Squeeze Please: Boobs in a snackwich

There I am, my right cheek squashed against a perspex screen, torso twisted at an awkward angle to my hips, calf muscles quivering from balancing en pointe for so long.

"Lean in a little more dear," the radiographer says to the back of my head.

My lips are puckered up for a sideways smooch of the perspex, but I manage to silently mouth: "F ... off."

If she hadn't just manhandled my boobs, I might have been inclined to be co-operative - I'm normally anxious to please - but she's been bullying me to "drop your shoulder dear", and "keep your hips straight dear" and pretending that by repeatedly calling me "dear" it makes it okay that she: a) doesn't know my name; b) just yanked on my boobs like a 15-year-old in the bushes outside the Rivonia Hall Friday night Under-16 Social; c) is Miss Bossypants playing a twisted game of Twister and making me feel like a spastic because I can't contort my body into the right position for her to jam her finger on the red button and snackwich my boobs in her medieval machine.

I try to suppress memories involving tongues and, in one particularly horrible instance, braces, in the bushes outside Friday night youth group, which assault me from the depths of my unconscious as I stand there in the grotesque bosom-buster.

Only a man could have designed the ol' mammo-masher. Hopefully, that old codger, whoever he is, is now getting sodomised by the latexed finger of his prostate doctor, before being wheeled in to theatre for his colonoscopy.

Following the indignity of the mammogram, I'm hustled into the next room for a sonar, and not just of the mammaries - I am also having a liver scan due to elevated levels of some enzyme the blood tests have exposed.

Next thing I am lying on a gurney, slicked from my breasts to my abdomen in KY Jelly, wondering if this much goo is really necessary or if I've been assigned the radiographer with a fetish. I am slimier than Lolly Jackson, and more slippery than Jacob Zuma's spokesman at an Nkandlagate press conference. I resist the urge to just run for it.

To go for a mammogram or a scan of any kind is to admit to the possibility that something could be wrong. Until now, I had no need for the routine screenings to which mortals ought to submit.

Then last week I found myself at the funeral of someone who, unbeknown to her only months ago, wouldn't live to see her 41st birthday, see her three children grow up, herself grow old. I listened as her husband struggled to put into words what she'd given them, what she's left behind in her kids, what he'd learned in the little time they'd had since she learned she was going to die. I realised how much I do want to grow old. It is at the end that we find out we don't only have one body - we are only a body. Book your boob snackwich - or your latex sodomising - today.

• Liebenberg is a writer and author of 'Habenero-hot Cry Baby', 'The Voluptuous Delights of Peanut Butter' and 'Jam and The West Rand Jive Cats' Boxing Club'. She offers free electro-blog therapy for suburbiacs at www.laurenliebenberg.co.za

Tickled Pink

Join some of Jozi's celebrities on October 26 with CRAFT restaurant in Parkhurst as it hosts its first official 4th Avenue Bra Run in aid of Breast Cancer Awareness. Both females and males are invited to run in bras from 11am. E-mail press@4elementsmedia. com for more information.