Pretty woMan

I am not a manly man. In our house, it’s Aviva that manages bills and changes light bulbs. I like to go shopping, I watch Top Chef, and I enjoy chick flicks. As an English Major at NYU, I focused on feminist literature while falling in love with books like the Yellow Wallpaper and The Red Tent. Now that I have to wear stockings for my clot and a bracelet indicating I had a transplant, there is even less of a chance that I’m gonna get picked early for the football team (that is if I was allowed to play in the first place). And so it came as little surprise when my doctor told me that I needed to go for a mammogram.

A few weeks before transplant, I began to feel a hard lump in my left breast. The lump was painful to the touch and got bigger by the day. Some men go through this during puberty and I hoped I was gonna have a growth spurt. More likely, I reasoned, my liver disease was probably affecting my hormones. The liver creates four essential hormones for the body which trigger cell growth, vasoconstriction, and produces platelets. But when I brought the issue up with my doctor, she was concerned that the pain and lump rested on only one side. Usually, she said, a hormone imbalance would show up on both breasts and therefore, this was more concerning. She immediately scheduled a mammogram for the next day.

Breast cancer does not run in the women in my family, let alone the men. Of course, neither does primary schlerosing cholangitis or Crohn’s, but I was nonetheless not nervous when I went to the appointment the next day. I had heard that mammograms are extremely painful and was more concerned about that than anything else. When I arrived at the sixth floor of the Herbert Irving Pavilion at New York Presbyterian, the first thing that struck me is how many men were waiting…none. As I walked through the waiting area, I had a sense that this was a place that men seldom entered, sort of like Loehman’s. I signed in and took a seat next to a woman reading Reader’s Digest. With a yarmulke, a y chromosome, and years younger than most people there, I knew this was going to be interesting.

I was soon called in for the exam and met by a nice technician who took me to the room and told me to take off my shirt. She warned me that the mammogram process can be painful but not to worry, it would be done pretty quickly. Alarmingly, she then took two stickers and placed them on my nipples, almost like tassels. I moved closer to the mammogram machine which looks like a small table with a light above it. I rested my breast on the table and then the technician began to perform a more tortuous routine than seen in Guantanamo. She pulled on my breast with all her strength, almost tearing and ripping my skin from its foundation. At the same time, the light above the table began to mechanically push down on my breast, as if you took a frying pan and slammed it on the counter. This medieval torture routine was performed twice on each nipple, until they were assured I could truly empathize with what a woman needs to go through.

Black and blue, I then waited to get an ultrasound performed on my breast. Of course, the waiting room inside is only for women as everyone is now shirtless. In a world built on equality, no one takes consideration for the man getting his breasts checked out. When I was escorted to the ultrasound room, the tech made sure to cover my eyes in case any stray women were walking around. Thankfully, the ultrasound was less painful than the mammogram, albeit more wet and longer. Afterwards, the doctor came to the room and delivered the bad news…I had gynecomastia.

Gynecomastia is the most embarrassing disease a man can get. It is the development of large mammary glands which ultimately can result in breast enlargement. Every aspect of the disease, even its name, spells embarrassment, as if I was slowly morphing into a pubescent girl. Of course, it was my liver’s fault, but I don’t think my friends would take that into consideration when making fun of me. Luckily, thanks to a new liver, I now have nothing to be ashamed of. My gynecomastia is gone and I am just a normal guy who enjoys Julia Roberts movies and Ellen DeGeneres. Yup, nothing to make fun of me anymore.