I’m twenty-something years old, and like Brigadoon, I’ve appeared again for the annual invasion of my privacy, sitting on an exam table wearing a blue paper gown, backwards, so that the opening is in the front, which makes it easier for the doctor to access my naked parts but leaves me completely open to the elements, which makes me wonder at the point of designing a blue paper gown for patients that opens in the Back when the doctor is trying to get at my Front and would have to have me take it off, in which case, why don’t I just sit here naked. But I think it has something to do with vulnerability, and mental capacity, as it seems to diminish when one is sitting naked in a blue paper gown in front of another adult they hardly know that will in short order put their hand in a very private and uncomfortable place.

But that’s already happened, and I am pulling together the semblance of my paper dignity, and she says, with her hands now wrapped around my throat:

We’re going to need to get this checked out.

Wait, what? I’ve got a lump. In my throat. She’s saying something about watching it from last year, which I don’t remember AT ALL, which is kind of unusual, considering my history; something about a ‘fine needle aspiration,’ that will tell us whether or not it’s benign or malignant - and that’s when I snap out of it.

No it won’t.

What?

It won’t tell you if it’s cancer.

[Vaguely] What do you mean?

The needle only takes out part of the cells, and just because it takes out some that aren’t cancerous, doesn’t mean the rest of it isn’t cancerous.

[Pause.] How do you know that?

This ain’t my first circus, Lady.