Comments on: Warning: This Post Is All About Boobs, But Not In A Good Way

By: BCA Gal

BCA Gal — Wed, 05 Oct 2005 14:33:20 +0000

Thank you for sharing your expierence and I truely hope nothing turns up in future checks.

By: amira li

amira li — Wed, 24 Aug 2005 11:52:54 +0000

i love u

By: KF

KF — Sun, 01 May 2005 03:12:50 +0000

Yeeks. At least nobody’s come at me with needles yet. Good grief, incline, I’m sorry to hear that—I hope all’s been better since then…

By: incline

incline — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 19:21:24 +0000

yeah, a similar thing happened to me like TWO DAYS before i left to study abroad in asia. so i went to a hospital and DEMANDED that they do their biopsy or whatever RIGHT THEN. this involved a lot of shooting huge needles through my boob. The next day I left on a plane for Taipei. Where I basically waited around for the results wondering if they were BAD, whether I’d just stay in Asia and ignore them. Hm. I have some benign tumor-like thing, apparently. And can I just say that it’s pretty unfair to be FLAT-CHESTED and have to go through all this boob stuff?

By: Francois Lachance

Francois Lachance — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 14:38:03 +0000

KF,

I sensed in first reading this “boob” posting a kinship with the posting on the adventures with commercial goods. That sense is also detectable in the comment about being “jacked around by the medical profession”. It seems that the authorial figure at Planned Obsolesence has developed a flair for the “damage and repair” narrative and all its annecdotal recreations. By a slight stretch of the imagination I can think through this narrative pattern in terms of the concerns with Catholic ritual and dogma. For in each of the “damage and repair” narratives there is a moment in the narration that foregrounds, without extensive exploration, the waiting, the sometimes long long wait for the response from complaint to remediation. The waiting period corresponds to the duration of diagnosis, a diegetic point where the protagonist is left waiting for the technician, the doctor, the customer service representative or whoever to do their thing off stage. The tie in with Christian and Catholic themes? The Incarnation. Very much a mystery of damage and repair. Salvation and Resurrection. But the Incarnation is also a mystery about the nature of waiting. Coming into being takes time, fills time, and challenges certain forms of narration. Of the three theological virtues, charity and hope propel narratives of “damage and repair”. Faith, the other virtue, which is neither directed to action and care in the present nor to anticipation of a future state, is perhaps the driver of a different narrative—it is not so focussed on outcome and very much on process. Whatever the outcome, faith insists that charity, in all the glory of the mundane acts of caritas, with triumph in its own quiet fashion, and that hope will continue to bolster faith beyond damage and repair. It is almost like telling the story, narrating the life lessons, in such a fashion that the belief that when I, the protagonist, am gone the ripples of hope and charity continue to infuse the world with the quality of intent with which I lived my life, that is incarnated my values. I know this is literary criticism applied to a series of blog entries, I know that in a sense it depersonalizes the content of those entries, I do not know how the application of a depersonalizing move will be received now or later. I hope that in those moves care for and hope in the person of KF will be read in.

By: Liz

Liz — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 14:25:47 +0000

Wow.

(a) You’re a wonderful writer, and captured the experience perfectly (you may recall I had a cyst-related scare back in 2003...)

(b) I’m so glad you got a not-awful diagnosis

(c) There are wonderful doctors out there--I have several here in Rochester (my internist and my ob/gyn), so I’d recommend asking around to find someone who *does* listen to and respect you.

By: KF

KF — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 04:19:25 +0000

Thanks so much, all of you, for the good thoughts. I’m fairly sure everything’s fine, and that I just need to get the cystic thing under control, but the entire experience just reminds me (as Kari and I discussed here) how much I hate getting jacked around by the medical profession. There’s an arrogance in too many practitioners that insists that you, lowly patient, are in no place to ask questions or to demand more from your doctor than the five-minute listen-to-the-chest and blood draw every other year, because (a) you couldn’t possibly understand, and (b) I don’t have time for this. That’s bad enough in and of itself, but coupled with a too-frequent inability to actually diagnose what’s going on, and a total lack of concern about patient pain or anxiety, it just sends me up a tree. Grrrr.

By: jo(e)

jo(e) — Fri, 29 Apr 2005 02:42:15 +0000

I hate how the medical establishment treats women’s bodies as just something to be processed. What horrible experiences you’ve had. I wanted to cry when I read this.

I am lucky enough to have found a doctor who treats me like a human who needs to have all her questions answered. Many doctors are saying that newer MRIs will soon be more accurate than mammograms ... and they don’t require boob crushing. You would think that developing this technology would be a priority, wouldn’t you?

By: marcus

marcus — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 20:48:36 +0000

I just read through the comments and at gzombie’s mention of the antibot word “body” I scrolled down (always up for omens, am I) to find “normal” as mine. That’s bodes well, doesn’t it ?

By: Shasta

Shasta — Thu, 28 Apr 2005 19:39:45 +0000

What a stressful process. I’ll never understand why doctors don’t tend to realize that many of us cope with health scares by doing research. I don’t want a simple thumbs up or thumbs down; I want INFORMATION, and preferably lots of it. I can look for books, articles, and websites on my own, but it would be nice to have a medical professional give me advice about where to start. They often seem reluctant to do so.

Here’s to good health!