in those days, they might have changed by now) machine, naked from the waist up, with the arm on the affected side raised above the head and the offending breast placed on a kind of 'plate', above which is the working part that takes the pictures. This I promise you is not an easy position to adopt in my case for the following reasons.

Firstly I was too bloody short - no surprise there then - and having adopted the prescribed position of torture it transpired that the distance between the ground and my breast was insufficient for me to actually get my breast where they needed it! I was shuffled and moved and poked by a very kind radiographer but to no avail, I was just not tall enough and in the end, with much apology, she asked me if I would be offended if she asked me to stand on a box! Hell no, I have been standing on boxes all my life, so off she went to find a box and came back with something plastic and officey looking and on it I got. Success, I was tall enough! Or so we thought.

But it was not to end there. The 'plate' on which I then had to 'display' my breast had markers on it, they are to assist the radiographer in lining up the camera so that suitable images can be obtained but my breast didn't even make it to the first marker and no amount of her maneuvering me would persuade it up to the starting line.

At this point the radiographer became a little embarrassed, she now had the probably usually unenviable task of telling her patient that her breast was effectively so small it was presenting a real logistical problem, but despite my stressed situation of facing the possibility that I had cancer, I couldn't help but find the whole issue hilarious.... and to her relief I began to fall about with laughter at what was rapidly turning into something akin to a slap-stick scene from a carry on film!

The ice was broken, I explained that I had no issue with being small chested and she had no need to spare my feelings or pussy-foot around me so off she went again and returned with a colleague who was apparently more practiced in this malarkey and who without compunction stood me on a book (it was a medical book so that was acceptable I assumed) ontop of the box, jammed the back of the plate to somewhere that felt it had entered my chest cavity and then manhandled my by now somewhat sore breast, with a severe degree of someone who knows that the job has to be done at any cost, into a position that she thought might do the trick. She warned me that this was going to be 'a little more painful than usual' ( I didn't know what usual was but hey)and then squished my offending body part, rapidly and without mercy between the plates and hit the 'go' button!

She wasn't wrong, it hurt like the very devil! I don't think it is ever comfortable but by her own admission she had to 'squish harder' than the norm to keep my bits in place and obtain her images. I have never had it done since and I don't relish having it done in the future, it was truly horrible but it was as funny as hell and the three of us finally finished up giggling like girls and with the required pictures successfully obtained.

I promise you, if you are breast tissue challenged this is something of an experience and not one for the faint-hearted, or at least it was in those days. Hopefully by now the procedures and equipment have evolved to include those of us who don't make it to page three status but as I near the age where this stuff becomes routine for me because of my risk levels I can't say I relish the thought, despite the amusement factor!