WHAT, ME GET A MAMMOGRAM? cont...

As I was being led to the changing area next to the monogram room, the technician turned to me and said: “Hi, I’m Sandy, and I will be taking care of you today.” This caught me off guard and I had to stifle a laugh because it sounded so much like what you hear in restaurants. “Hi, my name is Sandy, and I will be your server today. “ At first I thought that having the nurse/technician introducing themselves was stupid, later I found that I like the idea of knowing the name of person who is about to do some horrible medical procedure to me. It made the procedures seem…less intimidating.
I was warned over the phone a few days earlier not to wear power or deodorant before the test. I asked why. They said there might be metallic in those products that could be picked up on the test and give a false positive. Sandy showed me to the changing room. I took off my shirt and bra and put on a hospital gown. Sandy brought me to the mammogram machine and squished my breast into a very uncomfortable position.
If you have never had a monogram (shame on you) it works something like this: You stand up against a weird looking machine, the technician, usually a female, tells you to take off the gown to expose one breast. Then she then places that breast between two glass plates and the machine squeezes it as flat as possible. This is very uncomfortable.
Then the technician takes an x-ray picture. She does this with each breast getting two or three different angles. Then you wait while a doctor looks at the X-rays and tells you the results. I had come to the conclusion that the monogram machine was designed by a man who hates women.
Actually I was curious; I wanted to know who came up with the idea that to get a decent image of a woman's breast you have to squish it. So being an assistant librarian I did some research. According to www.gemedicalsystems.com and www.members.ozmail.com. Doctors had been using standard chest X-rays to check women for breast cancer since the 1920's. Around 1966/7 a new machine was in development: a machine that could focus on breast tissue. This machine consisted of a tube and a lens on a three-legged stand that produced images of better quality than the standard x-ray.
Major studies were done in 1963-1967 using 60,000 women. Then in 1973 270,000 women were studied to see if annual screening would make a difference in reducing the mortality rate of women over 50. It did. It was after these two studies that interest in mammography grew.
The new machine was in limited commercial use in 1967, and it was called the "Senographe," which is French for "picture of the breast" (just why the French have a word for picture of the breast is another question). Anyway, the machine was changing and improving through out the late sixties and the seventies, at about the same time that more women were entering the medical field. Coincidence? I think not!
By the 1980's, the second generation of mammogram: (by this time it was being called a mammogram) was being used. This machine looked a lot like machines do today (scary), the new machine reduced the exposure time a lot, it also had increased the accuracy, and better film was available. It was around this time that the first motorized compression device was invented (that is what they call the glass plates that squishe your breast), it reduced the tissue thickness so the doctors could read the x-ray better (so they say). I say the compression device is used to torture women, but that is just my opinion.
Anyway it was with this second-generation machine that doctors were able to start mass screening, so that more than just rich women and those with really good health insurance could get accesses to mammograms and the benefits of early detection.
In the 1990's more changes and improvements happened to the machine. They became more 'user friendly' for the technicians (what every that means), which made the exams faster and produced fewer false readings.
In 1999 the Mammogram Standard Quality Act (MQSA) was passed, which required that all mammography equipment must pass the MQSA test in order to legally operate in the United States (nice to know).
I didn't know any of this when I was sitting in the mammogram room waiting for my results, all I knew was that I had better things to do than sit around and wait.
After a while Sandy came back, she explained that there was "something" on my right breast and they were not sure just what it was. I shouldn't worry, it was probably nothing, but they wanted me to return in six months and have another mammogram.
"Great" I thought, "all I wanted was to do was have my prescription renewed so I gave up half a day, and now they want me to do this all over again in six months." I wasn't scared, I was angry.