Being emasculated is nothing new to me.  My wife orders for me; I welcome it because I’ll forget to tell the waitress to hold the onions and the like.  My wife drives most places when we go together.  I just can’t bear to see her clutching the door handle so tightly that she leaves indentations.

It has now happened on an all new level.

One day, I my shirt was rubbing my chest funny.  When I got home, there was a sensitive area and a lump underneath.  I have a few gym rats for friends, and this is pretty common for guys who have taken anabolic steroids (I don’t).  In fact, the drug Manny Ramirez was accused of using was an estrogen blocker designed to dissolve the fibrous masses.  So I wasn’t terribly concerned, but being insured, I had to go check it out.  I did some research and tried to get a script for the aforementioned drug… The physician’s assistant had never heard of the treatment and wouldn’t acquiesce to such an application.

They sent me to get it checked out… to the breast treatment center.  There I was in a lobby along with teens of others.  Other women, that is.  I was mired in that lobby with its generic art, blanched wooded furniture with hideous purple seating areas.  There was some mix-up with the referral that was generated all of 200-feet away that lengthened my stay by an hour or more; My hope that my fellow lobby patrons would think I was a supportive husband was shattered when they called me up to clarify the paperwork at least three times. When they finally took me back, they prepped me for an ultrasound.  An attractive, athletic looking, 30-something-year-old woman assured me that she sees “more and more men” all the time; Her cold comfort didn’t do much as she lathered my man-boob with a clear jelly, and proceeded to rub her magic wand all around my nipple.  I couldn’t help but laugh, but it was the uncomfortable type that produces barely a smile in reciprocation.

That wasn’t conclusive, so they took me into another room with quite an impressive piece of equipment, some high-tech mammogram apparatus.  I joked to the technician quipping “that it looks cheap.”  She assured me it was quite expensive; my humor was lost on her.  Humiliated and humorless, she clamped what little of my chest she could into the vice-like grip, and implored me to stay still.  I smirked agreeably thinking to myself, “where the hell am I going to go?  You have my tit as collateral?”  After about 5 more minutes of upper-torso prodding, I was made to wait for the doctor’s assessment…

Inconclusive.

I got a nice letter about two weeks later telling me that results looked benign, and that it didn’t go away in a few weeks on it own, to schedule an appointment with my primary.   It has since disappeared, but not before it ravaged my esteem left a lasting scar on my masculinity.

From now on, I’m getting the New York Steak, bloody as hell, and, woman be damned, I’m ordering it myself.

Smartly Writer: Man-O-Gram