photographer Irving Penn made a witty modern still life out of blocks of frozen foodâraspberries, blueberries, asparagus, carrots, beans, pale under a haze of frostâstanding on end, an architecture that must have already been thawing and on its way to collapse under the studio lights.
I preserved the apricots that August, and my friend who had helped me with the first round of canning badgered me to have my first mammogram a few months later, only about six weeks after the terrible turbulence of September and the invitation to Iceland. In those days every woman over forty was supposed to have one annually; I was years behind that schedule, though a few years later the guidelines would shift and suggest that some of us could wait until fifty, but by then it was too late for me. I went dutifully but dismissively to be irradiated by those machines whose vises clasp your breasts like a lobster clamping onto a clock. Everything in my family history and my own habits exonerated me from danger, and I expected this business of making images of me from the inside would do the same. It didnât.
I didnât see the first round of pictures from the standard exam, but they were apparently interesting enough that my nurse-practitioner, who had also urged me to get examined and saw the results, moved up my biopsy date. And so it was that I found myself one afternoon two weeks later lying facedown on a table, cautioned not to move for the next hour, with a major section of myself anesthetized, and the whirring sound of a tiny drill entering my flesh again and again through the hole in the table. From where I lay, in a position that became excruciating because I had to hold it so long, I could twist my neck and see a screen where images of that breast in black and white showed huge on a monitor.
What size is a representation? No size at all, for we get used to seeing satellite photographs of continents the same size as snapshots of babies. These images looked like a night sky, hemispheres of darkness with pale streaky strands like clouds or vapor or the Milky Way in a desert night when the stars are so numerous they blur into radiant fields. Some of the bright areas, the microcalcifications or tiny calcium deposits that looked pale in that dark sky, were the grounds for concern.
On the screen that day was an image that didnât look at all like me. It was me, and my fate, this mortal heaven they were exploring with instruments, guided by live X-ray images, working remotely, as though they were embarked upon a moon probe or an ocean-floor exploration. Pearls, bubbles, skulls, bowls of fruit, but in my case it was interior images; a portion of my body that had always been there had been numbed into nonexistence, and a version of my body that had never existed before, that strange night sky on the screen, had supplanted it. I was not here but there, in this new vanitas picture.
The procedure on the table was a stereotactic core biopsy, and the device I was lying upon made the digital images I saw on the screen, and the images guided the cluster of people hovering around me about where to drill next for the thin core samples of flesh that would be examined later under a microscope. A pathologist would look at my cells to see if some of the cells in the lining of the milk ducts had begun to stray from their intended pattern. That is, if I had cancer.
Or rather had anomalous cells that might or might not become cancer, might have âductal carcinomas in situ,â as theyâre called. Some go on to become invasive cancers; some donât; and no one yet can predict which are which. Twenty years ago these cells were too subtle to be detected by X-rays; in another ten or twenty, medical technology will likely be able to determine which go on to be invasive. At that point in time, their presence could be detected but not their prospects, so they were all regarded as perilous. My portrait was being painted by digital
I preserved the apricots that August, and my friend who had helped me with the first round of canning badgered me to have my first mammogram a few months later, only about six weeks after the terrible turbulence of September and the invitation to Iceland. In those days every woman over forty was supposed to have one annually; I was years behind that schedule, though a few years later the guidelines would shift and suggest that some of us could wait until fifty, but by then it was too late for me. I went dutifully but dismissively to be irradiated by those machines whose vises clasp your breasts like a lobster clamping onto a clock. Everything in my family history and my own habits exonerated me from danger, and I expected this business of making images of me from the inside would do the same. It didnât.
I didnât see the first round of pictures from the standard exam, but they were apparently interesting enough that my nurse-practitioner, who had also urged me to get examined and saw the results, moved up my biopsy date. And so it was that I found myself one afternoon two weeks later lying facedown on a table, cautioned not to move for the next hour, with a major section of myself anesthetized, and the whirring sound of a tiny drill entering my flesh again and again through the hole in the table. From where I lay, in a position that became excruciating because I had to hold it so long, I could twist my neck and see a screen where images of that breast in black and white showed huge on a monitor.
What size is a representation? No size at all, for we get used to seeing satellite photographs of continents the same size as snapshots of babies. These images looked like a night sky, hemispheres of darkness with pale streaky strands like clouds or vapor or the Milky Way in a desert night when the stars are so numerous they blur into radiant fields. Some of the bright areas, the microcalcifications or tiny calcium deposits that looked pale in that dark sky, were the grounds for concern.
On the screen that day was an image that didnât look at all like me. It was me, and my fate, this mortal heaven they were exploring with instruments, guided by live X-ray images, working remotely, as though they were embarked upon a moon probe or an ocean-floor exploration. Pearls, bubbles, skulls, bowls of fruit, but in my case it was interior images; a portion of my body that had always been there had been numbed into nonexistence, and a version of my body that had never existed before, that strange night sky on the screen, had supplanted it. I was not here but there, in this new vanitas picture.
The procedure on the table was a stereotactic core biopsy, and the device I was lying upon made the digital images I saw on the screen, and the images guided the cluster of people hovering around me about where to drill next for the thin core samples of flesh that would be examined later under a microscope. A pathologist would look at my cells to see if some of the cells in the lining of the milk ducts had begun to stray from their intended pattern. That is, if I had cancer.
Or rather had anomalous cells that might or might not become cancer, might have âductal carcinomas in situ,â as theyâre called. Some go on to become invasive cancers; some donât; and no one yet can predict which are which. Twenty years ago these cells were too subtle to be detected by X-rays; in another ten or twenty, medical technology will likely be able to determine which go on to be invasive. At that point in time, their presence could be detected but not their prospects, so they were all regarded as perilous. My portrait was being painted by digital
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