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This won't hurt at all.

Morning walk, South 11th between Wythe and Berry

I had my biopsy yesterday. As expected, it was AWESOME. Listen, the biopsy part is nothing compared to the Homer part of it. The biopsy is like, we're going to shove a needle in your numbed breast and then it's over. That I was prepared for. But then my doctor told me right before the test that there would be a second part, where they would shove a Homer wire into my breast, all the way in (because whatever is in my breast is really deep in there apparently), leaving about two inches of wire STICKING OUT. Then I would get a mammogram with the wire STICKING OUT. (This was to make sure that they did the biopsy in the right spot.) Did I mention it was STICKING OUT OF MY BREAST? People, this ain't no polite little acupuncture needle. That shit was long and deep. And after they put it in I had to wait, in the hallway for a good ten minutes until I could get in to get the mammogram. I ask you, can we not time this better please? Like make sure there isn't a wait list for the mammogram machine before we shove a four-inch wire in my tit?

Needless (no pun intended) to say, I was sobbing. OK, maybe I'm a baby, but I just really was not prepared for this. You can't just throw shit like that at someone at the last minute. And then I had to walk into a room and trust a person I had never met before (a very nice older Russian woman with an amazing bleach blond bouffant who kept saying "Sorry baby" over and over and I bet she had amazing family stories, I could just tell, but still) to handle my wire-laden breast in the already scary and painful mammogram machine. A terrible experience all around, and I am not exaggerating in the slightest.

So then after it was all over, the doc took me into a room and told me that whatever they had found was so deep that it could not have been found by human hands. Which meant that whatever my doctors had found a few months ago in their breast examinations was entirely different than what they had just biopsied. Which now means that I will have to go back to my breast specialist for another exam (already super) and if she still can find something, I will have to have a different kind of biopsy, because some things can't be tracked by sonogram and mammogram. So now I have another appointment with my specialist as well as a follow-up in six months for another mammogram. I suspect I will have to have a mammogram every six months for the rest of my life.

Are you exhausted? I sure am.

Here is the one thing I am going to say about all of this (and I know I've said it before): thank god I have health care. Seriously. If you do not have it, please get it. I have been paying close to 4k a year for it for the last three years, wondering why all this time, and I am telling you, now I know why. I hate all of this, but I feel so much better knowing I can afford to make it happen. Even if you are a freelance creative type there is affordable insurance out there if you just do a little research.

Getting off soapbox now. Have a nice weekend.

(06/08/07)