My mammogram results arrived yesterday. I had been eagerly waiting the notice, irritation building as the extreme end of the three to seven business day interval approached. And then, on the eighth day, there in my little mailbox was the envelope with the center's return address. The envelope was slim—the only time in your life you want a one-page notification. I didn't have to open it to know what it said, but I opened it anyway to see how they would say it. "We are happy to inform you that the above examination(s) showed no evidence of cancer." This, followed by a long paragraph of cover-your-ass language about the fallibility of such tests.

This is my ninth or tenth mammogram; I've been getting them since I turned 24. The industry recommendation for women whose mothers had cancer before menopause is to begin annual mammograms 10 years prior to the onset of the mother's cancer. Because my mother was 32 when cancer appeared, that would make age 22 the year of my first mammogram. But because the incidence of breast cancer in women under 25 is extremely rare, they gave me two extra years.

It wasn't emotionally easier to get the screenings in the beginning than it is now. Just different. When I was younger, the terror was closer to the surface and the procedure was new. I've been living with it for a long time now, and I'm kind of used to it.

For the first several mammograms, I saw a breast disease specialist annually and she spoke straight about the risk and the lack of anything to be done about it. She said, for all practical purposes, I have about an 80 percent chance of having breast cancer in my lifetime. She said I would hear all kinds of news about genetics testing and different risk factors, but that I should not consider any of it definitive. She recommended that I not be swayed into spending thousands to have a genetic test. She said that, in the end, we don't know what causes some people to get cancer and some people not to get cancer, but that family history is associated. She said the best thing to do is to eat healthy and exercise, and stick with the monitoring.

My doctor retired several years ago now and I rely on what she taught me and the regular advice of my primary doctor along with the annual mammogram.

Last year was the big year for me, the year that a clean test proved that I would outlive my mother and that whatever genetic legacy she left with me, it would not express itself quite as it did with her.

This year, oddly, was a little tougher. New territory, for one. I have no model to survive, just my own unknown fate. Also, mammography is a big business now.

More women than ever get annual mammograms, starting at younger ages. Ten years ago, the starting age was 50; now it's 40. And it's not optional—it's as mandatory as a pap smear.

The first clinic I visited back in the day had one or two machines; now I go to a clinic with rooms of them. Whole clinics are now devoted to the practice. Women are queued to pass under the press, one after another, every single day of the year. You go to the clinic, and the place is swarming with women anxious that something terrible is growing in their breasts.

The machines themselves have changed, not only have they switched from standard X-ray machines to digital imagers, but they've transformed from the kind of gray industrial-looking equipment you'd imagine to hulking effigies of the feminine hygiene aesthetic, branded in pastel pink and feminized with rounded edges. I find it ironic that the device bearing the pink breast cancer ribbon is the very thing that, in a sense, gives you cancer. Yes, the machine supports the breast cancer foundation, but from what angle? Without breast cancer, the machine isn't necessary. Without the machine, many of us would not have breast cancer.

And the assistants who place your breasts and pull the trigger are robotic and pollyannish, armed with scripts meant to soothe and keep you quiet so that they can get you out of there to make room for the next person. They talk to you like you're a child. This time, the assistant gave a saccharin-tinged sales pitch about how this year they were going to give me a digital scan because of my family history, that it was time to get me started on them. It was lie; I got the digital image because they have more digital imaging machines now. (Last year they told me they didn't have enough digital imaging machines to spare them for preventative scans.)

For all the pretense of being interested in my well-being, when I asked the assistant if I could see the images and get the results before I left, she said no.

"Uh-uh. We'll call you if we need you to come back. Otherwise you'll receive a letter in about a week. OK?"

Last year I asked to wait while they reviewed my films and they complied. This year, trying to be confident that I don't have cancer, I didn't push it.

Then she handed me a note on pink paper that said computer-aided detection (CAD) technology would be used to review the images.

All of the fancy new and expensive diagnostic imaging tools are fantastic except for the high false positive rates. The technologies provide clearer pictures that show what has always been there that we didn't know about. And there is a lot about normalcy we don't know because we've never really looked at it. Recent reports discuss the numbers of women undergoing surgery for cancers they didn't have when CAD was used to examine their mammograms. More closely, two friends of mine whose mammograms with the new technology showed "atypical" tissue were cast into a vortex of diagnostic tests, biopsies, and long discussions with different doctors about surgery options and post-surgery chemical treatment only to learn that they did not have cancer.

This is not to dispute the benefits of early detection, but we're clearly still in a dark age with this disease.

So when the assistant handed me the sheet, I began to worry—not that I had cancer but that I would be committed to a hideous round of diagnostic tests that would legitimate a likelihood of cancer and incite the tenuously appeased terror.

Every time I received a phone call from a local number I didn't recognize, I thought it was them. Each day I eagerly checked the mailbox for the slim envelope and it wasn't there.

I feel like I'm in a race: my (genetic) fate against medical research. If I can just make it past menopause, how much better any prognosis will be! Also, how much better the treatment, perhaps! In my head, it looks something like this:

It took them eight business days, but I finally got the results. And I can't tell you how relieved I am to have this permission slip for another year breast cancer–free.