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Annals of the Floored & Flabbergasted

Breast “Cancer” or Not: Another Amazing Adventure in Medical Never-Never Land

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Okay, so after I had arranged an appointment with the medical oncologist my gynecologist wants me to see for a second opinion about the advisability of further surgical attempts at a successful lumpectomy, Young Dr. Kildare became concerned enough that he unilaterally scheduled an appointment for me with his choice of oncologists.

Interesting. I decided to take a chance that I will have to pay for one or both of these worthies out of pocket — surely there’s a limit to what Medicare will cover — just to see what TWO of them would say.

Yesterday I spoke with YDK’s guy.

He seemed like a very nice man — certainly has a thriving practice: there must have been 20 cancer victims sitting around the waiting room. He seemed very smart, very empathetic, and open to answering all my questions, which are manifold.

So as he’s talking, he says something that really drops my jaw. And he says it more than once.

He says that ALL incidences of DCIS turn into cancer. Therefore what remains in my boob must be removed, and if I were his wife, he would recommend going straight to a mastectomy.

Well. There are several good reasons to turn directly to a mastectomy without trying again for a successful lumpectomy. But “all incidences of DCIS turn into cancer” ain’t one of them.

It simply is not true.

It is not true that all DCIS turns into invasive cancer. By 2010, M.D. Anderson researchers were estimating that 40% to 50% do so — meaning that even then, they thought 50% to 60% do not do so. More recent estimates peg the conversion figures at closer to 15% to 20%.

So that was unnerving: a specialist in breast cancer treating God only knows how many people who directly contradicts the facts. And contradicting my surgeon, my gynecologist, the Mayo’s medical oncologist, and the Mayo’s radiation oncologist, all of whom seem to have managed to get their facts right.

He also interpreted the records from the Mayo as saying the surgeon had found two growths in the boob: the EPC*, which he says she has removed, and a DCIS, which she has not yet fully excised. That’s not what she (or anyone else) has told me: the EPC is the DCIS. So, either the Mayo team is obfuscating or this guy has no idea what he’s talking about.

Wow! This is one scary trip through the medical funhouse!

*EPC: “Encapsulated papillary carcinoma”: a rare type of DCIS, a condition thought to be preliminary to development of breast cancer.

Voting in the Dark

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Yesterday I shipped off this year’s mail-in ballot. What a HUGE passel of things and people to vote on…most of them people and things no one ever heard of. Several extreme propositions appeared on the ballot, among them one that would take away firefighters’ and police officers’ defined pension plan and one that, if passed, will raise our property taxes into the stratosphere.

This fall we revisited the mystification that is the Superior Court judge vote.

In Arizona, big-city Superior Court judges are appointed through a merit system. However, every couple of years the citizenry has to vote on whether to retain those who are on the bench. This, of course, is completely wacky: unless you’re a lawyer, a Superior Court judge yourself, or an employee of the Superior Court, you have no way of knowing which of these folks is competent and which not.

The voter pamphlet contains exactly nothing about the judges: who they are, how long they’ve been on the bench, what their background is, what they claim to stand for…what??????? As I sat there staring at the page-long list of names, I finally recalled that there’s a judicial review system in Arizona. Googled that up and found that of the several dozen sitting judges, not one, not two, but three of them have failing scores. As in “does not meet basic qualifications.”

Wow!

Most people, I think, would either vote for all the candidates or not vote at all, thereby insuring that three incompetent judges would stay in place for at least another two years. Who would know you could look these folks up online and find their rankings on one page? There’s no clue in the voter pamphlet.

The mail-in ballot is such a convenience! In addition to giving you weeks in which to mull over your vote, you get to fill it out while sitting in the comfort and privacy of your dining-room table — with your computer in front of you as you look up the candidates and issues. The only nuisance is having to physically drive the ballot to a post office, since one wouldn’t dare leave it out for the  postal carrier to pick up from one’s own mailbox. Too much theft.

I got on the mail-in ballot list some years ago — once you’re on, you’re on, and they keep sending the things forever — after they moved our district’s polling station from a centrally located church to a very shaky gangland neighborhood in the war zone to the north of us. That year, I went to track the place down and found myself driving into one of those areas where you reflexively check to be sure your car doors are locked. The polling station stood about eight or ten blocks down the street from an apartment building where two small children playing on the sidewalk were shot by gang-bangers firing at each other. It’s smack in the middle of a meth gang’s territory, a place where I wouldn’t get out of the car on a bet, much less stand in line out in the open.

So, after laying my life on the proverbial line to vote that year, I arranged to have mail-in ballots sent to me. The result is that I vote in a lot more elections than I would have — all of them, including various small referendums that wouldn’t be enough to get me out of the house.

I expect that benefit will soon be taken away from us, though. A certain major political party is working hard to disenfranchise voters who are not in its demographic. Mail-in ballots benefit the unfriendly ilk of students (such as my neighbor’s son, the honors engineering major who come November lives on the ASU campus), minimum-wage workers who will have their pay docked or be fired if they show up at work saying they had to stand in line at the polling place for an hour (not unheard-of here), disabled people who depend on federal and state benefits that said Party would like to eliminate, and snowbirds who claim Arizona as their primary residence but who come from and spend the summers in “blue” states and so might be inclined to vote in undesirable ways.

They gerrymandered our local district to break up a block of affluent, educated voters who incline to favor moderate candidates and to oppose the extremist agenda so often manifested in the wacko propositions that appear in almost every referendum. Another strategy has been to disqualify thousands of mail-in ballots for negligible reasons — so one has no idea whether one’s mail-in vote is counted at all.

Not that Arizona has enough “liberals” (read “former Goldwater Republicans who now look middle-of-the-road”) to make much difference…but the ruling party has unequivocally shown it wants to make sure we have no voice at all. They’re very good at that.

Where federal and some state candidates are concerned, I felt frustrated to find myself voting the party line, something I have never done in the past and do now only because one of the parties is infested with bizarre extremists. I used to pride myself on studying each candidate and voting on the individual’s merits, not on her or his political party. But today I fear that even a man or woman of good will who manages to get on the ballot as a member of that party will be pressured to conform to the extremists’ demands for “ideological purity,” so that it really doesn’t matter who’s running — any vote for a member of that party is, alas, a vote against common sense and for obstructionism, mean-mindedness, economic inequity, and  duplicity.

I don’t like it. Matter of fact, I hate it. When a vote for a potentially good leader amounts to a vote for something you can’t support, and a vote for a potentially mediocre leader amounts to to a vote against something you can’t support, what we have is a dangerously distorted political system that no longer functions to drive what we as Americans imagine our country stands for.

Annals of the Floors and Flabbergasted: Padded Cell Edition

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 Check this one out:

paddedwalls

Came across that in an estate-sale organizer’s online ad. It’s an image of a bedroom in a Scottsdale house.

Talk about more money than taste, eh?

Yesh, I believe that is exactly what it appears to be: the Happy Homeowner has stapled custom appliquéd, quilted padding to the walls. Is that astonishing, or is that not astonishing? To say nothing of hideous.

What possesses people? Is there something about the term “gawdawful unholy fire hazard” that’s hard to figure out? How about “property value”? Breathes there a buyer who craves to strip that crud off the walls and probably reinstall the drywall or at the least float a thick coat of plaster to cover up the damage?

They so loved this exquisite motif that they had matching pillows made…

padded pillows

And astonishingly, they found a hideous black fake plant arrangement to go with!

PaddedInspirationOkay, you have to admit: that was a find. What a find it is.

Ain’t humanity fun?

Not in Kansas Anymore?

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Choir friend JJ reports on his and his partner LA’s experience of yesterday’s meteorological drama. Their power went out about 2:00 p.m. at their midtown high-rise as the storm blew in.

As they were staring into the wind, rain, hail, and turmoil, a sofa flew past their windows!

They live on the tenth floor.

Their power came back on around 7:00 this morning, by which time, one hopes, the sofa had returned to earth.

Image: Flying Red Couch. Posted by Jan-Willem Boer.

Lies and Prevarication

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PinocchioWe’re told — I forget where, offhand — that the present generation receives the word “lie” as unforgivably rude. So, to spare any Millennial blushes, let  us discuss the Art of Prevarication.

Isn’t it amazing, what people get away with? They get away with it so frequently and so sublimely that they regard it as part of life, their natural privilege.

Ms. Neighbor — the one who was prevented from boarding my ship because my son had the cojones to go across the street and tell her “no!” — called the day before yesterday to wish me luck in the surgery and mumbled some sort of apology that I didn’t hear fully because I didn’t want to listen to her voice and so hung up on the answering machine. However, my son, a born diplomat, had told me that I should go over there and tell her how sorry I was that he ordered me not to take her in and extend my sympathies on her predicament.

He’s so polite.

So this morning I returned her call and reached her at her house, soon to be her former house. Said she, “Oh, dear, oh dear, I would never have suggested it if I had known you were going to have surgery yesterday!”

Say what? REALLY?

Does she think I don’t recall saying, “But I’m going to the hospital tomorrow for a second round of breast cancer surgery”?

Does she think I don’t recall her saying, “Oh, but I can be of help to you! Now my refrigerator can fit right here…”

Well, of course she does. Or she thinks she can make me think I don’t recall it, not quite like that anyway.

One of the things that accomplished liars prevaricators understand is that most people tend to believe the most recent thing they’ve heard. You can kind of “overwrite” a previous conversation or fact by saying something different with enough confidence, especially if your listener is elderly or not too bright.

I guess she thinks I’m a little bit of both. 😉

She must be an accomplished manipulator. That’s prob’ly why her relatives don’t want her moving in with them.

It wasn’t until I was in my 40s that I became aware of the number of people who lie as easily as breathing. So repressed was I as a child that even to this day I find it uncomfortable to fill in a fake name, phone number, and email address on a form to get another nuisance “member card” for some retailer. So it seems to me that an awful lot of people are very, very good at lying, and they do it as a matter of routine.

When I was about 45, I met and befriended a young couple who practiced insurance fraud. The ways they collected would beggar your imagination. They awed me. I’d never met anyone like that. Interestingly — or, hell: maybe “not surprisingly” — their professional prevarication slipped over into their personal lives. You really couldn’t know for sure when some story one of them told — whether it was an episode of ordinary daily life or some High Drama — was true or not.

There’s an art to prevarication. It’s like acting: you have to practice at it. Method prevarication, as it were.

The result of coming to know people like Ms. Neighbor and the Insurance Fraudsters is unfortunate: most of the time I don’t believe anyone. When a student comes up with some excuse for why she can’t turn in thus-and-such a paper, I assume she’s lying. When a salesman claims he’s required to tack on thus-and-such a chargeable service, I assume he’s lying. Today I question the truth of just about anything anyone says. And about a quarter of the time, I’d estimate, that’s justified.

Maybe that’s just Life in the Big City?

Image: Pinocchio. Enrico Mazzanti (1852-1910). Public domain.

 

 

 

Bizarre Day on Wisteria Lane…

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Yesterday was bizarre. That’s about the only word for it. I swear, we no longer live in a Monty Python Show. We seem to have moved to Desperate Housewives’ Wisteria Lane.

I’m racing around trying to get out the door to meet my friend and business partner in Tempe for lunch at the fancy restaurant we favor, there to celebrate her birthday. The doorbell rings. The dogs go batsh!t.

It’s my neighbor cattycorner across the street. She’s sold her house and is moving out, apparently having fallen on hard times. The sale closes on Friday, the 29th.

As it develops, she has not found another place to live. She had arranged, she says, to stay with a friend who was going to put her up for a month while she looks for a new place. But said friend went on vacation to Puerto Rico and just returned to the states — with a Boy Toy in tow! This guy is moving in with the woman, and now Neighbor is dis-invited to stay there. Would I do her a favor and let her move in here? Otherwise she doesn’t know what she’s going to do.

Holy sh!t.

A month or two ago, when the house sold (it was underpriced by about $30,000 and so got snapped up instantly), while the three neighbor ladies on this end of the block were out in front yakking, she mentioned that she hadn’t even looked for a place, and I said, jokingly, that if push came to shove she could move in here.

That was before I had the last surgery and long before I was told I have to have MORE surgery tomorrow.

Caught point-blank and face-to-face, I didn’t see how I could say anything else than “uhhh….ohh-kayyy….” The puppy is squirreling around. I pick her up and put her in her X-pen to get her out of the way.  Now suddenly Neighbor is planning where she’s going to put her bed (meaning I have to move furniture out of one of the rooms) and talking me into letting her put her refrigerator in my garage (do you know how much a fridge running in a 110-degree garage will run up a power bill?!?) and saying words like “one to three months” and going on about how she’ll start looking for a place to stay after she gets her money from the sale (while I’m thinking…don’t you get your money on closing day? the kids aren’t moving in for a month because they want to do a bunch of renovations…can’t you ask if you can rent the place for a week or two while you look for an apartment?)

She wants to start moving in on Thursday. That’s the day after tomorrow: when I’ll be recuperating from surgery!

This conversation goes on until I say I have to leave because I have to drive to the far side of town. Neighbor is shoveled out the door.

Now I’m running late. I fly around the house trying to finish getting dressed and write a check for the  editorial work my friend has done, which I intend to pay her for over lunch, and get ready to shoot out the door. Last task is to stick the puppy in her crate so she can’t defile the floor. And…and she’s GONE!

I call and call, search and search, and I can’t find her. I figure she slipped out the door when Neighbor left. So next thing I’m out in the street screaming like a fishwife for Ruby. Neighbor comes over; they look around. Finally she explores the house and finds Ruby in her X-pen, where of course I’ve  forgotten that I stashed her. This is what happens when old ladies get distracted by unexpected and potentially hassle-laden new developments when their lives are already disrupted by repeated cancer surgeries.

I thank Neighbor, pick up Ruby, and shovel Neighbor out the door. Ruby, squirming in a frantic effort to get out the door, too, hooks a hind claw in my shirt — my favorite shirt — and tears a hole in it.

Shit.

Lock up the dog. Change my clothes, fly out the door. Meet my friend.

Have an amazing meal, as usual, at Tricks. Then we go over to The Shoe Mill, the single best shoe store in the Valley, where I need to buy a couple of pairs of the expensive Europoean shoes that don’t hurt my feet. There I buy two pairs of Naot sandals, all my sandals having simply worn out, and we each buy a pair of Pikadillos, actual shoes of the sort grown-ups wear. None of these are cheap: my tab is almost $600.

Well, I figure since I buy good shoes about once every four years, that works out to $150/year, so I don’t feel too bad about it. And I wear those kinds of sandals almost every day, since I live in jeans. One pair is a little dressy-looking and will be perfect for church (we’re required to wear black shoes to process), and another is an amazingly cute and astonishingly comfortable platform.

But meanwhile, as time has passed and discussion has been had, the whole idea of Neighbor moving into my house at all, to say nothing of one day after I get my boob cut open again, sounds worse and worse. I didn’t like the idea much at the outset but now I’m getting worried. I’ve lived alone for 20 years, and I like it that way! If I wanted someone living with me, I’d have someone living with me. Notice that I live with dogs: they can’t kipe my food, they don’t talk back, they don’t leave their makeup on the bathroom counter, and they don’t want to watch mindless television into the middle of the night.

I discuss this with Wonder Accountant, also a Wisteria Lane resident and friend/acquaintance of Neighbor. She suggests a written agreement and points out a number of pitfalls, not the least of which is “what are you going to do if she doesn’t want to move out after three months?” I want her out after one month, not three months.

Discuss with Insurance Broker to see if taking rent money from this woman will affect my homeowner’s insurance. He says not but is concerned about liability if one of the dogs bites her. He suggests I require her to take out renter’s insurance, about $15 a month. He asks what I’m going to do if she doesn’t want to move out after three months…

Discuss with Realtor Pal, to see if he can help find her a place to rent — he says the rental market, especially in the “reasonable rent” category, is impossibly tight right now and it could be difficult to find her a place to live. Because she’s getting so little from the house sale, it’s not going to be easy to get her into a condo or patio home, either:  she underpiced to begin with and then she agreed to give huge allowances to rereoof the place ($10,000) and do the pool repairs and apparently some other things, and then she discovered the house had a $45,000 lien against it to cover the care of her crazed father, Carlos the Knife, as he descended into his final dotage. He says that she should get her money on Friday when the deal closes and in fact if she asks they should cut her a check on the spot. By the way, Realtor Pal asks, what am I going to do if she doesn’t want to move out after three months?

Now I’m feeling behind the barrel.

Phone rings: it’s my son, wanting to see how I am and, while he’s standing in line at a deli to buy his dinner, to lay plans for the next Surgery Day. I explain what’s going on. He says, “I’ll be right over.”

He arrives, riding his white charger.

This man is an automobile insurance adjustor. His job is to spend the whole damn day, every day, listening to people’s sad stories, fielding their demands for compensation, and telling them “no.”  He pours a bourbon and water. I tell him the story with all its convolutions.

He says, “You stay here. I’ll take care of this.”

Mounting his white charger and taking up his white lance, he gallops across the street and presents himself at Neighbor’s door. Drawing from deep wells of testosterone-fueled swagger (God, but men are amazing creatures!), he informs her that he has unilaterally decided that his mother is not taking on a roommate one day after she has breast surgery. He tempers this by claiming that I’m actually a great deal more fragile than I look, and says he has decided this is all a very bad idea.

She says no problem, she’s sure she can find someplace else to stay.

So. Thank God and my doughty son, I’m out from under that. What a flap!

Today, then, all I have to do is deal with the plumber, deal with the cleaning lady, deal with the new 102 class, deal with new copy sent by paying client, prepare for surgery, and call in to the hospital after 4 p.m. to find out when it’s scheduled. Doesn’t that all sound like jolly fun?

At least I won’t be moving furniture out of the spare room…