I confess right up front: I was on deadline for this column and wrote it in the doctor’s office while waiting for my annual breast squash.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with a breast squash, it’s a procedure during which a woman’s breast is squashed like a pressed flower between a small x-ray table and a glass pane, which are then tightly screwed together like a vise in order to keep the woman from leaving the room should she develop a sudden desire to parade around the doctor’s office half naked. Once appropriately anchored, the technician takes several x-rays to check for breast cancer. Technically, it’s called a mammogram, but we all know it for what it really is. Pain with a co-pay.

This particular doctor recommends women wait for their test results, lest they have to return in a week for another x-ray if it is determined that there is something unusual with the first mammogram, like a lesion is evident or the technician had her finger over the camera lens and needs to take another picture. Waiting saves time and anxiety but turns a 5 minute x-ray into a two hour appointment.

That’s how I found myself sitting in a waiting room pretending like it’s an everyday event to lounge around with 50 women in bathrobes, drinking (decaffeinated) coffee and watching the Home and Garden network.

The good thing about the wait was that I got to read magazines I can’t afford to buy, like O Magazine, the publication with the latest information for trendy, healthy, hip women.

According to an article on fitness and the environment in the June 2006 issue, for example, if, instead of driving, a woman walks one mile three times a week, she’ll burn 200 extra calories a week and lose three pounds in one year. Not only that, she’ll save eight gallons of gas a year.

The point of the article was that by burning body fat rather than gasoline you’d be getting into shape and saving the environment at the same time. But I’m not buying it. If I’m walking 156 miles a year so I can lose three pounds and save $25 in gas there better be lunch with Brad Pitt waiting when I’m finished.

Anyway, as I was working out these numbers in the waiting room the technician called my name and ushered me into a private conference closet to give me the mammogram results. I felt faint as I realized she was about to tell me that I was dying from breast cancer, one of my biggest fears (along with brain tumors, heart attack, skin cancer, cavities and toe fungus). Instead, she told me that my mammogram looked fine and I should schedule an appointment in a year.

Hopefully doctors are working on a way to lose weight that will allow me to save the planet without walking half way around it, and I’ll read about it in 12 months when I return for my annual breast squash. But if I start walking now, I could be three whole pounds lighter by then.

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