Too Much Information About My Doctor's Appointment
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
I went for my six-month post-hysterectomy gynecological exam this morning ten months after my surgery. Oops! My bad. The lateness of my exam is due to a few reasons, most of which boil down to one: it turns out that every doctor I have had since that first one found my abnormal cervical cells back in September 2006 has divulged as little information as possible, especially when asked direct questions, even if it is something as simple as who you are supposed to make appointments with and when after having your fucking cancer carved out.*ahem*
I was terrified to go to this appointment today, because my recent history with medicine has taught me to hate it. I used to worry about having swollen tonsils or a yeast infection, but now I worry about cancer and death. As a result, I forgot to breathe during the entire cab ride to the doctor's office and was intoxicated from oxygen deprivation when I walked up to the receptionist's desk. When she asked for my name, I insisted that my last name was that of my doctor. The doctor's name is unmistakably middle eastern, and I am a glaring bright poster girl for white europeanness.
I only waited for about five minutes before being called in to the exam, and then the exam itself took less than ten minutes. The exam was fairly typical, but there are a few things that have changed, at least in my experience, since I first began seeing gynecologists in my late teens (do not read the following section of wholly inappropriate bullet points if you are at all uncomfortable with the discussion of my pink parts):
I just remembered that my mother- and father-in-law sometimes read here. Did you know that? I feel like crawling under my desk, and, yet, still I publish. Hi there, folks! How's your yard coming? Any more squirrels in the pool?
Anyway, back to my appointment today. My doctor did a pap test, palpated my abdomen, and ordered a CT scan for me, which is a completely normal procedure to make sure my insides are still cancer-free and not too overrun with scar tissue. So, I will get to do all that breath-holding again someday soon and then again every six months forever. Joy.The important thing is that I AM NOT DYING. I usually think I am, so this is excellent news which I should believe for, oh, the next six hours.
---------------------
P.S. I made that business card at the left while I was worrying the other night but have not ordered any yet. What do you think? Yay or nay?
Labels: the body, the here and now
51 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
To A Wedding We Did Go
Monday, May 26, 2008
We went to a wedding yesterday, and it only took us a forty-five minute taxi ride across town and back and a blood pressure raising fare to get there late. We ended up watching the wedding from the door when we walked in during the middle of the ceremony. Thanks Google Maps! The meter was soaring up to some ridiculous dollar amount when the cabbie finally turned it off out of pity. No one needs to spend fifty dollars on a Sunday to not go to a wedding that Google Maps said was twenty-three dollars in the wrong direction.
The last half of the ceremony was lovely, as was the food, the venue, the cake topper pictured above, and the other guests. The place was filled with babies, though. It was rife with them, which meant that I ended up with drool on my hands and cupcake mashed into the knees of my pants. I felt like a big weird freak for a little while there and spent some time eating compulsively with my butt parked in a corner, because all these women were talking about their babies' height and weight and development and when they were thinking of making more babies and saying boob a lot.
It is pretty easy these days for me settle into a bit of a blue funk crossed with a strong urge to flee when surrounded by women who appear to perform femininity so easily and whose lives revolve around the results of their having healthy uteri. I am passing through all the first anniversaries of tests and the diagnosis and the hysterectomy, and my emotions keep having their way with me. I am ready to be done with this, but the world keeps throwing babies and television commercials exhorting me to have a happy period in my face.
After inhaling half a platter of pork bits in lettuce boats and several skewers of mushrooms coated in pesto, I managed to calm down enough to stop counting all the exits and relaxed into some fine conversation with friends I had not seen in a long time and who had managed not to have procreated in the last three years.
Let's just say that I've still got some issues.
After the wedding, the Palinode (the handsome figure pictured above) and I went out for drinks with another couple, and after they dropped us off at home, I immediately trekked out again and set about getting spectacularly smashed while playing pub trivia and inquiring after the particulars of Towel Day. My quest was met with much success (for me) and also much hogging of the bed and obnoxious snoring (poor Palinode).
I did come away from my experiences yesterday with the discovery of a new talent, though. I found out that I am really good at working grubby toddler cupcake muck out of expensive dress pants. You cannot even tell that several toddlers made a beeline from the children's cupcake bar to my knees yesterday with fists of blue icing softened by body heat and spittle.
I can be called a talentless hack no more! My chest swells with this newfound confidence.
Labels: the body, the photographs
13 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
Searching For The Underbelly
Sunday, May 11, 2008
It is Mothers' Day today. And it is tragic. It is confusing. It is melancholic and anxious. There is some relief mixed up in there, a little hope, and a lot of wishing.
One year ago today, I announced that I had cervical cancer.
All these emotions are here somewhere, but I am not truly feeling them. I am taking muscle relaxants and listening to CocoRosie and wondering why I cannot turn any of these anniversaries over to see what they mean. It is as though they have no underbellies.
What does it mean to be told you have cancer? What does it mean to go through invasive examinations and day surgeries to see just how bad it is and then a hysterectomy at thirty-five? What does it mean if you have always resented this female body? What does it mean when you more or less made the decision not to have children but had that power taken from you, and now you feel even less visible as a cultural sub-class? What does it mean that I do not feel like the person I was before this, but that the difference is transient, nearly intangible, shifty as shadows beneath a tree on a windy day?
It makes me feel like nothing means anything on its own. I have often thought this, and it is not really a terribly sad thought. It means that we are responsible for our own creation, that we see the pieces and pattern them out into the maps we become.
Part of me wants all these things to mean something beyond myself. I want this to be the universal playing itself out in the particular. I want all of this to be greater than my body and my mind and not to die with me in fifty years. I want this to be more than human
I want this to mean something beyond my own survival. People are happy that I am well now, that I am alive, that it was not worse than it was, and I am happy about those things, too, but I am still aware of this fundamental shift within myself for which I have no words.
There is a larger place than me for these things I cannot even fathom.
I want to create gods out of experience; I want the gods to know themselves; I want others to see them.
There must be an embodied sum somewhere. It's wound around my fingers, if I can only feel it.
Labels: the body, the cancer
14 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
I Am Not A Breeder
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Do you know who can bloody well screw off? The woman I ran into earlier who looked at my shirt, then at my belly, squinted her face into a cutesified smile, and asked if I had any exciting news to share.Is she asking me if I'm pregnant? I thought.
I hardly know this woman. I wanted to eat her and floss my teeth afterward with the string from her fake pearl necklace.
I am wearing a slim-fitting pair of pants today in deep brownish-charcoal, and my shirt is black, fitted on the top, and flares out slightly below the bust. From what I have seen while out shopping over the last few months, this is a common style these days.
If people making cutesy faces and hinting about children drove me nuts before my brush with cancer, it just about makes me homicidal now. I never really wanted children in the first place, and I find most non-adults quite alien, but now that I am coming up on the one-year anniversaries of my colposcopy, LEEP, cancer diagnosis, and hysterectomy, that whole infantilizing what-have-you-got-under-your-shirt sing-song sets my neurons on fire.
I do not mean to insult anyone by the following statements, but this is what I want to have on the cover of the pamphlets I feel like giving out on just such occasions:
I AM NOT A BREEDER: How To Keep Your Assumptions Out Of Acquaintance's Vaginas And Other Tips For Living With The Possibly Barren And Otherwise
I am easy to set off these days.
So now I have spent the better part of the afternoon wondering exactly how pregnant do I look in this shirt? And can I ever wear it again now that I think it makes me look preggers? Because, lord knows, I do not want to run into this again.
I can think of nearly no other situation in which I would walk up to someone I did not know very well, ogle an individual part of their anatomy, and then make comments about what they were doing with it. I might tell them if they had lettuce stuck to their moustache, but that's about as far as I would go. You will hear no That's quite the set of breasts on you, Meredith! Did you have them enlarged? from me (at least not if you are only an acquaintance of mine and your name is not Meredith).
In short, I apparently look pregnant in this damn shirt, which shirt was once one of my favourite shirts. And I am a little touchy about it.
Damn the cancer, and the uteruslessness, and the never wanting babies anyway.
Labels: the body, the cancer
43 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
Hopefully Fleeting Brilliance (aka Viruses Can Suck It)
Monday, April 7, 2008
This person feels awful. I have spent three hours trying to figure out something else to say other than "this person feels awful", but that's it. I worked on variations that went like "this person feels really awful" and "this person feels awfully terrible". I even attempted replacing "this person" with "I" to personalize it, but I was not up to the task.Then, my mind wandered, and I remembered that time when I was home sick with the flu and had mounted a little video camera on my bed's headboard.
The previous sentence does not lead anywhere dirty, unless cat butts get you worked up.
I had the video camera on my headboard trained on the cats while they were licking their butts, and I was broadcasting it on some video broadcasting thingy on the internet, and the people who ran the video broadcasting thingy on the internet were playing my live streaming cat-butt-licking channel on a large-screen television during a meeting. They made lewd jokes about my pussy (har har) and commented on my arm hair. Sweet folks.
My internet live streaming video debut was stellar.
I think that was also the day I threw up an entire serving of dry ribs through my nose because I saw this commercial filled with giant wieners (also not dirty):
Back to the deal at hand, though, feeling like crap is where I'm at, and so my creativity has not exactly been putting on fireworks. I grew so desperate that I tried a random writing prompt generator, which came forth with such gems as these:
I am going to leave that particular writing prompt generator alone for now. It seems far too eerily in sync with my life.
This person, me, with the aching head, perspiration, clogged sinuses, and another unsavoury symptom of which description you will be spared, is feeling like high quality she-it at the moment, but despite my physical ills, I have managed to tell you about my debut internet live streaming video, show you a hotdog commercial, and write answers to three writing prompts.
This, folks, is brilliance, pure and simple. Catch it if you can (and by "it", I mean my brilliance, off course, and not the nasty virus).
Labels: the body
7 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
A Universal Apology For Dropped Balls
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
I am not sure where to start with this, because it is decidedly not funny, but every time I start writing about it, I get the giggles. You know that funny bone that is not in your elbow but is in your knee? The one that really kills when you bump it? Yeah, well my knee funny bone keeps jerking and kicking a whoopee cushion, a whoopee cushion that I wrote sad teenage poetry all over.So, let's start again. Hello, my name is Schmutzie, and I am not being funny. In fact, I am being very sad, especially over the last few months. I do not mean sad-all-the-time sad. It is more like anxious-sad, it's-blooding-fucking-spring sad, seasonal-affective-disorder sad, dealing-with-the-past-year-from-hell sad.
For those of you who were not here as far back as September 2006, that was the month in which I went for my first full physical exam in six years. If you are in a similar position, I would suggest that you run to your nearest doctor's office, demand a full physical, and gladly hop up into those stirrups, because otherwise you might find yourself not only facing highly abnormal cervical cells but also facing a colposcopy, a LEEP, a cancer diagnosis, and then, eventually, a hysterectomy.
You don't want that, do you? No? I didn't think so. Welcome that speculum with open
And then, while all of that was going on between September 2006 and July 2007, the Palinode's back decided it would be a good thing to get broken, reduce him to near immobility, put him through excruciating amounts of pain that opioids could barely touch, and then put him under the knife in November 2007.
Oh, and I nearly forgot that I started medication for my general psychological malfunction in January 2007.
So, the last nineteen months have been stressful, and while I am presently cancer-free and the Palinode is once again walking upright and using his cane less and less, all of which I thought would be a welcome relief, it is not. Yet. It may be at some point, but right now I am quite busy having all kinds of emotions related to spending well over a year wondering at times if I was going to live and if the Palinode was ever going to be over three-and-a-half feet tall again.
I do not know what made me think that everything would magically be hunky dory once we both were back at work and healthy. I think I was operating under the hope that all that crap would be behind us and that we would just move seamlessly into far less crappy lives. I was so very wrong on that front.
As a result of it taking me a while to snap myself back together, I have been unable to fulfill all the duties that come along with being Schmutzie, and I feel tremendous guilt for having had to scale back my activities so much and for taking so long to do things that seemed so perfectly doable.
I once belonged to two volunteer boards. I resigned from first one and then the other. I have backed out of more evenings out at other people's homes than I can count on both hands. Knitting projects pile up unfinished. My photography and poetry writing has all but stopped. Internet-related projects, my biggest source of guilt, have been sluggish in the offing at best.
At times, I feel like I should dig out my stash of blank note cards and send out fifty kajillion apologies to all and sundry that have depended upon me for anything even as small as showing up for snacks and a board game. I feel that I have failed so many over the last several months when, at the time, I was thinking that I should have been able accomplish the normal things I set out to do. I know now that my expectations of myself did not match with my compromised abilities, but it is still difficult to look back at all I have not done because of it.
The truth is that I am tired. After dealing with cancer and the Palinode's back surgery, what I really wanted to do, what I really hoped to do, was jump up and run into my future, but instead I am tired and anxiety-ridden. I have to accept that I can run headlong into my life later. Right now, I need to relax, breathe, and decompress.
I am slowly learning not only that I need more time to heal my mind and my heart but also that it is okay to do that. The difficult part is learning to accept that this is not a failure on my part but a fact. I am not lost. I am getting better.
26 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
Discrete
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
The sun shines in the morning now, even at 7:30.
I am not sure what keeps dragging me back.
Memory is shifty at the best of times. Sit down with a group of friends that you have known for years and bring up that time at the lake. Ask each of them to relate a particular incident in their own words. No two stories will be quite the same. The characters, the background, the emotions, and the conversation remembered will all be different. Life is in the eye of the beholder.
I slip back into memory so easily. I can smell a person's coat, I remember the feel of curtains between my fingers, there is the click of women's heels on linoleum that was put down in the 1950s. It is hard to turn away from things that are always within arm's reach.
Right now, I am in the girls' bathroom in the basement of my grandparents' church in their hometown of 150 people. It is 1984. The floor is covered in a layer of plastic meant to resemble brown pebbles, and the walls are whitewashed cement. The stalls are constructed out of flat sheets of cheap plywood painted white, and the toilet paper is appropriately economical one-ply with no embossed pattern. It is suspended against the the wall on wooden doweling.
I am in an eyelet lace dress that never turns me into the girls applying lip gloss at the next sink. The dress has a turquoise ribbon sash that I tie too tightly around my waist. Unless it is constricting my ability to breathe, I feel insecure. I have split it twice at the knot while sneezing, and so the sash is nearly too short.
My white stockings make me naked. The springy girlishness of the dress makes me naked. Everything makes me naked. A friend put lip gloss on me once, and I felt as though I had been caught masturbating in public.
While the other girls touch their hair and spray hairspray out of the handles of dual-purpose brushes, I run my hands under numbingly cold tapwater.
Did you see Darryl?
Yeah!
Do you thing he's cute?
Yeah! Have you seen his cousin?
Yeah! You should talk to him!
Is my hair okay? It's too flat.
No, it's perfect! Is my hair okay?
You look so cute. Where did you get that blue mascara?
While they giggle and re-tease their hair, I think about how the first boy they like has a dog bite on his face and his cousin drags his feet when he walks. My isolation is as palpable as the cold porcelain between us. I do not have their eyes. They smell like strawberries.
I shut myself in a stall and pull the elastic tights away from my leg. When the tights snap back, dust rises from them where my dry skin has worked its way into the knit. The bathroom smells like a hockey arena, and I imagine that I am there in the hall behind the stands where I can hear people bang their boots against the wooden boards.
14 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
An Open Letter To Festering Sore
Friday, March 14, 2008
Dear Festering Sore (née Deep Pimple):I have to admit that I thought you were pretty cool at first. I could feel the pressure of your new growth under the skin next to my nose, and I had that excited feeling I get whenever I anticipate something I enjoy.
I know that happily anticipating the growth of a deep, infected zit may sound odd, but I really do enjoy the satisfaction that comes from squeezing out all the junk after one of you has risen to full pus capacity. So, really, I was only excited to see you because I knew that I would eventually murder you.
It is not a sweet life into which you are born, and for that, I am sorry.
But that was way back in the days when you were known as Deep Pimple. Now, as butterflies transmogrify from caterpillars, you are known as Festering Sore, and I am much less crazy about you. There is no gleeful waiting, fingers tented, searching each morning for that telltale yellow head. No. Now, you are no more than a peeling scab, a peeling scab which resulted from a dissatisfying squeeze. If you had at least offered up some decent ooze, I might be more forgiving, but you did not.
You, Festering Sore, are a buzzkill.
In your present state, you defy make-up. You bleed after showers. You flake. I know that you like the attention and that you have been getting a lof it by the way people talk to you more than to me, but you need to get off my face now.
Your kind's hayday expired a century or so ago, and 2008 wants nothing to do with you. Nor, for that matter, do I.
Sincerely,
Schmutzie.
Labels: the body
20 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
There Are No Controls Left
Friday, January 18, 2008
I have been writing less over the last several days. That always happens when I come up against something I do not want to write.I have not written much about my hysterectomy since I returned to work at the beginning of September. I have not been able to put my thumb down on it. It keeps floating out around the corners of my eyes. It behaves like the ghosts I terrified myself with as a child. They were to the side of or behind or above me, but they were never where I could confront them. For a while, I believed that a late great uncle lived among the crystals in a chandelier, and I avoided our dining room table because of it for a week. I was afraid that it would get into my hair and touch my scalp.
Just like my now phantom uterus, this thing with which I am trying to deal is not specifically here. It flirts in my periphery. It is elusive. It is difficult to see a thing you have never before seen.
I never really wanted children. The idea of them sometimes seemed appealing, but the actual physical reality of bearing and raising them never did. Now, though, I find myself avoiding people who are pregnant or who have babies and toddlers.
I used to have a choice. I did not want that for myself, so I avoided it. Now it is no longer a matter of choice. It is a decision I cannot make with my body. Losing that choice, even though I always chose not to, is arresting. It is the first thing that I absolutely cannot ever do because my body is a faulty transport vehicle.
I am not a gymnast, because my parents did not continue to enroll me in gymnastics.
I cannot draw terribly well, because I did not pursue that form of creative expression.
I hated organ lessons, so I will never play for a synth band.
A bit of it might be that no one cut off my fingers or deafened me or broke my spine to negate those possibilities, but a doctor came and cut away a major portion of what used to fill my abdominal cavity. I never even really wanted a woman's body, so not only did I not want what I had, but now it seems to be even less mine than it was before. It feel like cancer stole my agency.
There is more to this than my being a sore loser. I just can't put my thumb directly on it.
Your babies smell good, but I do not want them. My body is more what I wanted it to be post hysterectomy, but I did not want a traitor. It is not possible for anyone to ever have my eyes or that black, curly hair I was born with.
These are choices I would have made, but I did not. There are no controls left. All conditions are fleeting. I am a malfunctioning contraption.
If you are so moved, please vote for me in each of the following three categories in the Canadian Blog Awards:Best Personal Blog, Best Photo/Art Blog, and Best Humour Blog. Thank you.
I am a participant in Blog 365.
12 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
#801: The Belly, She Swells
Tuesday, September 4, 2007
There is this HysterSisters-coined word, swelly belly*, and I have it in spades, thanks to my hysterectomy earlier this summer.According to the HysterSisters website, this swollen belly is not due to being fat, having weak muscles, or overeating but is due to trauma during surgery and can last for weeks or even months afterward. I am guessing that I have the months-long variety of the condition, because it has been more than two months now since my surgery, and it still swells up and down from day to day depending on how much I have been standing, sitting, walking around, or cleaning the apartment. I am now starting to understand why some older women wear those ugly, elasticized pants, (but this understanding in no way means that I will resort to such a measure, because, and I do not mean to insult anyone here, ew.** Stop it. There has got to be a better alternative).
When I wake up in the morning, I am relatively slim for my frame. My underwear fits, my pants fit, and I can do up my coat. In truth, I have lost six or seven pounds since my surgery, so prior to twelve noon, I feel pretty darn svelte. The afternoons and evenings hold a different body in store for me, though. If I have walked or bent over or lifted too much, which really means any amount of work more than your average eighty-five-year-old could handle, my gut expands. If it made me curvier in a way that I found attractive, I wouldn't mind so much, but that is not what happens. I get the nasty muffin top, and sometimes I can look like I am in the early stages of a second trimester pregnancy, which is really one of the last things I want now that I am uterus-free and my eggs just float about inside my abdomen without a purpose in the world.I spend my evenings sitting around the house without any pants on, parading my bare ass and protruding stomach throughout the apartment for all two cats, the Palinode, and probably several neighbours to see. I look like I am in the midst of having myself potty trained. Sadly, no one in our apartment has that particular fetish.*** I figure that, despite this particular fetish lack at home, it is far better for me to feel free and easy than to mentally battle the fact of a swollen muffin top and my lack of a belt to fit my new evening size.****
I think if I looked a little less like my great aunts, I would find this part of my recovery much less bothersome.
* Swelly belly is far too cute-sounding a name for my tastes, and I only mentioned it here for the sake of linking to HysterSisters' description of it. I think that there is nothing cute about abdominal surgery and its after effects, and there need be no application of feminity's infantilizing silliness. The cutesification of a subject belies the sincerity of its experience and makes me feel as though I am being patted on the head.
** My father once bought a pair of light yellow Sansabelt pants*****, and when he asked me what I thought of them, I stated quite bluntly that they made it look like he had given up on ever having sex again. After that, I only saw him wear the burgundy ones.
*** Hello, all you infantilization fetishists who googled your way here!
**** Scratch that "evening size" comment. Today, it is choosing to start up the puffiness over lunch. I should take bets on how sizable I might be by nine o'clock.
***** Sansabelts pants are not all that bad as pants for older individuals go, but honestly, baby yellow/blue/pink slacks of any kind make anyone look like a health professional. I have long wondered why so many people over fifty-five go for the nurse's uniform look.
Labels: the body, the cancer
12 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
#800: Two Cigarettes
Monday, September 3, 2007
The first time I smoked a cigarette is not the time I think of as my first time. There was something suspended, unofficial, about that event. It wasn't about the cigarette.Here's how it went down. I was fifteen, and none of my friends smoked or drank or did drugs. In fact, they made fun of the other kids who did that stuff, and I was a little confused by their behaviour. I knew that those things weren't the healthiest of life choices, but neither were eating fake cheez and hitting on your english teacher. I thought they were more than a little uptight, but it was the mid-eighties, and hysterical fear-mongering was rampant in the school system.
A classmate delivered a speech once that was all about her struggle through her addiction to poppers. She tried to make it sound like one of those desperate made-for-tv movies that were popular in the early and mid-eighties and to impress upon us that her life had been a mere thread away from spiraling into chaos and eventual death, but I must confess that I quietly rolled my eyes from the back of the room. Doing poppers three times in your suburban basement was not a brush with junkiedom.
I had never taken all the misinformed, hysterical anti-drug talks to heart. In those sessions, held in the school gymnasium under high-beam fluorescent lighting, we were told that marijuana led to heroin, and all other drugs were rungs on the ladder to that terrible fate. If any of us gave in to peer pressure and smoked pot, we were going to turn into the hollowed out skeletons that could be found on East Hastings in Vancouver. Even I knew at ten years old that that was ridiculous. Alcohol and nicotine were drugs, and yet after years of recreational use, my father and all of his friends weren't hanging out in alleys using their belts to tie off each other's arms. I was pretty sure that there had to be other factors involved in such a transformation.
By grade ten, I was tired of this clean living I had been doing, and I decided that I would steal one of my father's cigarettes. I sneaked one out of his pack while he was dozing in his armchair. It was not that I really wanted to smoke that cigarette. He smoked what I thought of as old-man, small-town cigarettes, Craven "A" King Size Menthols, which robbed them of any of the coolness I was trying to affix to them. A friend would later refer to menthol cigarettes as lung candy. What drove me to smoking on that fateful night was my group of friends. It was one thing to have my parents disapprove of this sort of thing, but when even my peers were too uptight for a little experimentation, I knew I had to strike out on my own to brush shoulders with addiction. Any rebellious leap I took was going to have to happen without them.
Mentholated cigarette in hand and an old pack of hotel matches in my jeans pocket, I sneaked out the back patio door and sat on the deck steps. Now, I was normally a pretty good kid. I was nonviolent, spoke when spoken to, and didn't swear in front of my parents, but this particular night, I chose to sit down and smoke in full view of the kitchen through the patio window. If my mother or my father had walked through and bothered to look outside, they would have seen me sitting there puffing away, and I would have been dead, but I didn't feel scared or thrilled or nervous or anything like that. I just sat there and smoked that cigarette like I did it all the time. I inhaled, I figured out how to french inhale, I flicked the ashes. It was like I had been doing that very thing my whole life. It felt simple and normal.
When I was done, I just put it out, tossed it over the fence into the neighbours' yard, and went inside to take a shower. Nobody mentioned that my coat smelled or wondered why I was showering at night when I never did that. My father never brought up his missing cigarette. I never told my friends about it afterward. It was a secret I wanted to keep for myself alone. I didn't want anyone telling me I was stupid or asking if I could show them how to do it. It was for me, it was my thing. I felt that, with that act, I had communicated something to myself that did not belong to anyone else. I felt dangerous, but not in a rebellious, motorcycle, hard living kind of way. I felt dangerous, because I suddenly knew that the continuum of my childhood, of that enforced transparency by those in authority, was snuffing out. I was stepping away from it, and I felt fearless.
And yet, I don't think of that as the first time I smoked a cigarette, because it wasn't about smoking. I always think of the first time as that time a friend and I went to a nearby mall, and I managed to buy a pack of cigarettes underage with money we had pooled from our allowances. She was nervous while we walked down the alley behind the mall, but I assured her that no one would care about two kids sitting on a step next to a dumpster and smoking. She had trouble with the lighter, so I lit both cigarettes and watched the sun set beyond the edge of a fence. I could see how impressed she was with my nonchalance, which made me feel less vulnerable. I felt stoic, like a fisherman looking out to sea and bracing his face against the sea wind.
When she asked me Why do people do this?, I answered, I don't know, but I like it. And I was no longer simply brushing shoulders with addiction.
8 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
#797: I'll Just Be Over Here, Yawning Myself To Death
Thursday, August 30, 2007
I had no idea how exhausting I would find going back to work, but since I started back on Monday, I have been getting a pretty clear idea. I originally had this completely unfounded notion that two months following my hysterectomy would find me up and about and ready to take on cubicle life with a vigor heretofore unknown in the world of cubicle farms. I obviously did not do my research.On Monday morning, I walked to the bus filled with an orderly sense of purpose. I was going to work! My life was back where it should be! I felt a completeness when I revisited my pre-hysterectomy habits and purchased a coffee and a muffin on my way to the office. I could do this work thing! It was time! I sat at my desk, drank my coffee, and started working my way through a backlog of four hundred and seventy plus e-mails. I felt productive and, for the first time in a long while, pleasant.
Until 10:30 a.m. Halfway through my morning and two hundred e-mails later, a sodden lump of exhaustion settled itself into my lap, and before I knew it, I felt like several hundred pounds of wet sludge. My skin ached, I was so drained. So, in an effort to battle the fatigue, do you think I took deeper breaths? That I got up to get more coffee? No. I wept. Actually, what I did was more pathetic than true weeping. I dropped my head to my chest, stopped breathing, and allowed three or four hot tears to seep out from my lowered lids. Luckily, I have a quick turnaround time when I get that pathetic, because I have a cousin who used to do the head-drop, tear-squeeze move when we were kids, and I hated it. I hated watching it happen to someone else then, but it is quite another, much more serious, matter to feel your own face contorting into a display of abject wretchedness, even if the only witnesses are a tape dispenser and a broken calculator.I dabbed a few tears from my eyes, took some deep breaths, told myself that I could too get another cup of coffee, and plunged myself into a battle with sleep that has lasted for four days. No one told me that I would be this tired even after my body began to feel normal again. Were I the sort who lived in reality, I might have taken note of the fact that, as recently as two weeks ago, doing a simple task such as washing dishes meant I had to take a nap, but no, I prefer to wander around in a peachy denial that would have me believe I was going to be running lively and free through green fields, glorying in being alive as though life were a shampoo commercial. I have done some asking around to find out if what I am experiencing is reasonable, and apparently, this weariness could go on for months. Months. M-O-N-T-H-S.
I guess that I could decide to be cup-half-full about it and look at this as an opportunity. I have been getting a lot of e-mails from Russian women who offer to send me photos of themselves, but not before they tell me how tired they are. They write to me and say: I am tired this evening. I am nice girl that would like to chat with you... Mind me sending some of my pictures to you? We have photography and tiredness in common! We could be friends! Those Russians are such a tired but friendly people.
This took me a very long time to write, because 1) I was tired, 2) I was hungry, and 3) I kept taking breaks to drop hints to the Palinode that we need Asian takeout, stat. The wonton soup and fresh rolls rallied me a bit, but I kept nodding off. I think I'm thirty-four going on eighty-five.
Labels: the body, the cancer
10 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
#794: I Am Working On Readjusting Myself To My Cubicle
Monday, August 27, 2007
Ten things you can't do anymore when you find yourself back at work after taking seven weeks of leave to recuperate after a hysterectomy:- You may have become accustomed to picking your nose whenever you damn well pleased when you spent your days cooped up in an apartment with nobody to watch but two delinquent cats, but that's a habit that must be broken once you are back in your cubicle. In mid-pick, when some excess snot may be stuck to the outside of your nostril, a co-worker may or may not show up to ask you how you are recovering.
- You can no longer continually stick your finger in your bellybutton a) to try to quel that bizarre post-surgical nerve twinge or b) to make that bizarre post-surgical nerve twinge happen on purpose out of curiosity.
- You don't have any tampons or maxipads to loan out to your co-workers anymore.
- Black chin whiskers are no longer kept around for a couple of extra days just because it is fun to run your fingers over them when you are thinking.
- Clothing is no longer optional, which is kind of a downer now that you are used to sitting around buck naked for an entire week if you feel like it.
- Also, you had better strap that bra back on in order to prevent the rest of the office from being harrassed by your nippliness.
- Faux-hawks, no matter how fetching, do not comply with the generally accepted standard of office dress. You must now make a habit of washing your hair and stop moulding it into the shapes of tropical fish fins.
- Talking to the objects you are manipulating - the toaster, blankets, the computer, the coffee table, your underwear - is an easy habit to fall into if you are used to being alone for long spans of time, but once you find yourself back at work in your cubicle, resist telling the stapler that it wants staples and promising the speakers that you will love them more if they tone down the buzzing. They can't hear you, but the co-worker on the other side of your half-wall can.
- At home:
drawing lipstick circles on your face and calling yourself the Bubble Girl = playful expression.
At work:
this same activity = extended psychological leave.
Please refrain. - Three naps a day are no longer feasible, even if living with two cats has convinced you that this is how things should really be.
Two things you can do when you find yourself back at work after taking seven weeks of leave to recuperate after a hysterectomy:
- You can borrow Pamprin from female co-workers just for the mood-enhancing high and, in fact, find that it goes even better with beer, especially now that you have no aggravating menstrual cramps to get in the way of your good time.
- You can decide to buy Pamprin despite your menstrual lack, because, hell, that shit's legal and does good work.
Labels: the body, the cancer, the lists
6 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
#786: Here's To Hoping
Friday, August 17, 2007
I am going to see my gynecologist today for my post-hysterectomy follow-up appointment, and I am completely nervous. Yes, completely. Even my toes are fidgeting. My skin feels like it is vibrating.It is not that I am afraid that she is going to tell me that I have to have further treatments or that there is more cancer than they bargained for, because I would have heard of something like that several weeks ago. I am afraid that she is going to tell me that I need more time to heal. I don't know how all of this is supposed to go, but I am still tired, I can't stand or walk for long periods without my hips/stomach/lower back aching, and last night, I was spotting blood again. There was not a lot, just a bit, but apparently the place where my cervix used to be is not done healing yet.
It is not like I am itching to get back into my beige cubicle under fluorescent lights, but I do want to be given the go-ahead to return to normal life. I am impatient for this to be over. I am crossing my fingers that in two-and-a-half to three hours I will be walking out of her office with good news, because this waiting is not good for my mental health. If my brain were a dog, it would be one of those cartoon ones that yells YIPE! YIPE! YIPE! as it disappears into the horizon.
Yipe!
Labels: the body, the cancer
16 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
#775: Physically, I'm Doing Alright
Saturday, August 4, 2007
Since I had a hysterectomy on July 3rd, I keep asking myself if I feel different physically. There are some obvious answers to that question. I had abdominal surgery, and despite the fact that it was done laparoscopically, which is technically less invasive, I still have abdominal discomfort. A combination of four abdominal incisions plus one internally where my cervix used to sit, the resituation of various internal bits like my intestines and my bladder, and spending a lot of time sitting or lying down for over a month means that I have limited abdominal and lower back strength at the moment. As long as I am not carrying anything over a few pounds, I can go for walks, but one walk equals one nap. Doing dishes equals one nap. Going for lunch equals one nap.I am not a napper. I have shunned napping since I was a tiny kid, much to my mother's chagrin. I always want to be awake and thinking and doing stuff, because sleep cuts into all that conscious experience I could be having. It has not been my favourite thing to spend half, and sometimes more than half, of my recuperation time sleeping. I am one who has a lot of vivid dreams, and when you spend as much time as I have immersed in dreaming, that shit can get really strange. I watch my brother butcher a Punch and Judy puppet show at a family event to celebrate cawgs (cat/dog hybrids), I am sexually pursued by many another blogger's significantly older partner, I eat live mutton, my mother repeatedly throws out all my socks and makes me buy a whole new sock "wardrobe", the Palinode teaches me chess with a chess set in which all the pieces have matching canes.
I suppose that this could all be seen as a better substitute for the real world, the one in which I nap and maybe get it together to do dishes or clean the cat litter.
So, we have covered the exciting topics of abdominal discomfort and being tired. And you are still here. I love you. What next? Oh, yes. PMS.
I have always become more aggressive/depressed/bloated/hungry within the week before my period, and then within an hour of getting my period, I become what I like to think of as myself again. What? you are wondering. Why is she talking about PMS? She's had a hysterectomy. Well, yes, I did have a hysterectomy, but I kept my ovaries, so I still get the hormonal cues. About a week ago, I bloated up, broke out in zits that rival my grade ten complexion, and muttered all kind of violent statements under my breath if anyone had the gall to try to engage with me. Yay me. I was curious to see how it went, because I usually rely on the arrival of a period, which is just not going to happen anymore, to signal my return to a preferable state of me-ness. This time, the crazy/ugly just ended without note, and I could not tell exactly when it happened. I just noticed that I wanted no one dead by my hands anymore. Basically, I feel different physically in this respect, because I no longer have to endure what I have always felt is an unnecessary annoyance for several days every month, a period.
The function of my external lady parts, and, oh, when I call them that I sound so bleeding conservative, so here it is, my vagina, seems to be absolutely up to snuff. It is a happy campground, which, I must say, is excellent. Horror stories abound about women who never orgasm again or live with constant nerve pain, and me, not so much. In fact, not at all, so far. All praise to my lovely surgeon.
And now, I can feel a nap coming on. I walked to this little café, you see, and my body's all Those three blocks were a killer, and now you have to walk back. Let's give ourselves two hours of dreaming about ripping the legs off upended turtles, shall we?.
Labels: the body, the cancer
10 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
#773: Exhaustion And Carcass Shopping
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Here's how it goes since I have been off work following my hysterectomy.I wake up when the Palinode hobbles off to catch a taxi to work. I read a little bit from a magazine or a book or the internet, and then at about 11:30 a.m., I turn over for a nap. When I wake, I might do a sinkload of dishes, which I find very tiring, because it involves standing, so at about 2:30 p.m., I lie down again. Sometimes I can't sleep, but I can't read, either, so I watch Onion lick himself and try not to think about how boring it is to be too tired to do anything. I have a shower at about 4:00 p.m. Then, the Palinode comes home. I stay awake until he comes to bed, but frankly, the shower I took was tiring, and so I spend my time absently surfing the internet. Occasionally, we will go out after he gets off work or I will have coffee at a local café that has wireless, but that means that I will spend even more of the next day asleep than usual.
Coffee helps. It at least gives me some mental alertness.
When you're tired, you don't remember anything, and I don't remember much. It has been a blur since July 3rd. The Palinode will tell me that we are having dinner with That Girl, but I will forget and think that we are having dinner with someone else, and then forget that dinner was ever planned with anyone and wonder why the Palinode sounds so excited about the evening. I haven't taken photographs, because I forget to take my camera with me. I also forget my keys in the mailbox lock and toilet paper at the drug store and what I am writing about.
I am yawning and stretching while I type this, but I am sick of napping. I am going to make myself some tea and, and, no, screw that. I am going to wet my hair down and drag my ass to the drug store, because I am going to have coffee. I am going to make it thick like a clay slurry with sugar and cream, and I am going to down it like jello shots.
That's it. I'm off to shower and go get coffee, and I am taking my camera.
...
I am now escaping the heat in an air-conditioned café with free wireless. And, not surprisingly, I forgot my camera. But I have coffee! (That exclamation mark is for That Girl, because she loves them so!!!!!) Although, my original intention was to buy coffee grounds and make it at home, but I forgot and just headed to the nearest decent café.
Switch! Yesterday, That Girl drove the Palinode and I to an M&M Meat Shop, and I was sorely disappointed. Don't get me wrong. They had a wide selection of tasty-seeming pre-made meals, of which I bought a few. What disappointed me was the lack of raw carcass hanging around. For some reason, possibly because my family time-warped to the present from some time in the 1800s, I had this idea that there might be half of a big, dead cow hanging behind the counter and maybe some guy with a moustache wearing a bloody apron who would stand there with his hands on his hips, chest out, looking proud of the carnage he had to offer me. This was not the case. Instead, all of the dead things were packed away in nearly identical tidy, white boxes, and there was this sour-faced woman behind the faux granite counter that refused to speak out loud to me except to try to sell me a free membership.
(I have this thing against free memberships to anything. If a company is going to give you a membership for free, then why wouldn't they just give you the discounts anyway? Because what they are doing is basically paying you for the information they will extract from you before they hand over your membership card. If some person just up and offered me a bunch of coupons or cash in exchange for my personal information, I wouldn't do it. Would you? Now my skepticism has robbed me of bulk meat discounts, and you know about my paranoia. Stop looking at me.)
Before I left the meat store, I notice that they had a display of reusable bags for $1.99 with the shop's logo on it. They sell meat bags for frequent meat shoppers! I am still laughing about the prospect of owning my own meat bag. I understand laptop bags and knitting bags, but meat bags? Do I really carry meat that often? Does anyone? How often do you carry meat?
The caffeine, she has hit. Thankful-fecking-ly.
I just e-mailed the Palinode to let him know that I had managed to extricate myself from the bed and was out of the apartment. During that exchange, he found an opportune moment to write That is the best news I've heard since the doctors told me those things were just testicles. And now you have to think about the Palinode's testicles. It's so easy.
Labels: the body, the here and now
12 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
#770: A Woman Is Little More Than A Procreative Device, And Don't You Forget It*
Sunday, July 29, 2007
When I was in my early twenties, I wanted to get my tubes tied. It seemed like the only reasonable option for someone in my position. I had been on the Pill for a couple of years, but it didn't agree with my body, so I had stopped taking it, but I didn't feel any better. In fact, I felt worse and worse, and a few months afterward, I began to experience horrible abdominal cramps. An ultrasound confirmed that I had not one, not two, but three ovarian cysts. I could see the small pustules in sharp black and white on the monitor, two on the left ovary and one on the right.Ovarian cysts usually clear themselves up within six weeks, she said.
What if they don't go away? I asked.
Then we will have to operate, she said.
Why did I get them? I asked.
Ovarian cysts are common in women who stop taking the Pill, she said.
No one told me that! What can I do to stop getting these cysts? I asked.
You can go back on the Pill, she said.
But I don't like the Pill. And that's what gave me these cysts in the first place! I said.
So, from the minimal amount of information with which my doctor was willing to part, I deduced that I could go back on hormones, which I hated, and avoid the cysts, or I could use other contraceptives, none of which had high enough success rates to satisfy my pregnancy fears, and get cysts. I wasn't about to go the abstinence route, because I was living with a boyfriend and wasn't about to don ye olde chastity belt.
I went home and thought about it and decided that none of the options that had been presented to me suited my needs. I had never wanted children, and despite my young age, I was dead certain that I wasn't going to want them down the line. It seemed like such a waste of my time and money to spend cash on various contraceptive agents only to continue to live in fear nearly every day that I might be knocked up.
And I did live in fear. I lived in fear from the first time I had sex right up until this third of July when I had my hysterectomy. Every day was accompanied by its own small pocket of fear that at any time I might end up pregnant, and every time I had sex I had to actively push conception out of my thoughts so I could derive some pleasure from the act. At one point, I even considered becoming a celibate nun in the hills of northern California, where, aside from the very rare event of impregnation by their god, I could be relatively sure of a child-free existence.
Then, it hit me. I could get my tubes tied and be done with the whole nerve-wracking mess. One simple surgery, and voilá! I would be free to live my life as I chose without the constant anxiety that my body could dictate a hairpin direction change because I had a healthy and nurturing sex life. I made an appointment with my doctor and virtually flew there on wings of excitement two days later. I was going to be free.
And what's going on with you today? she asked.
I've thought about my contraceptive options, and the one that makes the most sense for me is tubal ligation, I said.
You don't want to do that, she said
Yes, I do. I've never wanted children. I am terrified of pregnancy, I said.
Yes, but you don't know that you won't want them when you're thirty-two. You would be terribly disappointed that you could not have them, and what if you have a husband who wants to have children? she asked.
Then he would have to have them with someone else, I said. I want my tubes tied.
Well, I won't do it for you, she said. It would be wrong to make that decision when you're so young.
Then I'll go to another doctor, I said.
I can't think of a single doctor in this city that would agree to it, she said.
And with that, I hopped off the table and walked out without so much as a goodbye. I was both devastated and angry. It was my body, and I wanted something done to it that was truly of no concern to anybody but me. The possibility that I might have kids one day that I did nor did not want was of more concern to my doctor than my own desires for my life and my body. It was dehumanizing. Breadmakers make bread, and ladies make babies. I was a potential incubator that had to be kept in top notch condition.
What happened next is not surprising, although it was at the time. What with the cysts and general hormonal upset after going off the Pill, my periods were erratic, and so when one didn't show up, I wasn't sure if I was actually late or not. So, I trucked back over to my sweetheart of a doctor and took a pregnancy test. It came back light blue, which meant that I was either too early along in my pregnancy to know for sure yet or that I had been pregnant but had lost it. I went back and retook the test a few days later, and it came back dark blue.
I went into a dreamlike state. Everything seemed very far away, like if I reached out to touch anything, my hand might just pass right through. I was a hologram.
I would like to have an abortion, I said.
Oh, no. Are you sure? Because there are other better options, she said.
I don't want a child, I said.
There is always adoption, she said.
But I've done acid and smoked pot and drank a lot of alcohol. I'm on welfare. I live on noodles, I said.
I know the idea of adoption sounds scary, but, well, I'll try and explain it. Remember when you were in kindergarten and made a beautiful painting? Remember how you felt when you forgot it at school? You only felt bad in the beginning when you could still see it in your mind, but then after a while it didn't bother you as much, right? she said.
I want an abortion. I have been drinking and doing drugs and do not want to ever be pregnant or have children. This is why I wanted a tubal ligation in the first place, I said.
I can refer you to another doctor, because I don't handle things like this. We won't be seeing each other again, she said.
She was right. That was the last I ever saw of that doctor.
I could not believe that she likened my creation of a baby with a five-year-old's fingerpainting and adoption with a minor childhood disappointment. Her severe irresponsibility in trying to downplay the seriousness of the situation in order to coerce me into a decision I did not want to make was appalling. At that time in my life I may have been a diagnosed schizophrenic who did far too much acid, but I knew what was what, and what was a gastrula in the sour uterine soup of a psychologically imbalanced outpatient with a penchant for hallucinogens. What was not what was me fingerpainting while I waited for mommy to take me home for milk and cookies.
I walked out of her office and sat down in the bus shelter across from an older hospital. I was startled when a wrecking ball swung into view, knocking a massive chunk of the uppermost floor to the pavement below. That was the hospital where my mother had worked in the 1960s. That was the hospital where I volunteered as a candy striper in high school. And now this pregnancy would be terminated in the new, shiny, white-tile and glass wing that had been built at the end of the block.
And I knew that no one would treat me kindly.
* This entry was inspired by Bonnie Zylbergold's article in American Sexuality magazine, "Are You Kidding?: Tubal Ligation Procedures Denied To Young Women Who Don't Want Children".
Labels: the body, the feminism
25 comments ·
link to this entry ·
subscribe to this website ·
Vote for this website as the best written weblog in the 2008 Blogger's Choice Awards
#765: The Whiny Ghost
Monday, July 23, 2007
I am finally beginning to feel again. The anaesthesia is mostly out of my system, pain isn't constantly driving me to sleep or take drugs, and proper nouns are slowly making their way back into my brain where I will be able to use them again. With my brain restarting its thinking capabilities, my emotions have kickstarted as well, and I am not terribly fond of what they have taken to feeling.Until recently, I was somehow able to float along with the cervical cancer/hysterectomy ride. I was a step removed, watching it all transpire and explaining to myself in no uncertain rational terms that cancer is what it is, my cancer was the nicest kind to have, and that my choice to have a hysterectomy (uterus only) was logical and could be a point of liberation for me. I was a nodding and smiling human version of Spock.
Even I knew that my outward show of being perfectly fine had to fall apart at some point, because whenever I spoke to friends about my health, I heard my own voice as though it belonged to someone else at the end of a long tube. I knew that whoever was talking was doing a pretty decent job of keeping me from having to cry in public every time someone brought it up, and I was somewhere else inside my skull waiting for a change in conversation topic. I felt mentally very tidy. Each corner was swept clean and any remaining debris was neatly folded away into the backseat self who watched and listened. I felt very stepford.
This removal from the immediacy of my condition was a relief from psychological pain, but it also relieved me of my short-term memory and a sense of the passage of time. For the last three weeks, I am told that I have said and done things of which I have no recollection. Something that happened yesterday can feel like it happened two hours or two months ago. Have I eaten? Have I taken my psych meds? When did I last drink water? What day is it?
The other day, I broke out into tears when I was talking to the Palinode. I started crying because I could not figure out where all my money went, but it swelled into a breakdown about an overwhelming sense of futility that hollowed out the inside of my chest, and I hated it. I hated feeling it and naming it. But there it sits.
I once trusted certain things about life and the universe, but when I lost my uterus to cancer, I lost that trust. I no longer trust that my life is meaningful or that life is anything but making it from one end to the other. My body has always betrayed me, but this seeming betrayal to end all betrayals pointed out to me that this is not the situation at all. My body cannot betray me. It is what it is and does what it does. It does not love me. It is not attached to me beyond its need for basic care. I am suffering from that