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They were the best of students, they were the worst of students…

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Ohhhhhh 🙁 moannnnnnn

The Eng. 102s’ final, endless research paper is in. We have four days in which to grade the monsters, and then I have to post grades on the district’s system. Meanwhile, another set of papers from the wannabe magazine writers is pending — a “brite,” the shortest of short-form journalism.

The magawriters’ efforts will be easy, and besides, there are only about 10 students remaining in that class.

But the 102s…hevvin help us, MOST of them have hung in there through the entire semester. That’s got to be some kind of a record, because by the end of a term a third to half of classmates have dropped a typical community-college course. So it’s GOOD, in one way: somehow we’ve managed to keep them on track.

But…what, really, is ON that track?

I made a little chart dividing up the classmates by the quality of their writing skills. The idea is to grade the weakest writers’ papers first, so as to get the truly, truly awful stuff out of the way while the brain is still relatively fresh. Then plow through the mediocrities, which can be as or more difficult than the bad stuff to grade. And finally have downhill skiing after you’ve reached the point where you can no longer bear to look at the things.

So. We have the “Best,” the “Worst,” and the “Others.”

Or we could say, the “Excellent,” the “Dreadful,” and the “Mediocre.” Or…the “Good,” the “Bad,” and the “Ugly”….

Under the “Best” rubric, we have six classmates, one of whom is really a very good writer. The “Worst” number five. And the “Others”: seven. Only two students have failed to turn in a paper, and one of those fell under the wagon wheels some time back. Neither of them were among the “Worst.” That means, yes: here at the end of the semester we still have to read, assess, try to comment intelligently upon, and apply a grade to five unintelligible pieces of illiterate drivel.

So far I’ve read a paper whose author attempted to organize the entire 2500 words into two paragraphs. I’ve read a 2500-word “research” paper without a shred of documentation. And just now I’m about to take up one in which I entered FIFTEEN corrections in THREE sentences before I gave up and went to bed last night.

What, seriously, am I supposed to do with a student who’s doing the best he or she can but still makes an error about every second word?

Yeah, I understand that some writers who do that have learning disabilities. And I do understand it’s not their fault, whether their brains are wired in some unique way or whether they’re simply victims of Arizona’s half-assed educational system. But that doesn’t change the fact that they’re in my course, and I can’t very well flunk a quarter of the students in any given section — I wouldn’t keep my job long if I did that. And it doesn’t change the fact that these people — maybe as many as a quarter of our “graduates,” such as they are — are going to end up in some hapless employer’s business.

That’s right: 5 out of 18 is more than a quarter of the class: 28%.

And it’s pretty typical.

Postscript: As I was fiddling with this post, one student asked me to let him/her completely rewrite an abysmally failing paper (answer: No) and another asked me to accept NINE late papers because s/he’s had such a tough time this semester (answer: No).

Holy shit.

Like a Rocket….

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About to fly out the door: tons of work to do, interrupted by a couple of nuisance errands that can’t be put off to another day. But assuming you’d like to be entertained today, 101 Centavos kindly retweeted this rant I published at Writers Plain & Simple about the University of Virginia fiasco.

Drop by and give it a read. If you like it, do a little tweeting and retweeting of your own — I’m really working hard to build readership at that site and will appreciate any visibility you can share.

🙂

wooHOO! What a Relief. {And an unexpected hoot!}

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Hoot first: I come flying in the door from the doctor, who has spent a half hour or forty minutes talking about the bilateral mastectomy slated for January 6. Grab the mail out of the mailbox, and what do I find?

Yes!

A jury summons! For…when else? January 6.

😆

I’ll have to call tomorrow to get an extension, preferably a couple months’ worth. How hilarious is that?

Well, it struck me as hilarious because after talking with WonderSurgeon I came away feeling a great deal better. Indeed, HUGELY reassured.

In the first place, contrary to my expectation, they found NOTHING in the non-guilty breast. No masses, no calcifications, no weirdness of any sort. The guilty breast was not so cut [heh!]-and-dried. She said it was hard to tell because the surgery confounds MRIs with its disruptions, but it was possible there was some residual tumor there. Possibly not, too.

But we agreed that given the size and extent of the DCIS she removed — large and a lot — the smartest, safest, perfect no-hassle course of action is to lob off the guilty boob. She also felt comfortable about removing the innocent boob, for the sake of symmetry (hey! I’m getting Medicare to pay for cosmetic surgery!), safety (chance of recurrence in the contralateral boob is enhanced by the existence of a large DCIS in the other boob, by several re-excisions, and by age), and nuisance factor relief (NO MORE MAMMOGRAMS! EVER!!). This will virtually eliminate the possibility of any future DCIS or invasive cancer in my boobs, from now into perpetuity.

So now I show her the images of what I hope she can do and what I hope she can’t do:

Please do this:

or this:

Not this:

She said it was fairly easy to get the uncomplicated, flat, smooth result shown in the first two images. What appears in the third image is, she said, an unsatisfactory outcome. Part of it is that the woman is stylishly plump (I would not call her “fat,” personally) and part of it is that the surgeon failed to achieve an adequate result. But, she said, given that I’m fairly slender and my boobs aren’t very large, the result should resemble what appears in the b/w images here.

Thank goodness I dropped those 35 pounds last year!!!

Then she showed me some images of one of her patients (no face, no name, no identifiers visible), which she’s planning to put into a presentation for early next year.

Well, when I say WonderSurgeon, I exaggerate not.

This lady — the patient — was a good 80 to 100 pounds overweight. Maybe more. She had large, sagging breasts — very large — with neoplasms in both. For her a double mastectomy was not optional.

The incisions, while long (because it took a lot of doing to remove the substantial amounts of fatty tissue), were as neat and smooth and flat as you can imagine. She showed me the incisions as they looked right after she completed the procedure, while the patient was still asleep on the table, and then she showed how they looked three weeks later,  just about healed. The woman’s chest looked just fine: no “dog ears” as on the poor gal shown in the third image above, no distortions, nothing bizarre in any way.

WonderSurgeon explained in detail exactly how she accomplished this particular work of art. There’s a trick to it, and it’s one she figured out for herself. It’s one of those things that seems simple when it’s explained, so much so you’d think it would be obvious, but it’s not obvious until someone has an Insight.

If she could do that for a woman who presented a challenge of substantial magnitude, she certainly can make me come out like the women in the two b/w images above. Sans the tattoo, of course.

Then I asked my endless set of questions:

Would she refer me to my favorite physical therapist for the shoulder therapy?

Why? You won’t need therapy.

I understand I won’t be able to lift my hands over my head, or even hold a cup of coffee.

You’ll be able to lift your arms over your head, although with the drains in you probably won’t want to for the first few days. You’ll be able to do everything you do normally, right away.

Will the Mayo provide a compression garment, or should I buy a post-mastectomy camisole such as the Amoena 2105 Breast Surgery Camisole with Drainage Management?

Don’t waste your money on that kind of stuff. We’ll give you another compression bra; just pin the drain bulbs to that. You’ll only need it for a couple or three days, as long as it’s comfortable.

When will I be able to pick up a dog bowl (8 pounds) off the floor and put it back down?

Right away.

When will I be able to pick up the dogs (20 to 25 pounds)?

Right away.

A University of Florida page said I may not be able to get out of bed without help. Am I going to need someone to stay with me overnight? For how long?

No. You should have no problem getting out of bed. Or washing your hair. Or putting on a shirt.

Will I be able to wear a plain camisole, without a shelf bra? Or will the scars always be so sensitive that no fabric against them will be tolerable?

Who’s TELLING you this stuff????

The Internet.

And who goes to the Internet? I’ll tell you who: people who have bad outcomes. All the others who have good outcomes get on with their lives and don’t spend their time complaining on the Internet!

Heeee!

Linked images reside at The SCAR Project: Cancer Is Not a Pink Ribbon. Go to the site: it’s incredible. And while you’re at it, buy the guy’s book:

scar projectHe also has a DVD about the project, very affecting and reality-prone:

scar project 2

We are not our boobs!

Here we go again…

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Or so I expect.

Today is the day. In an hour or so, I have to drive (eternally!) to the east side of Scottsdale (again!) for another chat with WonderSurgeon. She’ll have the results of the scary MRI exams of both boobs.

Every time I’m subjected to some new procedure by these doctors, the results are always negative and sometimes hair-raising.

WonderSurgeon told me that she wanted an MRI made of my  non-guilty boob, since we propose to kill off both breasts by way of a) making me not have to spend the rest of my life lopsided and b) virtually eliminating any chance of any new growths. She said she wanted to see if anything was in there, so, said she, she could work her way around them.

Well, when I got there it turned out she’d ordered MRI’s of both boobs.

Frankly, that sounds a lot like a fishing expedition to me: let’s find something new to biopsy, to operate on, and to create another three to five opportunities for more surgery. And, to my distress, I found some confirmation of that: a 2013 study shows that “DCIS patients who undergo preoperative breast MRI are far more likely to undergo additional biopsies.” The group of researchers, publishing in the Annals of Surgical Oncology, suggest that the benefit of routine MRI before breast surgery is dubious and may lead to yet more unnecessary procedures…of which, IMHO, I’ve had a-plenty.

So I’m bracing myself, and trying to think clearly about what I’m going to say when confronted with what I’m certain will be more bad news. Sure as I’m sitting here, she’s going to tell me they found some new mass in the other breast and they want to biopsy it. Or that they found something in the guilty breast and want to biopsy that. When I say no, just cut it off, she will say, “But we have to know if there’s invasive cancer because if there is we’ll have to take out lymph nodes.”

Then I’ll have to decide whether to take my chances on whether it is or is not cancer, on whether it’s a DCIS that may or may not morph into cancer, and whether I want to proceed with more torture or just walk away.

A breast biopsy is painful: much more so than a lumpectomy. I really do NOT want to go through another of those, and I’m inclined to say if that’s what she wants, I’m done. On the other hand, I don’t want to just throw away my life.

But on the other other hand, there’s not that many years of life left to me at this point, and breast cancer grows pretty slowly. By the time it takes me away, I will have lived out my allotted years — assuming a heart attack, stroke, or car wreck doesn’t carry me away first.

Dayum, but I hate this!

Dollar$ and ¢ents, 2014

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So the year has come around the curve and is streaking toward the finish line. Time to take stock of the money predicament.

Turns out it’s not such a predic’ as expected. Really, I expected 2014 to end in Flaming Financial Disaster, what with the car bills and the dog bills and the house bills and the healthcare bills and the jacked-up property taxes and the one. freaking.  screaming. EXPENSIVE. thing. after. another.

Last January, I started the year with a cushion of about $11,000 in the bank. Rather than draw down from savings quarterly, as I did in 2013, I decided to estimate the amount I would need for 12 months and pull that out of investments in January: $13,000+.

That was a gulp-making maneuver. Yanking that kind of money out of savings triggers a Bag Lady Syndrome fit in me. But in theory it would all come out in the wash — one way or another, I’d need about that much to live for a year, and trying to calculate how much to take out in Q3, when little or no teaching income is forthcoming, was a verifiable PITA.

And I will say, Q3 was damn scary. I pretty much took up residence at the Mayo Clinic, a mighty pricey hotel, and precious little income was materializing from teaching, editing, or blogging. But in the fall, the piddling pay for three adjunct sections, surprisingly, took up the slack.

I have no idea how much I’m going to end up paying for surgery after surgery after surgery after surgery. Bills come from the Mayo — eleven grand here, fifteen grand there — but they seem to have no meaning. Medicare is picking up some portion of that; Medigap is picking up more. Apparently the victim mark patient has to pay something, but it’s so difficult to tell what it is that even the billing people at the Mayo can’t figure it out. Or at least, they claim they can’t. Right now, every time a check comes in from Medicare B or the Medigap insurer, I just throw it in the Mayo’s direction. That leads them to imagine I’m at least trying to pay the bills, and that, mercifully, has kept them off my back. So far.

Weirdly, despite all the extraordinary expenses, at the end of November the balance in checking was just a few hundred dollars less than the January 1 balance: a little over eleven grand.

But now for the BIG weird:

Hang onto your hats, folks.

The balance in investments and retirement savings at the end of October  was $107,633 more than the January 31 balance.

Yeah, you read that right: one hundred seven thousand six hundred thirty-three DOLLAH!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That’s after drawing down $13,000 to live on and after paying out $7,350 for my share of the mortgage on the downtown house.

Holy mackerel. And we want to put the Republicans back in charge of the government…WHY?

Thanksgiving Aftermath

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Stuffed puppy...
Stuffed puppy…

So, what Thanksgiving remnants are still strewn across the landscape of your life?

Hereabouts: Two pounds gained. Dayum! Now I’ve gotta get rid of that — it took six weeks to drop the two or three pounds gained during the endless stress marathon. Best thing to do, I guess, is just to starve for a couple of days. That was what finally worked to jump-start the weight loss last month.

More to the point: FOOD IN THE FRIDGE!

Holy mackerel, what a lot of Food in the Fridge. None of it is conducive to weight loss. 😀

I came away with half a pan of the (really incredibly delicious!) pan “dressing” we made for the party. It is, of course, mostly bread, the single most inimical foodstuff in the pantheon of delicious foods that loads the pounds on my bod’.

When I went to make this delectable, we were a little short on bread. M’hijito had picked up a couple of nice loaves from Sprouts, but they were focacccia and so not quite large enough to make as much dressing as we needed. I really wanted some cornbread but had neither eggs nor milk in the house and had no intention whatsoEVER of entering a grocery store the day before Thanksgiving. So I made a batch of regular yeast bread and substituted a cup of cornmeal for a cup of wheat flour.

The result was two particularly yummy loaves of cornmeal yeast bread. Put one and a third loaves into the dressing and then had…oh, yes! Bread!

Bread in the morning, bread in the evening, bread all throuuuugggghhhh the dayyyyy…. So good to eat.

Well. So. Bread “stuffing” adorned with leftover incredible turkey gravy for breakfast. Fresh home-made bread with butter on the side with the big noonday meal. Fresh home-made bread with butter, served up with a glass of wine, for evening snack. Oh, what the heck. How’s about another plate of bread and butter? And a splash more wine?

Inimical.

P1030290Meanwhile, I’d made a gigantic pot of turkey stock out of the bones from the Butterball pseudoturkey I’d bought and processed into food for the dogs. It made a lot, but it was watery. Like a Butterball itself, pretty flavorless.

But instead of throwing it out, I poured it into a bunch of storage containers and filled up the fridge with the stuff. That of course left no room for much else. Plus I need those containers, because over the next month I’m going to have to make several weeks’ worth of food for the dogs, not knowing how long it’s going to take to recover from the upcoming surgery. Assuming there is an upcoming surgery.

Today I poured all of that into a stock pot and set it on the stove over a low flame, where it’s gently simmering away as we scribble. The plan is to reduce it by about 30% to 50%. The result, I expect, should be pretty tasty, especially if a little wine is added to it. Sure smells nice right now!

Vinho_Verde_and_bottleSpeaking of wine, I’ve developed a fondness for that vinho verde discovered during the search for lower-alcohol wines. Very low-brow, no doubt, what with its tendency to display a little fizziness. But it’s really VERY tasty as a simple white table wine — not too sweet, not too stringent, just a refreshing drink that actually tastes like a halfway decent wine. The price could not be more right — $8.99 at AJ’s, a joint whose wine prices make Whole Foods’ look like a bargain — and some brands are as low as 9% alcohol.

So far I haven’t found a comparable red wine, which is too bad. Some Beaujolais are acceptable, sort of, in terms of flavor, but they’re unpredictable (some are truly awful) and the alcohol content is up around 12%. Personally I tend to prefer reds, but I’m fast cultivating a taste for Portuguese whites.

Well, it’s getting late. Got to make a Costco run, a Home Depot run, and a variety of other runs. Read client copy. Pay subcontractors. Walk dogs. Walk me. And generally carry on. And so, to work…