Douche Canoe Side Step. Pa dump bump.

Part Two. If you missed part one, you might want to start here.

Have you ever noticed when you try to focus on your intuition, your insight, your gut; clear thoughts evaporate? It’s like when you are having a dream (especially a really great dream) and you realize you are dreaming and once this happens you either wake up or the dream morphs into something comically inadequate.

Well. Maybe it’s just me.

I’d like to say that the second I sat up prodding that lump under my finger, I just KNEW. Because I did. For about a second. Then I convinced myself I was just being paranoid. Negative. I recalled the other close calls I’d had. This wasn’t the first lump.

I have fibrocystic issues going on in my tatas and gynecologists, radiologists, and all their buddies have scratched their heads and pondered the significance of densities since my first mammogram.

In 2002 I went in for a mammogram and while I waited in the stylish little hospital frock for the powers that be to make sure the films were readable, someone came out and delivered the dreaded words.

The radiologist sees something suspicious and would like to do an ultrasound.

The ultrasound tech was an idiot and while he glided the ultrasound over and around, up and down, he talked out loud about whether or not what he was looking at was potentially malignant.


Since he could not decide, he went and got the radiologist. Another idiot.

The two douche canoes discussed how high the cancer possibility rating should be while I was lying there listening to the whole thing. Almost like they thought I was under anesthesia. It took every ounce of strength I had to hold myself together.

If I had it to do over, I would have turned into a blubbering, wigged out mama right there and then and made them deal with the mess they had created. Or channeled my inner bitch and gave them a lesson on bedside manners. Ah, if only we could go back.

The way it actually went down was the radiologist finally released me with the assuring words that my doctor would probably want to do a biopsy and would be calling me as soon as she got the results.

And then I lost it once I got to my car. It was ten minutes before I could drive. And I never went back to that hospital for a mammogram. The passive aggressive approach.

To keep this side story from outshining the lead story, that particular lump turned out to be fibrocystic tissue; however, it kept getting bigger and after “keeping an eye on it” for two years, the doctors agreed a lumpectomy was in order. The medical reasoning was not that a fibroid would turn malignant, but that it had gotten big to the point that had a malignancy developed underneath, said malignancy might go undetected.

So. Anyways. In February 2006, I more or less calmly got up off my couch, called my gynecologist' office and made an appointment. I actually asked to schedule an ultrasound (I knew that this was going to end up there), but apparently insurance companies do not like patients to call their own shots. Her receptionist explained I needed to let my doctor cop a feel first and then the doctor would schedule the ultrasound.

I would spend the next two weeks doing the mahi mahi (that means flopping back and forth) between KNOWING this lump was different and therefore not good; and convincing myself that the lump was just another weirdo little fibroid thingamagig.

Part three tomorrow. I think it will be the final chapter. Don’t forget to click the little pink ribbon in the sidebar for mammograms.