Bone Density

Getting Beneath the Surface Doesn't Always Involve Technology.

My bone density scan appointment was yesterday. I got there fifteen minutes early, as instructed, to fill out a twelve page questionnaire, including how old were you when you got your first period? and do you eat cottage cheese? I had just finished when the technician told me to come in.

Bone density scans are relaxing. You don’t have to hold your breath or take your clothes off or assume an awkward position. You lie on your back on a comfy padded table with a pillow under your head while the machine whirs above you. The technician was polite, professional, telling me when it was important to stay still, where to place my hands. The whole thing took maybe ten minutes. “This has been the easiest morning I’ve had in a while,” I told her, quasi-seriously, because it was nice to lie down and put myself in someone else’s hands to undergo a painless diagnostic procedure.

I was slipping into my shoes to leave when I noticed a photo taped to the wall of her cubicle. “Are those your kids?” I asked, and she nodded. “They have your eyes. Especially your daughter.”

“That’s what people tell me,” she said. “She passed away nine years ago. Car accident.”

There’s a part of me that, upon hearing this, thought shit, why can’t I keep my mouth shut like a normal person getting a bone density scan? and a part of me that felt tears gathering at the back of her throat and a profound, narrowly-suppressed urge to reach out, despite the masking and protective gear, to give her a hug. “I’m so sorry,” I said.

She told me her daughter was living in Elmira, New York, where she went to college, and that’s where the accident happened. She told me her husband shut down, couldn’t cope, just locked the door and stayed inside for a year, after which she divorced him because she had to keep moving, keep living, for her son. She told me she went into therapy, forced herself to go back to work. Looking back on her daughter’s death, she said, “It was her time. It wasn’t the time I wanted for her, but it was her time. I can see that now.” She was starting to tell me something else when a buzzer went off, signaling the next patient had arrived.

“It was really good, meeting you,” she said, and I immediately stopped regretting my inability to let casual observations, like photos on cubicle walls, go unremarked upon. Polite, friendly, air-filling; however this conversation began, somehow, it landed here, with a woman whose name I never asked sharing her story with me, a woman she only knows does not eat cottage cheese.