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Had It…

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Okay, I’m done.

Last night, reflecting on the MRI maneuver, I realized this ultra-sensitive search mechanism is just bound to find more threatening (at least in the minds of doctors) stuff in my boobs. And when that crops up, as it surely will, I can say good-bye to the scheme to bring the ongoing horror show to an end by having them lob off the damn boobs.

I can feel it coming: Sometime next week someone is going to call from the Mayo with another “good news/bad news” call, and the bad news, as usual, is going to be some scary-looking thing that they want to carve out, carve up, analyze, diagnose, and use as the basis for more slicing and dicing.

A-n-n-n-d…that is not going to happen anymore. If they won’t just do the job without any more jacking around, I quit. I do not care if I die. I’m going to die anyway. We’re all going to die anyway. I’m not afraid of dying.

But I sure as hell am afraid of any more of this business as usual.

If they call me up and tell me they want to torment me in some new or extended way — more biopsy, more testing, more surgery, more treatments whose long-term effect will be to destroy my health, all in the name of “it’s not really cancer” — I’m going to tell them “fine, thank you very much, good-bye” and hang up the phone. That is IT. I’m not doing any more.

If they’re willing to take off my boobs without any more screwing around, then fine, they can do it. But I’m not going to be subjected to anything more than that. If they have some other scheme, I and they are done. If I die, I die. Then we can say it was time.

Enough. Is. Enough.

Black Friday Craziness Casts Gray Pall on Thanksgiving

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As if the Christmas decorations before Halloween weren’t enough, now we get Thanksgiving dinner cut short by by retailers stirring up riots of buying frenzy along about 6:00 p.m. on the newly dubbed “Gray Thursday.” Jeez. There really is not shame out there.

Like…REALLY? Your buyers, dear Mr. Avaricious One-Percenter Retailer, really and truly can’t wait till the morning after TG to stock up on more STUFF? One article describes people selling their places in line to the highest bidder — and sitting on $90 bids because they know they can get more. What on earth can be worth debasing yourself like that? A 40-inch TV? Sure, $119 is the next best thing to giving it away for free. But you couldn’t get me to behave like that if you did give the thing to me for free.

But then, what the hey…I have no use for a TV set anyway. 😉

My friend Carol and I spent Black Friday at the Mayo Hospital, where I was invited to have my boobs subjected to an MRI preparatory to lopping them off. The last time they tried to get me in an MRI tube — the time I dislocated my shoulder tripping over Cassie — I panicked and ran away. So to lure me back, they had me drug myself with Valium.

Since I don’t take any kind of drug at all (other than a little Maker’s Mark 🙂 ), the stuff had quite a kick. Of course, driving up there was out of the question, so Carol chauffeured me. I’d been told the MRI would take about a half hour.

Well. Yeah. Depends on how you look at it.

About a half-dozen 3- to 4-minute scans (18 to 24 minutes) plus one 15 minute scan do indeed add up to about half an hour. BUT…that doesn’t count all the dicking around beforehand and between times. We left my house at about 9:15 a.m. and got back right at 12:30. THREE HOURS AND FIFTEEN MINUTES.

The morning was shot for both of us. And since I’m bat-brained from the Valium, for me the whole damn day is shot. I’m going to bed whenever I finish cranking out this post.

The MRI itself was not bad. Because they have you lie face-down for a boob MRI, you can’t SEE the inside of the horrid tube, and so it’s nowhere near as claustrophobic and terrifying is it is when they roll you in there face-up. And the noise was just not that traumatic. More strange than anything. As it developed, there was no need to be drugged with Valium — in fact, it made things worse by drying out my mouth so badly it felt like the back of my throat was turning to petrified wood. Would’ve been a lot more comfortable without it.

Speaking of comfort, despite the loveliness of the afternoon and the prettiness of the front courtyard, wherein Cassie and I are writing this, I am retiring to the comfort of the sack.

Good luck in your shopping, if you’re up to that!

Image: Shoppers surging into Target. Public Domain.

Whatcha Doin’ for Thanksgiving?

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You have a plan for Thanksgiving? Eating in immoderation, I hope? Preferably with friends or at least relatives who don’t make you too crazy?

M’hijito and I are going, once again, to the home of his delightful friends, the couple with the twins. 🙂 Better them than me, eh? Seriously, the children are outrageously adorable and really very well behaved. Uhm…at  least, they were at the stage they were in the last time we saw them. LOL!

Every year this couple throws a gigantic TG  shindig, to which they invite ALL the friends and relatives. This provides an opportunity to trot the old folks around, which is entertaining. Lots of good food and booze are served, children play, dogs oversee, old folks gossip, young adults work their buns off. What could be better? Assuming you’re an old folk or a small child, that is.

I really enjoy my son’s friends. It’s always a delight to have the opportunity to see them in action and talk with them. Wish there were more such opportunities.

butterball-turkeyEvery Thanksgiving, too, I avail myself of the cheap prices on bad turkey, so as to get meat for the dogs, enough to feed them for a month or more.  Right now a Butterball is in the oven; it should be ready in another three hours.

At 79 cents a pound, these things are really no bargain. They’re injected with sodium-laced water, so, according to the package, 8% of what you’re paying for is water.

Hm. So this turkey is 11.59 pounds. That means I actually got 10.66 pounds of meat and bone for my $9.15. Sooo…if you divide $9.15 by 10.66 pounds, that should give you the real price per pound, right? $9.15/10.66 = $1.50 a pound. Cripes!

When you consider that maybe half the thing is bones, I could’ve done better buying a boneless pork roast at Costco, and probably gotten better quality meat for the hounds. A LOT better….

Add to that the fact that the agricorp that produces Butterball turkeys generated the first-ever conviction for felony animal abuse for its atrocious treatment of its captive birds, and you’re given even more pause.

Because of Ruby’s allergies, which lead to ear infections, the vet asked me to quit feeding her both beef and pork. She hasn’t had either in weeks, and her big old rabbity ears have pretty well cleared up.

That may have to do with the fact that she stole and ATE the whole tube of ear ointment… Does Otomax work internally? Argh.

Anyway, I’m pretty sure the problem is beef — the quiescent infection flared up when I gave her a rawhide chew toy, which is, of course, a beef product. But still feeling leery, I decided to hold the pork until such time as my health is good enough to allow for wrestling with the dog over her ears again. It’s no fun to treat this dog with ear wash and ointments!

So that’s why I bought a substandard turkey and stuck it in the oven.

Oh well. I hope this one doesn’t taste like factory chemicals, the way the last icky Butterball turkey I bought did. That one, I wouldn’t even feed to the dogs. I’m hoping to get a meal or two for myself, despite the low quality; then cut up the rest for the dogs and use the bones to make broth, which can be frozen for future use.

Speaking of turkey, if you imbibe do check out Revanche’s recipe for turkey meatloaf.

And so, to work…

Happy Thanksgiving, One and All

 

Another Day in Dystopia

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So what are we to make of lynch mob by media?

A police officer shoots an unarmed young man. One is White — the cop. And one is Black — the civilian. From there, the facts elide into contradiction, gossip, and ambiguity. The case is referred to a grand jury, and as jurors deliberate, news media predict mayhem. The President of the United States weighs in.

Nay. The news and social media urged mayhem. Reported pre-mayhem. Smelled blood in the air. Prayed for mayhem to sell papers (and website ads). Lordie!

Now we learn the grand jurors couldn’t discern enough evidence to decide, clearly and incontrovertibly, what actually happened during those violent moments. They decline to indict.

Doesn’t matter. The eighteen-year-old is in the ground. The cop has already been tried and convicted in the Court of Public Opinion, a.k.a. the Kangaroo Court of the Media.

As for due process?  Casualty of hysteria. Victim of circumstances. Lost and gone, maybe forever. Echo of the past. Wave of the future.

Plus ça change…

Boob Update: Back, Forth, and Back Again

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Okay, so WonderSurgeon is at last convinced, and so am I, that the best thing to do is to have the boob OFF, and better yet, to get them both off so as to bring a stop to concerns about the other breast and so I don’t have to spend the rest of my life lopsided.

It’s taken a while to get to this point.

Last week (was it only last week?) I went in to see the radiation oncologist. By then WonderSurgeon and I had decided to keep the boob and do radiation and aromatase inhibitors. This new doctor, though, said she would do it but that the chance of recurrence was high and that the side effects I’ve heard about are real. Among them, she said, I will have scarring of the lower lobe of the right lung, which may lead to pneumonitis, which can be life-threatening. Aromatase inhibitors are not yet approved by the FDA for preventive treatment of DCIS, and so they would prescribe tamoxifen, which I have no intention of taking. She remarked in passing that if it were her, she’d have the mastectomy.

So by the time I saw WonderSurgeon, I’d changed my mind in favor of chopping off the boob. Even though I was very certain that I wanted a mastectomy, she wasn’t so sure. She felt there’s a possibility there’s no more abnormal cells in the breast, in which case it would be unnecessary surgery to remove the boob. Between the two of us, the uncertainty factor was enough to give us pause. We decided that she would order an MRI of the guilty boob, slated for next week: if any more mass appears on that, then we would amputate; if not, then we would try radiation and hormone treatment. Neither of us was thrilled with this scheme, but neither of us knew for sure which way to jump.

Well, yesterday she called me up with a new report:

Still worried, she had taken my endlessly troublesome case BACK to her colleagues for another conference. First she asked the pathologist to revisit the samples she had excised and to analyze the results more carefully. Then she asked them for their opinion. And, she said, she was careful to keep her mouth shut and just listen to them.

The consensus, she said, was overwhelmingly in favor of removing the offending boob.

Well, I was relieved.

You know how when you’re worrying about something or thinking about some major project, you’ll wake up in the middle of the night with your brain spinning on it — with no hiatus between awaking and starting to think on the issue? Well, that happened a two or three nights ago. I woke up about 4 in the morning with a perfectly formed thought in mind: Trying to save this breast is the wrong thing to do!

It seemed as perfectly obvious as the dogs sleeping on the bed next to me. I do not want my chest irradiated. I do not want my lung scarred. I do not want pneumonitis, for godsake. I do not want to run the risk of fractured ribs, new soft-tissue cancers, leukemia, and some blood disorder whose name I can’t even pronounce. I do not want my life disrupted for another four to six weeks with daily trips to the hospital for radiation treatments. I do not want to take aromatase inhibitors that will thin my hair and give me joint and muscle pains on top of the nearly crippling back pain, thank you very much. And I most certainly do not want to take tamoxifen!

Furthermore, I do not want to wait five or ten years until a new DCIS, probably harmless, is found in the other breast and then I have to go through this entire nightmare circus again! I do not want to go around lopsided, having to stuff plastic or fabric prostheses in an empty bra cup in an attempt to look normal enough not to frighten small children. And I do not care whether I have blobs of flesh hanging off my chest, because I’m not a young girl anymore and I’m not in the market for a man.

At four a.m., I could not think of how to tell WonderSurgeon about this revelation without making her think I’m crazy. So I decided to wait until the MRI revealed more mystery tissue in there, which I felt pretty sure would be the case. If it didn’t, then I’d cross that bridge when I got to it.

So, weirdly, her call to deliver what she thought would be received as bad news was really very good news.

I told her that I had quietly come to the same conclusion. She sounded relieved that I didn’t burst into tears or some such stupid thing. Then I asked if she would take both boobs off, so as I could be the same on both sides and so we could be certain that no recurrence would appear in the contralateral (medico-talk for “the other”) breast. She agreed to do so. And she even folded on the “no goddamn reconstruction” topic.

We’re keeping the MRI on the schedule, but instead examining the contralateral boob so as to see whether there’s any DCIS in there. She said there was only about a 3% chance that would be so. I reminded her that every time we’ve had positive odds, I’ve managed to defy them. Pessimists drive the poor woman nuts. 😀

Do you realize what this means?

No. more. effing. mammograms. EVER AGAIN!

And….this is the best part…

I will never, ever have to shop for a goddamn brassiere again!!!!!!!!!

WAHOOOO!

Consumer-proof Packaging: What’s in YOUR Kitchen Drawer?

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So the other day I went to open a bottle of cheap wine, the type with the screw-on cap. Naturally, I reached into the kitchen drawer — premium real estate in this house — and quite naturally pulled out a wrench.

Yeah. There’s a wrench in the kitchen drawer, something no woman in my mother’s generation (or in mine, until rather recently) would EVER have allowed to take up space there.

This led me to reflect on the the ubiquity of consumer-proof packaging — almost everything you buy is hermetically sealed in layers of plastic (much of it hard as a football helmet) and cardboard — and how much I hate that kind of waste. And how much I hate the ways it has to be dealt with.

In addition to a wrench, my kitchen drawer contains a pair of pliers (good for pulling off the hated inner paper seals of paper and tinfoil, among other things), a heavy-duty pair of scissors, and an extra-sharp ultra-cheap grocery-store knife that I don’t mind denting or bending. The tin snips won’t fit in there — have to walk out to the garage to get those, whenever I need to hack into one of Costco’s accursed heavy plastic clamshells.

Costco isn’t the only offender. You get impermeable packaging from Fry’s Electronics, Target, Walmart, and even sometimes from Amazon, despite the latter’s policy designed to discourage it.

Also needed:

• A screwdriver and a hammer to break into the adult-proof pill and cleanser bottles
• A package of thumbtacks to render the adult-proof bottles openable
• A hacksaw, for worst-case scenarios

How can I say how much I resent having to own a tool chest devoted to opening containers? And how can I say how much I hate the amount of useless plastic and cardboard that goes straight to the city landfill, often tainted with a few drops of blood from my fingers?

Am I the only person who is made crazy by the crazy packaging? What tools do you keep in your kitchen drawers these days?