Of Balls and Boobies, or, What Not to Bring to a Mammogram

WARNING: This Post Contains Too Much Information

So…this is actually happening. There is a golf ball in my left breast.  This is especially alarming as that particular breast is only tennis ball sized in the first place and why am I referring to it singularly as if they’re both not the same size?  Like the other one could actually be, like, football sized?  BUT OH WAIT! 1) I nursed two children into adulthood.  Bridger had a beard before he finally weaned.  2) Waverly was a lefty not a switch hitter (nursing mamas you know what I'm talking about).  So basically, in the breast department I'm batting 1000 with one softball and one baseball--a statistic I've calculated on the grounds that back when the boobies were still perfect they helped land me a really fantastic husband and that my kids have never even had ONE ear infection and their brains are just HUGE from all that breastmilk (which is evidenced by the size of their abnormally large craniums--those kids have noggins like basketballs!) and I can’t even properly throw a ball so where are these sports analogies even coming from and also: THE 2010 WORLD CUP IS AFOOT, BITCHES!  Also: Tour De France.   Rhymes with LANCE! 

This series of events, which are only fortunate if you enjoy soccer, cycling, AND teeing off from my ribcage and are only possible in July of every fourth year leads me to two conclusions: 1) I'm going to have a mammogram. That golf ball probably shouldn’t be in there.  (I believe there's a Tiger Wood joke lurking nearbouts and if I think of it I'll let you know but all I can think of right now is Fergie singing "my lovely lady lumps") and 2) I really need a vuvuzela.  OR cowbell.  Or whatever those crazy Frenchmen use to cheer on the Tour.  (Sometimes they actually run naked alongside the peleton.  I am going to have to get naked enough for this mammogram so I think I'll have to pass on THAT particular indignity.)  In fact, I would like to take my vuvuzela / cowbell with me to the mammogram. Which is at Duke.  TOMORROW.  And I can annoy the SHIT out of those pretentious Duke doctors with their terrible Duke frowns and their terrible Duke nostrils and their terrible Duke football program.

ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!  Ding ding ding ding ding ding ding! 

(But I’m not thinking about that because as we speak England is being made naked by the Germans and this time Winston Churchill is nowhere to be found and in a fascinating if not serendipitous accident of providence the US is out of the war, having been defeated by some…Africans. Oh the irony! Oh the kismet!)

(OK I started this post a week or more ago.  By now Spain and Netherlands rule the world.  Little has changed in 500 years.  Colonialism waxes eternal.) 

In any case you shouldn't worry.  Spain will defeat the Netherlands, Contador will (I hate to admit it) beat Armstrong, and I will get my boobie pancaked, nay, tortillad, tomorrow afternoon.  In fact, you won't have to miss ANY of the action.  World Cup and the Tour will be broadcast in all their resplendent glory 'cross television sets across the land and I will be live-tweeting my mammogram (!).  EVERY SQUISHY DETAIL! 

In honor of the Tour (and to mitigate my fear of what exactly is growing inside my breast which I am not thinking about LANCE LANCE LANCE)  I might even ride my bike to the hospital.  It will be the Tour de Triangle.  I'll start out riding the Raleigh stage, scenic only in its view of Midtown shopping centers and a desparate suburbia but deadly in its threat of Northern-transplant Volvo drivers and Nascar-wannabe mullethead Camaro speedsters.  The Raleigh stage being only slightly less hazard-prone than the final stage, Durham, with its fine ghetto views and haphazard gunfire but ending in the award of a jersey in any color but red, blue, black, white, or gold WHICH WILL ALL GET YOU CLIPPED, YO, and a successful entry into the Duke campus which is only slightly more segregated / innoculated against its encroaching blackness than Washington D.C.

There.

OK maybe I should drive there, because the only thing less dignified than being carjacked is being bike-jacked.  And both are equally probable in our fine sister city of Durham.  By which I mean red headed stepsister city.  I feel bad for Durham, really.  I think someday that they, and Ft. Worth, Urbana, and St. Paul should all get together and start some kind of civil rights movement for under-recognized twin cities.  Parasitic or not.  We shall overcome.   

So I think I'll wear green to Duke tomorrow.  The maillot vert, in hopes that this journey of mine is just a sprint and not a Grand Tour.  The one with pockets big enough for my noisemakers and Tarheel pompoms.  Because I plan on winning.