By the way, Marvin who? Since he got that car yesterday, which he wanted me to stress to you is BRONZE and not pink, he has been nowhere but under its hood. Right now the BRONZE car is going, "Vroom! Vroom!" and there is a sickening smell in this computer room, which is right next to the driveway, and I have no idea why men find cars enjoyable.
Bronze. Okay, it is so not bronze. If that pink car is bronze, I am Dinah Shore.
Did I ever tell you that my grandmother used to insist that Dinah Shore was a black woman who was passing? She used to say that Dinah Shore had had her skin bleached. She spoke with utmost authority, as though the skin-bleaching surgeon had been over earlier in the day. Had passed the Creamora across the vinyl tablecloth and told Gramma all about it.
Naturally, we all thought this was a berserk theory until after Gramma died and we were going through her things, and we found some sheet music in a piano bench? There was some sheet music "as sung by Dinah Shore" and I swear to you Dinah looked black in the little photo of her.
I do not know what to tell you about Dinah Shore.
In other pressing news, tomorrow is the date of my mammogram, and my, am I ever looking forward to it.
For those of you just tuning in, two years ago I had my first mammogram, and yes, you are supposed to start at age 40 but I was scared it would hurt. Which by the way it doesn't. But two years ago, my workplace had this thing where they'd pick us up in limos and give us sparkling cider and we'd all go get mammogrammed together, so I went.
I didn't think anything of it once I figured out it didn't hurt. As I was getting dressed, I saw they had free massages for women who got called back in, to reduce the stress, and I remember thinking, "Oh, how awful to get called back in."
Then a few days later they called me. "Hello, June? This is the Breast Looky-Loo Center Near Your Work."
My first thought was, wow, did I leave my coat there? Honest engine. That was my first thought.
"We need you to come back in and take some more pictures," they said.
My blood turned to ice. "Okay," I said. "How scared should I be?"
"Oh, not at all. This happens all the time," they said.
Okay, but had they MET me? The scardiest scared hypochondriac of all time? So I let myself freak out for one hour. I closed the door to my office and cried on the floor, then I came home and calmly blogged about it. Well. Calmly for me.
"GET ALL THE INFO YOU CAN, JUNE!" some yahoo on here told me. "FIND OUT EVERYTHING ABOUT WHAT THEY FOUND! YOU NEED TO KNOW EVERYTHING!"
Okay, you know what? That was the worst advice I ever got in my life. Because I did NOT NEED to know what they THOUGHT they found. I would have needed to know what they DID find, had they found something, but for someone like me, finding out what they SUSPECTED they found did me NO GOOD AT ALL.
Because what they thought they found was totally scary. It was like the worst suspicion possible. That doctor might as well have written, "Oh, she has straight out the butt bad cancer. Plan her funeral."
And then of course I GOOGLED everything, which is similarly a bad idea. You can turn yourself into a ball of terror doing that. Don't ever do that.
Anyway, just like this year, it was right around Thanksgiving, and the Looky-Loo Breast Center Near My Work couldn't get me in for a few weeks. Yeah, right. I was gonna go around shaking and sweating and crying like this for a few weeks.
So I made an appointment at a place near my house, which turned out to be brilliant, because they have digital mammography, which means they can practically see every corpuscle and thought your breastical area has ever had. Plus also they got me in quickly.
But when I went to the first place to get my slides, I was so hysterical that they called my doctor, who called me to say, "This sounds really bad. Prepare for the worst."
HELLO! GOOD DOCTORING! Prepare myself for the WORST? Have you ever thought of working for a crisis line? Because by the time I hung up with him I was in a BALL on the couch.
Prepare myself for the worst. Good gravy.
So anyway, it turns out it was nothing. Well, probably nothing. There was a 2% chance it was something. They had me come back in six months just to make sure.
Guess who spent those next six months OBSESSED? OBSESSED! I have never been so miserable. I was so horrified. And then when I finally went back? It was fine.
So last year, at Thanksgiving, I went back to the digital place near my house for my regular mammogram. They told me they'd call the following Monday if there was gonna be a problem.
That Monday I was shopping for Thanksgiving, and I checked my messages, oh, 700,000 times. No call. Finally it was FOUR-FIFTY in the afternoon, and I was lounging with the cats, feeling secure, and the PHONE RANG!
They needed me to COME BACK IN! This time they saw something on the OTHER SIDE!
All I can tell you is I'm glad I'm not a mama dog with 48 teats or whatever. I'd have a heart attack.
So the day before Thanksgiving last year, they smashed the PEE out of me and figured out I had a totally benign thing going on. I am creating milk of magnesia over on the right or whatever. You need any?
And that is why, folks, I am SO excited to have my mammogram early tomorrow morning. Because so far these mammograms have been relaxing and enjoyable.
My hope is that the third time is a charm. They have now seen both hootie-hoots with their extra-glowy look-see digital machines, so I am hoping there is nothing to make them say, "Hey, hang on. What's that?"
I really picked the wrong week to stop shooting heroin. And passing for white.
