Month: February 2015

Fifty Shades of Green, Purple, and Yellow

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My adventures in mammograms

I had a mammogram today. I didn’t feel anxious about it all, to be honest. Which is actually a bit odd, because I have always figured breast cancer is probably the way I will end up going down. My mother died at thirty seven of the disease.

There’s always been a subversive undercurrent of “your-mom-got-it-you’re-probably-going-to-get-it” in my life since then. Whether it was relatives warning me that my chances of getting sick were high, or western medicine picking and choosing what one should panic about, it’s just always been there.

I had my first mammogram twelve years ago. I don’t remember worrying about that one either, that is until they called me to tell me they found a pea-sized mass that was going to have to be removed. I laid flat on my back, with a small white towel over my right breast, while my left one was shot through with syringes of Novocain. A big hollow needle micro-osterized the mass, blending up the tissue while simultaneously suctioning it into a hollow tube to be sent to a lab. While I waited for the results, I watched my boob turn many different colors. Day one was a deep purple that gave way to something more lavender by the end of day two. At day four we were into the dull greenish-yellows as my body reabsorbed the blood left behind by the invasion.

Eleanor relishing the joys of motherhood while my brother squirms like an idiot and I pick my nose.

The results came back benign. I still have a small metal piece in my breast. It’s called a target. Surgeons like those so they can hit the spot when they open you up. No one opened me up and no one seemed to care that this little piece of shrapnel was going to be left inside me.

“Do you have children?” The tech’s voice brought me back.
“No,” I said.
“That’s okay,” she told me in a volume that trailed off.

Her response seemed so automatic, instinctive almost, like she was used to women like me being in this room, completely distraught that they weren’t already mothers.

“I’m blissfully barren,” I offered, laughing a little to ease the awkwardness.
She laughed too.

I was being honest. I had never wanted to be a mother.

And then a sudden wave of emotion washed through me. My throat started to throb, and my heart sank for my own mother. She had actually wanted children. She had hoped to raise her two kids. She wanted to live to see us grow. She got none of that.

And somehow, even though I know we aren’t the same person, I often feel like a replacement who is not doing a very good job. A flopsweat imposter. I’ve outlived her; what do I have to really show for it? I feel like there is something more I should have in place by now to prove I deserve the extra time that was taken from her.

I pretended to have something in my eye to try and mask the welling that had come up. I got through a few more questions and then it was time to take the images.

She didn’t ask me to whip out a boob, as I expected, she asked me to take out my left arm. Guess what that does in one of those flappy hospital gowns? That’s right, your boob pops out while you are trying to free up your arm. I love Western sensibilities. We hyper-sexualize almost everything, yet we are so awkward and fearful about real human sexuality. God forbid we just ask a woman to expose her breast during a breast exam.  No, no – be decent! Request she remove her arm.  So I got my boob arm out and we were off.

Most of my mammography took place to the score for Jurassic Park. It was playing on a small boombox off in the corner. It was the really powerful piece of music that played when they first rose over that grassy hill and saw dinosaurs everywhere, eating and enjoying their prehistoric lives. It worked well for me. Made me feel strong and maybe like I could outsmart my catastrophic history as well.

I got my right arm out next and you know what followed. The second round of images involved much more compression and I tried to break up my discomfort with humor.

“This gives a whole new meaning to fifty shades of gray.”
Crickets. Blank look.
“That was an x ray joke. You know, the grayscale of imaging?”
Polite laughter followed as she let me off the hook with, “Ohhh, right. I guess so.”

Apparently my breasts photograph well. One round of images, and I was free to go.

As I wrapped the gown back around myself for the trip across the hallway to the little dressing room where my clothes waited, the technician leaned forward with a concentrated focus on the screens in front of her. I could see my shrapnel in one image, casting solid and black at the top of my breast.

“That target, you’ll have that forever,” she said, glancing at me.
“I know,” I quietly returned as I walked out the door, wishing her a good day.

Bloodletting

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“Bloodletting [or blood-letting] is the withdrawal of blood from a patient to cure or prevent illness and disease. Bloodletting was based on an ancient system of medicine in which blood and other bodily fluid were regarded as “humors” that had to remain in proper balance to maintain health.” – Wikipedia

“We’ve all got both light and dark inside us. What matters is the part we choose to act on. That’s who we really are.” – J.K. Rowling

“Haven’t you ever heard that quote? We’re all everything, Sal – even the shit you’re uncomfortable being. For you, I would guess that’s being even a little bit gay.”

I heard a snort on the other end of the phone just before my brother shot back, “Shut up, daniella. I’m not gay.”

I dug in, “Yes you are; I can prove it. You have those grey cotton short shorts you love to wear despite the fact that they still don’t come in men’s sizes, and you have a pretty extensive Mariah Carey album collection.”

Silence drew out as I waited for the barrage of protest. “Daniella. This conversation is over.”

And it was. We went on to a brief exchange over some mundane bullshit, and then we both hung up and went about with the remains of our day.

I live for giving my brother shit, but what I had thrown out was proof of nothing. Technically, he was right. My answer didn’t shine a light on anything real about him that could be considered to be of a homosexual nature/origin. I didn’t have the courage for that conversation.

But what about me? I started to wonder how things would have gone if Sal had started poking around the dark recesses of parts of myself I’m uncomfortable with. What lives in me that I haven’t changed, can’t accept, and still feel shame about.

Racism.

On the surface, it would be easy for me to make a dismissal of that term as a personal character trait. I’m a pretty socially liberal person, I have zero white robes and pointed hoods hanging in my closet, I don’t think people of different races are below me, and I consider diversity to be one of the great gifts in this world. So I’m not a racist, right?! (Yay!)

But wait a minute, there was last Friday.

Love your phlebotomist as you love yourself.

I had to have some blood drawn and had made an appointment at a diagnostics lab I have never been to before. I stepped in just before my appointment time and looked across the waiting room to the front desk. Three petite, brown skinned women in pastel hued scrubs moved about helping people. One of these women was speaking fairly loudly into the phone, and I realized I had trouble understanding what she was saying through the thickness of her accent. The other two were working at computers with paperwork, inputting patient information.

I signed in on the counter’s clipboard and took a seat. After a few minutes, one of the women who had been working at a computer called my name. I hesitated before answering. Had she actually called my name? A few minutes before, I had answered to the name called, thinking I had heard the tones and syllables of my own. I hadn’t. It was someone else who has been called, and I felt like a bit of a heel.

I still hadn’t said anything, and now she turned to look at me. I smiled and stood up to walk towards her. We politely exchanged the cursory dialogue required to get my information inputted into they lab’s system. As I leaned against the counter looking slightly down upon her where she sat, I was relieved I had understood enough to get through that. But even so, I couldn’t shake a feeling of unease I had picked up very soon after arriving.

I was instructed to go through the door to my right and wait in area one. I checked myself at that door. Why was I feeling so nervous and scared? Normally, I would chalk it up to my rabid hypochondria and fear of public humiliation, (You know, like when you jerk away from the needle and dislodge the vial, spurt blood everywhere, slip and fall in that puddle of blood trying to run out of the place, conk your head on the floor, fall into a coma, and die two weeks later. That sort of public humiliation.) but I could feel that wasn’t it. Just a few weeks before, I had had blood drawn, so I wasn’t nearly as worried about this appointment as I had been when I went to the earlier one.

It was something else entirely this time. I had been ratcheting up to higher and higher levels of discomfort as soon as these women became known to me as immigrants to this country. But I don’t have a problem with Asian people, and I don’t generally have an issue with immigration, so why would that bother me.

I’ll tell you why: deep down in some little shitty dark nougatty bit of my core, I was worried – I held an unexamined belief – that these women possibly weren’t trained to do their job well because they weren’t born in this country. My prejudice made me feel like I was in danger, and I was scared. Racism.

As I passed through that doorway, quickly fleshing this out in my mind, I felt like an asshole, but that was the truth of it.

And that was also the end of it. Bringing awareness to where my head was at wasn’t easy, but it had calmed me down, and helped me to realize how full of shit I was. I was also relieved that the bullshit of my fears was a much more real thing to contend with than the chances of the negative outcome I was so afraid of before.

The woman who had been working with me at the computer was also the woman who drew my blood. She had come in and sat down next to me just a few minutes after instructing me where to go. With hands cloaked in deep purple latex gloves, she adeptly found a vein in my right arm, inserted the needle, and filled the necessary vials. I don’t think the whole thing could have gone any better – or faster.

As I held the tiny gauze wad to the fold of my arm, she gently taped it in place and advised me to leave it on for at least thirty minutes and avoid lifting anything heavy for the rest of the day. We exchanged smiles, goodbyes, and good weekend wishes before I turned to leave. I hadn’t had any trouble understanding her at all. I left feeling like maybe I understood myself a little better too.

Velvet Elvis

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Anne and D-asaurus
Anne and me just fourteen short years later, making soup.


Trigger warning: Bad shoes, an even worse jacket, and a velvety body bag.

It was almost 3:00 in the morning when I opened the door. Two men, both smiling at me under the porch light. “Hello, we’re here for John” was all they said in explanation. I got a better look at these guys as they stepped into my living room. They both were dressed in black, and the one with the ponytail had on a mint condition, Members Only jacket. The other guy had black sneakers that looked to be one size too big, the material buckling around the velcro straps from being pulled so tight. I motioned to the first door across the hall and they left the room.

Anne and I plopped down on the couch exhausted. We had been sitting with John all night. He slipped out of consciousness in the late afternoon. His hospice nurse had me doing check-in calls every two hours so she could adjust his medicines if needed. He had passed just before midnight. Cremation had been his request, and the Neptune Society was here to do that.

I caught sight of a pack of cigarettes in one of the front pockets on Members Only guy when he walked back through the room to the front door. “We need a few things from the vehicle” I nodded as he stepped out, and looked at Anne again. We were both numb – and tired. I felt like I had been crying for seven months, and I knew I was going to be back at it soon enough. For now, rest; helping someone die was a hell of a lot of work.

John had mumbled all afternoon, as if talking in his sleep. By early evening he was only breathing. We would sit and watch him as we held his hands. It was a deep heavy breathing that seemed to involve much more exhaling than inhaling. When his hands got cold, and his body began to sweat, we told him stories, let him know it was okay for him to go if he needed to. We were offering anything we thought might make his transition easier. I even told him I would be okay, which felt like a complete, but necessary lie. Just before midnight, even the breathing stopped and he was gone.

The room fell silent, and I was the one leaving, floating, traveling over all the memories John and I had made. How we met at the college, and the awkward start to our dating. I remembered driving around in his convertible that Spring, blasting Beethoven, completely thrilled with ourselves. I saw our garden and our pond, with the hand picked, ten-cent goldfish, now fat and swirling the top of the water, checking for food. I heard our ducks in the yard, rooting for bugs in the soft dirt around the sapling Camphor tree we planted.

And then it was just John. His smile, his laugh, his jokes about my cooking, his reminder before this moment, that nothing that happens after his death could change anything that we had before.

He was in our bedroom changing his clothes the first time he told me that. I could never get over how skeletal he had become with this cancer. He was always trying to eat, and it never seemed to help. As he changed his shirt that afternoon, I couldn’t help but think it still looked like it was on the hanger. I didn’t want to hear what he had to say, but he insisted, and I gave him my attention. “There is nothing that can change what we have. Even if you got a boyfriend the day after I died, it wouldn’t change anything. It would be nice if he wasn’t better looking than me though, just a thought.”

The last time we ate out, we had just been to see the oncologist. The doctor had just told us that the weekly blood work showed the cancer was no longer responding to the chemotherapy. We sat quietly in a booth at the restaurant down the street, dejected, waiting for food we were going to push around our plates. I was so angry that we weren’t going to have even just a little more time. It had only been a few months for Christ sake! We had been positive, we had done everything they told us we should do. Had all the tests, took all the medicines, sat together for every chemo session, doing Readers’ Digest word puzzles while the IV meted our time together, in it’s succession of drips. I was considering a grouping of pictures, as I stared at the wall over John’s right shoulder. Who did these people belong to? Where did they come from? How did they come to hang on this wall in the middle of a chain restaurant dining room? John’s voice snapped me back to our table. “I think taking care of someone who is dying, is harder than the actual dying. Thank you sweets.”

When Members Only came back in he had a surfer’s grip on a yellow backboard and was carrying a deep red, velvety body bag. I leaned in towards Anne as we watched him join his buddy back in the bedroom, whispering, “Dude, did you see that body bag? All velvety? It’s fit for Elvis!” We both stifled our chuckles.

Velcro Sneakers appeared and asked if we wanted to say anything else to John before they zipped him up. Saying goodbye to my husband in a body bag, even if it was a Velvet Elvis body bag, was a little more than I could do. I politely declined and they both returned a few moments later with John, ready to leave.

I opened the front door for them and then Anne and I stood there watching. They had a whole flight of stairs to navigate. There were three steps down to the landing, where the stairs made a 90 degree angle and went the rest of the way to the first floor of the duplex we owned. If they miscalculated the landing, John could slide of the end of the board and arc on to the front lawn below. Crumpling the majesty of the velvet Elvis bag.

That’s when Velcro Sneakers caught the edge of the step and John lurched towards Members Only. Velcro Sneakers quickly regained his balance, and they both nervously smiled up at us as if to say, No worries – we weren’t really going to drop him.

“Did you see that? Near Velvet Elvis disaster!” We both laughed, and it felt good.

Meditating in the Face of Death

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I almost died outside today. I was sitting in a chair, with my eyes closed, when the dried leaves about five feet to my left started rustling. I was only about thirty seconds in to my fifteen minute commitment of sitting with my eyes closed when I realized I was in trouble.

Now normally these little sits are agonizing enough all on their own. I never get where I’m supposed to be. I don’t transcend, I never squelch the brain chatter, I hardly even manage to sit still. So you can see where I hardly need impending doom heaped on the pile.

But it was. If my eyes had been open, I’d mostly probably have been staring death right in the face.

I started to wonder what was going to kill me. Obviously it was a very large animal that was creeping towards me; using my lack of movement and eye contact as a green light to devour me, but what kind of large animal?

I narrowed down the possibilities to bear, mountain lion, and Sasquatch.

The leaves even closer to me rustled and I knew it was almost time. Soon my jugular would be gnawed out and I would bleed to death in my little plastic patio chair.

Life’s biggest questions raced through my mind. Had I lived a good life? Had I made a positive difference in the world during my forty years upon it? Did I have clean panties on? But there was no time. I had to settle up. Make peace.

My timer went off. I hastily completed the closing ceremonies on my meditation and flew open my eyes. I jerked my head to the side to meet my fate. I was ready. Please let it be swift.

And there it was, menacing, waiting for me.

image

I will never know why it didn’t finish me off when it had the chance, but I’m grateful. I will take my new lease on life out into the world and do better.