1. At the beginning of the appointment, they screen you for pregnancy. They do this by asking if there's any chance that you're pregnant. When you say "None whatsoever," they take you at your word. This is a vast contrast to those various adolescent medical appointments where they interrogate you about choreography and bodily fluids.
2. If you're of childbearing age, you get a lead apron to put over your abdomen so your uterus is protected. Then they tell you to lean over further so your head is closer to the machine.
3. The machine compresses your breast as far as humanly possible, and then another 10% further. The pain is exactly what I would have expected from this - it's not a shocking new disproportionate kind of pain, but neither is it painless.
4. The pain stopped as soon as they took me out of the machine. There was no residual pain, and no marks or bruising left on my breast.
5. What was weirdest to me about the whole experience is that you literally can't move once you're in the machine. You're held in place by your breast. That's rather a disconcerting experience.
6. If your hair is breast length or longer, you should wear it in a bun for the appointment. They don't tell you this in your pre-appointment instructions, but your hair can easily get caught in the machine.
7. The mammogram is taken by a technician. The images are then sent to a radiologist, who writes the report. The report is then sent to your doctor. This means that your doctor doesn't have access to the images, and the person who interprets the images isn't present when taking them. So the person interpreting the images might wish she could pan over to the left a bit, but she can't unless she calls me back in for more imaging (which is not a step taken lightly). Or my doctor might be wondering how the mammogram findings jibed with what he was feeling in my breast that he believed to be a cyst, but he can't just look and see. That seems inefficient to me, and likely to magnify any human error that may occur.
2 comments:
I found the experience of having a mammogram in the GTA so much more humane and considerate than it was in NYC. It was less uncomfortable physically (which might be down to improved technologies). But the biggest difference was the treatment I received from the technician and nurses. They were so caring and tried to minimize the intrusion and discomfort as much as possible.
I hope your experience was as positive as possible, too.
The receptionists I dealt with all added a sort of extra layer of sympathy once they realized my situation (i.e. unexpectedly having my first mammogram at a young age and on very short notice), so when I walked into the examination room I told the tech my story in the expectation of eliciting similar sympathy, but it didn't change anything in her demeanour. There was nothing wrong with her demeanour - she was businesslike but not unkind - but I was briefly thrown by not getting the same note of "aww, poor baby!" that I was from the receptionists.
I was also thrown by being asked to completely remove the gown once I was in the examination room, because every stock photo of a mammogram I'd ever seen had the patient with the gown off one shoulder and on the other. But once I actually got in the machine, I see that keeping the gown on would have complicated things and probably prolonged the process - we had enough trouble keeping my hair out of that machine!
But the process itself didn't add to my stress. My stress was caused by the surprise, the implications of a mammogram, and the fact that I think the whole thing was unnecessary.
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