So, it turns out that as far as cancer is concerned, I am not a mutant. No genes that make me necessarily predisposed to get this again. Though I will say that the genetic counselor made sure to let me know it is entirely possible that I am a cancer mutant, and that my particular mutation is as yet undiscovered. That’s a buzzkill, counselor! Apparently, if she were me, she would get a double mastectomy and have her ovaries removed as well. I will cling to as many of my lady bits as I can keep until they truly must go! That’s just how I intend to handle this.

In case you are wondering, I have drastically altered my diet and have begun taking supplements- some recommended by my probable soon to be surgeon, and some recommended by the lovely and talented TCM physician at Thank You Mama (to be fair, the surgeon is also lovely). I am also anemic and have to get that figured out and taken care of.

This morning’s appointment with the doctor was all about lumpectomy vs. mastectomy. No final final decision but I have to make it soon. Next up is to make an appointment to get blood work done- must check my iron again and look at my vitamin D levels with my GP. Then a consultation appointment must be made with a plastic surgeon. That is a sentence that I never thought I’d write! Then appointments for a second opinion, even though I do really like my probable lovely surgeon. I think it’s the right thing to do. This Friday I’ll be at Thank You Mama with my full test results to work up a complete game plan for the things that I can control (like what goes into my big ‘ol piehole).

I’m tired, but I’m trying to stay funny. Every once in a while I think about something that I need to teach the husband to do for the kids, just in case. You know, the mom things that I do. The stuff that just gets done and no one will notice until there is no one there to do it. And then I think: “Fuck it, just let him figure it out!” Ha! Just kidding. Then I push it out of my brain and try to go back to focusing on killing cancer, instead of focusing on the chance that it will kill me.

Tags: ends & odd, health & medical, square one by Van McCourt by Van McO
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I’m the type of person who works things out in writing. I make notes of my thoughts. I make lists. Facebook is the best, I swear status updates are like a combination of therapy and a vehicle for my need to feel like I’m entertaining people. If I didn’t write it down, or put it into font, did it happen? Maybe not.

Recently, though, I’ve been struggling with something that I haven’t shared online, for which I’ve taken no notes, for which I’ve just today started my first list of things to do. It’s been going on since September, really, and I’m just making my first list. Pretty easy to look back at the last few months and realize that I didn’t want it to be happening, but it turns out that I totally have cancer.

I did tell just a few people, family and some friends. My mother I told in person, because, you know, she’s my mom. My husband made some phone calls. I did send a few text messages. In regular life, I don’t do phone calls unless it’s an emergency. Texting is my favorite, but this time I would have rather not been communicating at all. I only told these people because I felt the need to explain why I’ve been avoiding everything and everyone.

The thing is, if you ask me how I’m doing, I will cry. If you ask me if my kids know (they don’t), I will cry. If you tell me that you care about me and will help out with whatever I need (I don’t know what I need), I will cry. I don’t want to cry in public.

I can talk about kids, the crummy school system, our new kitten, this hot and dry winter, the new Netflix series (or The Walking Dead, or GOT), TED talks, and podcasts, but not politics (not this year), and not cancer.

Initially, when we told a few people, it was a relief to not have to pretend anymore that everything is swell and that my new business isn’t quite taking off because I’m just moving slowly (I am moving slowly but I’m not taking my time, it’s totally cancer’s fault and apparently I’m also super anemic). Then I started to have to field phone calls and explain things that I don’t yet understand. I started to have to talk about treatments that I haven’t decided on, and listen to people cry as they tried to deal with things themselves. Opinions are beginning to arrive as well. I imagine that will only increase, and dramatically.

So, maybe this is as good a way as any, or even the best way for me, to share this with people. Hopefully they won’t call me crying, or ask me what I need (seriously, I don’t know. I could use a stiff drink but I read that it’s a no-no.) Hopefully they will still invite me out for stuff, and maybe won’t give me “the face” too much (the one that says: “I’m totally thinking sad thoughts about your cancer right now, I wish you would tell me how I can help.”) If you need to make the face, maybe make it toward my back as I walk to the bathroom.

If you want to know how I’m doing, physically, I have invasive ductal carcinoma in my right breast. It is stage 2 at 2.1 centimeters, though the cut off for stage 1 is 2 centimeters and my doctor initially was referring to it as “stage one, but kind of stage 2.” There is apparently no stage 1.5. The cancer is estrogen and progesterone positive, but HER2 negative. I hear that you really want to be HER2 negative, but when I met with an oncologist and made a joke about having “the good breast cancer” he did not laugh. I guess it’s not that good.

If you want to continue to know how I’m doing, physically or otherwise, you can check back here. I’ll need to keep working out my thoughts, and if you feel like you need to cry about it, you can get it over with before we hang out. Ha! (I do want to hang out, it turns out that people who close themselves off socially when they discover they have cancer tend to have a greater risk of death. My kids need me to live, so text me when you have time for tea. Hey! Maybe that’s what I need.)

Tags: ends & odd, health & medical, square one by Van McCourt by Van McO
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10. Hospital Waste Grab Bag

9. Hello Kitty Tiki Torches

8. Miss Piggy’s Big Bag O’ Pork

7. Easy Bake Microwave

6. Baby’s First Choking Hazard

5. Lil’ Devil: The Satan-Worshipping Game

4. The José Canseco Finger Trimmer

3. The ISIS Indoctrination Reader

2. Toddlers & Tiaras‘ Official You’re Never Too Young To Twerk Outfit

1. Mr. Wizard’s Live-Culture Ebola Kit

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, games, health & medical by Bob Sullivan
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10. Dirt-Nap Helper

9. One Ticket to Paradise

8. Help Making It Across

7. Subterranean Horizontal Retirement Village

6. Motel Deep 6

5. AARP AARGH!!

4. Club Mud

3. One-Way Travel Arrangement

2. Stairway to Heaven

1. The Hokey Croaky
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, health & medical by Bob Sullivan
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Being pregnant, in my experience, is kinda like being part of an extremely trippy science experiment for the better part of a year. Suddenly, the body with which you have been intimately familiar for thirty-some-odd years changes drastically, turning you into a pod person for an ever-growing alien life form. It’s terrifying. There is a lot of poking and prodding, and I’m not just talking about what happens in the doctor’s office. I’m getting advice bombs lobbed at me from all angles, usually from people I don’t know all that well. I love talking to friends and family about every aspect of my pregnancy but the comments and questions I get from co-workers or strangers on the train have ranged from mildly odd to just plain uncomfortable. Here are some of the many things I will NOT miss hearing once my baby is born. [Read more →]

Tags: diatribes, family & parenting, health & medical by Meg Boyle
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Recently I have been feeling slightly long in the tooth. It was the death of Mrs. Thatcher that did it. Watching the street parties on TV, I couldn’t help but notice how very young the revelers were: most of those idiots had not been born when she stepped down from office. And yet I remembered her resignation as if it were yesterday. Suddenly I realized that I was of a different era, that I was now in the same position as those bores who were always banging on about Woodstock when I was a teenager.

And if Mrs. Thatcher’s resignation is increasingly “ancient history,” then that means some of my other memories must be positively Jurassic. Here, the pop culture index is most telling. 1960s rockers like Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney have always seemed “old” to me, but now even the members of rubbish New Romantic bands from the 1980s are closing in on their pensions. Simon Le Bon will turn 55 later this month, for example. His song “The Reflex” is older now than Elvis Presley’s  [Read more →]

Tags: getting older, health & medical by Daniel Kalder
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10. You can curl up on the couch and catch up on your “stories”

9. No one will come near you, so you’re much less likely to catch someone else’s cold

8. With a high enough fever, Adam Sandler actually starts seeming funny again

7. You can sneeze on everybody you hate

6. When members of the opposite sex avoid you like the plague, you have an excuse

5. It’s nice to be able to call into work sick and actually sound sick for a change

4. If you’re a misanthrope, problem solved

3. You can give pet names to your parasites

2. You can pound back a pitcherful of NyQuil

1. You like it when people say you’re “hot,” even if they’re only feeling your forehead
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, health & medical by Bob Sullivan
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Two months ago I was told by my doctor that I would never be able to have children.

But let me back up a little. Nine years ago I married the love of my life. When we first got married I thought that in a few short years we would have a house full of kids… rambunctious, adorable, smart-ass little kids just like their parents. I was wrong. After 4 years of fertility drugs, acupuncture, surgery, herbal medicine, praying, begging, and pleading, my doctor called me in June and told me that I had to give up and go on with the rest of my life. It was not going to happen.

[Read more →]

Tags: family & parenting, health & medical by Jessica Alfreds
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(Originally posted at TheDefeatists.typepad.com)

When I consider how my light is spent
Ere half my days in this dark world and wide,
And that one Talent which is death to hide
Lodged with me useless, though my soul more bent
To serve therewith my Maker, and present
My true account, lest He returning chide,
“Doth God exact day-labour, light denied?”
I fondly ask. But Patience, to prevent
That murmur, soon replies, “God doth not need
Either man’s work or his own gifts. Who best
Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best. His state
Is kingly: thousands at his bidding speed,
And post o’er land and ocean without rest;
They also serve who only stand and wait.

John Milton, “On His Blindness”

It’s been an odd summer at Defeatist Central. In the last few years, we’d have gone crazy with lots of stuff about how horrible the politicians, economy and so on have become. However, not unlike a lot of other bloggers, we’ve become strangely quiet. Is it because, as in the case of Mr. Fun, we are frustrated because once you go Pek you can’t go back and no Pony has arrived? Perhaps because of the arrival of Defeatist Babies while we mourn the departure of beloved Defeatist Pets? Is it perhaps because of more mundane concerns? Or, maybe greater concerns? Who knows what ennui and disinterest lurk in the hearts of men? Well, besides Yeats, of course….but I quote him often enough.

For me, it’s been an odd time. Mrs. AXE came home one day and announced that she wanted to retire from Federal Service because she was old and because she was working for complete assholes. Well, that was fine with me; I did some math and said, OK we’ll be fine. She then went through some totally unnecessary hassles over insurance coverage for some tests, submitted her paperwork, got the tests in early March and retired on the 31^st. That afternoon, we got the diagnosis – colon cancer with fairly large polyps that probably had breeched the walls of the colon. On April 20, they did the surgery. The surgeon said it went very well; on the following Tuesday, I got a call at 10PM saying they were taking her to emergency surgery because of complications; when I got there, she greeted me by crying “Goodbye…” Now, by nature I am not a nurturing type; my response was fairly unemotional and probably helped in this case – “Really? I don’t think so unless you know something I don’t.” The surgery went well – there had been an obstruction and the surgeon took out three feet of small intestine that was gangrenous. To allow everything to heal, he performed a temporary Ileostomy, that is, a procedure to route the small intestine to a sack outside the body. When she was healed, they would reattach the plumbing. In the meantime, she’d start with an oncologist and see if Chemo was the next step.

[Read more →]

Tags: health & medical, money, politics & government by Mike Farrell
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Tags: drugs & alcohol, health & medical, on the law, politics & government by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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Tags: health & medical, on the law, politics & government by Alexander Thorburn Hoffman
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Last night I dreamt of you, Abbie Hoffman peddling your books, I gave five bucks to you, the other kids just gave you dirty looks.

I said “I’m sorry it didn’t work out quite the way you planned.”

You said, “That’s silly boy, the revolution is at
hand.”

And if you got a ten spot brother, I got a dime,
These are desperate,
desperate times.

Last night I dreamt of you, Pepe Lopez strung out on a stage, It don’t even look like you, smiling like sawed-off twenty gauge.
I still remember the
Telecaster down around your knees,
It’s late November and I think I smell tequila on the
breeze.

And if you got the Cuervo honey, I got the lime,
These are desperate,
desperate times.
And if you got the shotgun honey, I got the crime,
These are
desperate, desperate times.–Rhett Miller

I’ve been too busy dealing with family issues to write or think or do anything really coherent of late. [Read more →]

Tags: diatribes, health & medical by Mike Farrell
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10. When you call in sick, it doesn’t involve nearly as much playacting

9. You can get drunk on NyQuil even if you’re underage

8. When members of the opposite sex avoid you like the plague, you can blame the flu

7. You can catch up on your daytime soaps

6. The show “Working It” almost seems kinda funny when you’re delirious with a fever

5. When you’re rude and obnoxious, you have a good excuse

4. You like it when people say you’re hot, even if they’re only feeling your forehead

3. When you call into work, it’s nice to tell the truth for a change

2. You get such a kick, secretly licking the dinner plate of people you hate

1. You can lay around in your jammies all day and not look like a lazy slob
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, health & medical by Bob Sullivan
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Events have disappointed Massachusetts Mitt but not fatally. On the Monday before the Tuesday there were Rep Est douchebot gunslingers out on the airwaves openly speculating that if Romney couldn’t put Santorum away in Michigan!? Well, the muckies would have to entertain a late term abortion, drawing Romney out like a bi-racial bastard and replacing him, Torch-style… with whom? Jeb Bush seemed to be warming up but he did so by taking the contempt and revulsion Romney has for those who think the problem with the nation is excessive socialism, and doubling down. How this could be done, legally or even within existing Party rules is not discussed. As with the government proper, in the penumbras of Leviathan like the Party machinery there is not a disdain for the law, precedent or simple fairness. Rather these are alien concepts; really alinguist exhalations like the moan of a ghost to the bi-partisan, multi-racial and gender mixed claque of face-smilers and back-stabbers. Their enthusiasm for Jeb, the Chris Christie of the Dynastic Bushes, should be enough to cool the ignorant approbation his name and mug commands. But while Romney did NOT put away Rick, neither was he put away himself. It cost him some four times as much to earn his 41% as Santorum expended to get his 38% but what the hell? To Mitt, it’s only money. [Read more →]

Tags: health & medical, money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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From Change we can believe in to It was like that when I got here. It’s not so great a leap, really. Who thought the ocean’s level was rising disastrously in June of 2008? Who believed that Obama’s seeing off the Hillary juggernaut would stop it? No one and no one. We have simply gone from optimistic nonsense to a fatalistic nonsense. Now, instead of a Bright New Tomorrow we are offered a Bleak Repetitive Today.

If you’re willing to put in the work, the idea is that you should be able to raise a family and own a home; not go bankrupt because you got sick, because you’ve got some health insurance that helps you deal with those difficult times; that you can send your kids to college; that you can put some money away for retirement.

Tags: all work, health & medical, money, politics & government by Ken Watson
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Let’s discuss the etymology of fascism. Fasces, to the Romans were a collection of sticks. The word means no more than bundle or sheaf but a particular bundle was relevant to their daily lives. The fasces were carried as a symbol of office by Roman bigwigs and when they walked through the streets or were carried on litters their bodyguards, called lictors, carried fasces to beat a path through the crowd. The city of Rome was supposedly disarmed by law so the fasces were not considered to be weapons except when the central stick in the bundle was a bronze ax. This symbolized MORE power, in effect the right to chop a lesser citizen into bits. The idea was that state power, as held in the fasces, was to be used coercively but lightly. At first. Stubborn resistors would be beaten. And beaten. And then beaten harder. Finally, reluctantly, sadly… the ax would be employed. [Read more →]

Tags: health & medical, politics & government, religion & philosophy by Ken Watson
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Kudos to the city council and mayor of Los Angeles, California for exhibiting rare leadership by mandating that pornographic film actors wear condoms when they make their films within the LA city limits.

With just a few strokes of his pen, the mayor has saved literally dozens of lives, probably. Actually, it’s probably millions of lives, because now not only will the performers in pornographic films be completely protected from uncovered penises, but the people who watch pornographic films will be reminded of how great condoms are, and they will emulate their pornographic film performer heroes and put them on when they engage in their own coitus. [Read more →]

Tags: health & medical, movies by Ricky Sprague
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Rick Perry seems to be adjusting his meds with some success. After sleeping through a couple debates and partying through a couple more his native cunning produced a good, if limited result, assuming the goal was to let some air out of Mitt Romney. Maybe there is real benefit to these bi-weekly debates since there is only ever one or two highlights that make it out into the wider world. The Massachusetts Princeling is wishing he had skipped this one after boldly betting Rick Perry ten thousand dollars that his book says one thing and not another. [Read more →]

Tags: health & medical, politics & government by Ken Watson
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10. While slicing the pumpkin pie, you cut your finger and gravy came out

9. Your belly button, formerly an innie, is now an outie

8. People kept saying, “Happy Thanksgiving, Gov. Christie!”

7. NASA is considering one more mission to photograph the other side of you

6. A policeman came up to you and ordered you to disperse

5. You just woke up from your tryptophan coma

4. You’ve gotten inquiries from the Guinness World Records people

3. Old Country Buffet just issued a lifetime ban

2. Your relatives took a picture of you in your Pilgrim outfit, and it’s still printing

1. You just caught the flesh eating bacteria, and were given 67 years to live
 

Bob Sullivan’s Top Ten Everything appears every Monday.

Tags: Bob Sullivan's top ten everything, health & medical, recipes & food by Bob Sullivan
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The McRib is a miracle sandwich. It’s something delicious that is made from a bunch of seemingly non-delicious ingredients. This apparently bothers some people.

Some people are just never satisfied.

Tags: health & medical, recipes & food by Ricky Sprague
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