It's Friday, boys and girls, and if I'm writing this it's good news! It means, boys and girls, that I've made it through another long week in civilized society without being arrested for having, no, absolutely being required to, punch someone in the throat because of their stupidity.
Also exciting? Getting word that we do NOT have breast cancer. Woot! Knew it all along, I was just waiting for the doctors to concur with my instinct for these things.
Not very exciting? Having to have your ta ta biopsied because you had an irregular mammo. Boooo! Muy mal. And may I interject here that if you are frightened of needles, you will definitely shit your pants after this little procedure. What a winner episode this was. No one will tell you what to expect with a stereotactic until you are actually in the radiology room ready to have your "biopsy" performed. Only then when they have you at their mercy do they become the gods of transparency with all the information your little heart desires! All this is great if you are the sort of person who does well with not knowing what to expect before you get there - the "what you don't know won't kill ya" type of person....Not so great if you are a control freak, please talk me off the edge because I need to know everything out there about this upcoming procedure or I'll freak out right here right now type person.
So! Being the mega-helpful soul that I am, I'm going to give you all the inside skinny, the 4-1-1, the dirty low down on this whole matter - because I just love you like that. It's like.....it's like...well, an 8th grade spin the bottle fest only you are the only girl in the group whose breast is getting felt up by like 20 pre-pubescent, acne-riddled boys who wouldn't know what gentle petting was like if their life depended on it.
So! Being the mega-helpful soul that I am, I'm going to give you all the inside skinny, the 4-1-1, the dirty low down on this whole matter - because I just love you like that. It's like.....it's like...well, an 8th grade spin the bottle fest only you are the only girl in the group whose breast is getting felt up by like 20 pre-pubescent, acne-riddled boys who wouldn't know what gentle petting was like if their life depended on it.
Ok. Not necessarily accurate. Let's try: you have to lay, face down, with your lil lady part dangling through this opening on the table. Then they compress your dangling mammary with a machine that is vaguely similar to the mammo machine that got you there in the first place. With this one, however, they take a bazillion images of your compressed boobala to help plot the coordinates to where the offending area is so that when they go in with the needle and excavator thingy, they are hitting the right area. Translation? Squeezing the you know what out of your bubula, x-raying it a bazillion times, checking those images each time, and then repeating the process because they needed to be absolutely, positively, without a doubt sure that they were right on the area. If there was any hint, even a modicum of doubt about these coordinates, they started it all over: lather, rinse, repeat. The whole time you cannot flinch or move because if you do, you'll mess up their coordinates. When they finally locate the bad part that they need the tissue from, the numbing needle goes in, followed by the excavator, so on and so forth. The whole time, did I mention?, YOU CANNOT MOVE....not even an inch. This was the truly sucky part because I am not a belly sleeper and stuff was just going numb left and right and my neck was like, really? you're keeping me turned like this and we are going on hour two?, this totally sucks. Oh, as distressing as that whole process was, having a needle phobia like I do and being instructed not to move when it goes in was enough to finally send me over the edge - as in thumb sucking "I want my mommy" over the edge. I could put up with not moving for 2 hours - but the "here comes the needle you may feel a slight pinch but for F***'s SAKE don't move!" - that was a whole other level of WTF.
As I'm thinking about this friggin needle I start to panic. My breath starts getting super fast, then the beads of sweat started to roll down my forehead, then my eyes started to tear, then I started to shake with fear....I know, ridiculous, but I have this total fear of needles. Happens all.the.time. It's big league fear not some puny, ooo, I am scared to stomp out the life of a spider with my shoe type fear. Needles: big league phobia.
The long and the short of it meant that for the biopsy, my poor boobala was compressed for almost 2 hours, poked by needles and bludgeoned soooo much that even 5 days later it still looks like it went 5 rounds with Mike Tyson. It is a rainbow of colors that I no longer think can be found in any natural environment; shades of puce, neon greens and yellow - purple that is beyond eggplant - just the nastiest collaboration of Crayola you could ever see. And it's all on my lil lefty lady part. Poor girl.
The uptake of all that? BENIGN!
I am grateful.
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