(Jane Bye/KUCB)

Driving past the clinic in Unalaska, it’s tough to miss the 33-foot-long, petal-pink bus parked in the lot out front.

The bus, nicknamed “Nancy,” is the Breast Cancer Detection Center’s new mobile exam unit.  The BCDC is sending Nancy through rural Alaska this year, to areas where breast cancer screening isn’t otherwise available. Unalaska is the latest stop on a list that includes Seldovia and Tok.

On the inside, the bus looks like a cozy, private doctor’s office. There’s a small waiting area with a flat-screen TV and soft lighting. Tucked in the back is the exam room, complete with a state-of-the-art digital mammogram machine.

"The radiation dosage is less than the traditional method. It’s a digital image, and it’s a much better, clearer image," says Dawnia Freel, a radiology technician with the BCDC. In three days, Freel was able to examine about 80 women in Unalaska this year instead of the usual 30 to 40. That’s because exams take half as long to perform with a digital machine than with the old film machine.

Wait times were shorter this year -- and according to women who had the exams, they were also a lot less uncomfortable.

In the past, the clinic put the BCDC mammogram station in an empty storage room off the ER. Patients would wait in the hallway in flimsy paper gowns while they filled out paperwork.

Wendy Hladick, a diabetic educator and physician’s assistant at the clinic, remembers it well.

"I mean, I felt that my mammogram was well-done at that time, too," says Hladick. "It was just a little more crowded in that room, and the beds were pushed aside and it was kind of makeshift, where the mobile mammogram van that we had was completely set up for just that purpose."

Hladick says it doesn’t hurt that the inside of the van is more living room than exam room.

"If I remember now, the decor was pink and grey," she says. "The couch that I sat on to do my registration was very comfortable. I thought it worked great."

The BCDC performed its last exam in Unalaska on Wednesday night. Clinic director Eileen Scott says the bus will leave town this Saturday the same way it came in -- on the ferry.