Pictures of Health

According to ancient female wisdom,  a woman waiting for a period that’s late to arrive will be aware of an unusually large number of babies. Postponing a mammogram may create a similar effect: Every other headline I see in the weeks before I schedule my mammogram seems to have something to do with breast cancer. I read, for instance, that anxiety is linked to breast cancer—which makes me more anxious, until I read another study debunking the link. Breast cancer screening comes up in an early presidential candidate debate and again when John Edwards drops out of the race, his own wife’s breast cancer now classified as incurable. I read about new research into an alleged connection between incandescent lighting and breast tumors—and then turn off all the lights. I hear about “mammogram parties,” where groups of friends schedule their appointments en masse and later relax with a glass of wine and an Advil. Unfortunately, when I propose this safety-in-numbers strategy to friends who also turn forty this year, they tell me that mammogram and party are two words they’d rather not hear in the same sentence. Which is how I now feel about the phrase breast compression.

“The way the equipment is set up, you have to pull the breast away from the chest a little bit in order to see it,” says the U of M’s Tim Emory, who’s also a radiologist at the clinic where I eventually make my appointment. “It’s a balance between getting the highest-quality image with the least radiation exposure and not hurting anyone too much.”

Mammography is not a perfect tool: One-fourth of all breast cancers are discovered through breast examinations alone and don’t show up on a mammogram. Magnetic resonance imaging is another screening technology that women may be reading about lately, but, because of its high false-positive incidence, the American Cancer Society recommends an annual breast MRI only for women who know they have a greater than 20 percent lifetime risk of contracting the disease. For someone like me—a first-timer in her early forties—and those under age fifty or with dense breast tissue, digital mammography is considered the best tool, somewhat more sensitive than high-quality film-screen mammography in detecting cancer.

“You all ready?” the technician asks when I walk in, wearing jeans and a hospital gown—sadly, not the premium waffle-weave robe I hear is part of the trend to make breast-imagining centers more like spas. Oh, well. Though her hands are cold, the tech’s demeanor is warm as she adjusts me to the equipment. She asks me to grab a small handle, lean forward, lift my chin, and put my breast onto a glass sheet that really doesn’t seem suited for the purpose. “Ow! Ow!” I say to myself as the top half of the machine comes down on me like a panini press. But before I get to the third “Ow!” the pressure subsides, and we move on to the next image. She takes four images, two of each breast from different angles. After a quick check of the images on her monitor, she tells me I can go. 

“That’s it?” I ask. Three minutes have elapsed, according to my watch. Three minutes, five months, and thirteen days.

A week later, I receive a letter from the lab saying everything looks fine, and, for the first time in five months, I stop thinking about it.

Says Emory, “That’s really what you get for your money and your trouble by getting a mammogram every year”—a better chance at a longer life, a little peace of mind, more time to worry about other things. And he’s right, of course. It’s such a good return on a three-minute investment that I know I won’t postpone my next one.

And maybe next time I’ll get my friends to come with me.

Contact contributing writer Laura Billings at edit@mspmag.com.