The anxiety and quiet of waiting for a mammogram
By Sally Friedman, Special Writer
Every year it startles me.
The moment I step inside the cheerful waiting room of the Women’s Imaging Center at a local hospital, the silence is dense. Almost eerie.
What makes it notable is that in other settings, even women who are strangers generally talk to one another. We’re good at it. We chat easily in ladies rooms, communal dressing rooms, elevators, lobbies, libraries, anyplace where we’re likely to find one another.
We may even find a new best friend forever while checking out of the fashion discount store.
But the one place where I’ve never heard a conversation start is in this waiting room where women — including me — gather to await our mammograms.
Chatting somehow seems off-limits here. Even though the sofas are actually comfortable, the chairs aren’t that awful hospital molded-plastic, and the magazines are current, we’re suddenly bereft of speech.
In our pink hospital gowns, there seems to be nothing — and everything — to say.
Every year, I march into that waiting room and try for nonchalance. I always pause at the water fountain, because anxiety has made me parched. And I look at my watch compulsively, because waiting of any sort is a special kind of torture for me. Waiting for a mammogram is even more so.
But I’d never miss this diagnostic test. I’m enormously grateful that it’s available.
So I pause, always, as I sign in and receive my hospital gown to reflect on how lucky we women are in ways that our grandmothers and, depending on our age, even our mothers never were. I do a lot of silent self-talk about how technology has made everything better and more hopeful.
We have mammography as part of our medical arsenal. Thank goodness for that.
We have radiologists trained to spot early trouble.
We have more and more awareness of why this test matters, and why it’s so important to make — and keep — that appointment.
That doesn’t mean that I’m not apprehensive about what the verdict will be once I meet that gigantic machine that will look inside my body, specifically at my breast tissue.
Even as we sit in this dense silence, we all know that it’s pretty much the luck of the draw as to who gets the good news and who gets the bad.
As I finally hear my name called — always “Ms. Friedman” to be politically correct — I study that technician for signs that she’ll bring me good luck. Yes, it’s irrational. But there it is.
A few times in these many years of having uneventful mammograms, there have been minor scares, the kind that make your heart lurch. The technician walks off with the films, and returns to re-take some.
”Is anything wrong?” I’ve heard myself ask that question in a voice I don’t recognize as my own. “No — just routine,” the technician will answer. But she understands my panic.
All the good, clean living in the world can’t give you a guarantee that you won’t be the one in eight to get the bad news.
It’s happened to colleagues, neighbors, young women, women in their 80s. It’s happened randomly in a cosmic kind of breast tissue crap shoot.
The good news is that today, breast cancer is no longer shrouded in secrecy, a whispered, terrifying death sentence. We’ve come a long way since my mother’s best friend died of breast cancer decades ago when all we knew was that Vivian was “…not well.”
As the mother of three daughters, and the grandmother of three girls, I hope to see the day when those silent waiting rooms don’t exist any more because they’ve found whatever it is that unlocks the mystery of breast cancer. Or there’s a vaccine. Or a sure-fire predictor.
But for now, I’m terribly grateful that I’ve had my annual mammogram this month. I’m overjoyed that the report I was handed had the word “normal” printed in bold letters.
On my way back to the dressing room, I wanted to dance. I wanted to high-five someone.
Instead, I smiled and waved a little wave to the women still sitting in that silent room.
I was sending my unspoken hope that they, too, would want to exit dancing.