The Beast

Based on the title, no one would assume I am going to blog about mammograms, but I am, so if you feel you may be offended by me discussing the 'girls', I would stop reading now.  This medical test annoys me greatly.  I just want to know who invented the machine that I affectionately call 'the beast'.  All I can say about it, is that a MAN invented the stupid thing.  Not just any man, but a sadistic, SOB, with a small 'mind'.

Only a man would say; yearly every woman should go and place their 'girls' between two plates of steel while a vise grip squeezes them until they are flat as a pancake.  And oh yeah, by the way, we may not be able to detect your breast cancer, but you still need to do it because it is the best we got.

For those of you who have never been, you first walk into a room where the beast lives and with a x-ray technician, who would scare me in a normal situation, but next to the beast they are just frightening.  They always (at least everyone that I have had) look like they could beat up most of the men I know.  So, this is the person, who is going to 'man handle' YOU.  Yep, this is the person who is going to grab, push and maneuver my girls more than any husband I have ever had.  At least it is a woman (I think).

Then she proceeds to twist you into a pretzel shape.  First, you stand in front of the beast, and she says, put your right arm, over your head but hand towards your back, put your left arm behind your back, place your right foot in front of the left foot, move your shoulder forward.  OK, if that is not bad enough she then grabs your right girl (as if she owns it) and maneuvers it onto a steel plate that is about 30 degrees.  Then because the sadistic SOB who invented the beast, says you must put the top plate over her, the technican starts to lower it.  Once you think it can't get it any lower, she says, OK I am going to start lowering the top plate.  REALLY.  Yep, while you are standing there like a pretzel, trying not to move and you haven't breathed in a couple of minutes (at least since she grabbed you), then she starts to lower it.  And about the time you are about to scream, she stops and says in the most pleasant voice, 'OK, don't breath or move!'  At this point, I have crocodile tears in my eyes and the only thing that makes me not cry is my pride.  After the picture is taken, and she releases the vise grip, I wipe away the tear and she smiles and says OK the other SIDE!  And she proceeds to do the another side.

Once the whole humiliating experience is over, she says, let me make sure the pictures are Ok and we don't have to do again.  Well, there is NO WAY in hell, I am doing that again.  And it may take me another 5 years to get up the nerve to do it again.

I ask myself every year, 'Why haven't they come up with a better way.'  There must be a conspiracy is all I can think of. 

You don't ever see a medical test that is as evasive as those that we women must go through. 

I would love to see the beast used to detected testicular cancer.   But I don't see any man willing to put his boys onto a steel plate and have the crap squeezed out of them.  So why do we!  All I can imagine is that we have a genetic flaw.

Some may say this is totally inappropriate, but I think it needs to be said!