Tag Archives: breast love

our bodies are not disposable

graffit of a tidal wave, painted in red on the side of a buildingGood morning good morning, my friends. This morning finds all the technology quieted because the batteries died in the night, next to me sleeping on  the couch on my back so that the (slight, ok, sure) bleeding would stop.

Let me back up. Yesterday, at about 9 in the morning, I got a biopsy in my right breast, after my first mammogram where they found a tiny gathering of micro calcifications and had no other photos to compare it to, no way to know whether this was a new gathering or a group that’s been hanging out together for awhile. And because I will be losing my insurance at the end of this month when I leave my day job, I decided to go ahead and do the biopsy now instead of waiting for 6 months for a followup mammogram and maybe having to do it then.

I woke up yesterday intending not to give the biopsy any energy at all. I didn’t want it to be a thing. I didn’t want to worry about it, because worry is negative energy and could affect the outcome of the tests. (What? This is what magical thinking looks like.) I expected to be in and out of there in under an hour, which the radiologist had lead me to believe would be the case.

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breasts and ceremony: my first mammogram

(Yesterday morning my website wouldn’t load; something going on with the isp. So I’m sharing yesterday’s post today!)

On Thursday, I got my first mammogram. I’ve turned forty, it was time. On Wednesday, when my doctor was giving me a quick breast exam during a checkup, she felt at the tops of my breasts and said, Where are you in your cycle? She said, This just feels all lumpy in here. She called it grittiness — the tech explained to me, We call that nodularity.

I didn’t feel worried: my breasts felt like my breasts. Not smooth maybe but nothing out of the ordinary. Still, I needed to get a mammogram — don’t they say you’re supposed to get them once you turn forty? This would be my rite of passage. What if we had other welcomings into the different phases of our life? Continue reading