This is a post about my breasts. In my house, we call them The Ladies. The Ladies have distinct personalities and preferences. The left is named Simone, the right Françoise. I don’t remember naming them; just, at some point in my 30s, they introduced themselves to me with their unique identities, rolling their eyes at my ignorance. They presented themselves separately to my husband, who – if he was surprised – accepted their acquaintance with good grace, and to this day manifests respect for each of them; their quirks and idiosyncratic behaviors make him laugh. Simone and Françoise flirt with my husband, their French-accented rivalries good-natured, if barbed. They accuse each other of upstaging, instances of “mauvais goût” (bad taste), and routinely annoying unfortunate habits. But they agree on many details of daily life and the vicissitudes of society.
I would never dare dismiss them as inconsequential members of our family.
*****
Simone and Françoise had primped and preened, that Friday in August, because I was scheduled to have my annual exam and yearly mammogram. And, on est Française ou on ne l’est pas,* and no self-respecting French boob would go to such an important appointment without making sure she looked her best. I had to cancel both appointments, though, for a commitment on campus. The MyChart system let me automatically choose a new date for my annual, but I had to call to reschedule the mammogram. I put it off because, well, I hate making phone calls (and Simone and Françoise are NOT fans of mammography). I figured that since the standards have changed, and mammograms only need to be every two years or so, I’d be OK. But then The Ladies both started leaking. On the right (Françoise), it was just the familiar, pearled, yellow-ish liquid I used to gather like manna for those silicone bags I would keep in my freezer. But on the left (Simone), it was olive green.
This was new. It was weird. And, despite my light tone, it was scary.
Eleven years (and some) ago now, in the first weeks of nursing, once our newborn had established a regular nursing routine, my husband called my left breast the “super-producer.” Simone filled quickly, pumped with delightful plenitude, and satisfied our baby’s hunger all by herself. Sometimes in the wee hours of the infamous fourth trimester, I would – loopy with fatigue – picture my left boob as a cartoon superhero: a little cape streaming valiantly from the aureole, a geometric “P” emblazoned across the milk-swollen curve.
The fact of having a baby at advanced maternal age in the first place felt, and was, miraculous. But being able to nourish my child from my own body? It blew my mind. I had never thought of my breasts as anything other than part of my appearance, usually a sort of nuisance because I could never find a bra in my size – whether that size was big or small or sometimes, somehow, both at once. For the first time in my entire life, my breasts were just right. They worked perfectly. I didn’t care what they looked like; they fed life into our baby boy. Our second son had trouble nursing from the very beginning, but still the left maintained its heroic production pattern. When he was at his sickest I scheduled feedings for every 90 minutes, with a 24-hour alarm system on my phone; and derived a small measure of comfort from the knowledge that at least, no matter what else went wrong in his world, Simone would never fail him.
Flash forward to the summer of 2024.
One night a few days after the kids started their school year, my husband mentioned the fact that our younger son seemed to have a cold. As he talked, I felt the once-familiar sting of lactation letdown, breastmilk rising into my nipples. This used to happen when one baby or the other was sick – my body knew they needed extra nourishment, extra immunity support, and all the benefits breast milk provides. I laughed because our kids are now 11 years old and 8 1/2 — nobody in our house is nursing these days! But there it was, that feeling of tickly urgency, the body-knowledge I once anticipated viscerally, my babies’ needs calling to the depths of my physical being and pulling forth the manna that would keep them alive. I pulled my shirt up and sure enough, a little drop of clear liquid sat on the surface of my right nipple. On the left, though, there was a strange green smudge.
“Hey honey,” I said, “look at this.“
(I was smirking a bit, because – well, my BOOB was leaking GREEN. I kind of wanted to wake up our 11-year-old, knowing he would go “EWWWWWW!” but also crack up. He is very intrigued by breasts and finds them hilarious, innocently, in this first tween phase of curiosity about all body parts, especially those we tell them to respect as private. Genitals are comedy, I tell you, and boobs? It’s like striking gold.)
My husband looked – then made a face and said, “maybe someone professional, like a boob doctor, should look at that.”
Our “super-producer“ had started oozing green, slightly-thicker-than-breastmilk liquid – about five years after anybody had regularly nursed. I called my doctor. The nurse who returned my call got me in for an appointment later that afternoon. The NP I saw did a breast exam. She scratched quick notes in her notepad, then sent me for a mammogram, an ultrasound, and blood tests to rule out any kind of infection or any one of the nameless conditions I couldn’t imagine.
The ultrasound technician (Rachel) wore her hair in a long bob, and I watched it swing satisfyingly against her jawline. She asked a few questions, had me squeeze each nipple so she could evaluate the fluid herself, then whirled around to the system computer and tapped on the keyboard a few times, while drawing “select and click” rectangles over the image on the monitor. There was a moment during the ultrasound when Rachel dropped her cheer. She had examined my right breast with its clear liquid, taken some still shots, and said, “this all looks just fine!“
But she went silent as the wand touched Simone. She moved the wand carefully, slowly, and took many more pictures than she had taken of Françoise. (Françoise, by the bye, muttered something about a “prima donna” and “always needing attention, but I ignored her.) The wand created grainy black and white images on the screen, and I tried to understand their shapes and contours, the places where the image showed more white or more dark. But I didn’t really know how to look at what she was looking at, and my mind shut down. She squinted at the monitor, dragging and clicking. I watched her swinging hair. Once she had finished with my left breast, she said in a voice I couldn’t quite decipher, “I’m going to take this to the radiologist now, so just hang out here and wait a couple minutes. It won’t be long.“
When a medical practitioner says “it won’t be long,” that statement usually proves false. In fact, sometimes it is an outright lie. And indeed, that morning, wrapping The Ladies up in the flimsy cotton of the mammogram jacket, it was. Long minutes, waiting to hear if I needed further testing, or if they had detected something. What had her face meant, when it stilled and she let the wand hover underneath the bottom curve of my breast? What had those gritty pictures shown her, that made her go silent? Should I text my husband now, while sitting in a cold room at Woman’s? Or should I wait in case there was genuinely bad news he would need to know, and not just my fear of bad news I couldn’t anticipate.
Approximately 12 million other thoughts spun across my mind while I waited for Rachel to return. When she did, the door swung open quickly, and she handed me my exit paperwork.
“So,” she said, “the radiologist didn’t see anything concerning. Green discharge is ‘normal.’ We only need to worry if the discharge is red or black. Just keep an eye on it … her,” she said, looking at me strangely, “and you’re good to go down to the lab for bloodwork. The lab is on the first floor across from Subway.”
In the years since I moved to Baton Rouge and began seeing my OB-GYN at Woman’s Hospital, I have walked the hallways of that building more times than I can count. But that day, I got lost on the way to the lab. I had to ask at the information desk, and apparently displayed my confusion in my words, because I ended up at the wrong lab. The inpatient lab had no record of any orders in my name, so a kind receptionist led me to the correct hallway. As I thanked her, I felt the stinging behind my eyes, from tension and fear I had not registered before. She patted my hand and returned to her desk. I went down the hall, found Subway, found the lab. A hematology technician with a suave grin and blue braids took two small vials of blood, wrapped my elbow with that stretchy tape, and said, “now YOU have a GREAT one, yeah?”
You’ll be relieved to know that Simone is fine …
Simone, my Super-Producer, still “regurgitates” a bit if I squeeze her. It is always olive green, and she finds the color … distasteful. Françoise remains somewhat jealous of the attention Simone receives for her new oddity, but you know, sisters can be petty. They can also be glorious. Simone and Françoise have worked in tandem for over 50 years now. They lift each other up.
The initial scare and the process of investigating it brought insight: my body teaches things I didn’t know I didn’t know.
I learned that breasts have times of life just as uteruses do. I remembered mine aching a bit when I was a teenager who had just started menstruating. I remembered them reacting to a birth control medication I took during college; and how they grew sore when I went through a hippie phase and stopped wearing a bra. (I remembered that soreness repeating itself during Covid, when I simply didn’t wear a bra because why would I because Covid.) I remembered the way they swelled and felt gloriously full the first morning I knew I was pregnant with our older son – the morning my now-husband looked me up and down and said, with wonder in his voice, “you’re glowing.” I remembered how it felt when our beautiful child latched correctly for the first time, and I watched his little mouth move, drinking in utter trust and elemental need, and the feeling of him on my chest, watching him nurse and grow and learn, feeling my heart explode with love at this tiny human who depended on me for the nourishment that kept him alive.
And now, I remember what it was like when my breasts started letting go of the period when I nursed my babies. It has been years, as I said, since our babies were babies who needed to nurse at the breast. It has been years since we shared the closeness of those long, exhausted newborn nights in a rocking chair or on a couch or sometimes on the floor, or bouncing and walking around the living room, trying to cajole a baby or toddler to sleep without waking up my husband.
A few days later, an official letter came from my OB-GYN’s office: enclosed please find the results of your recent breast exam. We detected no abnormalities or signs of concern.
There was a time when I put together a scrapbook of every single ultrasound image. I did not receive the images from this recent visit, but I wish I had requested them. I want to be the woman who collects pictures of my own healthy body for inclusion in a photo album. Because it’s easy, as a mom, maybe especially as a mom of children who are no longer babies, to forget to be amazed at everything our bodies can do. To forget to treasure them as the gifts they are, whether they are carrying children or nursing them or recovering from a C-section or the postpartum weight gain, or simply settling into their shape as we enter our next decade. This, as Tay-Tay might say, is my “middle-aged mom” era. My boobs are adjusting to it too. The right one still issues a tiny drop of clear liquid if I squeeze hard enough.
And the left? My “super-producer” is happy to excrete a bead of bizarre green fluid on demand. I can’t explain it, I don’t know how green discharge from a breast is “normal,” but like so many other things about settling into my middle-aged body, I will learn to roll with it. The meaning of normal continues to evolve, decade to decade, and this detail is just part of that process. In order to know that though, I had to call my doctor. I had to conquer my fear of the phone, my fear of a medical result I didn’t know how to deal with, and allow a professional to examine my breasts. I could not settle for looking it up on Google, or posting about it – even anonymously – in some mommy group on Facebook, were even calling my sister.
I know some women hesitate to get mammograms because the machine, let’s face it, is not exactly comfortable.
(One day, someone will understand that breasts are round while mammogram machines are flat planes, and will develop technology that actually works with a woman’s body. That person should win a Nobel prize.) A mammogram can be painful, which is a shame, and technicians can be curt or (in corporate medical settings) rushed to see as many patients as possible in a working day, which is also a shame. I rescheduled my recent mammogram not out of fear of pain, but because it was inconvenient given everything else that fills the hours of my day. There is morning carpool for school; the commute to LSU; the 800 emails I have to reply to; the grades I need to enter; the classes I need to teach; the meetings I’m supposed to attend; the grant applications and their various deadlines.
what it feels like to get a mammogram
But Simone’s green issue has brought new awareness about this stage of my life.
First: I cannot put my health second. My kids need me healthy.
My husband needs me healthy. My students and colleagues need me healthy. And I need me healthy. It isn’t narcissism to insist that my health matters. I can’t attend meetings or submit grant applications if I allow a concerning health situation, no matter how inconvenient, to fester and worsen until it takes up all my time.
Second: breast-health is serious, and not separate from just – health.
Though our culture uses them to sell everything from cars to ice cream, breasts are an important part of the body and deserve to be taken every bit as seriously, and receive every bit of the medical attention we give to any other organ or condition.
We talk a lot about self-care these days, and though it’s more fun to think about lavender eye masks and mani-pedis, I am deciding to be realistic about all that self-care can and does entail. Part of self-care has to be about allowing my body to receive the medical attention it deserves. That may mean I take a morning by myself to go to Woman’s Hospital, get a mammogram, and see my OB-GYN. Less fun than some of the alternatives, I’ll give you, but how much more meaningful to know that I am intentionally putting my breast health, and thus my health as a woman, at the top of my list of priorities.
October is breast-health month. Have you scheduled your mammogram?
It’s so easy to put off, or put last, after the kids’ soccer and karate and check-ups and school projects and work deadlines and 75 bazillion emails to answer. But when that temptation comes – oh, I can get a mammogram in a couple months; it’s so uncomfortable and inconvenient … – I invite you to picture Simone stamping her dainty foot. Here is an October challenge: find an accountability partner and schedule your mammograms together (with the understanding that there will be massages or mani-pedis afterwards).
Let’s make breast health a normal part of Health Care, of self-care, and of self-valuing. Let’s evangelise. Tell the women you know: get squished, get informed, and celebrate the gift of your body. Your boobs are worth it.
needed extra nourishment, extra immunity support, and all the benefits breast milk provides. I laughed because our kids are now 11 years old and 8 1/2 — nobody in our house is nursing these days! But there it was, that feeling of tickly urgency, the body-knowledge I once anticipated viscerally, my babies’ needs calling to the depths of my physical being and pulling forth the manna that would keep them alive. I pulled my shirt up and sure enough, a little drop of clear liquid sat on the surface of my right nipple. On the left, though, there was a strange green smudge.
Our “super-producer“ had started oozing green, slightly-thicker-than-breastmilk liquid – about five years after anybody had regularly nursed. I called my doctor. The nurse who returned my call got me in for an appointment later that afternoon. The NP I saw did a breast exam. She scratched quick notes in her notepad, then sent me for a mammogram, an ultrasound, and blood tests to rule out any kind of infection or any one of the nameless conditions I couldn’t imagine.
“So,” she said, “the radiologist didn’t see anything concerning. Green discharge is ‘normal.’ We only need to worry if the discharge is red or black. Just keep an eye on it … her,” she said, looking at me strangely, “and you’re good to go down to the lab for bloodwork. The lab is on the first floor across from Subway.”
October is breast-health month. Have you scheduled your mammogram?
