Reading: Salman Rushdie, Midnight's Children

Moving: Walked 2.7 miles

3 August 2001: Trauma

Yesterday I happened to hear Coolboss say she had to get her passport renewed because the country she's going to doesn't like a passport to expire within six months of your visit there. I mean, I just happened to overhear that.

Huh.

I freaked.

Today I found tollfree (since I didn't have my cell at work) number for the British consul in New York City. A kind woman told me that an expiry of 5 November would be fine for my trip to the U.K. in September. I asked her about France. "Well..." she said.

I freaked.

Now, CoolBoss didn't freak, which is why she gets to be a manager and I get to be panicky support staff. She didn't have a cow just because one spot on the State Department's site said to make checks payable to "U.S. Department of State" while another said to make them payable to "Passport Services." She didn't lose her head just because one form said a passport cost $40 and another said $60. And she's leaving--she hopes--three weeks before I am.

I tried to stop freaking. And I think it's ridiculous for a passport effectively to expire six months before it actually expires.

I got a good photograph. My original passport, obtained in the fall of 1991, shows the fall of 1991 Rim of Fire face with zits all over chin and forehead, the slightly crazed James Taylor look in the eye, and my hair pulled back in a growing-out kind of way. This one is better, despite my immediate state of mind. (Perhaps it's from farther away.) So now I sit back and fret.

Another reason I might have had to be slightly worked up came after this, but to finish up: when I came back to the office from the photograph store, I passed Bob in the hallway and demanded a hug. She is wiry and buff and gives a good hug. Nearer my cube, Nebra spontaneously offered me a chocolate chip cookie, which of course cures all ills. Then, in a nervous ReArranging of My Entire Life by Way of My Backpack, the one thing over which I had immediate control, I found Under the Net.

If I hadn't paid the library for it on Wednesday, it would not have appeared from some complicated pocket of my backpack on Friday, nervousness or not. I am convinced of this.

So anyway I felt much better. PLT might say that this supports his hypothesis that just as a slight downfall can sweep me low, so can as minor a thing raise me high. I like to think I'm not quite as bipolar as that would imply, but then it was a long time ago he came up with that idea.

Then it was time for my mammogram. I had said merely "doctor's appointment" but when Coolboss asked specifically what it was about and I told her, she said, "But you're too young, aren't you?" Egg said something similar when I bade her farewell--this after I was feeling better--with "I'm off to have my boobs mashed for posterity." I am two years away from a baseline, but during my first physical in three or four years last month, and six months after my last gynecologist appointment, the doctor found a fibrocystic tumor in my right breast and a nice symmetrical one, not giving a bilevel effect, in the left. Oh.

The mammography clinic was everything a medical appointment should be: kind and jovial and reassuring. Oh, and prompt. The tech behind the desk made the usual kind of small talk that would make me crazy if I had to make it with a succession of strangers and that in fact often would annoy me merely to be on the receiving end, but all my cynicism had been temporarily washed away with the hug and the cookie and finding the book. She asked if that Soc--can I say that and be understood to mean "Social Security Number" instead of "Socials," as if I were S.E. Hinton?--on the card were mine, and I said no, it was my husband's. So she needed his information too. She asked his first name and I gave it, and then she continued merrily typing along. I realized what she had assumed and I added, "His last name isn't mine." She exclaimed, "It's not?!" as if this were a completely alien concept of which she was now hearing for the first time.

She also asked my religious preference, which I thought was bizarre until I remembered I was at Presbyterian/St. Luke's. Ah. Besides, if I oozed and died with excessive tit squeezage they would want to know whether to give me last rites, or not to leave my corpse unattended, or to shove my body raw into the ground under an acorn, not that they'd do that last anyway.

The next tech, who took the images, was as tender with me as I could ever want. "I'll explain everything..." she began, explaining everything. I smiled at her, "I'm not a bit frightened and I have a high pain tolerance, so I'm completely okay." There were two mashings per side and then I was done. My results will be read on Monday.

I have used up all my worry on my passport, the lack of which will affect me a lot sooner than anything that might be wrong with my breasts. I have not the whisper of a trace of anything scary in my maternal line, with my great-great- and my great-grandmothers dying well into their 90s of simple nonegenarianism.