Tales from the Shark Tank

The doc just called. The final pathology report is in. The biopsy that found it also got it all; what remained were pre-cancerous cells inside the offending organ and nothing even vaguely abnormal anywhere else. It was, indeed, grade 1 and stage 1, and while I get to follow up every 4 months for the next 3 years, and every 6 months for the rest of my life, the medical part of this saga is essentially over.

Now we get to see what the non-medical aftereffects turn out to be. I’m not so foolish as to believe there will be none.

I’ve gotten a lot of e-mails, IM’s (and my apologies to those who tried to IM me when the computer was up but I wasn’t), messages, etc that all run on the same theme.  Every single one of them says, usually in the first sentence, Don’t overdo.  You’d think everyone was expecting me to try to go bungee jumping the day after surgery and try out for the Olympic weight-lifting team the day after that.

I’m not.  Really.  I haven’t even tried to do laundry or cook dinner yet, and have been considering getting dressed generally optional.  I am spending much of the day in my recliner (which my cats like) or asleep in my bed (which they don’t, because they aren’t allowed in there.)  I don’t even have the inclination to do anything terribly active.  My mind is starting to plan what I want to do next, but planning is as far as anything is getting right now.  It’s not enforced inactivity, which would indeed drive me nuts and which I might try to defy.  But neither is it “I feel fine, so why on earth shouldn’t I”….fill in the blank.  What I feel is tired.  That is quite natural, and I know it.  So I’m sleeping a lot.  And since I’m only on restrictions for another week, it should be over by the time it starts to chafe.

See?  I can surprise even those who’ve known me for upwards of 30 years.  Not only can I be sensible, I can actually sit still!

My older cat, she who parked herself on the front steps in a snowstorm and stayed there all night to get my attention when she first adopted us, is lying on top of my computer back-pack and watching the snow fall. She’ll stay out if there’s a reason to (and evidently getting my attention was reason enough, since she did have a nice warm barn to retreat to at the time), but warmth and indoor-ness are Good For Cats, and she is not one to deny herself the good things.

Her daughter, on the other hand, is like any teenager. She’s restless, she’s got more energy than she knows what to do with, and she doesn’t believe it when Mom says “look, kid, it’s cold out there. See those snowflakes blowing sideways? There’s a fair bit of wind, and I’m telling you, it cuts right through the fur.” So at intervals, little Miss Tornado insists that she must go Outside. Now. She is convinced that each snowflake might possibly conceal a mouse, and must investigate personally. So I open the door for her, she darts out, and I wait.

It hasn’t taken more than five minutes yet for her to realize that hey, it’s not just cold out there, it’s cold out there. Freeze the fur off your tail cold. Make your whiskers shiver cold. Make you want to levitate all four paws off the ground at once and keep them there cold. (It really is; the windchill’s about 10 below zero.) At which point, if I open the door a crack, she darts in as quickly as she went out and jumps into my lap, purring enthusiastically and grooming whatever part of me she can reach. “Oooh, you’re nice and warm, I think I’ll let the snow-mice play by themselves, why did you let me go out in that?”

She’s in my lap right now. And judging by the rest of the day, she’ll stay here about 10 minutes, wander around the house for half an hour, and then be back. I’m not sure if she thinks it will have warmed up, or if she simply forgets how cold it was. But she will be scratching at the door again, mewing frantically, demanding to chase the snow-mice. If the definition of insanity is repeating the same action under the same conditions and expecting a different result, then Tornado is completely insane.

Hi, World.  This will be very short, as I’m still at the “sleeping a lot” phase of things.

Surgery was Wednesday.  I have five very small bandages in a rough circle on my belly, which I’m told have been closed with a single dissolving suture each.  And with that access, my surgeon managed to remove all the reproductive equipment intact to send on to pathology.

One of the things the hospital offered was to let my husband stay the night with me.  I sent him home, and I’m glad I did - they were in to check on me about every 2 hours.  He’d have gotten no sleep at all.  And when I was offered the choice, I came home yesterday late afternoon, as I prefer to sleep undisturbed and nothing appeared to be wrong.

The doctor said that everything looked very normal and very good, no sign of anything untoward in lymph nodes or abdominal cavity or even on the outside of the equipment in question.  So pending a report that’s due in 10 days or so, it looks like this is it - grade 1, stage 1, minimal chance of recurrence.  I have good drugs for pain, and not much need of them.  That’s a Good Thing(tm) because I really hate having a brain made of banana yogurt.  And I think I’m going back to sleep now.

I have been told when I get to lose the internal time-bomb. It will happen next Wednesday afternoon, January 24th.

I’m quite looking forward to it.

Today my husband, my friend Kris and I betook ourselves to University of Chicago to meet with the oncologist. Wick and Kris were along for immoral support, which I needed. As it happened, they were along to keep me from floating away in sheer relief.

I have seen the oncologist, and short of saying “oh, it was false positive” the news is as good as it could be. On re-evaluation they concluded that the thing is grade 1 rather than grade 2 (i.e. less severe), and tell me that there is a very strong likelihood (above 90%) that surgery alone will take care of the whole thing. More…there’s a new form of surgery out now that is minimally invasive but still gives the surgeon a good look around, for which I am evidently a good candidate, so that’s what they’re going to use. (Robotic surgery…welcome to the 21st century!)

We won’t know for absolutely certain until the final pathology report comes back, of course. I’m told that’s usually about 10 days after surgery. But they’ll call me in the morning to tell me when my surgery is scheduled. They do these on Wednesdays, so it will be either January 24th or 31st. Assuming nothing new shows up in the final report, a month to six weeks from now this whole episode will be over.

Pardon me while I go sleep for about a week now….

An amazing group of chosen family/ friends descended upon my parent’s home yesterday. They threw away a (small) dumpster-load of assorted papers, leaflets, book-club fliers, etc., took a truck-load of unused small stuff to Goodwill, and will be back to take things Mom doesn’t want but which are of genuine value to an E-bay store on the northeast side of Indy. Basically, they got the house from being in violation of several health and fire codes to liveable in a single day. I’ve been trying to do that and fighting a losing battle for several years. I cannot thank them enough.

I have the most wonderful friends in the world - and I know it.

“Not knowing drives you around the bend…the bend of a  Moebius strip.  And you just keep going.”  — L.I.R.

Every so often, life presents you with something that you know, as it is happening, is changing the path of your life so completely that you will forever after mark time by that change. You are one person on one side of it, and another person, in the sense of thinking and responding entirely differently, on the other side of it. Breaking up with a boyfriend I’d been with for three years was the first such that I can put my finger on. Before that, I’d unthinkingly adopted my mother’s paradigm, that a girl could go out with a group of girls, or with a boy, but not alone unless it was for something like shopping. $Deity forbid she should take a road-trip, even a short one, on her own. $Deity forbid she go and stay in the home of a virtual stranger (like accept crash-space at an SCA event or con) by herself. R. broke up with me, there was no one else on the horizon, and after the first shock and anger, my reaction was “Well, good, now I can go to the things that looked interesting to me that he didn’t care about.” That was followed within a second or two by the realization that even were I with someone seriously (and I’d have married R. in a heartbeat had he asked me, only he told me six months after the break-up that he was gay) there was no reason I couldn’t go do things he wasn’t interested in all by myself if I so chose. Being female did not make me forever a child. I did not need permission and accompaniment for my activities. I could decide where to go, and when. I could live alone if I thought it was best for me. I liked sharing my interests, but if some were different from my partner’s that was okay. No, traveling alone wasn’t as safe as traveling with a friend, but I could choose what risks I would take. It was a personal declaration of adulthood and independence that caused enormous consternation within my extended family, and that I have never once regretted.

There were others, more common to general experience - the day near nineteen years ago that I married my husband, the day our son was born and the day on which his legal adoption was final. I remember being single, but can no longer wrap my mind around the way it felt; I remember being childless more clearly, but that too is a thing that feels impossibly distant, as if from another lifetime.

Now I’ve passed another such roadsign, gone around another bend, this time one I didn’t even see coming, and once again I knew it as it was happening, sitting in the doctor’s office staring down with him at a pathology report that said “Polyp, single, endometrial endometroid adenocarcinoma grade II/III” (meaning grade 2 of a possible 3). Of the most relevant words I understood one entirely (endometrial) and another only in part (the “carcinoma” in adenocarcinoma), but the import of it was clear as crystal. Cancer was no longer a thing I would watch and try to help others through; it was a thing I was going to live through. Suddenly I was not in control. I had felt nothing at all - still don’t, to be honest, and those who know how I read my own body will understand what kind of a shock that is. I knew my genetic heritage; I paid attention, I didn’t blow things off as “nothing” - and still I had been blindsided entirely. I dove in directly to educate myself as much as I could, so that when I get into the oncologist I can ask intelligent questions and make informed decisions instead of simply nodding passively at the recommendations I get. It is, at this point, the only sort of control I can get. I called the people whom I love, who love me, telling them what was happening and asking for support, for an ear, for patience, for good thoughts and strength, because while I know myself to be strong, I know as well that I am not strong enough to take this one on alone. And I watched as all my expectations for the future simply dissolved into mist, because there is no way of planning it at all and it seems the ultimate in hubris to say “I will do this in a few years” when I can’t even plan for the next month intelligently. I said I would be picking up my regularly scheduled life, but really, that isn’t quite true. I will pick up my life on the other side of this adventure - but it will not the one I thought was “regularly scheduled” on January 4th. It can’t be, because the road took off around a bend, and that life no longer exists.

I have a long standing practice of cutting my hair when my life is changing.  Much to my own amusement, I’ve done it again.  It was (pulled out straight) down to the middle of my back.  It never looked that long, because left to its own devices it waves in dry weather and flat out curls in humid.  But now there’s no least question about how long it isn’t.  It’s about at the bottom of my ears, with bangs.  You have been warned.