In honor of October being Breast Cancer Awareness Month, I’m sharing with you 10 ways to improve your mammogram experience. You ARE getting one, right? Good, that’s what I thought.
1) Don’t bother with the tit jokes. “I’ve brought the tatas out for a play date” type shit gets old in a hurry. Trust me, the techs have heard it all.
2) It’s nice if you can have a woman do your mammogram, unless you are OK getting felt up by a dude in blue gloves.
3) Do not, under any circumstance, use the word “areola.” It’s just gross, even if it is technically correct.
4) Shave both armpits, not just one like I normally do.
5) Save the intimate boob talk for your sexting partner. No one wants to know details of your perky jugs.
6) Wearing deodorant proves you have nice manners in normal circumstances, but since you’re not supposed to wear deodorant to a mammogram, at least don’t jog beforehand.
7) Look away when the technician shoves your tits into a vice grip. It hurts less if you don’t watch.
8) Not sure what to chat about? Try talking shoes. Always a safe bet.
9) Don’t share your great grandmother’s breast cancer saga with a technician that hears 50 similar ones every day.
10) Don’t update your Facebook with a status such as: “Hangin out and gettin’ portraits done of my girls.” Guess what? No one gives a shit.
Please don’t put off an appointment because you are scared. In this case, ignorance is not bliss. When it comes to potentially saving your life, now is not the time to be a pussy.
If that still doesn’t convince you, maybe the chocolate they give you afterwards will.
Editor’s note: We originally published this post on Facebook with an image of what getting a mammogram (kinda) looks like. We’ve been assured that your breast gets squished more than this, but you get the idea. Facebook yanked our post down and threatened to unpublish the page for sharing a photo of a medical procedure which happened to include a nipple. So fine, we changed the Facebook image. But we also believe in women’s education and that you should have the right to know what a mammogram looks like. So here you go: this is the evil nipple shot that got us into trouble.
