SOLSC: Russian Mammogram

            Today was my annual mammogram. Julia, the technician, was, of course, Russian. Not that all radiology technicians at this clinic are Russian, but many are.

            Julia admired my pink bangs, then marveled that I didn’t look 75. “Good genes” is my usual response, and I added, “and oily skin.” She had an accent, so I asked if she was from Russia (years ago, I helped start a nonprofit supporting women activists in the former communist countries, so aware of different east European accents). Yes, she said, from St. Petersburg. Julia still has cousins there, and they are doing very well. Not everyone in Russia is poor, she added. She sounded proud of that, so I didn’t ask what she or her relatives thought of Putin.

            I mentioned that my grandparents all came from what was then Russia. Julia was impressed, then asked hesitantly if I was Jewish; she wasn’t sure because I had fair skin and light (green) eyes. Julia had brown hair and brown eyes, and said her mother was Jewish and had married a Jewish man, but her mother’s sister married a Russian and her cousins were blond and blue-eyed. And, Julia said, she’d been discriminated against because she didn’t look “Russian.”

            She’d had a Russian boyfriend here in the States who’d wanted her to dye her hair blonde, and she had refused. “If I wanted to do that, I’d do it,” she emphasized, “but I wasn’t going to do it for him.” And she gleefully reported that this ex-boyfriend brought back from Russia a blonde woman who proceeded to “screw” him legally and financially. We both agreed that the “dumb blonde” stereotype was a stupid stereotype. Her mother was blonde who’d been an engineer and supervised 1,000 men, so clearly, the stereotype did not apply.

            I enjoy this kind of conversations when having to go through the intimate, and also very uncomfortable, experience of the mammogram. The choreography of squeezing my breasts flat, positioning one arm just so, keeping my chin up, and holding my breath feels like a bit of stationary dance.

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I’m participating in the 11th annual Slice of Life Challenge over at Two Writing Teachers. This is day 27 of the 31-day challenge.  It’s not too late to make space for daily writing in a community that is encouraging, enthusiastic, and eager to read what you have to slice about.  Join in!

SOLSC 24: Mammogram Time!

            Women, you all know what this is like. Men, if you read this, try to empathize with your wives or girlfriends.

            When my daughter was going for her first mammogram, I had to tell her it wouldn’t feel pleasant. Your breast is treated as a hunk of meat. Mine are relatively small, so I hesitate to think of what it must be like for women with large breasts.

            You probably have to wait, first in the waiting room. Then you are called and shown a changing room with a locker, or maybe the lockers are full, so you’re offered a large plastic bag for your belongings. Undress down to the waist. If you’re lucky, the radiology center will have cloth gowns, not those paper ones. Then you wait some more, in the inside waiting room.

            Then your technician calls your name and leads you to the exam room. She will most likely be from an East European country. I’ve had technicians from Russia, from Azerbaijan, from Ukraine.

            The room will be cold. Very cold. That’s for the health of the scanning machine. Cloth gowns will be marginally warmer than paper. You lower the gown to your waist so the technician can attach labels, first to cover your nipples, then to indicate any brown spots aka liver spots or keratoses.

            Finally, the scan machine. The right breast is placed flat, squeezed down by a plastic frame just to the point of pain. One arm is placed under the main structure, the other up and onto a hand-rest. You feel like a stage set in a piece of choreography. You are instructed not to move, not to breathe.

            Same for the left breast. The machine is moved at an angle, breast positioned. This time your arm is held over your head with your chin turned away, your other arm down and around the edge of the machine. Don’t move, don’t breathe. Other breast, don’t move, don’t breathe.

            Finally, the technician checks the scans to see if she has to take any more pictures.

            When it’s a routine annual exam, which mine was today, I don’t even think about results. I don’t think about my sister’s experience more than 20 years ago, when she had her first diagnosis, or five years later for her second diagnosis, or eight years after that with her third, and final, diagnosis.

SOLSC Day 17: Mammogramming

I had my annual mammogram today. I don’t know what it’s like where you live, but in New York almost every mammogram technician is from eastern Europe. I always ask where east Europeans are from, since, back in 1991, I co-founded a nonprofit, the Network of East-West Women, supporting women activists in the post-communist countries, and still co-moderate a workshop on their issues.

            Today’s tech was a late-middle-aged woman with short dark hair. When I asked where she was from, she answered by asking me to guess. Hmm, I thought, is she Russian? Polish? Serbian? Croatian? Not Bulgarian, I thought. “Russia?” I guessed. Yes, she replied. I said I’d traveled in eastern Europe, but wasn’t good at distinguishing accents. She said their languages were all Slavic, so they mostly sounded the same. I said, not really, Czech sounded quite different from Polish.

           Then there were several minutes of her positioning me into the machine, adjusting my body and arms, and letting the machine squash my breast. There’s one position, with my shoulder down and head turned back, that always feels like a frozen dance move.

            When I asked where in Russia she was from (maybe I’d met someone from there?), she confessed that actually she was from Tajikistan, near Afghanistan, in what they called Middle Asia, but she’d stopped saying that when most Americans had never heard of Tajikistan. (My workshop has had a couple of speakers from Tajikistan.) I asked if she spoke Tajik. She said, the Tajik speak Farsi, but it’s written in Cyrillic. She still speaks it, but not so well, and her children, born here, don’t speak it at all and aren’t  interested in Tajikistan.

            One hundred years ago, there were massive numbers of immigrants into the United States — including all my grandparents. It feels like we’ve having another wave now, and I welcome them.