Getting My Ducts In A Row

So, I took almost two weeks off. A health siesta.

I did not make a single phone call to even one doctor and sat around eating mayonnaise from the jar with a spoon and drinking absinthe spiked with aspartame-laden Kool-Aid while I chain-smoked cigars. I am very glad I did.

What was supposed to be an hour-long "second look ultrasound" appointment last Friday turned into one of those four-hour-long ordeals where multiple doctors march in and out while I lay prone on a table shivering in a paper napkin and flipping through a stained 1987 copy of Time magazine. Never had one of those? Trust me, they are crazy fun.

Jeff hung around in the holding tank of the aggressively PINK waiting room because no men were allowed back past the double doors into the inner sanctum that is The Breast Center. When I finally emerged, he asked what it was like back there, with the hint of awe and wonder that most men feel when confronted with an image of A BREAST (or, even, the word). A continuously-looping DVD demonstrating how to do a proper self-exam played for hours while he waited and I think he was at sensory overload.

I told him it was just like Key West in April, but with fewer tan lines and more sagging and grey hair. He then asked what a mammogram felt like. I told him when we got home he could remove his pants and I would do my best to replicate the feeling using equivalently-tender gender-specific organs and my two heaviest books from law school. The questions stopped there.

The general agreement among the whispering breast guys (and they were all guys, this struck me as a bit ironic given the no-male sign on the double doors) is that there is "something" in a duct. Confetti? An underwear gnome? A lost sock from the dryer? Your guess is as good as mine.

I am scheduled bright and early tomorrow morning for a repulsive-sounding procedure that involves threading a catheter into a place catheters ought not to go (one hint: it rhymes with "whipple"). Yeah.

I did my own research on-line about how this procedure may feel. "Mild discomfort" is what I uncovered; which, I have learned by now is medical site jargon for, Jesus God and Mary!! HOLD ON TO YOUR F$#%*$G HAT!!

Will keep you posted. If nothing else, I expect this will be good blog material.