‘How did you get there?’: The awkward chats I’ve had while having a mammogram

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If you’ve given birth or suffered the indignity of having a bra fitted at a department store, you’ll be used to having wide-ranging conversations – about recipes, about weather, about people who park badly – while having your most private parts probed, measured or exposed.

I have given advice on eulogies, swapped stories of being robbed, and offered political opinions I am ill-informed to offer while having my breasts pinioned under a measuring tape, while having cells swabbed from my cervix, and while peeing on a stick behind the flimsy curtain. Once, I was asked for publishing advice while having my pelvis probed by an obstetrician whose wife had a collection of short stories hidden in her bedside drawer.

Mammograms: come for the health check, stay for the awkward conversation.Credit: Istock

After lockdown, asserting responsibility over my own health, I booked in for my first breast ultrasound and mammogram. Though I am lucky not to officially need the tests for another decade, I am the kind of person who is certain of my own capacity to develop a terminal illness simply by thinking the word tumour.

It was thus that I found myself expounding to Gary the radiographer the marvels of bicarb and soda as a cleaning agent while he slid an ultrasound wand around my breasts like a detectorist on a beach.

Gary had a lot to say about many things. By the time he got to the over-regulation of the tech industry I had slipped into the kind of disembodied torpor that comes when one’s breasts have become central to the conversation. Down pressed the ultrasound wand while Gary orated on content moderation; up waved the wand when he got to consumer privacy. I didn’t agree with his thoughts on the latter, but when you are having gel wiped off your nipple by a stranger, you will agree with anything. Or even display feigned appreciation for the stranger’s jokes with a kind of strangulated giggle emitted from deep in the throat. At least, I will.

But the ultrasound was the least of the discomforts. During the mammogram I discovered the wondrous diagnostic miracle that is having your breast contort horizontality (little known fact: the first victim of the mammogram machine was a toasted sandwich). First, though, there were five minutes of waiting in a state of half-nudity with a paper apron fluttering around my knees while the mammographer set up the machine. It occurred to me during that interminable time, as she fiddled with various buttons and knobs, that we were both behaving as though I wasn’t half-naked, and avoiding the point of the visit: that I was there to have my body tissue scanned for signs of illness.

A few times I made jokes – about the machine looking like a giant sewing machine, about how this wasn’t anything like other grams (telegrams, holograms, pentagrams). Many times, I made that laugh that sounded unlike any other laugh.

When the scan began, I discovered, much as I had when I went into labour, that there are things about pain and discomfort and the body that no one shares with you until you experience them.

No one, for example, had told me I would need the skills of a contortionist for a mammogram. That I would need, at points, to balance primarily on one leg while angling my shoulder to the opposite ear, a pose that only an owl can achieve. Or that I might need enough strength in the side of my left foot alone to hold my body weight while my breast was being rearranged as if on a crudite platter.

While all this was going on I kept up the Olympian-pace banter in that tiny room. If there were a category for avoidant camaraderie I would have been on the podium with bronze, silver and gold around my neck.

Here is a sample:

“Good grief! I had no idea my arm could do that!”

“Is it OK if I breathe?”

“Oh! Gosh! How did you get there?”

“Sorry, but you’ve clinched a bit of my back skin in there too – could you just prise it out?”

There wasn’t a moment during this polyptych of semi-naked acrobatics that I considered what I was there for, and that at the end of this experience I might, however unlikely it may have been, receive information that would involve a terrifying leap into illness. Which may be the point of the whole arrangement. Distraction.

I tell you all this not to discourage you from going for tests – mammograms, other grams, whatever they do with men’s bits. The contortions are survivable; even funny. The illnesses are not. I tell you this merely to say: no one told me, and I wish they had because I would have at least relaxed into the absurdity. I certainly will next time.

Nicola Redhouse is a freelance writer and the author of Unlike the House: A Memoir of Brain and Mind.

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