Mammography and Melodrama

Sophia's breasts endured their annual squishing and radiating yesterday. Because she recently changed insurance providers, Sophia is not longer being mammographed at the Big University Hospital in her town. Now, her breasts--and all her other parts--are squished, palpated, and perused at a small regional hospital that will accept her new, cheaper insurance.  She was nervous about this, but it turns out that the small regional hospital is kind of cool. The technician, a fantastic woman named Ellen, even let Sophia look at her Breast Imaging. This mitigated Sophia's anxiety considerably, since she is an Information Glutton. Knowledge is power. Lack of knowledge, in medical matters, leads invariably to paranoia and terror.

Sophia did notice a tiny little white spot in the corner of one breast image. It was kind of oval-shaped, like a little grain of white rice. Could this be the Rice Grain of Death? Stay tuned tomorrow. That's when the Dreaded Call-Back is supposed to occur, if it does. In the meantime, Sophia will treat her readers--okay, reader, since she's only told her mom about this blog--to a short mammary retrospective.

The Early Years

Sophia's breasts appeared unexpectedly on her post-pubescent chest sometime in the summer of 1970, and quickly grew to an inconvenient size.  Sophia, who just a week before (or so it seemed) had been bemoaning the scant contents of her training bra, was stunned by this sudden Development. She had, at age 14, decided to resign herself to a life of breast-envy. Sophia's mother was not surprised. Both she and all of Sophia's paternal aunts were endowed like old-time burlesque queens. Along with left-handedness, right-braininess, and a deep-seated hatred of mayonnaise, a formidable rack had been encoded into Sophia's DNA.

Sophia's relationship to this abundance has always been an ambivalent one. In youth, Sophia's wit and intelligence competed with her breasts for the attention of the opposite sex. Needless to say, the rack always came out on top. So to speak. Her breasts inspired adulation, prurient glances, and embarrassing entreaties. They were worshiped as twin goddesses, sought after like mythic golden apples of the sun, and given way too much attention in basement bedrooms and the backseats of cars. Although she had a very attractive face--not, perhaps, as beautiful as that of the Other Sophia, above, but pretty enough--Sophia often found that men addressed remarks to her breasts, as if they were sentient beings. Sophia sometimes liked this, and sometimes lamented it. Less well-endowed girlfriends doubtless found Sophia's laments annoying in the extreme.

A Digression

On a related topic, Sophia recently read an article about a woman who is suing the bank that employed her for something called "looks discrimination." This woman alleges that she was fired because she was too sexy; her hot body was having a deleterious effect on office productivity. In other words, the men in her office were too sexually aroused by her curvaceous presence to get their jobs done. The newspaper printed pictures of her in various sultry poses--all of which suggest that the attention wasn't unwanted.

Sophia was not this kind of woman. She wasn't smart enough to take her 34-D, an unmerited gift from some god with a sense of humor, to the bank.  And while "The Girls" did get noticed, Sophia never got a single thing she really wanted because she was Seriously Stacked.  This may, of course, be due to her complete lack of marketing savvy.

The Danger Zone

Now that she is Over Fifty, Sophia has even more ambivalence about her breasts. Because now they're not only annoying--they're also scary. In the 1930's, unruly cells colonized the breasts of Sophia's maternal grandmother. By the end of that decade she was dead, depriving Sophia of a lifetime of Christmas and birthday presents, cookies, needlepoint samplers, and other grandmotherly stuff.

So every time Sophia has to get her breasts squished and radiated, she freaks out a little, imagining a renegade battalion of cells marching senselessly to their own destruction, and hers.

She also fears--perhaps irrationally--that the increase in breast cancer in recent years is owing to....mammography! The last time she had a mammogram--before this one, that is--the technicians insisted that her right breast be radiated twice, in the interest of Better Imaging. Sophia was certain, after this event, that her right breast was Doomed.

Despite her ambivalence, Sophia would very much like to keep her breasts. For one thing, Sophia's husband is deeply enamored of them. Sophia is not sure if her marriage would survive the loss of her breasts, which have taken on a somewhat mythic status in the mind of her otherwise rational and temperate mate.

Irony

When called upon to do the one thing for which they were presumably created, i.e., feed baby Percival, Sophia's breasts completely choked.  Despite having swelled to twice their (already excessive) size. Who knew one could wear a 42 F? Not Sophia, certainly. When she read about all the pregnant women who were thrilled with their new voluptuousness, she wanted to scream. No one should have breasts bigger than her baby's head. It ought to be a law of physics, or physiology, or something.

But here's the ironic part. Sophia's breasts, their horrifying hugeness notwithstanding, could not produce enough high-quality milk to feed a voracious 8-pound baby. Sophia's mom called this the "Prohibition Bar Effect."  During the Prohibition years, bars all across America were forced to shut their doors and remove all alcohol from the premises. Like these shuttered establishments, Sophia had all the right equipment, but offered nothing to drink.

Silly, Bouncy Things

Sophia has always found that there's something ludicrous and comic-bookish about large breasts. They are the stuff of comedy, not tragedy. Because really, they look kind of silly, don't they? Unless they're fake, they bounce. One cannot take bouncy things seriously. Once, when Sophia still had girlfriends (more on this later), she and they went to a strip club. There, Sophia saw breasts unlike any she had ever seen before. They were huge, and bounceless. They stuck out like Russian church spires. They made the stripper's head utterly superfluous. Sophia compared her own bouncy, slightly sagging duo to these technological wonders, and  realized that these breasts were a different species altogether. They were perfect, but alien. Inhuman, but beautiful in some weirdly fake way. Fitting objects for reverence, but utterly useless in feeding other mammals. Like Sophia's own breasts, only much, much better!

Still, Sophia's breasts have been constant, if occasionally uncomfortable, companions in the adventure of her life.  She no longer complains about them, even though they are unwieldy, heavy, and mostly useless. In the absence of close girlfriends, they are the best she can do. They aren't judgmental, and they still look pretty good, if one likes that sort of thing. To paraphrase an old Geritol commercial:

My breasts. I think I'll keep them.