CAREER DAY BOOBS
Mammogram Technician Discusses Knockers All Day
Yes, I am required to pinch the nipples…in order to perform a ductal lavage
8:25am: Arrive at high school to man booth for Career Day, feeling, as we say in the business, ready to perform a diagnostic screening of students to identify candidates for the mammography industry.
8:27am: Put out the “Early Detection Matters” brochures — the hot ones with the drawings of the naked broad reaching up over her head, checking her melons for BRCA2, a gene located on chromosome 13.
8:30am: Wait for someone to come up, ask me about my career as a dude in the breasticle business.
10:15am: Girl named Jamie walks up to the booth. Talk to her about titties. “See this here? This chick felt something odd in her cream pie. Turns out she had microcalcifications. But see, those tiny deposits within the breast, singly or in clusters, are often found by mammography. So, that’s what we do.” Smile at Jamie.
10:16am: This Jamie person not impressed. Ask her if this doesn’t blow her mind, what other fancy profession is she looking for?
10:17am: Jamie says she wants to be a vet but there’s no booth at the Career Day for that.
10:18am: Reach for the So You Want to Be a Breast Imaging Technologist flyer I created for today. Tell Jamie I can see how tending to puppies and parakeets might seem like a good way to get some dough, but there is nothing like the feeling of getting some human bazongas into medical diagnostic equipment and then determining that a contrast agent should be used to enhance or increase variance between her anatomical structures.
10:19am: Jamie rolls her eyes and moves on. I tell her fine, get lost. Attitude like that she’d suck at breast scintimammography anyway.
10:20am: Group of boys overhear the word ‘breast’ and arrive at booth. Alpha of group asks if I play with boobs all day.
10:21am: Tell the kid I don’t play with boobs, I save them. Ask for his name, and he says it’s “Chest-er.” I pause then say “Good one.”
10:22am: Relay to Chester that I don’t mess around at work, not when my job is to help detect horrors like BRCA1 or 2, or ductal carcinoma in situ.
10:23am: Ask Chester if he’s familiar with those terms.
10:24am: Chester says he’s not but that he’s familiar with nipples. Chester picks up a brochure, and traces the woman’s areola. Asks if he gets to twist those if he does my job.
10:25am: Take brochure out of his hand and explain that yes, I am required to pinch the nipples…in order to perform a ductal lavage.
10:26am: Chester tries to interrupt so I say loudly that a ductal lavage is a procedure in which a small catheter is inserted into the nipple and the breast ducts are flushed with fluid to collect breast cells.
10:27am: Chester says that’s disgusting and that he and his friends are going to go check out the ob-gyn booth so they can learn how to examine pussy.
10:28am: Call after them that going the ob-gyn route would be heavy in cervical cytology, not vaginal histology. Call them morons.
11:58am: Fold up tablecloth to clean up booth. Consider ways to tell boss that unfortunately, this particular class of academics did not possess the qualities we’d hope to see in our hands-on breast tomosynthesis modality field.
11:59am: Dude in sweater vest and khakis comes to booth. Ask him if he’s the principal. Tell him he should know that his school is real deficient in youths interested in assisting with mammography to help reduce deaths from breast cancer among women ages 40 to 74.
12:00pm: Sweater Vest takes a flyer and says he’s here about a career in mammography. Tells me he teaches ADH: Advanced Discourse in History, but is looking for something new.
12:01pm Tell the guy I do a lot of ADH myself: atypical ductal hyperplasia. Tell him the mammogram tech job is heavy in looking at milk monsters through breast-specific gamma imaging all day.
12:02pm: Guy says he understands, and expects the work to be satisfying.
12:03pm: Size the guy up.
12:04pm: Tell the guy I have to leave because I have a 1pm with a regular, the woman whose density I detected in her X-ray analog. Today we’re hitting her fun bags with a 3D mammogram to obtain sectional images of the breast.
12:05pm: Write down my phone number on the back of his flyer. Tell him that later, after I’ve entered all my data into the BI-RADS system, which sorts results into categories numbered 0 through 6, he should meet me down at Paps Tavern. Tell him I think he’d be a good member of the team, but I got to make sure he’s the kind of guy I can get a beer with.
12:07pm: Tell the guy that in the meantime, to see if he has any natural talent, to spend the rest of his day looking at cans to see if anything stands out, if any of them look like they could be carrying spiculated cells.
12:08pm: The guy agrees.
12:09pm: Grab all my stuff. Tell the guy I’ll see him tonight.
12:45pm: Text my boss that I have successfully detected a new member of the tig ole biddies protection industry.
