Mome reads Mommy, My daughter's way to spell it when she was younger... It stuck. My son calls me Mome... just like it looks. I now sign all my notes to them "Love, Mome". It's our inside secret and makes them smile. I always want them to smile.

Wednesday, May 6, 2009

Mammogram vs Ultrasound

I wrote on my other blog about my first Mammogram last week and what a wonderful experience it was (my first time). Maybe I shouldn't have sounded so enthusiastic. They called me up and invited me back for a full diagnostic exam with ultrasound. Ouch, that was like a punch to the gut. I freaked for a couple hours, composed myself after several glasses of wine and went to bed. Today I awoke fine. Barely even thought about it. Googled it. But barely thought about it. Anyway, here is what I found out.

Half of all women under 50 (and a third of women over 50) are dense. Well, that is to say they have dense breasts, which yield very poor results from regular mammograms. Full diagnostics with ultrasounds are extremely costly to the radiologists due to insurance covering only 67% and the time involved being 30-40 minutes. So while this is clearly the best way to detect anything, it is currently cost prohibitive to administer to everyone although research is being done to create machines that would cut down on the time involved.

So, I'll be going back. No worries.

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