“After this news, I still make an appointment for a mammogram”

José Rozenbroek talks about her experience with breast cancer research.

I eat with my trusted group of friends. We have just ordered tarte tatin and cheesecake with four forks, when M. tells us that she has breast cancer. Her husband fiddled with her breasts one evening until he stopped abruptly: “Can you feel, is this a bump?”

M. hardly dared to feel, she confesses. I get that, I like to hug my breasts, but meticulously scanning them for lumps, bumps, bumps and other irregularities, as we women are always advised to do, I rarely do. Too scary.

We eat our dessert in defeat. M. is the second of our group of four to have breast cancer. She says that the tumor is still very small and fortunately not of the meanest kind. Next week she will go under the knife and with a bit of luck she will be clean after a number of radiation treatments.

A week later, there happens to be a letter in the mailbox, with a call for participation in the population screening for breast cancer. I look at it doubtfully. I ignored the previous call, I was so furious about the mammogram I had had a few years before. I had fallen into the hands of a stout nurse, who satanically squeezed my innocent, sweet, little tits between the glass plates, crushing them into pancakes. Crying with fury, I drove home and wrote on Facebook, “So far, breast exam calls ignored as much as possible because of misogynistic, painful tit crushing. But now that the girlfriends are getting breast cancer in droves, they have gone again. And again it was painful, misogynistic and humiliating. Girls, let’s go on strike en masse to enforce a kinder method.’

Well, I knew that. I received almost two hundred responses from women. One half agreed with me: if men had to undergo this examination for their balls, a screening would have long since been chosen in which the private parts would be sparingly spared. The website of KWF Cancer Control states that such a painless test exists, especially for small, firm breasts and for women who have undergone breast-conserving operations, but that this method still needs further investigation. Strange, in countries such as Belgium and Switzerland, excellent scans have been offered for years in which breasts are not crushed. In the Netherlands we think that is too expensive.

The other half of the comments on my Facebook post came from women who had or had breast cancer. They were furious or laughed at me. I shouldn’t have been acting like that, come on, I was happy that prevention was being done in our country. That little inconvenience, what did it mean?

For five years I silently boycotted mammography. But after the news from M. I make an appointment anyway. Again there is a nurse who cheerfully and relentlessly tightens the screws. Tears of pain and humiliation well up in my eyes again. Again I cycle home furious, with breasts that remain sensitive for days. I’m pinching myself: what if I’m punished for my affectation with a bad result…? Fortunately, according to the letter that was just delivered: the God of breast cancer appears to be merciful to me. As long as it lasts, he doesn’t give any guarantees.