Tuesday, May 12, 2009
Boobs and Boob Health
A few weeks ago a dear friend called to tell me that she was attending the funeral of another friend who died of breast cancer.
I paused. I didn't know the woman who had died. But I tried to think back to when I had last had a mammogram.
"Something good, Arlene, has come from this news. I will call and make an appointment for a check up."
When I did, I asked the staffer why I hadn't received a post card reminding me to make an appointment. That was what had been happening for twenty years since I passed that marker, forty, when mammograms for women "at risk" become annual events.
"We stopped sending them out," was her response. "A cost-cutting measure."
On the day that my breasts would be misshapen into dorsal fins, a great line from comedienne Elayne Boosler, I found out that I hadn't been to the radiologist in two years.
Today the Washington Post reports that nationwide mammography is down, enough that it warrants an article in a major newspaper. "A Declining Tendency."
In addition to questions about the efficacy of mammograms, do they only find small tumors that would not ordinarily be life-threatening, yet are treated as such, there are these factors: cost, fear of pain, and inconvenience.
I would have had my annual mammogram if I had had a reminder, as I had always gotten one. When I was leaving, another staffer told me the office was going to start sending post cards out again. That I was able to get an appointment almost immediately suggested that the cost savings of not sending out post card reminders had caused a serious decline in the number of patients.
And this was new, too: no one gave me a breast exam and no one read my films there. Instead I have to wait two weeks for a letter in the mail sent simultaneously to my doctor and to me. I guess it's time for me to find a new radiologist.
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