Mammograms

Someone I love needs a mammogram. She doesn't want to get one and I am having trouble understanding this. No woman looks forward to her mammogram. It doesn't usually come with presents or fanfare but it is something that we need to do. It is a part of routine health care for women. It is a necessary evil.

The first time I had one, I was a bit nervous. Someone told me it was like having your breast driven over with a truck. Great. But I was determined as someone I worked with had just been diagnosed with breast cancer through a routine mammogram. Into the x-ray room I went. There I met a very compassionate woman who described the procedure to me, talked me through it, told me when things were going to be "uncomfortable" and when it would be over. The entire thing took less than 15 minutes. Was it fun? No...but it was necessary. And each year since then I went in, never looking forward to the procedure with happy anticipation but always ready to face it. It was the mammogram on 1/30/07 which quite likely will give me many more years of life. Great wisdom out of painful experience~what a gift I have been given.

So...back to this woman. She's my age, intelligent, well-educated, capable and yet, she refuses to have a mammogram. In discussions with her I can't get an answer about what is so frightening to her. "I just don't want to do it" seems like such a lame response, particularly when people around her will be living healthy lives as a result of a simple x-ray. Perhaps she knows something she isn't sharing. Perhaps she has found a lump and is too scared to know the truth. I can almost understand that. By now everyone in her life has been on her to have the mammogram and perhaps that is the reason for her inability to make the appointment. I'll never be able to really understand.

What I do understand is how much I love this woman, how much she means to me in my life and how difficult it would be to lose her. Perhaps that is what she needs to hear.