Going under

One definition of chaos is "a confused mass or mixture" so maybe this means I have a chaos in my body. In my nurturing milk giving breast somehow a piece of chaos has erupted, inside the recipe book imprinted on the DNA of one of the little cells on the inside track of the racecar infinite track of the ductal stuff, the inner hallways of the department of milk. Where little tiny milk maids used to milk little tiny cows and pour the buckets of milk into little tiny rivers that flowed to Fiona. Did the chaos first show up in the DNA? What does "the" mean in that sentence anyway? Or is it "a" DNA "thing" or "piece," which begs the question "a" DNA what? A strand? I think maybe we just draw those strands of double helix things because they are fun to draw and kind of cute, but really the scientists are just trying to make it something we mere mortals can grasp. It is all physical - I know that. Physics is god in case you were wondering. We are all just matter, star matter, in varying forms.

Somewhere in the physicality that makes up me, a cell or the nucleus of a cell got something wrong. It tended toward chaos, toward entropy love the concept of chaos or KHAOS, described by Ovid as:

"the confused mass containing the elements of all things that were formed out of it."

I like this. It comforts me. My cancer is just part of the chaos that is the entropy of this universe and it is all made of stars.

What was it? The 100+ chest x-rays I had as a child after contracting TB?

Right now I am contemplating my second surgery, which will occur in about 11 hours. I am having another lumpectomy (what a world class dumb ass name for surgery), as well as a portable catheter installation. My doctor, who I like a lot (Jane Nelson) and her team will install a special kind of torture device to drop chemo right into my heart - called a Port-cath.

Port =  Latin portus  harbor, haven
Catheter = variant stem of kathiénai,  equivalent to kat- cata- + hiénai  to send, let go

Ok

The portable catheter THING actually quite amazing, it's like a plug with a tube that will go like 9 inches from my chest right down into my vena cava or something like that. It will "deliver the chemo directly to the space above my heart." My oncologist (onc = mass in Latin. Ha ha maybe a Catholic mass?!) thinks that this portable catheter concept is so lovely that she declines to take any new patients who want to go old-school with Ye Olde IV. My oncologist is Dr. Allison Gorrebeeck and she had me at hello. Her name reminds me of Buckbeak and that is a hippogriff I can believe in.

Here's what my surgeon will do at 7:30 am 5:30 am arrival (just saying): cut a slit in my neck. Take a long tube thing (maybe a rootbeer float straw from another life) and run one end of that down into this slit, into a vein (or is it an artery - I forget) down to this vena cava living room of my body. It will stick its little neck into there and say "Hello! I have a big fat mouth and I shall vomit bright red poison into this space soon!" and all the little valves and atriums and foyers will say "No you shall not you rude interloper!" and the tube-end will say "We shall see about that shan't we?" in a nasty British accent. Anyway back at neck-slit junction dear doctor shall take the OTHER end of her snakey tube thing and fasten a sort of round little tiny swimming pool thing to it - an above ground, dime-sized (quarter? peso? rupee?) pool with sturdy sides. She will then shove, unceremoniously, this unwieldy contraption - tube, swimming pool and all - down under my skin, burrowing like a mole, about 4 or 5 or 6 or 3 inches (I have no idea I am making this part up I think) down my chest to an attractive point just around my décolletage. Here it will sit, giving me a cool Lady-Gaga-like protrusion that sticks alienly out of my chest. She will tuck in any remaining tubularness sticking out gently at the neck-slit, and sew the fucker up. I shall then contain a portable catheter, entirely inside me.  I shall contain multitudes. Multitudes more plastic molecules than yesterday/week/month/year/life. When such time comes for me to receive chemical poisons, the nurses will breach the skin upon the top of the buried tiny swimming pool with a cute special needle and inject me effectively.

I'm going under.