Knitnut.net. Watch my life unravel...
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Posted by zoom! on May 22, 2009, at 12:23 pm |
It has been a busy couple of days. The imaging tests were all uneventful. I even slept through most of the bone scan. The most eventful part was when I opened the washroom door and found a man sitting on the toilet. (I think he and I were equally disturbed by that brief encounter, although he might have found it slightly more disturbing if I’d told him I was going to blog about it.)
During my bone scan, the technician phoned a doctor, gave a patient’s name and birthdate, and reported he’d found a mass in her brain. It seemed strange to me that I knew about this total stranger’s brain tumor before she did. And then I started wondering if the next patient to lie on this bed would hear him telling my doctor that I have a tumor in my spine. (I myself will have to wait until June 8th to find out.)
I’ve dealt with quite a few different medical people over the past little while, and I find it interesting to note how differently they treat me. Nobody has been outright rude to me, but some are just civil and detached. They don’t look me in the eye, they don’t interact with me beyond the absolute minimum required to carry out their duties, and I get the feeling they don’t think of me as fully human. They’re just processing me.
But others have been warm and friendly and have taken the time to do a little more than they have to. Like Lisa yesterday, at the Queensway-Carleton Hospital. Her job was to give me an injection in preparation for the bone scan. But she asked me what other imaging tests still remained to be done, and when I told her I didn’t yet have an appointment for the MRI, she made a phone call and got me that appointment. I thought that was awfully kind of her.
Speaking of kind, Debbie, Bonnie and Grace came over yesterday afternoon and spent a couple of hours transforming my goutweed patch into a garden! It’s lovely. There are hostas, forget-me-knots, bloodroot, a bleeding heart, a jack-in-the-pulpit, and some other things I can’t remember. They also noted that the garden gets more sun than they expected based on my description, so we left some room for a few herbs.
Remember when I said I was sure some good would come from me having cancer? There have been several good things already, and this garden is one of them. (Thank you kindly, my green-thumbed friends.)
It was a pleasure to meet my imaginary friend Grace, whom I’ve known online for quite a while now, but have never actually met in real life. All our prior interactions had been though my blog, email, Facebook and Farm Town, plus a couple of cards via snail mail. Sometimes when you meet someone in real life after a long online friendship, you’re surprised by how different they are from what you expected. Not this time. Grace was exactly what I expected. I was happy about that.
 Name That Sheep My Dad and Merle came to visit from Montreal last night, and we went for dinner at Mexicali Rosa’s in the Glebe. We had a very pleasant evening, and they brought me this fabulous sheep that they found in Florida. She doesn’t have a name yet; suggestions are welcome.
Here’s the Sheep with No Name grazing in the Garden of Hope.
Posted by zoom! on May 19, 2009, at 3:58 pm |
Wednesday I get started on the diagnostic imaging. At 7:30 in the morning they’re going to do an abdominal ultrasound to see if there’s any spread of the cancer to my liver. After that, they’ll do a chest x-ray to see if there’s any cancer in my lungs.
On Thursday morning I go to the hospital twice. First thing in the morning, they’ll give me an injection and then I’ll leave. I’ll return at noon for the bone scan to see if there’s any cancer in my skeleton.
After that, the only pre-surgical imaging required is the MRI of my breasts, which hasn’t been scheduled yet. But I do have my actual mammogram films in my filing cabinet. If I wanted to, I could post them right here on my blog, so we could all look at the insides of my squished breasts. (Don’t worry – I won’t.)
I know none of these tests will hurt, but psychologically they creep me out. I want to get the tests over with so I can heave that big old sigh of relief when they all come back negative. But the idea of going looking for more trouble? It’s tempting the fates, and the fates haven’t been exactly benevolent towards me this year.
It’s like going down to the basement to prove to yourself that the ominous noise isn’t coming from demons. But what if it is?? What if there’s a big fat ugly demon rubbing his hands together and chortling gleefully as he waits for me down in the basement? (I’m still working on that Ghandiesque view of cancer, by the way. There are wrinkles.)
Posted by zoom! on May 18, 2009, at 11:10 am |
A while back I was checking out the career resources section at Chapters. I was startled by the number of books with aggressive titles. Good is Not Enough. Bullet-Proof Your Job. Knock ’em Dead. Power Talk: Using Language to Build Authority and Influence.
It struck me that the language of job-hunting is overtly masculine, which might perhaps explain why it’s called job hunting, rather than job gathering.
(The books aimed at women, by the way, were just as bad, only different. Play Like a Man, Win Like a Woman: What men know about success that women need to learn. The Girl’s Guide to Being a Boss (Without Being a Bitch): Valuable Lessons, Smart Suggestions, and True Stories for Succeeding as the Chick-in-Charge.)
At the time I was feeling a little deflated at being laid off, and I didn’t see myself coming back with both guns blazing. I saw myself coming back gently, after a period of reflection and self-assessment, and perhaps setting out on an entirely different career path.
I’m reminded of this now because the language of cancer also strikes me as aggressive and masculine. It’s all about battles and wars and fighting and killing.
About 20 years ago I had a family of warts living on the ball of my left foot. The doctor burned them with dry ice. They retreated temporarily, but came back. She repeated this treatment numerous times over several months, but they kept coming back. Then she tried burning half-way through my foot with a flesh-burning machine. She said there was no way they could come back after that. The foot healed and the family of warts moved right back in. The doctor gave up and referred me to a dermatologist.
The dermatologist said “What we’re going to do is chemically shock your immune system.”
I liked my immune system just the way it was. It kept me healthy while everybody around me was getting colds and flus. Shocking it, in my opinion (which was based purely on gut feelings) could go either way – my immune system might get even better, or it might get worse.
I declined the treatment.
I said “I will learn to live with the warts.”
And that’s exactly what I did. I called off the war on warts. I accepted them.
Two weeks later, all the warts disappeared. They’ve never come back.
I’m not saying I’ll accept the cancer and it’ll miraculously go away. I’m just not sure I want to wage war on cancer.
We use war language for many social problems these days. Drugs. Terrorism. Poverty. These are problems and they are symptoms of other problems. You can’t fix them with a battering ram. You can’t fix them without first understanding them. By framing them in the language of war, we’re making our problems worse and dooming ourselves to endless fighting without solutions.
I haven’t finished thinking this through as it pertains to cancer. My thoughts are still evolving. But I think I want to focus my energy and imagery on getting healthy rather than on defeating the enemy. You know what I mean?
Posted by zoom! on May 16, 2009, at 9:24 pm |
GC and I dropped into my local community centre on Thursday evening for Meet the Chief night.
But there was no sign of Police Chief Vern White.
“Where’s the Chief?” I asked my city councilor, Maria McRae, who organized the event.
She explained that the Chief couldn’t make it, but he’d sent his Inspector in his place. Perhaps I’d like to meet the Inspector?
Well, you know, I’m sure the Inspector’s an interesting person too, and under other circumstances I’d love to meet him, but this event was actually called Meet the Chief night and I had my heart set on meeting the Chief.
There wasn’t much reason to stick around, since the Chief wasn’t there and I didn’t feel like meeting the Inspector or the bylaw officers or anybody else who was there promoting safety in the community. I asked various official looking types what was on the agenda for the 2-hour meeting, but nobody seemed to know. Judging from the information booths, it looked like there wouldn’t be anything controversial or meaty going on, so we left.
It turned out the Chief really did have more important things to do than go to a Meet the Chief night. We found out the next day that he had been meeting with the taxi drivers, who were understandably upset about that off-duty racist thug.
That story made my blood run cold. If it happened the way the victim and the witnesses say it happened, Ottawa’s police force has some serious problems that require serious fixing.
This off-duty thug beat someone up while hurling racist insults, and then flaunted his authority and his badge, confident that he was above the law because he was a cop. And the responding officers treated him like a cop, not like a criminal, when he showed them his ID.
This suggests there’s a systemic problem in the force, and one that will not be easily remedied. The longer it’s permitted to go on, the harder it will be to eradicate, because it becomes entrenched as part of the force’s culture. Corruption is contagious.
Every time a cop gets caught abusing his power and doing something illegal or disturbing, the force closes in protectively around its own. We’re encouraged to think of it as an isolated incident rather than a systemic problem. We hear that a thorough investigation will be carried out, and we should be patient because a thorough investigation takes months, but we’re assured that justice will prevail in the end.
I don’t buy it anymore. I think they take months just to give public outrage enough time to die down and fizzle out. ‘Thorough’ investigations often end up going nowhere. If it comes down to one person’s word against another, the benefit of the doubt goes to the cop. Witnesses, understandably, aren’t comfortable coming forward against cops. Cops aren’t comfortable coming forward against other cops. So unless a case is absolutely rock-solid against a cop, and there are plenty of credible witnesses, bad cops seem to get away with atrocious and illegal behaviour. (And sometimes even with a rock-solid case and credible witnesses and even video evidence, cops get away with committing unspeakable acts. Remember Rodney King?)
The Chief’s got his work cut out for him. I don’t think this is just about damage control, or optics, or the force’s image. I suspect it runs much deeper than that.
Posted by zoom! on May 15, 2009, at 10:52 am |
Remember Kimberly Malysheff, the charming Sock Monkey Woman? Well she’s back, and this time it’s not about sock monkeys.
Kimberly and I share a love for tintypes, which are photographs on metal and which were all the rage back in the late 1800s and early 1900s. Tintypes replaced daguerreotypes and ambrotypes, and made photography more accessible to the masses. They were cheaper and less fragile, so people started to lighten up a bit for photography. Sure, there are still lots of stern looking people in my antique tintype collection, but there are also touches of humour and more casual clothing, expressions and poses.
None of these photographic forms have completely died out. There are still working daguerreotypists and ambrotypists out there. Mike Robinson offers daguerreotype workshops in Toronto. And Kimberly, the Sock Monkey Woman, is offering a tintype workshop this summer right here in Ottawa!
 Invitation She’s also got an exhibit of her own tintype art happening at the Manx (370 Elgin Street) from May 11 to June 7. Her vernissage is this Sunday May 17 from 5pm to 7pm.
Posted by zoom! on May 14, 2009, at 2:14 pm |
This morning my phenomenal primary support team – Duncan, GC and Donna – gathered at my place for coffee, and then we headed off to meet with the surgeon, the resident, the intern, the home support nurse (who is a breast cancer survivor herself) and the social worker. (Duncan opted to stay behind and keep the couch warm for me.)
I had been simultaneously looking forward to and dreading this meeting. I wanted to get the show on the road, but I was scared of getting even worse news than I already had.
We were in meetings for about two hours. Processing that much information was exhausting – towards the end, I was having trouble absorbing anything anybody was saying.
But I’m hugely relieved to be able to say that things look encouraging so far. The lump appears to be small – 9mm. As far as they can tell, it has not spread. They think they caught it early enough.
I’ll be having an MRI of my breasts sometime soon. It’ll be followed by a bone scan, a liver scan and a chest x-ray, to make sure the cancer hasn’t spread. If all these things come back cancer-free, next month I’ll have surgery to remove the lump and, at the same time, a sentinel node biopsy to make sure it’s not in the lymph nodes. This will be followed by radiation every weekday for five weeks. After all that, there will be a 5-10% chance of the cancer coming back.
This plan is of course subject to change if the cancer has spread. My biggest fear over the past week is that the pain and tingling I’ve been experiencing in my back and legs for the past few months is because the cancer has spread to my bones and there’s a tumour on my spine. The surgeon says it’s possible, but she doesn’t think this is what’s happening. The bone scan will tell us for sure, but at this point, I’m cautiously optimistic that I’m going to be okay.
I’m not out of the woods yet, but I feel so much better than I did. SO much better. Now I’m going to go curl up with Duncan on the couch, listen to my creative visualization CD, and have a snooze.
Posted by zoom! on May 12, 2009, at 10:54 am |
I’ve blogged before about my front walkway garden and its invasive goutweed. In fact, it’s not a garden at all, it’s a goutweed patch with a piece of landscaping fabric over it in an effort to stifle the goutweed and keep it from taking over the world.
Last summer I felt embarrassed about what my front garden was saying about me to the neighbourhood: that the person who lives in this house has no pride and is too lazy to try and make her place look nice. I promised myself that this year I’d make an effort to make things look better out there.
Well this year I’m looking at my front garden and it’s reminding me of cancer. It’s not entirely the goutweed’s fault, of course: a lot of things are reminding me of cancer. But goutweed’s an invasive weed and I have invasive ductal carcinoma, and the goutweed is spreading and I’m afraid the cancer is spreading, and, well, let’s face it, there are similarities.
I need to see something more hopeful out there in my front garden. I don’t think I can entirely get rid of the goutweed, but maybe I can keep it under control by weeding it more often. And maybe I can plant some other stuff that will survive in a goutweed patch.
I know some of you are avid and knowledgeable gardeners, and I’m hoping you might have some good suggestions for me about what to plant. It’s a north-facing walkway garden and it tends to get the late afternoon sun only.
Thank you!
Posted by zoom! on May 11, 2009, at 11:12 am |
Like Laurie Kingston says, it’s not ALL about breast cancer. So I’m going to try to think about – and blog about – other things too, as if everything were not profoundly different now.
You know that wacky bright yellow condemned house on Gladstone Avenue? I love that house. It’s got its own movie now! Go yellow house, go!
Also, I’m a little overdue on reporting this, so you may already have seen it, but a short film about Ottawa’s favourite street art, the Swap Box was released last month. Go Swap Box go!
I went to a Mothers Day storytelling event at Dean and Ruth’s house yesterday with my mom and some of her friends. The storyteller – Ann from Lennoxville – told stories about her ambivalence and experiences raising her twin boys. I enjoyed it very much. Storytelling is kind of like blogging out loud.
Later my son took me out for dinner at the Royal Oak, and we played a trivia game there. We sucked. The questions were so long and convoluted and weirdly worded, by the time we got to the end of a question we couldn’t remember the beginning of it. Kind of like a recipe that says ‘heat until boiling less two minutes after adding thyme.’ (But we did have fun mocking the questions afterwards.)
Remember that mixed media art show where I bought the newspaper dress? Well the show ended and I’m now in possession of the dress. It’s called Fashion is Fleeting and it was created by local artist Patricia Gordon. Check it out. (As always, you can click on the images to see bigger versions of them.)
 'Fashion is Fleeting' by Patricia Gordon  Close-Up 
And that’s about it for now. I just got my record of employment last week, so I’m heading downtown to register for Employment Insurance now. Maybe I’ll stop in and see how Mayor Larry’s trial is proceeding while I’m down there.
Posted by zoom! on May 10, 2009, at 9:39 am |
The hardest part is the fear. Since I don’t know the magnitude of the problem yet – ie, what stage it is, and whether the cancer has spread beyond the original tumour – I sometimes feel very much at the mercy of my worst fears.
I was lying in bed this morning thinking about the fear. It’s unlike any fear I’ve ever known or imagined. The closest comparison I can make is that it’s like the fear you feel while watching a horror movie, and the girl hears a noise in the attic and she starts creeping up the attic stairs while creepy music plays in the background. And you’re sitting on the edge of your seat, your heart in your throat, your hands half-covering your eyes because you can’t bear to look but you can’t bear not to look, and in your head you’re pleading with her not to go up there, just turn around, and run, run, run away!
It’s sort of like that, except it’s ME creeping up the stairs and it’s not all slow like in a horror movie, and there’s nowhere to run and hide. And it turns out that Google is the attic. So help me god, I am never going to google breast cancer again. It’s like opening the floodgates of hell.
Let me tell you about the first few hours after I found out.
After the biopsy, I was told that my results would be sent to my doctor at the Centretown Community Health Centre within seven to 10 days, and she would be the one to let me know. On Day 8, I called the nurse (at XUP’s urging) and asked her to see if she could make things happen a little faster. At 2:00 she called me back and said they had some results and my doctor would like me to come in for 3:00.
I pretty much knew then that it was cancer, because they don’t make an appointment to tell you it’s not cancer. But there was still a possibility that it wasn’t cancer…maybe it was something else that should be dealt with, and they wanted to explain it. But I was 99% sure it was cancer.
GC picked me up and drove me there. As soon as I saw my doctor’s face, 99% went to 100%.
“How are you?” she asked. The last time I’d seen her was just a few weeks ago about my back.
“My back’s much better,” I said. “How’s my front?”
“Sometimes I hate my job,” she said.
I was a brave little soldier. I felt inordinately proud of the fact that I didn’t cry. I left, retrieved GC from the waiting room, and told him it was cancer. We walked over to the Second Cup at Bank and Somerset and got cranberry-apple muffins, and then went back to my place.
By this time it was 4:00 and our volunteer shift at the Shepherds was starting at 5:00. I decided not to go, since I wanted to tell my son and a few other people. We decided GC should go, since we didn’t want to leave Shepherds doubly short-staffed. So off he went.
Okay. So here I am, one hour after finding out I have cancer, and I’m alone. The first thing I did was hit Google up for more information. And Google, as always, obliged. Within five minutes I was backing away from the computer, absolutely panicked by what I’d just read, sobbing and completely at a loss as to what to do next. Then I returned to the computer and shut down that window.
Behind that window was another window with my blog stats on it. The very first item on the list was a post I’d written about running in a breast cancer race a couple of years ago. Someone had just visited that page! So I clicked on the link and re-read the post and studied the picture, and then I knew what to do next. Call Lori.
So I composed myself and looked up her number and called her. I’m not much of a phone person at the best of times, and for some reason I was very surprised when she answered.
I couldn’t talk. I just burst into tears. I sobbed and sobbed and sobbed. Fortunately Lori has call display so she at least knew who was sobbing on the other end of the line, even if she didn’t know why. So she just kindly and patiently tried to guess what was wrong while I sobbed. And finally I pulled myself together enough to tell her I’d just been diagnosed with breast cancer.
She was absolutely the right person to call. She picked me up and dusted me off and gave me the perfect combination of empathy, moral support, optimism, realism, book recommendations, good starter information and helpful tips. (“Whatever you do,” she said, “Don’t Google breast cancer.”)
She also told me that when the picture in that post was taken in 2006, she was the only one of the twelve women in it to have ever been diagnosed with breast cancer. I’m the fourth. We’re all still alive.
By the time we got off the phone an hour later, I was feeling infinitely better and my son was knocking on my door.
Posted by zoom! on May 8, 2009, at 4:13 pm |
GC and I are having a tough time trying to decide what to do tonight, because there are soooo many interesting things happening around town. We’re divvying up the following events amongst ourselves and our clones. I thought I’d share them with you too, in case you’re looking for something to do tonight. (I’ve also tacked one on at the end for Sunday.)
1. Ember Swift’s CD Launch at the Black Sheep Inn in Wakefield, at 9:00 tonight. I’ve never met Ember Swift, but we play a lot of Scramble together on Facebook. She’s an amazing Scramble player, and a fine musician too. Her new CD is billed as “A Folktronica Collection – World and Folk meet Electronic and Groove.”
2. Ottawa blogger Laurie Kingston is launching her book Not Done Yet: Living Through Breast Cancer. 7:00-9:00 pm, First Avenue Day Care, 73 First Avenue. Go Laurie!
3. Stafford Studios Annual Open House and Reception, 7:00-9:00 pm. This is an artists’ collective of nine professional artists. Nepean Creative Arts Centre, 35 Stafford Road, Nepean. (The reception is tonight but the open house continues Saturday and Sunday.)
4. Celebrate Barry Doyle at the Elmdale, on what would have been his 42nd birthday. This event also features a silent art auction, including a piece by one of my favourite artists, Meaghan Haughian! (Hat tip to Miss Vicky.)
Those events are all happening tonight. Here’s a heads-up for Sunday: The Experimental Farm is hosting a Rare and Unusual Plant Sale.
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