Fourth Eve

It's the eve of my fourth surgery on my dented left beast. This experience of surgery - once anticipated with awe and fear and specialness - has now become merely routine, banal. I'll just catch a ride to the hospital Tuesday morning at 5 am, and get dropped off at the swishing auto doors in the special surgery parking lot. I'll wave to the sleepy dude parking attendant we have gotten to know. He runs a very special lot - it's small, there is no charge or ticket for those of us lucky enough to come here. He sits on a wooden chair, reading a book, his long hair flopping stylishly over one eye. He shows you to a nice spot in the small living room of a parking lot. 

Mike'll drop me - then go back home to tend to the morning rush of eggs and shoes and backpacks and peanut butter and jelly and teeth and yelling - peanut butter and yelly sandwiches - that ends up in a loud car on a loud highway and a final denouement of flying out of the car with a slam. Then: a wall of traffic cuz your commute back is terribly unfortunately the wrong way. 

Anyway before he commences this grind I'll go up the quiet elevator that penthouse-ishly deposits me right into the beehive of surgical bustle. I'll walk ten feet to the left and sign in with the elegant slim man with the ebony skin and dazzly smile, then go sit behind the huge water wall art thing and watch my name appear on the digital screen: Adams/Nelson. My surgeon. 

Across the room will be some slumping sleeping raggedy family or clump of grey people. Always someone. I don't stare - anyone there waiting already at 5 am is probably not having fun. What happened I'll wonder - gunshot at midnight? Crash? Pop had a heart attack? Probably not elective rhinoplasty. 

I'll read Dark Places as I wait. Things are coming back. One is my appetite for reading - once again I can't get enough. And I'm reading book after book and books and articles and essays all at once. I'm reading all of Gillian Flynn as fast as I can - ate up Sharp Objects the other day and now I'm into this dark place joint. I love the psychopathic murdery messed up fucked up nature of her books - they are like Law and Order meets David Lynch plus sharp super sharp pop culture commentary and eating Fritos - simply delicious. Yesterday I held the book open in my left hand while unloading the dishwasher with my right. If you think reading is so great you may not understand that it's an escape drug. I'm on it.

Then I'll hear my name called. But not for surgery - no, the first stop is always with Ye Olde Financial Department. Lucky (??) for us, we've already blown the deductible this year so it won't be too horrible. I think I should have a St. David's/Jane Nelson credit card by now - an account. I'm a frequent flyer here. Yes bartender I'll start a tab.

Soon I'll be called behind the curtain into a freezing world of green fabric, needles inserted skillfully by a tall friendly man, an anesthesia nurse with alopecia and expertly tattooed eyebrows, and endless minute ticking away until I'll WANT the surgery to get started. Why arrive at 5:00 for a 7:30 event? I'm easy to set up - big juicy veins that invite the IV warmly, no questions in particular (I've so been here), no fear, no special requirements. I'm a peach - an easy patient. Why can't I just slide in at 7:20? 

Soon they'll wheel me back into an even impossibly colder room and ask me to scooch over onto a tiny table. I may or may not remember this - they finally inject me with some magic forget juice literally as they wheel me down the hall. Sometimes I remember lots - getting to the OR, joking with the nurses and doctors, hearing the radio, thinking that the table is so skinny how do fat people fit - my arms can't even lie next to me WHAT DO THEY DO WHILE I'M UNDER, tie me onto this surfboard of a table?!!! - and other times my memory ends around corner two of the hall. 

When I wake up someone will pick me up I think. Just another Tuesday. 

I wanted to drive on a field trip this Thursday with the eighth-grade to go to a farm, but I'm not sure if I should do that 48 hours after surgery while I'm still wearing an ace bandage. But I might. I'm very used to this.

I seem ok. Now in this time valley between one event in the next. But underneath I know that all is not quite right. 

She lay in the bed on her right side. Her right arm was tucked under the pillow she held between it and her left leg, which was quick forward like a flattened sideways runner pinned to the ground. The bed. Above her was the ceiling of the clicking fan. Below the ceiling seemed to be another invisible ceiling made out of atoms and silver. Like the ceiling in an old car, a 1962 Dodge, that is sagging where it has become separated from the glue that held it to the inside of the metal capsule. This invisible ceiling in her bedroom was sagging toward her with some kind of weight like I have a bowl of water was resting on top of the gauze and was pulling it down down down. The heavy part of the invisible ceiling had sunk lower and lower toward her and was now pressing on her left arm and pressing her to the bed. It seemed to press on her throat to make her feel a little sick. She was pressed and could not move.

6 Things 6 Weeks Out From Chemo

1. My hair is chia-petting in but my eyelashes just fell out. Is there a complaint department? I still apply mascara to the air in front of my lids.

2. There is still a chemical wall between me and the world. Food and alcohol and drugs are through the looking glass - a bit backwards and seemingly real but not quite right.

3. Every 97 minutes a warm hot breeze breezes me.

4. My children are sick of this. Fiona wants me to put on a hat in the pick up line at school. Violet rolls her eyes and complains "God MOM why do you always have to tell everyone everything about your stupid cancer?!!" she says if I even make any casual reference to my hair or a hat or say that I might not be able to go on a field trip or something. I can see her point, maybe it seems like for too long everything is been about me. And maybe I don't need to mention anything, but sometimes when I see someone I haven't seen for a long time and I have no hair they ask me about it. Also I feel this weird obligation to put other people at ease, to bring up the subject or break the ice before they feel like they have to. Like, yes I know I have no hair, ha ha ha, isn't it just delightfully hilarious? This is something my mom would say. But don't worry about me, I just have a touch of cancer, everything is great. Ha ha, it's cool! Am I polite? Or am I seeking attention? She thinks I'm trying to get attention, I don't know what I'm doing. 

5. That's another thing - people ask me what's happening, why is this happening, why is that happening, when will your hair grow out, what color will it be, will it be frizzy, will radiation make you tired, why are your eyelashes falling out now? Why are you having to have four lumpectomies for god's sake?!?!?? How common is this? Exactly what is going on inside your body, exactly exactly exactly?? EXACTLY? The thing is, this is all new to me. I have never had cancer before. I do not know the answers. I'm not an expert.

6. I'm stiff and crinkly. When I get up to walk I kind of hobble for a minute or two. Am I getting old? Did chemicals crunch up my bones and joints a little bit? Is my brain crushing me so that I'm in a different gravitational force? I feel differently than I used to feel physically and mentally.

Outside the tornado we are blasting along here merrily and I like it. Seeing lots of friends and playing and playing and playing.

Spring break

The kids just had two weeks of Spring break. I'm on my own useless break too. A break in the action. The only thing on my dance card is another surgery on April 1. No pomp and circumstance. I think my doctors have forgotten about me and I'm kind of forgetting that I have (had?) breast cancer and still have surgery and radiation and many many many hundreds of hormone bending druggy pills (maybe over 3500 of them - how big a jar would that be?) to take. But right now I can hide and pretend none of that is true or real or coming. I'm lulled. And dulled. This part is boring, frankly. And you'd think "but this is the GOOD kind of boring!" wouldn't you? But it's not because I feel paused. Not poised. Not poised for action or in any way. Unseen, unheard, not very anything.

I want to cast off this current job I have of being a cancer patient, yet I cannot yet. So right now I don't feel like much of anything. Even writing that is so boring that I feel like throwing my phone across the room and quitting my blog altogether. However that would go against my goal of writing a blog.

I've been listening to lots of lovely loudy  music lately with Violet. She is my contemporary and I'm glad that I made her, to join me.

I've been writing a lot of letters and cards and weird little creaky poems and I've been reading lots of books and magazines and stories and books and more books (such good books) and doing lots of crossword puzzles - cramming and eating and spewing my drug of choice: words words words. I eat them and shed them. Uselessly? Too bad whatever the reason the result is, it's my life. My habitual me.

Too many of the word "I" here. I am with and for and about many other people and things too. Spring break included a parade of beautiful girls coming in and out of my kitchen my house my stairways my bathroom my shower my minivan my couch my refrigerator my computer and my front door. I'm so grateful for the beautiful bouncy bubbling barbaric babbling girls that I have and the little friends they bring and drop at my feet like kittens for me to put in my nest and rearrange and tend. We have lots of fun. I am privileged and honored and so so so enjoyed being the mother of girls with fun girls and boys as friends. They are my party of choice.

I like to craft little wordy things for friends. I'm looking for utility so if you want me I'll write one for you. Here is a wordy thing I wrote about Vicki a while ago  (and I know her and we are similar so I'm in it too) - the last line is my state of mind now:

Dark Girl Sunday

I am boring

sometimes sad

she said in her head.

As someone walked by and looked at her thinking what an utterly charming person that dark haired little yustwanian person must be with her darling little three baby salads on toast points all eggy and tuna delighty and toasty.

Even the way she eats is

entrancing and her scarf says a lot about her.

I don't really care about most things

she continued in her head not

knowing that indeed she did but her radiator needed replacing.

She ran hot when she should be cold and vice

versa

Grapefruit soda is a sign of deep charisma

she’d forgotten.

The toms muddled in her head like the bottom of a mojito where the glass muddler smashes the mint and sugar, crystals crashing into green cells popping them;

the camp bell the pine street the brother so fair, the big one

and not last nor least the dad one.

They messed me up she asked herself, maybe

maybe not.

I’m not sure what gets me excited anymore

she pondered, once again going inside herself instead of noticing the merician purple flowered pictures and the breezy breeze and the crowds of people who could not take their eyes off of her coffee grounded eyebrows, her queenly fingers, her bubbling brook voice that was silver in color.

I need more interesting friends that live around me

she thought but forgot that modern day moves us all around and maybe next door is a wise witch

Maybe I do not try hard enough with anything she also

thought and this could be but really the world is who doesn’t try enough for her, for her the world should bow down, for she is lovely.

I do love my dog oz the oz of oz land and I don’t mean Australia he is so

short he falls short he gets up short but so understands me and she didn’t know maybe but that is

good.

Good enough.

 

 

I knew nothing but something

Today I cruelly  read the beginning of "The Wasteland" to my children. Suddenly, and impulsively, this seemed like the thing to do, out of nowhere, in Leila's living room while sitting on a bunch of magic cards and shoving away cute little barking dogs. Or were they barking in another room? I don't remember. I suddenly felt that I had to read to them about April. It came to me. 

APRIL is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain. (From THE BURIAL OF THE DEAD, The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot, 1922)
Then it came to me again an hour later through the telephone: April Fool's Day! Did I will it to be? I think I did.  This is the day that I have my fourth surgery. Not the dreaded mastectomy. It is to be another incision into the same incision, I will be unzipped and scoped again, spared this time from an entire breast removal. Ah yes une lumpectomy de quatre. C'est magnifique n'est-ce pas? Est-il fou? Oui. Je connais. D'accord. I knew this. I knew with crystalline clarity that I would get a call this morning from Nancy, and that she would tell me that I was not having a mastectomy, that the surgeon had decided that I would have a fourth lumpectomy, and that it would be in April. I hope this one works smashingly well. I hope that my surgeon can put on her tiny little goggles and shrink herself down into a mole, with silky soft fur and a divine body and dive down into my breast and swim in there with her blind eyes and feel with her little soft paws in and out of the little milk ducts as they curl gently in and out and around and in and out like a lazy stream, and then gently but cunningly claw out any of the uninvited high-grade cells with the perfection of a truffle seeking pig. I hope she can sniff them out. I hope she takes hours and hours in there and is as careful as careful can be. While I am sleeping on the cot I will smile at her through my sleep and hold out my hand and whisper "Ya got me feeling hella good so let's just keep on dancing" like Gwen would say, and I'll think please rock this beat. And I hope that I wake up clean. Because I think this will be my last chance to avoid having a complete mastectomy. Why I don't want to have a mastectomy (and why I'm in awe of the power and strength of the women that have done this. HARPER, HOLLI, ANDREA,  DIANE, and TOO MANY OTHERS I bow down to you): It's a much larger surgery involving muscles and lymph nodes and skin grafts and things like "flap removal" (uh....uh...) and tattoos and nipples being thrown in the trash and muscle and skin grafts (I might have made up the muscle graft part) and fat grafts (I have some extra fat for sale) and pain and pain and pain and reconstruction and plastic surgery and swelling and lymphedema and physical therapy and arms that don't work and shoulders that don't work and a stomach that doesn't work and a boob that is fake in one or several ways. One boob. If you only have one boob removed this brings up a whole new can of worms. Like...if I had one breast removed, should I have the other breast removed too? Or should I have the one that's removed reconstructed to a smaller more manageable more American size? If I had THAT done, then I should I have its larger twin on the right side reduced? So I'd have a fake reconstructed Frankenstein breast on one side, and then the real one reduced? How in the fuck would they ever be the same size or even look anything like each other? This whole thing becomes mind bogglingly crazy and almost funny. Should have them both cut off? (You would not believe how many people have told me to do this. Strangers have actually ordered me to chop off both of my breasts. Everyone thinks they know what I should do.) Or: chop both and then keep my terrain flat as Kansas and wear balloons to please men? That would make me thinner and clothes would fit better. Baby this is my chance to be slim and be a real clothes horse, a hanger, like Patti Smith or a real model! Who gives a shit about that? I used to. I'd rather just keep my body the way it is, as imperfect and flawed as it is - I'm kind of used to it. I like to sleep with it. Although last night I didn't sleep one wink.  Trying to balance my mental health with my lack of sleep. Do I take pills that make me sleep and then worry about becoming addicted to pills, or do I lay awake looking at the clock at 11:15, 12:48, 1:17, 2:39, 3:48, 4:11, 5:06, 6:58, 7:27?  In eighth-grade I weighed 90 pounds at almost this height, but had large huge bouncing breasts and I was famous across the land for that. Was that an omen for now? What a stupid fucking thing to be known for. So my latest final plan, as Burnyce would say, is: Tuesday, April 1 here we come! I am doing other lumpectomy! I am completely delighted that my latest final surgery lands on April Fools' Day. This could not be more perfect. It pleases me. I embrace the absurdity of it all. I want it to be even more absurd, more sticky, more strenuously ridiculous. What else can I do to make this sublimely inane? Shall I break my leg on the way to the hospital? Or maybe I'll be involved in a freak breast accident the night before where my right healthy breast will be accidentally stabbed by an over enthusiastic dinner guest as he waves his fork around in a fit of pique over who was just cut on Project Runway. Perfect.

STATUS

Heart monitor off

No cardiac events

Sticky glue stuck on me

Carotid arteries to be ultra sounded on Thursday - they will sonogram my neck to see if there are any tiny babies floating in there or sticky glue or brie cheese or Conan's pizza clogging up my neck tubes. This is an extra cautious precaution just so that we can be sure my brain is about to be syncoped to death or shut off.

Didn't Miami sound machine say 

"TURN THE BEAT AROUND! LOVE THAT SYNCOPATION!" ??? I remember thinking what the fuck's syncopation? What a dumb ass word. I didn't know that when they wrote that lyric back in the early 80s, when my next-door neighbor Clay (only real person I know who got famous) was helping them rockstar jam it on the piano on stage, that they were foreshadowing February 9, 2014 when I was going to experience my own syncope. Maybe they're not related to me. Maybe I'm getting too self-centered, ya think? Actually I'm not trying to be too self-centered, in fact I have to try to remember myself, because I feel myself becoming less important less substantial as the minutes go by. I'm not doing much of anything worthwhile. 

In fact it got so bad that a little while ago I went online and looked up my rate your professor comments. College students go on this website and write whatever they want about teachers they've taken, and they use this site all the time to help pick professors to take for classes. (Luddites insert your we're going to hell in a handbasket comment here). I had some good reviews - people said they really liked me ("You like me!" Who said that?) la la la sunshiney unicorns, and then one that was written just about a week ago that said "I really hated this professor and so did everyone else in the class. She was really hard and opinionated. Then at the end I learned a lot and it was worth it." really? Everyone else in the class? Now I know it feels like to be Lindsay Lohan. Well maybe not really.

That was a very good and important use of 73 seconds. 

A tall Texas tall cool drink of water guy we know went to law school, and then amazingly became a judge, and now amazingly is on the Texas Supreme Court. (Don't worry successful person I shan't out you). He sent me a message today on Facebook that he has been reading my blog and wanted to know what I thought about science and the universe and books. So I told him. I suggested an essay by Carl Sagan to read and he said he was reading it. I am honored that he'd ask my opinion. Get it?

Here's a link to that essay. I make my freshman comp students read this the first week of class and then we discuss it in great detail. I force them to think about thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking about thinking: 

http://www.stephenjaygould.org/ctrl/sagan_science.html

These small reports represent the highlights of my day. See what I mean? Who am I? A driver, a person who makes toast. A typist. Or at my laziest, not even a typist, more like a person who blats to Siri. I'm not a judge. Or am I?

Free yoga for breast cancer ladies tomorrow at noon. Will I downward dog it up or simply savasana for 60 minutes?

Splurged on Betsy Johnson jammies at Dillards today.

Ate a huge crusty hero sandwich today, tearing it lamb by limb on a hot porch while scrubbing birdshit. 

Many things are happening at once and nothing is happening ever.

I waste time. 

I waste things.

But I can share other much better writing:

More from Eliot:

What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),
And I will show you something different from either
Your shadow at morning striding behind you
Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;
I will show you fear in a handful of dust.
Frisch weht der Wind
Der Heimat zu,
Mein Irisch Kind,
Wo weilest du?
“You gave me hyacinths first a year ago;
They called me the hyacinth girl.”
—Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyacinth garden,
Your arms full, and your hair wet, I could not
Speak, and my eyes failed, I was neither
Living nor dead, and I knew nothing,
Looking into the heart of light, the silence.
Öd’ und leer das Meer.

Flat circles and knowing

Flat Circle

I've been watching the show True Detective, in which Matthew McConaughey's character discusses the idea that outside of our universe is another universe of eternity, where the eternal ones are looking down upon our sphere, but they see it as a flat circle. In this circle we are going around and around and around uninterrupted, living our same lives over and over and over again - unaware and unable to change anything. So whatever you're going through, you've already gone through an infinite number of times, and you will again and again. The plane will disappear from Malaysia, or the China Sea, again. It has already disappeared. It will disappear again, and again, and again, and again. Your father will be born and bear you and hold you again, over and over. You will laugh. I will undergo chemotherapy again, and again, and again. 

This is interesting, but different from the Buddhist idea, where you are reborn and live life over and over again, but each life time in a different state (What will you be next - a Chinese president, a skinny rich heroin dealer, a heroine, a sniveling slumlord, a eunuch, a fat happy ice cream scooper, an artist in Thailand, a preacher, a Haitian baby? Or even more esoterically - a pineapple, a Dover cliff, or a pebble fallen off the cliff?) with the idea that you are to strive to reach a higher state each in each life, until you finally reach nirvana, or enlightenment. So whatever problems you're having now (Are you bitchy? Strident? Incurious? Self centered? Unkind? Not good at friendship, sandwich making, or empathy? Sharing much?) may be informed by something you needed to learn from a past life. Uh oh. That hurts.

Then there's the Christian idea where you're supposed to praise a God who promises you eternal life. Are any of these things true? Or are they all true? Or just a little bit of each one is true, all being the same thing? I have no idea, don't ask me. Or, do ask me let's talk about it. I think the character in True Detective knows something

I like the idea of a flat circle. I feel like a flat circle right now. Today I saw a very kind cardiologist, an old ally. His name is Arthur Smith, and I first met him in 1995, after I had a grand mal (big and horrifying to spectators, nada to participants) seizure one day at work. This was my first introduction to the world of medicine, where I learned how to be a patient. I was so good at it. I won't tell you that whole story here, that's another story from another time, but it ended up with me meeting Dr. Smith, who led the safari into the Africa of my body, only to discover that my heart had a hole in it that needed to be repaired. Right in the middle - hidden like a secret. A secret murderer in the chamber. At the age of 35 I embarked on the heart surgery of a newborn baby born with a heart defect. A round, quarter-sized, neatly stitched patch was sewn into me and I was repaired. Quilted.

Today. I hadn't seen Dr. Smith for over 13 years. He had pronounced me perfectly healthy in 2000 and said get outta here. Because I fainted a few weeks ago after chemotherapy, my oncologist invited me make an appointment to see him again, so he could give his blessing that my heart is not chemo-trashed. To make sure my "long Q rhythm" was a fluke caused by the stress of chemotherapy, rather than something perfectly deadly. 

When he walked in I was seeing an old friend. He was short and kind and he said "I'm an old man now," which wasn't true. He is not an old man. His wife had breast cancer last year. He said. He looked at me with the kindest, most sympathetic eyes. Luckily for her, she had one small surgery and radiation. But he knew. He knew what I was feeling. He looked at me and he knew.

Right now I am wearing a bunch of electronic snaps with long green snaky wires that are stuck to my skin all over my chest and under my hilariously annoying and way too attention-seeking breasts (please stop) clipped to a little tiny computer stuck to the side of my jeans. It watches my heart. The heart monitor sticker-onner-of-leads-and-metal-things today said in all earnestness: "See this button on your cardiac monitor? Please press it IN THE EVENT OF A CARDIAC EVENT, and then be sure to note it in your jourmal." So if I go into cardiac arrest or tachycardia or full out clunk to the floor passing out please pause for a moment while I press my button. Thank you.  I am bionic. I am the Borg. Resistance is futile.

I shalll be monitored as such for 24 hours. Then in a few days I will have the carotid arteries in my neck looked at with ultrasound, just to make sure they're not all clogged up and about to cause me to drop dead. All this attention to my arteries and veins and heart seems ridiculous to me, but my oncologist is on supreme caution watch. I wish to be normal and not be treated with caution. 

This is just another non event - a piece of iceberg lettuce.

Here are a few things that I know:

1. Or infer: I am having another surgery. I know this because my planning session to set up radiation, which was scheduled for this Friday, has been canceled. The party has been canceled, do not pass Go, do not collect $200, cancel the catering, cancel the CAT scan, cancel the whole shooting match. Cancel any awareness of what might happen, or ability to make plans. I'm in my flat circle rut, I can't seem to move on from the surgical station to the radiation station, or get closer to the end of this journey.

2. My surgeon, Jane Nelson, will be making a decision tomorrow. Lumpectomy for Amy, or mastectomy. Apparently my case file is at the top of her towering pile of list of things to do tomorrow. On her desk. What color is the folder? And apparently that case file is completely covered with scribbled notes from my radiologist. I'm scribbled. I asked the on-phone nurse, Nancy, to sneakily tell me what those notes said. "It's a tossup" and then "Oh, dear, I hope you don't have to have a mastectomy." She knows.

3. Chemotherapy alters your body chemistry. Alcohol no longer renders me tipsy, or pleasantly anything. This freaking irritates the shit out of me. I like to drink gin and tonics, and I like to drink wine. I like the idea of having my cocktail take the edge off my afternoon or evening. This is no longer the case. What almost annoys me more than anything, is the idea that oncologists and the whole world of cancer medical blah blah kind of lie to us patients. Everything is made more mild with euphemisms like, you may feel some discomfort, chemotherapy may make you feel "different" (from what?!), radiation may cause you to feel a little bit warm or pink in your skin. Et damn cetera. It's all a bunch of euphemistic bullshit. You want the real info, ask me. There is no evidence online that says that this alcohol thing is true, yet my friends who are going through chemotherapy with me have told me that this is true for them too. I could take a Vicodin and a Xanax and a Valium and drink five drinks and a Vicodin (yeah I know I already said that) and still feel perfectly normal. Take it! Take another little piece of my life now baby! Janice Joplin knew.

4. I'm in a good mood. I am completely sick of people telling me that I seem a little down, or why am I not in a very good mood? I am in a goddamn stupendously excellent mood! How the fuck do you think this feels dealing with this shit day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day after day? I'm eating drinking driving caring washing cleaning cooking dressing vacuuming dusting sponging rinsing flossing texting folding talking singing chatting Facebooking blogging reading going being wearing scrubbing shampooing shaving caring holding setting weeding typing spraying toasting frying sleeping laughing talking getting trying dressing writing hugging tucking corresponding mailing making listening doing the best I can and I think it's excellent. 

5. My hair is slowly maybe somethinging. But not enough. I'm like a hedgehog without the hedge. Chia pet unamusement. Almost six weeks later. There are two layers, like a husky or a goose. Layer one: thin insubstantial floating screwy insubstantial fluffs that are the color of clear. Layer two: dark dirt colored pretend Tiggywinkle prickles that are not really there or prickly. Effect: dead goat. 

I'll be ok. You know. I know. Don't tell me it looks good.

5. Violet snuggled with a cat today and yesterday a guy in a punk band leapt off a stage and threw himself on her and knocked her down and she cut her ankle and today she did 5 out of 42 algebra problems assigned to her over her two week Spring break. 

6. Today Fifi put a chinchilla on her head and shot real arrows with Zora and ate a bowl of Cheezits and Sunday she rollerbladed all over our neighborhood, and helped transform our under the stairs closet into a Harry Potter cupboard/library - come see.

7. Our girly two week Spring break has been fun so far full of silly friends and silly laughs.

8. I know how to have fun. I know how to. I know how. I know.

Report from the kitchen sink

I'm seeking clarity. Today I saw doctor Gorrebeeck, my oncologist. It was a party of two and we made sparkling conversation for a long time. 

Following is a medical update on me:

What about that damned report from surgery three that still shows a margin?

I just had my third lumpectomy. (Didn't even hurt - I am a surgery rock star!) The oncologist was surprised and "bummed out" that the pathology report from this last surgery shows that there still cancer inside of my left breast. Ductal carcinoma in situ. She thinks the surgeon definitely needs to do another surgery, and that said surgeon may consider a mastectomy now because the margin that was left last time was completely "positive" not just "close."

Why would I still have cancer cells left my breast after I just went through poisonous chemical warfare?

Dr. G says the reason chemotherapy didn't knock out what was left in there is because what's in there is a noninvasive type of cancer (DCIS), and chemotherapy only kills rapidly dividing invasive cells. 

Ok, if they're non-invasive why do anything?

However, the cells are also what's called "high-grade" (like grade A beef? Prime rib!) which means that they could develop into tumors, and she think that's what happened with the tumors I had before. So...not ok to ignore.

(Interlude)

GET THOSE MOTHERFUCKING CELLS OUT OF ME STAT!

Back to calm medical questions:

Is it insane that I've had not one, not two, but THREE surgeries already and how do I deal with my friends and family and strangers that tell me that my sugeon must not be doing something right, like they say "Can't she CHECK WHILE DOING SURGERY? GOD!!!!" and stuff like that?

Dr. Gorrebeeck assured me that Dr. Nelson is the best surgeon in Austin. I know this too. And no they can't check right there in the operating room (you're thinking of that skin cancer surgery called Moh's named after Dr. Moh - google it). These kinds of cells (google DCIS) cannot be seen or felt. It takes having the tissue (eew) shipped to a lab, then sliced into many tiny sections, stained different colors, and examined very closely for a long time by a pathologist who does nothing else, and who then types up an extremely long and detailed report (before going out for a chicken BREAST sandwich? Nah - he's probably vegan). Takes DAYS.

What next?

My surgeon and my radiologist are together at a conference right now, so Dr. G thinks they are probably discussing my case while there. Maybe even right now over a glass of VERY GOOD wine. (I hope). So I will have to wait till they get back next Monday and they communicate with me what they think I should do. So no radiation or tamoxifen until that is resolved. Right now I have NO PLAN. 

(Nobody knows).

How do I feel?

I had a very nice meeting with my oncologist, and I feel good about that, although now I feel nervous in a whole new sort of way. And something else is happening. Several times today. It's kind of like numbness, although not really numbness, it's sort of like I am turning into vapor and I'm not really there, physically, in the place that I am at the time. Like in a chair, or my car, or the grocery store. A vibration. I think this is mental, not physical. However, if you see me and I start to fade out visually, to pixelate, please let me know. I may have discovered a wormhole. Where shall I go?

Please read

No one has done anything wrong. I have excellent doctors. I have confidence in my doctors. The human body is hella mysterious and complicated, and any doctor worth their salt will tell you that the world of medicine has barely scratched the surface of understanding the human body. Cancer is also very complicated. And any treatments that are done to a patient with cancer (chemotherapy, surgery, nutrition, voodoo, drugs, herbs, carrots, the kitchen sink, radiation, snorting cabbage patch dolls, etc) are done on one specific body with its own variables (hormones, constitution, ecosystem, sensitivities, physical state, age, plumbing, previous screw ups, genes, jeans, flaws, immune system, mental state, insurance, blood, intelligence, addictions, propensities, diseases, fat, skin, bugs, etc,) and millions of other variables and circumstances. 

Every single case of cancer is completely unique and separate from every other single case. 

I am no exception to this. There are no fixed protocols or rules. Cancer is complex and even within that complexity, apparently my case is one of the more complex ones. It's befuddling, confounding, annoying, rude, irreverent, and unclear.

I am tired. My red blood count is low, my iron is low, my liver enzymes are low. But I'm also tired in another way. Mentally.

I am managing this as well as I can. It keeps evading me - it being "the case of Amy's badly behaving bucking bronco of freaking supposed stage one breast cancer" and evading meaning "continuing to not have the damn clear end date that I want." 

And now for a poetic interlude:

The Whole Mess...Almost

By Gregory Corso

I ran up six flights of stairs

to my small furnished room   

opened the window

and began throwing out

those things most important in life

First to go, Truth, squealing like a fink:

“Don’t! I’ll tell awful things about you!”

“Oh yeah? Well, I’ve nothing to hide ... OUT!”

Then went God, glowering & whimpering in amazement:   

“It’s not my fault! I’m not the cause of it all!” “OUT!”   

Then Love, cooing bribes: “You’ll never know impotency!   

All the girls on Vogue covers, all yours!”

I pushed her fat ass out and screamed:

“You always end up a bummer!”

I picked up Faith Hope Charity

all three clinging together:

“Without us you’ll surely die!”

“With you I’m going nuts! Goodbye!”

Then Beauty ... ah, Beauty—

As I led her to the window

I told her: “You I loved best in life

... but you’re a killer; Beauty kills!”   

Not really meaning to drop her

I immediately ran downstairs

getting there just in time to catch her   

“You saved me!” she cried

I put her down and told her: “Move on.”

Went back up those six flights

went to the money

there was no money to throw out.

The only thing left in the room was Death   

hiding beneath the kitchen sink:

“I’m not real!” It cried

“I’m just a rumor spread by life ... ”   

Laughing I threw it out, kitchen sink and all   

and suddenly realized Humor

was all that was left—

All I could do with Humor was to say:   

“Out the window with the window!”

Gregory Corso, “The Whole Mess ... Almost” from Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. Copyright © 1973, 1975, 1981 by Gregory Corso. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

A Drink With Something In It

There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth--
I think that perhaps it's the gin.

Ogden Nash

Dirty Face

BY SHEL SILVERSTEIN

Where did you get such a dirty face,

My darling dirty-faced child?

 

I got it from crawling along in the dirt

And biting two buttons off Jeremy’s shirt.

I got it from chewing the roots of a rose

And digging for clams in the yard with my nose.

I got it from peeking into a dark cave

And painting myself like a Navajo brave.

I got it from playing with coal in the bin

And signing my name in cement with my chin.

I got if from rolling around on the rug

And giving the horrible dog a big hug.

I got it from finding a lost silver mine

And eating sweet blackberries right off the vine.

I got it from ice cream and wrestling and tears

And from having more fun than you’ve had in years.

“Gregory Corso, “The Whole Mess ... Almost” from Herald of the Autochthonic Spirit. Copyright © 1973, 1975, 1981 by Gregory Corso. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation.

A Strange Wild Song

by Lewis Carroll

He thought he saw an Elephant,
That practised on a fife:
He looked again, and found it was
A letter from his wife.
'At length I realise,' he said,
The bitterness of Life!'

He thought he saw a Buffalo
Upon the chimney-piec e:
He looked again, and found it was
His Sister's Husband's Niece.
'Unless you leave this house,' he said,
"I'll send for the Police!'

He thought he saw a Rattlesnake
That questioned him in Greek:
He looked again, and found it was
The Middle of Next Week.
'The one thing I regret,' he said,
'Is that it cannot speak!'

He thought he saw a Banker's Clerk
Descending from the bus:
He looked again, and found it was
A Hippopotamus .
'If this should stay to dine,' he said,
'There won't be much for us!'

He thought he saw a Kangaroo
That worked a coffee-mill: 
He looked again, and found it was
A Vegetable-Pi ll.
'Were I to swallow this,' he said,
'I should be very ill!'

He thought he saw a Coach-and-Fo ur
That stood beside his bed:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bear without a Head.
'Poor thing,' he said, 'poor silly thing!
It's waiting to be fed!'

He thought he saw an Albatross
That fluttered round the lamp:
He looked again, and found it was
A Penny-Postag e Stamp.
'You'd best be getting home,' he said:
'The nights are very damp!'

He thought he saw a Garden-Door
That opened with a key:
He looked again, and found it was
A Double Rule of Three:
'And all its mystery,' he said,
'Is clear as day to me!'

He thought he saw a Argument
That proved he was the Pope:
He looked again, and found it was
A Bar of Mottled Soap.
'A fact so dread,' he faintly said,
'Extinguishe s all hope!'

String theory

I am knitting up my days, loosely.

Maybe it's ok just to exist like a piece of string that blew in from a ball of yarn. A piece of red and blue twisted yarn, twisted together to make a sort of purple hue from a few feet away, but up close you see the red fuzz splitting into many fine strings that spread prettily against the midnight blue of the background fatter cable of yarn. Maybe someone was knitting a blanket for their friend's large milky baby, or a hat for their small roasted squash husbandly, or just knitting away mindlessly or mindfully. 

And a piece of the yarn that got cut when she was trimming the end of a particularly troublesome row got stuck to her pilly pant-leg. Later the knitter went outside and brushed up against an untrimmed (not even noticed) sage bush. The yarn bit rubbed off and was left hanging there, blowing in a way that was attractive to a grackle, who swooped down to get it, but didn't get a good beak-grip, and halfway back to her nest she inadvertently dropped it when she opened her mouth absentmindedly, gracklishly, mindlessly, never missing it for even a micro nanosecond. Maybe it drifted and blew down and across and across and around and came to rest, after minutes and minutes above us, on a flat birdshat slat of my front porch, and through physics and chance, blew in at just the right angle to become impaled grabbed upon a useless forgotten nail that is stuck there, in a way that allowed it to remain, just so, obscure, unknown, stuck, on my porch. For a long time. As time goes by it becomes more fuzzed out and bleached but remains exactly as it was in one way: obscurity. Obscureness. Obscure.

 

I feel like this. A blown-in stuck fuzz.

 

Just existing in my state of nothing. I am in between things in terms of my medical miracle mess mud mystery mass miasma. I thought I was writing a blog.  I thought maybe it could be made into an essay I could publish or an article or a book. I thought I signed up to join the Writer's League of Austin. That I may attend their summer conference. I thought that the writing I thought I was doing might help me get better or get out of this state. I thought I was advancing one step further in my maze, into radiation, and that I was done with surgery.

In fact, I am doing all of these things and yet really none of them. Nothing much is happening to speak of, much less write.

"Glory is fleeting, but obscurity is forever." -- Napoleon Bonaparte

I write some things. I read a lot of things. I read without seeking things like "must read: Austin's top 10 bloggers to follow" or articles about new books on breast cancer (The ABC's of Breast Cancer in The New York Times Book Review today). I read things on Facebook about people I know with their new book or poem or article. Things are passing me by. I feel. I read about somebody's student who published a new collection of words written. I missed a deadline I meant not to, to submit a synopsis of my blog to a nonfiction contest for a writer's conference in Austin in a few months. The deadline was ironically the day I last had surgery and I had a nightmare the night before surgery that I'd missed the deadline, and the nightmare picked back up as I swam to consciousness after my propofol sleep, and I awoke to find it was true.

If I were to write a blog that is what I have to write about.