One Small Piece of Advice

If you haven't had the pleasure of a mammogram, you may not know that the first thing they tell you when you schedule the appointment is that you can't wear deodorant or powder on the day of the test. That's because both have a tendency to show up on the films as little white specks, which look a lot like microcalcifications (aka tiny calcium deposits), which can be an indication of cancer (or of a precancerous condition).

So to avoid a false positive, you play it safe and go in for the test with armpits au naturel.

I used to have my mammograms in the spring, between March and May. This year, for various reasons (like I was busy being poisoned all spring and couldn't fit anything else into my schedule), I didn't have the test until yesterday.

And what was yesterday?

Just the kick-off to this week's heat wave.

So I had the great pleasure of leaving my house in the middle of the day, walking five blocks in the heat, and then heading underground, where I got to wait on a toasty subway platform before boarding the blissfully air-conditioned train to ride a total of one stop before getting off and waiting on another toasty platform before boarding a second, equally blissfully air-conditioned train, riding another six stops, climbing two flights of stairs, and walking most of an avenue to the cancer center.

By the time I arrived, blissfully air-conditioned trains notwithstanding, you can be sure that my skin had pretty much liquefied.

And that any natural sweetness you might think I possess had long before succumbed to, shall we say, something much riper.

Of course, now that I have shifted to midsummer mammograms, I'm pretty much stuck with this scenario from here on out. Maybe next year, I'll wear some kind of warning sign for the benefit of my fellow straphangers.

Meanwhile, I offer this suggestion to those of you who a) have breasts and b) have not yet been initiated into the wonderful world of mammograms:

When it's time to make your first appointment, shoot for January.