Kelly Ripa spent six minutes detailing her recent mammogram on Live With Kelly and Ryan on Tuesday, September 24 — because the experience was just that onerous.
“You don’t know the fun of a mammogram until you’ve gone with me,” Ripa, 48, told cohost Ryan Seacrest. “Because, you know, what really are they going to put in that vice?”
Adding to Ripa’s misery was that she was behind schedule that day, so during the procedure, she texted husband Mark Consuelos to tell him to prep the clams in the fridge. “I was making linguini and clams. The boys asked for that. And Mark is home so infrequently that I try to do wife things and be nice when he’s there,” she quipped. “I try to, like, fool him.” (Ripa and Consuelos, who met on the set of All My Children and married in 1996, have three children: Michael, 22, Lola, 18, and Joaquin, 16.)
Ripa even demonstrated the procedure on Seacrest’s chest, using her palms to squeeze the 44-year-old’s pec. “They would have an easier time with you than with me,” she told him. “Trust me. They’ve got more to work with here than with what I have.”
The Hope & Faith alum also described her mammogram technician’s brusque demeanor. “I go, ‘I don’t know what you’re going to put in there’ and she goes, ‘Don’t worry about it,’” the host recalled. “She literally looks at me, like, ‘I’ll take skin from your neck and your back if I have to.’ … There’s not so much for them to work with, so literally, my face is smashed in the glass. … And then she goes, ‘And hold your breath. And breathe. … And hold your breath again.’ And I’m like, ‘Why am I a woman?’”
“It’s one of those things that I go, ‘Uh, there’s gotta be a different way to figure this process out, right?’” she continued. “Ladies, right? At a certain point, don’t you go, ‘This can’t be good for me.’”
Plus, unless he’s on his best behavior, Seacrest might witness the procedure firsthand. “I should actually force you as some sort of punishment to come,” Ripa told him. “One day when you do something bad, I’m going to make you come to my mammogram.”
