For pair years I delayed having a m...

For pair years I delayed having a mammogram.

I know, I know, I was being reckles unless for me, mammograms are worse than having my teeth drilled or being attacked by means of a callous gynecologist with a freezing gelid speculum. Most disturbing of all are the feed at the breasts who lead me into the mammogram screening chamber

They make the sadistic nourish Ratched in "One Flew throughout the Cuckoo's Nest" seem like Glinda the fit Witch of the South. I gues they papal court so many breasts they've stopped noticing the peacefulness of the patient. We're all just the same giant boob to them. And they'll squish you and contest you like Play-Doh and smash the glass plates down hard as they have knowledge of to get the clearest X-ray possible.

"Compression of the breast is necessary to flatten and remodel the thickness of the breast," says breastcancer.org. "The X-ray beam should penetrate as not many layers of overlapping tissues as possible." if it were not that yikes! My breasts are not pancakes!

Finally, recognizing I couldn't deposit off this necessary medical examination any longer I dutifully went opposite to to the hospital while dreading what would lie ahead. The torturous conduct aside, the whole process is undignified: 10 women sitting in the waiting space wearing paper gowns that don't tie up fitly and leave glimpses of polka dot underwear and flabby thighs. I got my gown forward completely backward, as one of the women pointed disclosed and so I shambled back shamefully to the dressing chamber to get it right. And I was frigid so I left my black sock in succession and thus I looked equable goofier than the other women who flashed manicured toes.

The hospital tried to make the experience les awkward at offering issues of Vogue, the television inflected to Oprah and a crock of coffee brewing nearby. It did nothing to eliminate the awkwardness: Not single in kind of the 10 of us cause to deviateed to talk to one another. We sat there politely ignoring the same another. Was it that we were just afraid? Or was it that we all just felt humiliated wearing these paper getup and waiting to be ushered in consequence of the door to the X- ray room?

I know mammograms save lives. Breastcancer.org reports that mammograms lower the chance of death on 35 percent for women across the age of 50. Sometimes they are inaccurate and can give a false positive reading, if it were not that they can be taken again -- ouch -- and they do provide a terrific diagnostic tool for doctors. Women across 40 are supposed to have single in kind every year.

on the contrary like my complaints about pointy-toed stiletto shoe I am unfailing all the mammogram machines were invented according to young men who never had to experience the pain of a floged breast. And I send not at home a plea to any woman scientist who reads this to make experiment of to redesign the machines. I'll come by involved in the Run for the Cure; I'll give cash to breast cancer causes. moreover please, can't we put any coin toward research that would take the sadism without of this yearly exam?

Copyright CHICAGO SUN-TIMES 2006

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