LET’S BE VERY clear: getting a mammogram is not only physically unpleasant, painful sometimes, but it’s upsetting to the core. Even though you are facing the truth, and facing the truth is ultimately the best thing to do, everyone in the room is tender, everyone is vulnerable, and everyone is handling some degree of uncertainty. There is a hushed worry that you soak in the moment the elevator doors open on the radiology floor. You also feel cold. In order to keep the imaging machines working properly, it must be a certain temperature—and it’s not a warm one.
At my last mammogram, sitting in a robe trying not to invade anyone’s privacy with my eyes, I noticed the cover of a book, framed, leaning on the windowsill. It was a coloring book called Lost Oceans. Around the title of the book swirled drawings of bubbling seaweed, octopi, coral, currents, angelfish. In print below, it said, PAGES AVAILABLE FOR YOUR USE, PLEASE FEEL FREE TO ASK THE FRONT DESK FOR A CLIPBOARD. As I took this surprising gesture in, I thought that I would love to do some restorative, distracting coloring at that moment. As a person who wants to draw all the time, the book got my attention. As if I were looking to identify the person who had the good coloring-book idea, I noted what the staff was doing. Every few moments, someone would come to offer a soft, well-worn, clean blanket to put over knees. Coffee, tea, and hot water were set up in the back of the waiting room. I was asked twice if I was cold, and I noted there were small space heaters distributed and nestled near the chairs. The heaters could easily be turned on without a lot of fuss.
Nobody in the entire hospital can take away how unnerving, sad, or mysterious it is to have a mammogram, but someone was certainly making an effort to help people get through it.
That waiting room modeled some behavior for me, and reinforced the idea that you have a hand in your experiences. Sometimes we think we don’t, that we will just careen through the (endless) less-than-pleasant things like mammograms. However, there are two things at play here: mammograms are terrible, and if we take some control, we can have a better time of it. Can you build serenity before you even leave the house? Do you think your facility will have tea and coffee? If not, is there a place nearby where you can stop first and bring it with you? Or even a Martinelli’s apple juice? Do you have a gripping magazine article that will keep your attention or possibly provide perspective? A pack of spicy gum? Do you have the right clothes on? What are those clothes? Tidy? Soft? Easy to remove and put back on? Are you armed for the fear or uncertainty with things that make you feel good? I suppose a companion could be comforting, but most of the time I go for a mammogram, I go alone.
I remember waiting in the pediatrician’s office with the boys when they were very small, two and four. I knew it was just a routine checkup, but they had no real idea of why they were in there. We moved around a lot when the boys were small, and didn’t have a familiar pediatrician to ease any ambivalent feelings they may have had about being in a doctor’s office. I could see the anxiety in their delicate shoulders under the paper robes. My instinct was to distract by describing the tools and machines. If you have knowledge about your surroundings, it can feel less intimidating. But there was only so much I knew (This is what they look in your ears with!) and the distraction wasn’t hugely satisfying. What I settled on was counting from one to one hundred. We would lean against the wall and count. If the doctor wasn’t there by one hundred, we’d start again. I didn’t know at the time if this methodical counting had any effect until recently, when I was sitting in a doctor’s office with Thomas, who is now fourteen and six foot four. The doctor was delayed, and we were sitting in silence. I was about to get out my phone and anxiously scroll, and then I heard my kid’s voice: “One, two, three.”