The Blue Hospital Bracelet

After putting off for weeks, no make that months, the mammogram that every woman over fifty is meant to undergo every year, after deleting phone messages from the nice ladies at my primary care doctor’s office as well as the nice ladies in the radiology department at the local hospital, I finally decided to stop behaving like a surly teenager and, in the words of the redneck bumper sticker, “git r done.” I’ve never understood the meaning of that phrase, but I suspect that it has politically incorrect sexual overtones, and is not feminist friendly.

Mammograms, of course, have no skanky sexual overtones and are feminist friendly, but I still would rather do almost anything than have one. It’s not just that it’s annoying to have your breasts pushed, plumped, and squeezed by nice plump ladies (I don’t know why, but every radiological technician I have ever had has been at least thirty pounds overweight) who turn and twist your mammary glands under the cold, hard metal plates of the X-ray machine like chicken parts on a grill, it’s also that you inevitably put yourself through the worst-case-scenario storytelling spin cycle, as in what will you do if, after three days, you get the phone call. The nice, fat nurses always reassure you that only ten percent of patients get the call, while ninety percent get the letter in the mail signed by your primary care physician, informing you that all is quiet on the western front of your mortality.

My friend, Lisa, got the call, and it led to more calls, none of which contained good news. It will be two years this fall that she’s been gone, and it all started with a routine mammogram at the very hospital in which I find myself on this feverishly hot May morning. As I shuffle down the clean, brightly lit halls--I enter by way of the ER, which I try not to interpret in too ominous a light—I remind myself it’s only a mammogram. If I go in ready for stage four breast cancer, I will have only myself to blame if the news is bad.

“Who’s your primary, Sweetie?” asks the huge nurse checking me in at the radiology desk. Now, you’re probably going to accuse me of sizism, and I really can’t say I would blame you because all I can think about is that this one is over-the-top huge, and I mean so massive that she’s busting out of her teal scrubs and the swiveling office chair can barely contain her. I tell myself that my attitude sucks. If my teenaged son behaved the way I’m behaving, he’d get a big fat lecture and no Red Sox games on TV for a week. I can’t very well threaten to nix my nightly baths, but there’s got to be some way I can find a better PMA (positive mental attitude).

I start mouthing the Scientific Statement of Being, penned over a hundred years ago by Mary Baker Eddy, the discoverer and founder of Christian Science who never had breast cancer, outlived three husbands, and reached the august age of 89. I haven’t darkened the doors of a Christian Science church in forty years, but the pellucid sentences roll off my tongue—“There is no life, truth, intelligence or substance in matter”—and I am back in Sunday school standing like a steeple reciting the six-sentence prayer before the end-of-service bell rings.

But oh misery of misericordias, I am beamed back to a plump, beatific-faced middle-aged lady in a floral dress with lace smoking at the neck. Many lifetimes ago, this Sunday school teacher, who reminded me of a kinder, gentler version of granite-faced, tight-curled Mary Baker Eddy, failed to show up to teach her class, failed to appear when church resumed in the fall, which meant we got her husband as a sub, who could never remember our names.

Her husband was Norman Simpson, a successful writer of bed-and-breakfast books and a minor celebrity in Berkshire County. The Simpsons (and this was long before the television series of that name, though Mrs. Simpson’s trusting character was not unlike Marge Simpson’s) lived in Stockbridge, not far from Norman Rockwell’s studio on Main Street. They sent their kids to the Berkshire Country Day School and belonged to the Stockbridge Golf Club. Mrs. Simpson--and thanks to the declining dendrites in my middle-aged brain, I can’t remember her first name—was the last person you would expect to get breast cancer, but she did, and since she was a devout Christian Scientist, she elected not to have chemo or radiation.

Mrs. Simpson never returned to our basement Sunday school, never sang “Mother’s Evening Prayer,” to the accompanying chords of the Spinet before we were released to our parents’ care. The adults who gathered in the upstairs vestibule on that Sunday after her death whispered that she had slipped away peacefully at home with her family all around her, which is what she had wanted. But I found nothing beautiful about the story. On that morning when I learned that Mrs. Simpson was in heaven with Mrs. Eddy, I informed my mother that Christian Science was a joke, and that I wanted nothing more to do with it.

As I continue to berate myself for failing to remember Mrs. Simpson’s Christian name, my own first name is called. A woman dressed in street clothes—and this one is slender and fit, putting the lie to my sizist stereotype-- beckons me into her windowless office. She wants me to verify my primary care physician as well as my birth date and social security number. When I confirm all these details to her satisfaction, she produces a blue plastic identification bracelet and slips it around my wrist.

“Oh Geez, do they think I’m going to go into cardiac arrest on the breast imaging machine?” I ask.

“Of course not, Sweetheart,” she says. “The hospital just wants to make sure that everyone gets to where they need to go.”

“But I’m here for, what, an hour?”

“New policy, as of last year. Nobody passes through those doors without an I.D. No exceptions.”

Meekly, I return to my straight-backed chair and wait, like Godot. An athletic-looking woman in sleeveless tee and khaki shorts is leafing through a copy of Real Simple, and when she leaves, I pick up the oversized magazine, wondering whether focusing on 26 ways to get organized might take my mind off the 50 ways I’m about to lose it.

Instead, I twirl the bracelet upon my wrist. There are an annoying number of numbers, bar codes, slashes and asterisks on the white rectangle stuck at a rakish angle onto the tissue-thin plastic. The plastic is probably made in China, and no doubt contains cancer-causing polyvinyl chlorides. If I don’t have cancer now, I will surely get it from this wristband.

And why, in the name of Mary Baker Eddy, is the blasted thing blue? Code blue is the big bad wolf of all hospital emergency codes, reserved for those sorry folks who are one machine away from the morgue. Blue also summons up the insurance megalith which began with the best of intentions, covering teachers in Texas in the twenties and oil workers in Oregon in the thirties but which has become synonymous with everything that is wrong with the health care system. (I can’t afford the premiums charged by Blue Cross, Blue Shield, but I do carry insurance from a lesser regional entity and it’s covering most of the procedure, save for $63.68, though how Health New England arrives at this number is beyond me.)

But if you can forget about all these “Sicko” associations, the patient bracelet is sort of calming. It’s the blue of a cloudless summer sky over the Connecticut River, the blue of Block Island Sound when the ferry first slips out of sight of land. I am moved to mouth a random line from the Scientific Statement of Being: “All is infinite mind and its infinite manifestation.”

My name is finally called and I am instructed to walk all the way down the hall to the left of the front desk. I enter another windowless room where the athletic woman in khakis is now seated beside an end table staring at her fingernails. Within seconds a nurse beckons to her and she creeps away on rubber-sandaled feet. Another nurse in periwinkle scrubs appears, asking me whether I am wearing any deodorant, powders, or perfumes. When I report that I’m not, she says “Good Girl,” as if I am a puppy who no longer pees in the house.

Like many life events, my mammogram is far worse in prospect. The nice fat technician calls me Sweetie more times than I can count, reminds me to breathe, says I am doing great (great is technically an adjective rather than an adverb, but I resist the urge to bust her). When all the pics of my left and right breast, front and back, have been taken, and I am permitted to return to my cubby, remove the blue-and-white dotted hospital johnny and slip on my smelly, coffee-stained tee-shirt, I am hologrammic with joy.

On the way out, the admitting nurse, who must have overheard my kvetching about the bracelet, offers to dispose of it in the hospital shredder. But I surprise myself and say, “Thanks, but I think I’ll keep it. For a souvenir.”

I don’t get the phone call, and a little key stroking on Google calls up Mrs. Simpson’s first name: Nancy.