Maintenance....Every 3000 Miles

Most everything in life has to be 'maintained'. Our cars, our homes, our food storage, our lifestyle, our bodies.
So last Friday was 'maintenance' day. The Honda needed the oil changed, fluids filled, tires kicked and rotated and cleaned inside and out. A $49.95 charge when all was said and done.
Then, it was MY turn....off to the OB-GYN. I was poked, pricked, kicked, smashed and cleaned inside and out. Those visits are not fun. My body maintenance is the worst visit of the year...the typical questions...any new info in medical history? How old was your mother when she got breast cancer? When was your last period? ETC...Then they draw blood to test if I'm pre-menopausal...geez, just ASK me..I can tell you!!! Then they prick my finger to test my blood clotting abilities...good to go there, but I AM anemic...not enough iron in my diet. And then of course, we always have the 'finale'...the good old 'spread Eagle, loss of any pride probing ritual' that every obstetrician must just live for!!! Can't they go through the belly button for this?? They can for everything else these days???!!
Of course, then I finish with the 'icing on the cake'...the mammogram!! It's amazing to me how much emphasis is placed on the woman's breast. It's a source of nourishment for our children, a body part that many see as sexual and depending on size, mostly determines what I am and am NOT able to wear in clothing. All women are either too big, too small, too flat, too imbalanced but certainly NEVER perfect, unless they cost over $10,000...and then they have the chance of 'leaking'. So mammograms prove for a very interesting experience.
After we have been poked, prodded, pricked and pronounced ready to re-dress, we are then led to another room where, once again, we have to partially undress the body part that we try sooo desperately to keep covered out in public, but so freely display now for an xray technician. Thank heavens mine is a female...so I can be humorous and sarcastic about the awkwardness of the situation.
To say that gravity has moved my body parts into different places gives too much credit to gravity. The poor technician was in such a state of confusion, trying to carefully move one body part out of the way, only to have another one massively takes it's place. There were not enough hands to hold my stomach, my extra breast tissue and other breast all out of the way at the same time. It was becoming a 'team effort'. It's at this point, that she feels she has my breast in the right place to smash it with this clamp device. Flat - flatter - flattened.
Can I say something at this point? Why? I'm pretty sure 'they' will never be the same again. By the time she had my arm positioned correctly and my head and chin up out of the way, she then has the nerve to tell, no, ask me 'not to breathe' as she snaps the xray. Of course, it's then that I envision this VOGUE pose I'm in and how absolutely ridiculous and uncomfortable I must look and I laugh.
Take two...and I didn't laugh.
This is, of course, to see if I have breast cancer or the beginnings thereof. I won't know any test results until next week. So far, they have been negative year after year. But there is going to come a year that the results are not going to be as they have previously been for either me, or one of my 11 siblings. My mother had breast cancer..in both breasts, and then a double mastectomy. Her only sister had breast cancer...our odds are good that one of us 12 siblings will get breast cancer. Probably even two of us.
So, each year, I go back and do the whole maintenance visit again. I'm figuring that I put on a little over 3000 miles each year, although, this visit, I had lost 4 pounds from last years visit. I think I'm holding on about as well as our 2005 Honda Accord with 108,000 miles on it. But HER maintenance visits aren't nearly as humorous as mine are.
I walked out of the doctors office fully dressed, feeling a little beaten up but contently happy with my 1 yr prescription of Paxil in hand.
That little pill makes the past hour's discomfort totally worth it.