As many of you saw me posting on the social networks last night, Dara had round two of her eye surgery last night. This was done in a different facility, and this time by a different surgeon as well. Everything went pretty much okay, and I got a lot of sympathetic noises from the nurses who were looking after Dara afterwards, when I told them that I get to go in for a hysterectomy on Monday.
(It was in the middle of one of those conversations that I realized that Dara and I really have had quite the tour of many of the Seattle area’s major medical facilities. I was at UW Medical in the U district when I broke my arm; Swedish did my thyroidectomies; Dara was at Harborview for treatment for the car accident; Evergreen, of course, has been my cancer care, and they also handled last year’s fun with h. pylori and they’re handling the hysto stuff as well. And now we’ve been to UW Medical in Northgate AND to the facility over in Bellevue. And OH YES we’ve also been over to the Overlake Emergency Care Clinic as well. All told: we’ve become rather involuntary connoisseurs of all the medical care Puget Sound has to offer.)
Today, we had the followup with last night’s surgeon. Who says that Dara’s eye is looking good (and honestly it looks less scary than it did after the first round), BUT, he also says that she needs to keep her head under positional restrictions until the next followup appointment, which will be either Wednesday or Thursday; we’re scheduling that on Monday.
This, clearly, makes Monday a problem. So I am already coordinating with Dejah from my Quebec session crowd, who has kindly volunteered to be my chauffeur to and from Evergreen. This frees up Paul to be at the house in case Dara needs anything (she’ll probably be okay, but better to have someone on hand just in case), and also so that he can look after the cats (and since Fred’s on medication, that does need some attending to). So we’ll make it through this coming week, it’ll just start off a bit bumpier than expected, is all.
And Dejah is a rock star, a folk star, and a star of all other musical genres, and I WILL be buying her dinner at some later date of her choosing.
Now we’re just counting down to Monday at this point and taking care of various and sundry errands and household chores that need dealing with.
Anna the Piper Industries appreciates your patience during this time of erratic functionality, O Internets, and we promise to return you soon to your regularly scheduled programming of writing, tunes practice, and fangirling well-played fiddles and bouzoukis. Stand by.
I’m taking Dara to her eye surgery this afternoon at 4pm. I’m expecting this to be pretty much a repeat of round 1, which is to say, it’ll be likely she’ll have to spend tonight constantly looking at her own feet, including sleeping face down.
Tonight I expect any entertainment is going to be strictly audio, since if Dara has to return to Feetlandia, she won’t be able to watch any TV.
Tomorrow there will be a post-op followup, to see how she’s doing and what kind of positional restrictions she has to maintain to promote healing of the eye this time.
Monday at 11am is when we need to report for my surgery to Evergreen. We are planning for this to be an overnight stay, although there is a possibility that they might send me home early if things go well enough. Whether or not Dara will be able to accompany me to Evergreen, and whether she will be able to spend the night if she does, will depend on how Saturday’s followup appointment goes.
A few of you have already offered transport duties, and that’s much appreciated. Though since we are a three-person household, Paul’s already kindly agreed to take care of getting me (and hopefully also Dara) to and from Monday’s adventures. Everybody please think ongoing positive thoughts that Paul’s health stays solid, mmkay?
A couple of you have also kindly offered to come cook for Dara and me, or bring us a meal. That is also most appreciated. If you’d like to discuss that with me further, email or PM as appropriate. Pretty much “any time Tuesday or later” will be the time frame to shoot for there.
Meanwhile I’m going to be spending this weekend doing the synopsis for Vengeance, taking care of cleaning up stuff as best I can since Dara and I both will be effectively out of commission for some days, and other necessary “prior to my brain going into Vicodin mode” tasks.
Good thoughts, virtual hugs, lit candles, playing of music, or any other positive activities are, again, most appreciated. October and November are turning out to be rough for the Murkworks this year, and apparently 2013 is making up for the off-time from medical crap we had in 2010, 2011, and most of 2012.
Dara had another followup appointment about her eye surgery this afternoon–and was informed, much to our dismay, that she had further retinal tearing. There had been a ten percent chance that this would happen, and apparently, she’s just managed to roll REALLY badly on her Luck roll.
This means another round of eye surgery tomorrow. And no going down to OryCon this weekend. AUGH. We’ve cancelled our hotel reservations and gotten our Amtrak points back for the train, and additionally, OryCon’s concom said oh god yes of COURSE we can have a membership refund; they’ll deal with that after the con is over.
So. Dara’s next round of eye surgery is tomorrow at 4pm. Which means I get to spend tomorrow morning writing a proper synopsis of Vengeance of the Hunter to hand over to my editor, and then I will take Dara to her procedure. She’ll have a post-op followup on Saturday as well.
This may make Monday more challenging. We’d already realized that oh shit Dara’s not cleared to drive yet, and had gotten Paul’s agreement to drive us to and from my surgery. However, now that Dara’s going to have to have another procedure of her own, this may make it difficult for her to go with me to the hospital at all. Much will depend upon whether she is still under position restrictions by Monday, since the first round of this fun required her to spend the next day or so constantly looking at her feet and having to sleep face down as well. Which would be PROBLEMATIC, trying to stay overnight with me at Evergreen. But we’ll see what happens with that as of Saturday.
Tonight Paul made us a tasty dinner, and there’s been cider, and I’m also having a shot of cake vodka, given that tonight pretty much took a hard turn into the land of Fuck Everything. The forecast of instruments being picked up later tonight is also very, very high.
Please keep us in your thoughts, folks. And if anybody finds the son of a bitch who decided to bump up our medical misfortune this year, let me know, okay? I have a heat ray and an itchy trigger finger. >:|
Dara was experiencing some weird vision problems, an uptick in the number of floaters she was seeing in her right eye, and so she scheduled an appointment with an ophthalmologist yesterday to get herself checked out. The verdict: she’s got retinal tearing. JOY. Which means that today, she gets to go in for emergency eye surgery, because if they leave this untreated, it could lead to blindness in that eye.
NOT AN OPTION, so yeah, we’re dealing with this NOW. With LASERS. Because that’s what a supervillain and her right-hand girl do: solve problems with lasers!
From what Dara learned, this is very old damage resulting from childhood abuse trauma (Dara talks some about said abuse on her link, trigger warning as appropriate). A weak spot in her eye finally gave way, and there are a couple other spots that are also in danger of tearing, so while the surgeon’s in there, he’s going to secure those too.
Today I’m going to work from home so that I can accompany Dara to the surgery. I need to be there since a) she’s my wife f’r chrissakes, and b) I’m also the one authorized to make medical decisions for her if need be, since we are each other’s PoAs, with appropriate paperwork saying so. I’m likely going to be chugging through the line edits on Vengeance of the Hunter while I’m waiting, and then I’m going to come home with her, jump on the VPN, and do day job work.
All hail my team at work who are being VERY understanding with this sudden outbreak of medical adventures on my and Dara’s part, too. Gods, we’re tired of this. And between this and my fun still coming up next month, we’re sad that this’ll mean we probably won’t be able to make Worldcon in the UK next year, just because we’re going to be paying off medical bills over the next several months. AGAIN.
But I’m still going to see Le Vent du Nord in Victoria next March. And very likely De Temps Antan in Vancouver the weekend before. Because after all this shit, I’m here to tell you, people, gonna need me some music.
I’ll be posting updates on how things go on the social networks today, so for those of you who follow me on Twitter or Facebook or G+, be on the lookout for further bulletins as events warrant.
This post is going to get introspective, people, and it’s going to get medical, so you can skip this one or not as you like. I’m going to put the majority of it behind the fold, ’cause if you don’t actually personally know me, this may be a bit more information about me than you want to know.
I’ve just come back from the consultation with my gynecologist, and we’ve got a game plan now for my next medical adventure, joy oh glee.
Here’s what we know now. I had a fibroid in my uterus, described by the doctor as about the size of his thumb, and specifically “precancerous”. Which puts it into a category comparable with the other tumors and things my body’s generated, in my thyroid and in my breast. Additionally, once I explained my history to the doctor, he told Dara and me that the thyroid, uterus, ovaries, breasts, and colon are a known, common cluster of problems.
So yeah. Thyroid, been there done that had it out. Breasts, yep. And while my ovaries haven’t demonstrated a problem YET, they are at risk given that I’ve already had a breast incident. Now I have a uterine incident too. Which leaves the colon, which, moving forward, we’ll be keeping an early eye on just to be on top of it in case THAT part of me decides to join in on these shenanigans.
I told him that the main thing troubling me was that I now have a clear and demonstrated tendency for these precancerous tumors*, which led into the discussion of the aforementioned common clustering of problems. This, taken together with my mother’s history of cancer (as previously described), how I’ve got at least one known cousin with a thyroid issue, and another known cousin fighting stage 4 bone cancer, pretty much equals ‘yes, the uterus has to come out’. (ETA: And yes, the ovaries and my tubes are coming out, too. Since the doctor said that some ovarian cancers are actually cancers of the Fallopian tubes, and again, since my ovaries are at higher risk given my prior history.)
My primary care doc is backing up the surgeon, so yeah, we’re going to do this.
We now have the procedure targeted for November 11th, just after OryCon, since if I have to deal with this, I want to get it done and dealt with and not have to worry about it. We’ll be doing a procedure that’ll allow for fastest possible recovery time–I should have probably about a week of downtime, and after that, by the week of the 18th, I should hopefully be coherent (and bored!) enough that I can get on the VPN to get back to work. By the week of the 25th, if I’m physically up for it, I should be able to resume going back into the office. (We’ll have to see if I can do my usual bus + walking 4 miles a day commute; I suspect that at least for a few weeks, I’ll be doing the two-bus version of my commute. Let’s not even discuss driving. Bleh.)
So. Plan’s in place. We’re going to do this thing. More bulletins as events warrant.
* Here to tell ya, folks, “generating precancerous tumors” rather sucks as a superpower. I DEMAND A REFUND. Or at least if I have to keep this as a disadvantage on my character sheet, I want compensatory extra dice on my “Learn All The Tunes by Ear” and “Learn All the French” skills.
(Though more seriously, Dara and I have started wondering WTF is up with my system. Clearly I have a bug in my genetic code somewhere.)
Some of you may be aware, Internets, that I had to have a medical thing done last week. The short not-TMI version of this was that I had a hysteroscopy due to weirdness in my menstrual cycles. I had previously been wondering whether this was due to my going perimenopausal due to being in my mid-40’s, but given my previous history with my thyroidectomy and my stage 0 breast cancer, I had it strongly recommended to me that we should have my uterus checked out just to be sure.
I just got called with the pathology results from the sample they took out. The phrase “pre-cancerous change” was used in the conversation I had with the doctor.
And he recommended we have my uterus out. And my ovaries and tubes as well.
I am to come in on the 10th for a followup appointment to discuss these results and what my options are moving forward.
I wanted to be done with having to have parts of my body cut out due to threatening to turn into cancer.
But apparently I’m not.
God fucking dammit.
ETA: To everybody who’s been expressing their support to me on the various sites I’ve posted this news to, thank you.
At this point I’m mostly just tired and numb. I can’t even manage to muster any real rage for this–because as I told the doctor when he called me with the news, part of me was half-expecting something like this as worst case scenario just because I have been down this road before. I do have a history of portions of my body up and deciding to pull shit like this.
I can deal with it, I know I can at this point just because I have before, and I’m at least grateful that this time around I had a couple of years’ breathing room to get my strength back.
Right now though all I can think of is Tommy in O Brother Where Art Thou?, when Delmer boggles at him about trading his immortal soul to the Devil in exchange for being taught how to play the guitar. Tommy’s answer was a laconic “well, I wasn’t usin’ it!”
I would just like to now protest that losing my uterus WILL NOT IN FACT IMPROVE MY GUITAR PLAYING. Something seems medically awry here. I feel like I should be getting some kind of musical superpower out of this deal.
Not too long ago on Facebook I was giggling over the Easter egg on Google Maps that actually takes you into a TARDIS interior if you click on certain police boxes that show up in the UK. Related to that story, I went and dug up this old pic of myself from 1995, from when Dara and I went to the Worldcon in Glasgow in Scotland that year. We called this “Anna Buys a Used TARDIS”.
Anna Buys a Used TARDIS
I posted it to Facebook and was promptly asked whether I lost the vehicle in a card game. This was my reply!
Certainly not. There was a PERFECTLY LOGICAL EXPLANATION for the entire affair. See, this little Scottish dude with an umbrella showed up and said to me, “YOU! I NEED YOUR HELP! I seem to have parked my police box here without proof of ownership and aheh, well, I’ve got something I’ve DESPERATELY got to take care of. I don’t suppose I could convince you to buy it from me for oh, say, half an hour?”
“What?” I said? “Why only half an hour?”
“Well,” the little Scottish dude with the umbrella explained, “that’s the RULE. But if you’ve bought it from me that makes you the legitimate owner. It’ll be safe then!”
“Ummmm okay?” I said dubiously, but what the hell, we were only just wandering around being tourists anyway, and it was going to be nice to hang out for a bit. “I’ll give you five pence for it.”
“SOLD!” he said, and dashed off like his shoes were on fire. That’s when things got REALLY weird, because THEN a guy with curly blond hair and the most hideous coat I’d EVER SEEN IN MY LIFE showed up.
The blond guy started to argue with me about the police box being HIS, but I said quite firmly that I HAD just paid five pence for it. So then he stormed off, gesticulating and pontificating wildly, and I was about to say bugger to the whole thing when a THIRD guy showed up. This one had pointy hair and a pinstriped suit on and he was running as fast as his red trainers could carry him. “For the love of all that’s holy, GET OUT OF THE WAY!” he bellowed as he charged past. “Also, you might want to duck!”
I ducked because somebody was firing FRIGGING LASERS over my head, and when I turned around, wait, what? Stompy robots? In Scotland? Da hell? They weren’t even wearing kilts or playing bagpipes. Just kept blithering on about YOU WILL BE DELETED, and they stomped off after the guy with the pointy hair.
By then, I can tell you, I was DEEPLY confused. But that was when the door to the police box opened from the inside, and the little Scottish dude with the umbrella poked his head out and smiled at me. “Here you are then, here’s your five pence back! Also, you might want to have a dash of this nitro nine. On your way now. Be on the lookout for those robots.”
Which was when the police box promptly vanished, with a WHRR-WHRR-WHRR noise that I was pretty sure that police boxes weren’t actually supposed to make. So I went on my way, wondering what the HELL had just happened, and chucked the nitro nine over the fence just so that last robot would explode nicely.
And then I had tea.
Cross my hearts, this was exactly how it happened.
I hear tell authors need things like official Facebook pages, so I made one, and you can find it right over here.
Those of you who’d like to follow me in an official Facebook capacity and focus on getting data about my writing, that’s your best bet. ‘Cause if you follow my personal account, you’re going to get a LOT more blathering about Quebecois music and Great Big Sea, and y’know, if you like those things, that’s awesome, but I DO tend to blather on. ;)
Probably what I’m going to do with that page is use it as a place to talk about interesting Here Be Magic posts (’cause that’s the Carina author blog I’m on), any general Carina news, and news about my self-pubbed works as well. Writing-specific posts from this blog will get cross-posted there. And I’ll maybe post answers to questions, or maybe tidbits of excerpts of stuff coming, or cover reveals, or y’know, author stuff!
Mostly though it’ll serve as a way for people who don’t know about me already to find me on Facebook.
So yeah. Those of you with Facebook accounts, y’all know what to do! That Like button sure looks shiny, doesn’t it?
Earlier today I had to link again to a post I did earlier this year regarding my take on the memes that periodically go around the social networks (Facebook is where I’ve personally seen this happening but it wouldn’t surprise me if it showed up elsewhere) and encourage women to post cryptic status messages in the name of raising breast cancer awareness. I think I’ve made it pretty clear at this point what my stance is on those memes, and the convenience of linking back to that post is one small part of why I posted it–so I won’t have to post it AGAIN.
This post is a followup to that and has to do with breast cancer awareness in general. As I asserted in that previous post, in my experience it’s pretty nigh impossible, at least in North America, to NOT be aware of breast cancer. For the last several years, I’ve found that in order to NOT be aware of breast cancer, you pretty much have to avoid going in a store or looking at the Internet for the entire month of October in particular. Shelves in American stores get flooded with products branded with pink ribbons. The Safeway I usually get my groceries from holds month-long in-store fundraisers to get people to donate a few dollars along with their purchases, so yeah, I get reminded of what month it is every time I set foot in the place, all throughout October.
So yeah, I don’t think the lack of breast cancer awareness is the problem. If anything, I think there’s so much awareness of breast cancer that it’s taken on this amorphous existence and frequently doesn’t seem to have much connection to reality. Or to the women (and sometimes men) that have to fight the disease in the first place.
This particularly goes through my mind when I see well-meaning campaigns with names like Save the Ta-Tas or Books for Boobs going around. Notice where the emphasis on those names is? It’s on the breasts. As if the breasts themselves are these independent entities that are in danger of extinction, and which must be saved at all costs.
And while I got off pretty lightly in the whole battle with breast cancer thing, I nonetheless have had it change the course of my life enough that I’m really, really tired of seeing so much emphasis placed on saving the breasts and not much at all on saving the women.
Let me tell you a bit about what it’s like to be a stage 0 DCIS patient, Internets.
It means that you have to negotiate with your workplace to take time off to go do radiation therapy. And that even if you’re young and in reasonably good health, it will be a significant drain on your energy and ability to handle life in general. If you’re fortunate, you’ll have a workplace that’s supportive of your medical needs and the simple fact that if you’re having to go do radiation therapy, this means that sometimes you will not actually be in the office. Not all breast cancer patients are that fortunate.
It means that you have to go through several massively stress-inducing conversations with your medical professionals about what exactly this means for your life. Especially if you have a family history of cancer. It means you have to spend many months trying not to flip out because your mother died of cancer, and you’ve been diagnosed at about the same age as she died, and even though you’re not particularly prone to depression or anxiety, you still can’t escape the fear of shit am I doomed?
It means that you have to have mammograms every six months, and if there’s the slightest irregularity in the results, your stress level gets to spike back up. And it means you get to go in for periodic new MRIs, too.
It means you wake up from a mastectomy to discover half of what you used to see every time you looked down is gone. You have body dysphoria because that just does not make sense to you, and your center of gravity is off, and wearing a prosthetic only helps when you’re actually wearing a bra.
It means that when you opt for reconstruction surgery, you get to prolong the months of going in for medical activity as a chunk of your back is moved around in front to build a brand new breast, and that tissue has to be stretched before a proper implant can be put in. This is not fun, and it’s not comfortable, and even once the implant is in it feels distinctly weird.
It means that when your reconstruction surgery is done, you’re going to have some big lingering ugly scars even if you’re more or less symmetrical again. Emphasis on the “or less”.
It means that because a significant portion of your musculature has been rearranged, the entire right half of your upper body is prone to tensing up in odd ways. You have to be careful about twisting in the wrong direction if you want to avoid cramps along your back or chest, and you have to go in for semi-regular massage by way of pain management. Especially during winter months when it’s cold. Or damp. Or both. Like it gets in Seattle. (I don’t so much mind the gray of Seattle winters, but I’ve gotten a LOT less fond of the damp.) And it also means that you have to be very careful not to take too much aspirin or ibuprofen, and that eventually, you have to accustom yourself to a low default rumble of pain in your consciousness. An entirely pain-free day is a blessing and a gift.
Speaking of pain management, it means you get a lot more aware of your personal pain threshholds and you still have to struggle to acknowledge when you’re cranky and stressed because you’re in pain. And you have to still periodically remind yourself that it’s okay to step back and deal with that.
It means you get to be skittish about wearing a one-piece bathing suit, and never mind a bikini, for reasons that have nothing to do with your figure or your weight.
It means that even if you have a decent paying job with good medical benefits, you are still going to sink several thousand dollars into your medical care costs. And let’s not even talk about what a cancer patient who doesn’t have good medical benefits is going to have to deal with. (Hint: see previous commentary re: the fucked-up state of the American health care system.)
It means that you get twitchy every time you see articles like this one circulating the Net, because yes, it has in fact occurred to you to wonder whether you were over-diagnosed, and whether there was any possibility whatsoever that you might have avoided three years of stress and massive surgical procedures. And then you have to just deal with it, ’cause it ain’t like you can go back and change what happened now.
And I was a stage 0 DCIS patient, Internets. Kick this up a few more orders of magnitude for every additional stage of severity a breast cancer patient might go through. I was really, really fortunate and I’m grateful for that to this day. But I’m also very cognizant of what other women I know have gone through fighting this same fight.
So I’d like to ask you all, this coming October, when you see the inevitable Breast Cancer Awareness campaigns fire up… please think about it in terms of the people who have to deal with it.
We are working women and retirees. We are writers and musicians and mining engineers and product managers and countless other professions. We are mothers and grandmothers and adults without any children at all. We are sisters and daughters and wives. We are young. We are old. And we are every age in between. We are countless colors and creeds and sexual orientations.
We are women, and we are defined by much, much more than our breasts.
