It’s official. The health authorities are no longer recommending breast self-exams. All that is strictly recreational now.
This means you can politely decline that nice man on public transit who offers to do it for free.
I’m thrilled. I never liked doing self-exams. When you never find anything, you don’t know if you’re healthy or you’re just bad at it. My breasts are not even close to a matched set and on the larger one I always got bored before I got halfway around. These days I’m not even sure where they stop off and the back-fat fold begins. It’s all of a piece. There’s a perpetual squabble going on under my armpit while they work it out. I just want to shout “Pick a side! Don’t make me come down there!”
Which means if it looks like I’m doing a self-exam, it’s more likely I’m moving the furniture in the bra. Periodically I need to reach in there and haul everything around to the original default position so nothing gets too dented up. It’s like shoveling sand in bags in advance of a flood. You’re trying to get things more or less contained but you’re not going to achieve perfection.
I’m not sure why they’re no longer recommending we do our own exams except that it’s liable to get you all upset over nothing, and spending a lot of time all upset probably causes cancer.
There was never much motivation. Best you could hope for is you don’t find anything, and then you just wonder if you missed it. Especially if you own a fair amount of boobular acreage, you’re liable to get about three-quarters of the way through and then think: Good enough! Why court trouble?
I mean, it’s this whole ordeal. Theoretically the breast self-exam is a simple job undertaken in the shower with soap. But if you’re trying to find a rogue mystery kernel and pin it against your chest wall, and you’re not Barbie, you have to lie down and roll this way and that for the gravity assist, just to get everything flattened out. It’s like trying to find a marble in a mudflat with your eyes closed.
“You get to know your own breasts,” the pamphlet assures you, “and so you’ll know if you encounter something out of the ordinary.” Yeah? No. It all feels weird. You’re wrist deep in a bowl of grits looking for the raisin.
One time I went in to the doctor after I thought I found something suspicious, and he sat me upright leaning back and proceeded to palpate the zone of doom. Very gently. Very very gently. I thought he was being over-delicate. “You can push harder, it’s okay,” I said to the Highly Trained Person, like he was a kid I’d hired to thatch my lawn, and he kindly explained that lumps can be up against the chest wall or somewhere in the middle of the pudding, and you can do several sweeps through different layers with different pressures to try to locate them. Oh! Definitely not anything that I had learned.
I’m happy to turn over the cancer detection business to the experts. I don’t even use the self-service line at the store. I’d rather haul in the suspects and let someone else do all the heavy lifting and x-rays. That’s what I’m co-paying them for.
And then there’s me, who found the lump upon self examination (actually during the pulling on of a sports bra), even though I had accomplished a mammogram within the previous year, and now I don’t have to do breast exams of any sort, so, win-win! Just came upon the bracelet you made me for the occasion a few days ago.
It probably won’t surprise you that I can’t remember that bracelet!
You made a whole nest of them. Peg’s and Margaret’s and yours said WWMAD, and mine said: WWID. You also made me a T-shirt that said, “I lost 10 lbs. Ask me how!” LOL
That one I remember!
I learned about self-exams in college. Found a lump. Went in to the school nurse. She examined me, smiled gently, and explained that I was palpating a rib. Embarrassing.
Boobs got ribs? I knew it.
OMG… that reminds me of when I did a self-exam and found a lump under my armpit. I was in a panic, and called my gynecologist, who examined me. She explained that it was a swollen lymph node. I knew I had them in my neck, but didn’t realize they were in my armpits as well. Scared the crap outta me!
Swollen lymph nodes can be a cause for alarm regardless of where they are. My sister found one in her armpit. Her GP reviewed the family history and recommended a colonoscopy. That found a huge polyp that fortunately was benign
Basically, if it’s a lump…
If your boobs aren’t staying where they’re put perhaps you are wearing the wrong size or style of bra.
I really hate the breast exams and though I’ve had repeated messages urging me to make my appointment I really don’t want to.
I’ve been having them yearly since I was 35 (family history). That first time I was worried because things was so tender; the nurse told me to quit drinking coffee. The whole issue went away. And a few years later when I started drinking coffee again, it didn’t come back.
Regarding River’s comment about the wrong size/style bra: There is a great online company called Montelle Intimates (https://montelleintimates.com/) that is run by women and the bras are designed by women. If you go to their bra collection, there will be a little icon at the top that tells you how to measure yourself. Their bras are comfortable — yes, even the underwire ones. I think that women find underwires uncomfortable because most bras are designed by men, and also a lot of companies try to cut costs where comfort is concerned. I won’t buy them from any other company.
How do you know most bras are designed by men? Other than the cone ones. My most comfortable bra is no bra. There’s a lot of herding involved but I’m up to it.
Honey, there are no raisins in grits. Not a one. I’d bet you haven’t had a grit since you had the good sense to move to a blue state. Your memory and suspension may have slipped, but your cartoon skills are still fab!
Why thankee ma’am! No raisins in the boobs either. But there’s always that first time.
That recommendation (to not do BSE, or, in some papers, SBE) applies to “average-risk” women. My congratulations to all who are average-risk. You have won the genetic lottery.
True. And although my mom died of breast cancer, I do not have that BRCA gene.
I just talked to a young woman this morning, on my way to the studio, who had just had a prophylactic bilateral mastectomy because she had the BRCA2 gene, and all the women in her family had died of breast cancer. I told her that I had mine done in 2006, and it was one of the best things I had ever done, so she was cheered by that. And she didn’t have to have the chemotherapy.
I wouldn’t miss ’em much if they went away, but I’m not signing up for as-yet unnecessary major surgery.
All I can say is that I laughed for times and I don’t even own breasts.
They can be rented though.
If testicular cancer was found out by testogramms, there’d have been a whole new era of diagnostic machinery invented a long time ago.
Now THAT’S an image I can’t delete from my mind! Balls being compressed in a small x-ray machine! It sounds painful, even though I never had balls. (Except in the metaphoric sense.)
A few years ago I was suggesting the expression “¡Qué cojones!” be replaced with “¡Qué ovarios!” but it never caught on.
The Nutcracker 5000!
What I don’t understand is why human boobs haven’t evolved more. It seems like sometime after 40 or 50 years old, most owners start complaining about them. I daresay that other mammals have more evolved breasts. For example, look at dogs: when their breasts are not needed for milk production, they conveniently shrivel up to nothing more than pimple-sized teats. I mean, I don’t see old girl-dogs running around with breasts that are saggy or floppy. Who’s in charge of evolution here? Why can’t we get this kind of feature for human breasts?