North Star Writers Group

Not too long ago I treated my readers to the details of my colonoscopy, an often-feared medical procedure that turned out to be a bit of a technological miracle. Of course, after that little excursion to a place where no-one has gone before, it’s also a bit of a miracle that I have any readers left.

Well, here we go again. Recently, inspired by a particularly poignant episode of Family Guy, I performed a self breast-exam.

Ok, go ahead and do a quick gender check on the name of the author and the photo at the top of this column – I’ll wait.

Back? OK, yes, I’m (for all intents and purposes) a guy. But as Peter Griffin’s life-affirming experience taught me, guys can get breast cancer, even though it’s very rare. So I thought to myself, “Ha, ha, ha, wouldn’t it be ironi… Hey, what the heck is this?”

At this point we could use a little sidebar. Most of us as young men labored under the impression that we all looked pretty darned good with our shirts off, and that taking our shirts off to show off our pectoral muscles, or “pects”, might nurture opportunities to talk girls into showing us how good they looked with their shirts off. You see, we were blissfully unaware that women are generally a lot more interested in things besides our chests, no matter how fervently interested we are in theirs.

Over the years, we older men have accumulated enough wisdom to realize we were pretty much wasting our time with the whole shirt-off thing. Of course, over those years our bodies have also accumulated a fair number of pizzas, beers, Slim Jims and glazed donuts, forcing us to accept the fact that our cool “pects” have undergone a sort of trans-fat metamorphosis to become those dreaded “man-boobs.”

The point of all this is that no man is really crazy about having man-boobs, much less finding a lump in them. Nevertheless there it was, a lump about the size of an old-fashioned jelly bean. Not one of those frou-frou little Jelly Bellies, mind you, but a genuine they-may-be-different-colors-but-they-all-taste-the-same-except-of-course-for-the-black-ones-which-nobody-has-ever-actually-tasted-but-we-can-assume-that-they-are-nasty jelly bean.

So I did the one thing that the average man does only slightly less often than he loans out his toothbrush or his gas grill – I called the doctor.

The doctor said he wasn’t too worried about it, but he referred me to a surgeon who was also not too worried about it (why should they be worried – it wasn’t their jelly bean), but he thought it should come out just to be on the safe side.

And so I found myself lying on a table with one arm over my head, locally anesthetized and getting a lumpectomy. I never had that sort of surgery before, since the overwhelming majority of my previous experience with hospitals has involved what the health care industry officially refers to as the classic Done This Time, as in, “What has that bonehead Done This Time?”

The surgery itself was amazingly quick, simple and painless. And fortunately, my jelly bean turned out to be a “lipocyst,” essentially a bit of pecan pie, or cup cake, or even jelly bean that turned itself into fat then decided to form a smooth little lump just to keep things interesting.

I have to say that the only really uncomfortable thing about the whole experience was trying to explain to the cute and somewhat puzzled young receptionist at the doctor’s office that I needed an appointment because I found a lump in my breast.

It seems she missed that episode of Family Guy.

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This is Column # MB6. Request permission to publish here.