cancer

For those of you who have been paying attention, you know I got breast cancer for Christmas. I had my first chemo treatment on Monday, 2/11 (in keeping with that holiday theme – Happy Valentine’s Day, early!), and so far the after-effects have been weird, but manageable.  I keep thinking of cartoons where some character starts quivering, and then his head explodes into a Dali-esque fright mask with, oh, a foot springing out of his forehead. That hasn’t happened. Yet. What is happening is that instead of my usual eat-like-a-garbage-truck self, I’ve become someone who has to think hard about what might be edible. The data sheet on my chemo cocktail lists this side effect as “anorexia” – which makes me laugh so hard I can barely breathe. My name and anorexia in the same sentence? Get outta town. The closest analog I can come up with for the current eating sitch is this: back inna day, when I did offshore sailing, there were more than a few times that the rest of the crew was crawling around on the deck, beggin’ to die. At those times, my experience was usually, “well, I don’t feel GREAT, but how about I make some soup?” The most memorable version of this was twenty years ago, delivering the schooner ORIANDA from Lauderdale to Tortola. The skipper decided to leave Lauderdale literally on the tail of a hurricane (luckily only a weakening Cat 1), just before midnight. No, it didn’t seem like a great idea to me, either, but a ship is not a democracy. Another woman on the crew and I had drawn 12-4 watch, meaning we were first up, and would be fighting the Gulfstream by 2am. When we did hit the Stream, we had 15 foot cross-seas and were shipping green…

It’s been a while, so let’s catch up: got cancer for Christmas (whoopee!), and then a New Year lumpectomy, followed by Valentine’s Day chemo. Coming up later this year – Fourth of July radiation, in which I’ll get beamed up by the mother-ship. Enough of that. Back to another story already in progress. I’m sure you’ve wondered why I haven’t weighed in on all the twisted tales being told daily – even hourly – by all sides of the current political race. All sides in that sense including the candidates, the flacks, the mainstream press, and “new media”, a/k/a the blogosphere. The answer there? Exhaustion, pure and simple. Back inna day, when political noise emanated from just the campaigns and the mainstream press, I thought there were way too many words being used to describe way too little real thought or policy. Adding the chorus of new media voices to that dissonant opera has done…what, exactly? At best, it gives every possible view the opportunity to have its champion, particularly on the media side. At worst, it confuses the hell out of everybody. This reflects the scattered political landscape this country – and any democracy – has, whatever tidy little bundles history books try to make out of the American past. For every issue: fetal rights, fetal pig rights, gay rights, “sanctity of marriage” rights (that’s got to be a joke, considering the divorce rate in the U.S.?), education, dedicated ignorance (a/k/a “teaching creationism”), there is a candidate that will meet your needs. Once you pick one…is he, or she, electable? That’s what this long, muddy slog toward the first Tuesday in November is purportedly about. I have to admit, though, that as I watch this horse race, I’m thinking less Lincoln, “To give victory to the right, not bloody…

Remember that old song, “All I Want For Christmas Is My Two Front Teeth”?  A sincere cry, albeit with a lack-of-dentition lisp, for a physical transformation. Just in time for Christmas. I’ve had occasion to recall that song in the last few days, as well as one of my favorite Jules Pfeiffer cartoons.  In the cartoon, a guy is bemoaning all the things in his life that have been discovered to cause cancer, the most recent being scotch whiskey.  In the last panel of the cartoon, he lifts a glass (scotch, of course) and says, “Whoopee! Cancer!” This year, I got cancer for Christmas.  Whoopee! Cancer! Yeah, yeah, I can hear you screaming.  Trust me, it was a gift, and here’s why.  I’ve gone for a mammogram every year since I turned 40.  That’s fifteen of the suckers.  This year, instead of hearing what I’d heard every year before – “see you next year” – I heard this from my radiologist as we looked at my films: ”Hmmm…”  There was a “thing”, and he wanted to take a look at it. Magnification mammography.  Stereotactic core biopsy (for this procedure, I highly recommend an IPod with volume set to “Stun” playing something like the Clash or Pearl Jam).  A diagnosis where he actually said, “Well, I’ve got good news and bad news.”  You can guess the bad news, right?  The good news is that it’s so small that the only thing that makes it Stage 1 vs. Stage 0 is that it’s an invasive carcinoma. Why am I telling you about this?  I think you probably have an inkling already.  Girls, get your mammograms.  Get a baseline by 40, and then get one every year after 40.  Guys, encourage the girl you love to get her mammograms. And help her get…