Dr Hector and Dr Santiago watch as I take a sip of water to make sure that it
doesn't come out anywhere it's not supposed to. The feeding tube is coming out of my nose,
and there's a drain coming out from the bandages on my neck.

Ah, let me write you all a little something right now, when I'm afraid.

    I read somewhere that injuries swell as a way of providing a cushion around the hurt area, to protect it. I think about that often, because there sometimes seems to be a swelling between me and my feelings. My good ones don't feel exalted, and my bad ones don't feel like they're going to crush my bones.

    About a week ago, Bruno had to go to Guadalajara. I had a day nurse here, and honestly, although I am recovering from surgery, I'm not quite in the "I've fallen and can't get up " category. I can't think of any scenarios where I couldn't have managed if I had been left on my own, which has never had a snowball's chance of happening. I move around pretty well, and although It's against surgeons orders to talk, I can, if necessary, and I have kind, competent neighbors. Bruno had planned to be home by the time the nurse left, but he wasn't, and I shooed her away, certain of my safety. After she left, past her shift's end, grumbling and scowling, I enjoyed my solitude for a few minutes.  And then, I called him. There was no answer, quite right, he was on the highway. But then I started hitting the redial, stabbing the redial, calling, texting, relentless.

       And I started imagining what I would do if he had been kidnapped by narcos. Taken away by immigration. I started envisioning rolling cars, flames. The whole time though, it was as though someone else was doing it...that's what I mean about the swelling between me and the emotions that were driving that crazy scene.Even while I was imagining these horrific scenarios, there was a part of me that was considering what my next step would be, who would I call, where were the necessary papers hidden, as though a tragedy involving my husband was just one more link in a heavy, unhappy chain of events, one foot in front of the other.

    This whole episode lasted about ten minutes, and then the front door banged open and he was home, appalled that I had been left alone. He had bought a new phone, and didn't know how to answer it. Idjit.
   And unless he reads this, he'll never know that it happened.

My feeding tube is out. I was waiting to celebrate that moment from the day I woke up after surgery, certain that I was going to die of thirst in a hospital.  I am no longer chained to the IV pole from which my sustenance dripped, three times a day, three hours each time. But I'm still on a liquid diet.

 With the tube feeding gone, so went the nurses, all 5 of the Lupitas with their various personality quirks,the multicolors of streaks in their hair, their stethoscopes and thermometers and blood pressure machines. I couldn't wait to be free of all that, to be alone.

But it's not working out exactly like I thought it would. The days stretch long. I miss them.
 
In fact, nothing has felt like I thought it was going to. Each baby step forward that I couldn't wait to celebrate as an accomplishment on the way to good health seems to move the football a little farther back.
     I thought;
      When I get out of that hospital bed.When I'm able to walk around. When I can pee on my own. When I'm home.
      All of these, I thought, would make me feel more like the Elliott I was before all this started, but you know what? I'm never going to be her again . I'm going to have new scars and and possibly new disablilities--if my first efforts at trying to get my liquid diet in me are any indication, you will not want to take me out for barbeque. Or even oatmeal. I haven't been allowed to talk yet, so we don't know what that's going to be like, but it won't be the same, and talking is my ...thing.

     At the end of the day, with the swelling around my emotions to "protect them from further injury ( that's my guess,) it all comes down to the same story. At what point would you quit? As my friend Joelle described it, it's like labor...once you're in, you can't exactly back up to the starting line and rethink the plan. So onward we go, come what may.

   My plan, with the support of my husband and family, has been to fight this bitch until one of us yells uncle, and I don't plan on it being me. I don't feel my highs very strongly, or my lows very deeply, and that perhaps is how we are designed to respond in situations like this. I'm in a new phase now. I feed myself ( with the help of about a million caring friends) and Nurse Bruno is in charge of meds and bandages. If you're interested, the meds have to be dissolved in water and then shot into the back of my mouth with a syringe. I've done it with my dogs,  Millie and Pumpkin, no big deal.
     And once again we will figure it out. And continue to move forward. But tonight I'm afraid that this will all be over, and I won't be me.
    But I will be somebody, and I will be here.
 

First stop after the appointment? Starbucks! The tubes are out.
While this may have been my first clue that a period of adjustment
would be required, the symbolism is real. And encouraging!

 

Keeping it Real in Margaritaville

Oh, I have gotten a lot of positive feedback on my naked honesty, my raw vulnerability, and all of that. I'm delighted y'all are enjoying it. I found myself having a little overdose of raw honesty when I was bent over the sink in the bathroom most commonly used by my husband.

If more than an hour has lapsed since the maid left, that sink is not where you want to be face down. I don't understand it...it's not like he runs in there and does a little quick manscaping and then squirts toothpaste around to celebrate, but that is the way it always looks.

 But listen, who am I, Jane Austen? I was the one bent over the sink, pajama pants pulled down to my knees. And because today's nurse was Scatter Brain Lupita  (5 out  of 7 of the day nurses are named Lupita, so we have to give them modifiers, like Hot Lupita and Frosted hair Lupita) I was likely to be there, stuck in that ignominious position, for some time, while she ran back and forth for the gauze she forgot, or the scissors to cut the gauze, or the cream to put on or the.....

Scatter brain Lupita....she has her talents, and a nice mani/pedi makes
 up for myriad of shortcomigs

     I had a a rash..a "superficial skin infection secondary to surgical procedure." When the nurse in charge tried to explain it to me, our language got so screwed up that I believed for a moment that I had been diagnosed with buttock mushrooms. This seemed unlikely,  but it was all I could get out a conversation that included the words " pampas" and  " hongos".  I semi solved the mystery by reading the notes on the tube of cream, which is how I learned that it's possible to walk away from eight hours on a surgery table with an allergic reaction in the form of a fungus. In my case, it occurred in the most unmentionable location. Unmentionable? It's practically unreachable.

  Oh, I know you! You're thinking " ew, fungus, unclean, unclean! " like they were sewing me up with a guitar string in one corner of the dirt floored operating  theatre while a cockfight was going on in another corner and señoritas in off the shoulder blouses sold  long neck bottled beer and tequila shots. Don't be silly.

     I've been through the system now. I've been in the National Health clinic and the nicer hospitals and even,briefly, in one of the nicest. And Mexico seriously has some of the best medicine in the world.

   I've been flying by the seat of my pants through all of this. I've tried hard between curve balls to figure out the best, most efficient and economic way to handle my medical needs in Mexico, but so far the curve balls have been coming in a little too fast. So I've probably made some mistakes along the way. Even so, I don't seem to be able to find a doctor who isn't startlingly professional and up to the minute in his thinking, or one who has anything on his schedule except for me. They are so caring, and so personal that I've fallen in love with every single doctor I've been in front of.  What's more, it came to my attention the other day, that if I needed to call the reception desk at my oncologists, I wouldn't know how....I only have his personal cell phone, which he answers promptly when I call, and makes appointments with me himself. How is that possible?

    For this last surgery, I feel like my hand was heavily guided by, well you call it what you want to. The awful leak in my neck seemed to be worsening on a Sunday morning. It was impossible to drink coffee without the most absurd arrangement of strips of towels and hefty bags, really, it was ludicrous. And it was Sunday. I cannot deal with medical issues on Sunday--the anxiety reduces me to to near hysteria, and not only was it Sunday, it was Sunday before Semana Santa. (Holy Week for Easter. Celebrated here in Mexico by closing the interior of the country and going to the beach) so I was struggling. In an effort to find an action to take, any action at all that would make me feel like I had some power in my life. I located this page and sent in an appt request  at about 3:00 in the afternoon. By 4:00, I had received an email confirmation.

    I am normally kind of skeptical of this kind of streamlined  modern system. I like alternative medicine. I like my doctors to wear dreadlocks and shake a rattle before they draw blood. I want to feel like they have secret knowledge that mainstream medicine isn't allowed to sell because of big Pharma.

 Dr.Santiago Hernandez is not down with rattles or incense. What he's down with is getting the job done. I submitted the online request on Sunday, saw him on Monday, had an appointment with a world class head and neck dude  that he arranged on Wednesday, was checked into the hospital a week later for the surgery, and  returned home to my house to find in home nursing care waiting for me. All of this was coordinated by Dr. Santiago, I couldn't tell you how. AND he was on all the appointments, and has made three house calls since I got home! Somehow, all of this has happened within three weeks, so I'm endorsing ChapalaMed. There are less expensive options... but when you're neck is leaking  coffee...

Can you believe I'm wearing a hair accessory for this?

well, it's hard to put a price tag on the guy who's going to get that to stop. Dr. Santiago did, and he's still on it, as he drops by the house once or twice a week with his stethoscope draped jauntily around his neck to check on me.
     I feel like I'm being extremely well looked after. There's a big team of drs. and surgeons and nurses involved in putting Humpty back together, and there appears to be seamless communication between them, facilitated by Dr Santiago, who makes sure that questions don't slip through the cracks.

    I have an appointment in Guadalajara today, and I might have a surprise when I get back!

The Story

This was taken a couple of weeks before the operation ,at the movie premiere of "Thriller in  Ajijic." I gotta tell you, bitches in town are all " You've been doing the HCG diet!"
 I  wore that high collar because the "fistula" had opened up, and every thing I drank came out of my
neck. The whole front of my dress was soaked behind the sequins. God bless sequins.,









Cancer is inscrutable to me. I've heard the word all my life and yet it never seems to mean the same thing, or anything, really. It's like saying "evil curse".
   
 Cancer is not one of those things that you can read about until knowledge has reduced it to another scientific equation.I tried! I read The Emperor of all Maladies, which documents the history of cancer since before the dawn of time, and practically every day thereafter.If that book doesn't desensitize you, then my point is well made. The language of cancer is just too powerful too manage.

 Perhaps there are those out there who have a different experience. For me, the more I know, the more occult it becomes.
 
I should be on familiar terms with it, like old enemies that see each other each Spring when the fighting starts again. I have been besieged by this illness, encircled and suffocated during one two year span when my father, and my brother and my sister in law were all sick and dying, and they all had Cancer, but nobody had the same thing, and they were all suffering in a different way. It's a big   shell game.
   
If they had all gotten a heart disease,   I would know all about heart disease. I  would be on fuck you terms with heart disease.But it's not that way with....this other thing. This other thing, if you say it's name you're afraid you'll call something terrible into existence, something worse, even, because its such an evil shape shifter.

 It doesn't help that my  "patient profile" or style. is such that the first mention of a word like tumor or malignancy, and  my inclination is jam my fingers in my ears and start singing "lalalala" at the top of my lungs. It's amazing what, after another almost non stop two year battle,my own, I do not know about what I have been fighting.
 
 I do know that it first appeared during the run ups to our little village's annual synchronized presentation of the Zombie dance from Michael Jackson's Thriller.

   This just happens to be something that I am involved in. Our village is full of eccentric and bohemian expats that are forever setting up art installations and backyard pantomimes. You can't cross the street without tripping over an oil painting exhibition or female mariachi singers having a rodeo. The Zombie dance is what I do, to raise money for the Cruz Rojas. As a matter of fact, being able to direct that fundraiser is a primary goal that I focus on for getting well. Check it out here
 
So, "it" showed up during rehearsals as a sore on my tongue that really, really hurt. I had a couple of different doctors look at it, and although they remained  unconcerned by what was surely the herpetic evidence of a debauched American sex life, as soon as Thrill the World was over, I hightailed it to Dr. Edgard., who did a biopsy. The first indication I had that things might be sliding out of my control was when Dr. Edgard suggested I might be cancelling the travel plans I had to drive up to Virginia and bring my Mom back with me.

My friend Linda F.asked me to give her as many particulars as I could, so she could consult with a supplements expert while she's visiting the states. The following is from that email

    I had a squamous cell tumor on the base of my tongue. It was successfully removed, but impossible for anyone to know, microscopic cells were left behind, and 10 months later, I was back in front of the oncologist team. Surgery was no longer an option, as removing any more tongue would have been the end of speech, eating, and swallowing/breathing, so radiation was the only choice.

I had 35 sessions of that, supported by targeted chemotherapy. and although we celebrated at the end, and the tumor as measured by CT scans was shrinking and continued to shrink, looking back it's easy to see that there was never that feeling of " yay, we got it!"

Of course, what I'm learning is that you don't get that feeling a lot when you're dealing with Cancer.

   Eventually, about five months after the end of radiation, the most bizarre thing happened. It is totally gross, so I warn you now, but on a Sunday morning I was drinking coffee and it began to escape through the surgery scar on my neck.* Really. So that was how we got into this chapter, with the discovery of that hole in my neck ( among oncologists, known as a fistula, an abnormal connection between two hollow places.)

At first, I was absolutely opposed to surgery. My poor body has been though so much already, and  radiation is no joke, ahem, Three Mile Island. Having been pretty much slowly poisoned by one cancer treatment, it would be that much harder to bounce back from a big operation. More than that, surgery meant there was something happening in real life. I would no longer be someone who had successfully treated cancer, I would be someone who had cancer. I didn't want to be that person, but no magical thinking could argue with surgery.

 Speaking of magical thinking,we tried some things, including filling the hole up with surgical crazy glue. It was these efforts, by process of elimination, that eventually made it clear that there was no choice but to go back into the operating room.

This arrangement was intended to let me drink a cup
of coffee.

This is another favorite: Hands free Phone!

 

Notice the scarf. Same idea as my home coffee drinking
ensemble, but in animal print.

 Surgery revealed that it was those same shitty original cells, resistant to radiation, to chemo, to the law of attraction, to krypyonite, to any thing that I could do to them. The rockstar surgeon cut those bitches out, and did an incredible job, as my worst fears, those of losing more speech or other function have been avoided. Considering where he had to cut from, it's pretty impressive.

.

  That part is behind me now, and I'm on the way back. Linda wrote out of the blue, offering any help she could ( well, specifically a really va va voom wig, which I still might take her up on) and we've ended up in a dialogue about supplements to help me recover well, and to make my body a bad host for any possible little microscopic shithead cells that may have gotten left behind.

    I think the rockstar got 'em, though. 

Underneath the post surgery feeling like I've been jumped into a particularly savage red hat gang, I feel pretty damn good.

I am an Ungrateful Wretch

Honestly. Its been a week since I woke up alive and fixed in Santa Maria dlas Chapalitas Hospital, and first realized that I was immobilized, catheterized, traumatized, and thirsty in a way that I only associate with cartoon figures seeing imaginary ships go by their deserted  islands.

  Hospital beds are okay. For a while. I was in there for five days and only allowed to be in one position, on my back. Oh my God, did I try! Knees more up, head more down, head more up, bed more up, just hoping that would change something. It didn't, FYI. But here's the thing...Telecable.

    Oh shut up. I know I'm in Mexico, and the dust lays on my heart and all that. Obviously the television channels in the hospital had to broadcast in what the Oklahomans call Mexkin for the benefit of the other hundred patients. And yes, my Spanish should be better. And we had picked a lovely, clean, high quality and low cost Convent hospital to save money. But I really, really wanted to watch TV. 

     In American.

 For the five days, Bruno and I had the choice of CNN and nonstop coverage of Hilary Clintons announcing that she was running for President, (which I did not find to be a particular shocker)  an art film channel that showed odd movies in any old language, and a channel called Panico, that was reliably in English and showed the most lurid and disturbing horror movies imaginable twenty four hours a day.

   We almost always settled on Panico, which is not the best psychological option if you've just had a set of major surgeries and are immobilized on your back in a hospital bed, in that hazy, morphine- drip, round the clock twilight. I watched a number of gruesome vampire movies featuring monsters suddenly losing their minds and eating each other because someone smelled human blood. I cheered them on from my bed prison, knowing that I would have gladly eaten one of the nuns if she had a bottle of  water on her tray. I had a lot of empathy for those hideous ghouls.

     I guess that's a little weird.

Just as CNN was reporting one thing and one thing only, the art movie channel seemed to be obsessed with movies about the mysteries of the Orient. When we could catch one of those in English instead of Croatian or Inuit, any movie that was being shown was a red carpet event.  In this way, I watched  The Painted Veil

 AND The Children of Huang Shi

 at odd hours in my morphine--(close enough to opium, right?)--haze, while Bruno slept in the chair beside me, exhausted from the latest vampire epic.

     Those movies about pre-war China and Japan apparently planted some kind of post hypnotic suggestion in me, because today, home from the hospital, safe in my easy chair with Judge Judy on, a 19th century coolie shuffled across my field of vision, laden with a bamboo pole carrying an inhumane weight of...Walmart bags. I am still on drugs, you know.

    It turned out not to be a coolie at all, but my very own husband, bent over under the weight of gallons of homemade food for my drip feeder. Somehow our Pam marshalled the tribe on my behalf yet again, or perhaps the good natured and kind hearted tribe I live among marshalled themselves, to whip up enough of this stuff to keep me going. You can't imagine how much of it I go through...three times a day, every day. (interested? Here's the list. It all goes into the vitamix, and then into me) When I think that I have spent literally my whole life preoccupied with losing weight, only to find myself at this sorry pass,  obsessed with gaining it back! Take a note, you silly thong wearing adolescents, I was you once. Except not even a stripper would have been able to figure out a thong back in that day.

     Now, as to being an ungrateful wretch, it suddenly occurred to me that I can walk around my house. I can go outside! I can change positions, and I can by God change the channels, bless my infinite variety of apple tv/netflix/ hulu plus. I can't talk, but that's only so I'll be able to talk, and I can't eat, but a family of family and friends have drawn together to make sure I wont slip through any cracks, and that I get the nutrition to heal rapidly, the better to talk your ear off.

    In other words, I'm out of the hospital.
     

The First Update

So listen, let me tell you how it started.

My surgeon is so good looking...doesn't speak English, doesn't care to. He knows anyone who wants to talk to him is already quadruple lingual or will run out to buy a Rosetta Stone just to ask him check out that suspicious freckle on their breast. I heard through the grapevine that he liked to crank up Pearl Jam and other heavy rock music when he was operating.

   I was fairly cheerful checking into Santas Marias de las Chapalitas. My memories of my last hospital visit just aren't that bad. All that really come to mind is drugs and lemon sherbet. I was definitely eating the day after my tongue surgery, as unlikely as that sounds. And the radiation wasn't pleasant, but you know, I got to hang out with all my friends everyday. Anyway, I didn't go into the hospital with any fear, I mean, shit just always seems to turn out all right for me.

I was already in the OR...the surgeon showed up last, after everyone else was in place, and I think he might have given the table I lay on a quick spin.That probably didnt really happen, but it gives you a sense of the guy, in his black scrubs and piratical head cover. Then, I kid you not, he leaned over me, got right in my face, whispered "escuche," and turned up Luis Migul singing "Sabor Ami" If I hadn't passed out at that moment from the anasthesia, I most certainly would have swooned away like Olive Oyl in a Popeye cartoon. That guy had my number, and no mistake.

 When I woke up, I felt fine,and everybody told me how great it went, so I drifted off peacefully and woke up cheerfully, full of morphine and that surgeon.

I guess things kind of took a turn for the real the next morning when I realized that I was immobilized from a cast....that weighs at least eight pounds, by the way... On my left hand and 17 IV lines in my right, and some highly distressing arrangement of hardware that ended in a line snaking out of my nose. I was later to find that the line would remain there for weeks. No sherbet for me. No water for me.

The lack of water made me so indignant that I may have tried to say " do you know who I am?" I just couldn't believe they meant it. But they did,not only no ice cream, but no effing water, and no matter how many ways I tried to get them to admit to a language barrier being the only problem, they didn't budge. I am now on my 6th day without brushing my teeth, or really any kind of decent hygiene, and it is a special kind of hell. I still don't really believe it.

  I will say the nurses at the hospital have sponge baths down to a science. They get right in there, and somehow washed my hair and changed the bed at the same time.  Bruno, I suspect will not be quite so adept.

  Obviously, the surgery turned out to be a much, much bigger ordeal than we were prepared for...I took a freaking eyebrow pencil and cute pajamas with me, thinking I'd have a bit of a spa getaway while I was in there, for the love of God.
         An eyebrow pencil!
that would have been a riot, trying to get some eyes on around the tubes.Believe me when I tell you, I didnt care who saw what, or what it  looked like when they saw it.

   It needs to be said that as miserable, overwhelmed, and frightened as I am, as bewildered about how to handle the nuts and bolts, now that there are at  two or three weeks of rigid discipline instead of the five days of taking it easy we planned on--I have to feel grateful that it was done, and that it was done when, how and by whom it was done. It was bad shit that they found, shit that wanted to kill me. And that rockstar surgeon was good at what he does.

 
  It has been impressed upon us that we don't get two chances at this being successful, that I have to be more compliant than I've ever been in my life. The stakes are high. So that means no sherbet.It means no water, no food, and no beloved friends to help me pass the time, because I mustn't talk, and how can I see you and not talk?

  But I know that you're there.