You have to try, when you're a girl and you're fighting cancer. It's hard, and believe me I'm not talking about blowing my hair dry and putting on mascara before I wake up my husband in the morning. I'm talking about taking my hair out of it's ponytail and putting on clothes once in a while. Still, you gotta make an effort. It's hard when all the things that have happened have happened to your face, when it's all scarred and crooked, and your lips are just busted up, but you gotta.

It's six weeks since I limped home from the hospital, feeding tube up my nose, IV pole permanantly attached, cast that weighed as much as a kettlebell dragging my arm down, and a drain draining....something, I don't know or care what, from my neck.

I'm having lunch. The bandage on my neck is
holding a drain in place

    Last week I cried at the doctors office. I did, I broke down in tears, and had to reach for a tissue from my purse.

    I always have napkins and paper towels and bits of rag and washcloths stuffed around. Since the radiation I've had problems with extra saliva (but that's only when I'm not suffering from excessive dry mouth. Listen, I am the list of side effects on the drug commercial) In fact my poor exercise class had developed a special etiquette to cope with the fact that it had become pretty common for me to slobber like a St. Bernard every time I did a move that required bending over. They pretended not to notice and in the next move I would hop over to stand right on the spot where I had drooled on their floor. God, I love that class, I miss them so much.

Then I had the effing fistula to worry about. That required me to really amp up on the paper products because if I ate or drank anything with a consistency more liquid than a cinderblock, I was going to have to mop up my neck and chest, goddam evil disease.
 

Dr. Hector, Vascular Surgeon who gave
me good news and made me cry. You can see
that the scar starts at my lip and travels down to that
drapey part under my neck. You can also see
my bra strap, because I'm a professional model

    One time Bruno and I were driving home from a medical appointment at the National Health in Tlajamulco  and I wanted coffee. So used was I to the absurd condition I was living in I took off my blouse and rode home in my bra, napkins tied around my neck with a bandana. Never thought twice about it. Gross. But I can tell you that after a few months of that, the idea of reaching for a paper towel, dabbing the hole in my neck, and then throwing it away before reaching for another a second later was absurd. I was using handfuls, all the time, and I've grown very careless about their care and storage in between uses. Also,  I've developed the habit of adding tumeric, a well known anticancer superfood, to practically everything I eat..
 
So when I reached for a hanky to dab at my misty eyes in the Doctor's office, I came up with a vile and over-used paper napkin, ripped and wrung out and dotted with mustard colored tumeric stains. A girl had forgotten to make an effort. Oops.

But why was I crying, and leaving tumeric trails on my cheek?
   Because I'd gotten a break, that's why.

For some reason, I am often complimented on my courage and positive attitude. I feel guilty for the deception I've managed to perpetrate, because believe me when I tell you that I spend most of my day shaking my fist at God, and wondering why I'm going through this, or swimming around in the murk of a depression so deep and muddy that continuing on to the next event ( chemo! yay!) just seems like a waste of effort. I've done everything already, and I keep having to do more shit. I'm sad, a lot. I'll never be the me I got to know again, and I never said good-bye.

    So when Dr Hector explained that I had gotten a break, it was a powerful relief in a pretty bleak landscape.

I didn't even know that I'd dodged a bullet, because nobody had seen any benefit to advising me of the utter unlikelihood of this operation working. But now it's been six weeks, and ....oh God, I'm scared to even talk about it. Here is what my husband wrote the day of the appointment.

Today actually the surgeon revealed how complex the operation had been, and until now we didn't know that the risk of failure had been very high. he recounted most of what transpired during the eight hours, how the lead surgeon had stopped everything half-way through, advising the team he needed to remove a three-inch diameter area next to the tongue, which was subsequently grafted. the graft was at high risk of failing, but is now safe and we all breathed a lot easier.


Dr. Delgado had excised all of the tumor that was visible, including scraping and cleaning the jaw. Not to get too technical, it was a major operation, and the team now is saying that we have a very good chance the cancer was removed. What happens next is evaluation by the team whether to move forward with chemo as preventative measure, which is likely. We will know more after the appointment at Centro next week.


At some point in the future, Dr. Orozco will perform surgery for the stretching and lumpish appearance, because they decided to leave in all the healthy tissue that they could. The procedure will be done as an office surgery under local, and is purely for cosmetic purposes. After everything he'd heard today, Bruno said "I could care less what she looks like after all of this miraculous work you've done!" No leaks, the grafting is secure, we are truly grateful.

Dr. Hector is checking out the integration of the skin graft on
the inside of my mouth. I could tell he was happy...although he still
had to tell me a scary story before I left.

Bless his heart, we truly are grateful, and he really doesn't care about the "stretching and lumpish" appearance-- which is revolting, by the way, but I have noticed that it's getting more and more normal looking as time goes by. Six weeks isn't that long. I'm getting better, I really am. Even without trying.

   

It Always Happens on the Weekend

Dr Santiago and his battalion of cancerfighting superheroes were not my first team of doctors. My first team, whom I adored, were urbane, professional and educated, and they treated me like a princess.
 Nothing but the sheerest desperation would have led me to cheat on them, which is what it felt like to me when I called Dr. Santiago. I didn't even plan to cheat on them. You know how these things are...it just happened.

 Although there's a certain amount of party trick value in finding out that by pursing your lips a certain way, you can make a Bellagio style fountain of water jet out of the side of your neck, it freaked me out the first time it happened on Palm Sunday morning. Palm Sunday in Mexico is the beginning of a two week period where the country is essentially closed. Gone Fishin'.
Gone to the beach is the fact of it, and Guadalajara, rich and poor, my doctors included, had headed for the coast. I ended up at Dr.Santiago's because the fix they had put in place to get us through the two week holiday period hadn't lasted the weekend, and I was headed for a panic attack and I didn't have a doctor. It was a Sunday, and Dr. Santiago, who I had been hearing about around town, is one of the few, or possibly the only, local medico who has a fully functioning webpage which allowed me to make an appointment for the next day. In Chapala! No schlepping to Guadalajara!  Because obviously I wasn't going to get through the next two weeks in the get up shown below;

Me, relieved to have gotten an appoint-
ment with a Dr. in Chapala for the next day.

This situation had been coming for some time. I had been balking for weeks, absolutely unwilling to admit that anything might be going wrong, although any nitwit that wasn't in one hundred per cent denial would know that the fistula was already something gone wrong.
 But see, the way I saw it, I had done my time for Cancer. I had had surgery. I had had part of my tongue removed. It was stage one, clean margins. Done with cancer, let's carry on with my excellent life.  No double jeopardy. One bite of the apple only.



But then there was more, and I had to have radiation. Day, after day, every day, for thirty five days, I was driven into Guadalajara by a rotating cast of loving friends. Once there, I would be attached to a bed by means of clasps on a mask, that when placed over my face, were fastened to the corresponding hardware attached to the the bed. Yes! It is the stuff of horror movies. You can be thankful I don't have any pictures of that, although this comes surprisingly close:

Athletic types will recognize this as a hockey mask, but
it's actually surprisingly close to the hideous apparatus they actually used.
On Halloween, I pasted a Bandido moustache on it when the attendants
weren't  looking. Haha. A little radiation humor.

So after both of those things happened, nothing else was possible. Because it wouldn't be fair, right? Lightening can't strike three times. Oh boy, fair schmair, that's cancer.

 This fistula thing, we all told each other, was because of the radiation. It had made the skin so weak and fragile that it had literally collapsed. That explanation I was willing to buy. When my first surgeon , who had done such an excellent job on my tongue, started talking about operating again,  using words like skin grafts, I went deaf. Not possible. No surgery. My surgeon was a fierce little firecracker, and she really, really hated cancer in all it's hideous forms. She also loves surgery.
 
     I, on the other hand, had become afraid of surgery. I never had been before, finding it kind of cool that you disappeared from the world for a snap of the fingers, and then you wake up fixed. But that's when you're talking about a wisdom tooth or something. This was a different animal.
 It was that snap of the fingers, that folding of time that made me anxious . I didn't like it anymore that  I'd count back "99, 98" but when I got to 97, a whole alternate world had occurred.

Do you remember those Al Jaffee Mad Magazine fold-ins?A regular size magazine page had a  normal (for Mad Magazine) picture on it, but you could unfold it and reveal another picture entirely.
Only in this example, of general anaesthesia, when you unfolded the picture, what would be found inside were phone calls to my family in the States, decisions about my quality of life and what it meant, conversations with surgeons about discoveries they had made as a result of cutting me open, good or bad, and what they were going to do about it. And while that picture was coming alive, I would be lost in that crease in time.

The decisions to be made while I was "in the crease" so to speak,  would decide whether I could speak or eat or breathe on my own when I woke up. Bruno and I had spent a lot of time in serious and very difficult conversation and we were in agreement on what to do with the choices that we knew about. I knew he wanted what I wanted and would honor my wishes, however difficult the choice. But I was afraid that options would be revealed that we didn't know about, that we couldn't discuss and that Bruno was going to have to choose.
,
My medical duo--oncologist and surgeon-- admitted there were a couple of mysteries they'd like to solve before they put me back under. One, there was something peculiar located at the base of my tongue that kept showing up on MRI's and various other modern diagnostic monstrosities. The mystery thing  was getting smaller since my vacay in  the chamber of radioactive horrors, but it was still puzzling. It was either malignant, which meant cancer, or it was "necrotic" which meant okay. Believe me, you've come to a hard place in the world when you're hoping for something located in your head to be necrotic.

 The second question that begged an answer was, what was causing the fistula? So team one and Bruno and I had a conference and agreed on a plan. The plan called for a pet scan, the only kind of test I hadn't yet taken,  horribly expensive,  available at one lab. Hopefully this Pet Scan would solve the riddle--is it or isn't it, yes or no? Their other suggestion, which I grabbed on to like a drowning man, and which you've already heard about, was to try to fill the hole in my neck with, well, with surgical crazy glue. There was a chance that it would set and last for long enough for me to enjoy a few months of pretending I'd never heard of cancer, get the pet scan, and gather some strength for the next step.  Both parts of this plan met with my approval, because neither involved surgery. The downside was that it left me with no doctor to turn to when the the surgical super glue failed the weekend after it had been put in. It had lasted just long enough for all of us to agree that it had been a big success, and for the my original oncologist and surgeon to shout "Cowabunga" and head for the Pacific Coast.

    (Sitting in a new doctor's office the day after Palm Sunday a surgeon in Guadalajara I had never met looked at the  photo that Dr. Santiago  had snapped and sent on his phone. This remote new surgeon took a  less delicate approach to my desire for options other than surgery. Without so much as a glimpse of the real me, going solely on the picture, he didn't hesitate . "Oh Shit" says he."I know what's making that happen. Yep, it's got to go."

"Er," says I, to Dr. Santiago, who was manning the smartphone that made this conference possible, "shall I have a pet scan?"
    "Pet scan?" replied the doctor from Guadalajara "Why bother? You're going under the knife, sister, so get used to it.We'll find every thing we need to know once we're in there."
The tone of his response made me feel as though I had asked if I should take a Meyers Briggs Type Indicator, or a Cosmo dating quiz. )

Obviously, this translation of the conversation is something less than accurate. But the gist of the exchange was clear from where I sat, eavesdropping on Dr. Santiago's Samsung.

This is the end of this post, but not the story. Things happened fast after that, and as we know, I left very good hands to end up in very good hands, for which I am grateful. As it turned out, as we got further into the process it appeared that I might be able to eventually see the man who would become my new surgeon through IMSS, or the Mexican National Health Care, and so that had a lot to do with the change. But mostly it was timing. By the time my first doctors got back from their richly deserved annual vacation, the surgery had already been done. The fistula fixed, the cancer removed, and me in the hospital getting better.

It's a shame about the quality of my one and only picture of Dr. Delgado.
He's the one who played Luis Miguel instead of having me count backward.
Look at me..don't I look like someone who's hoping to get asked to Prom?

 
 

What does Cancer Feel Like

There's been a lull in my cancer. I didn't really anticipate when I started this blog that there might be times when I wasn't getting into hilarious scrapes or intense dramas to write about. I secretly had sort of a "The Adventures Of" model in my mind.  Cliffhangers! Code Blues, Paddles! Handsome Doctors! Sex and Romance!

That's what happens when your experience of hospitals and medical stories is cobbled together from Dr. Kildare, House, and Grey's Anatomy. In other words, no relationship whatsoever with real life.

Well, there is a  regular avalanche of handsome doctors, that is true, but so far the closest anyone has gotten to a sexual escapade is that time I had to pull the leg of my sensible briefs to one side in order to have the incision at my groin examined. And in my opinion, the minute you say "groin" all hope of sexual adventure flies out the window.

At the moment, the thing that is most likely to kill me is boredom.
 Cancer, if you're lucky, is just pretty boring. But wait a minute...was it just a month ago that I was confined to  that hospital bed, with a tube that felt like a garden hose running through my nose, forbidden to have so much as a sip of water while I was forced to watch vampire movies filmed in a garage in Indiannapolis? That wasn't boring! It was Gitmo!

  I wrote a blog post very early in this endeavor, when I realized that I had the freedom to walk from room to room and to watch as much Judge Judy as I could handle, and that only days before I had solemnly sworn that if only I could do those two things,  I would be good for the rest of my life ( a promise I have worn threadbare recently and resold more times than Florida beachfront.) That post was written on the seventeenth of April. I was released from the hospital on the thirteenth. Four days later I was grumbling about not being allowed to talk.

 A lot happened those first couple of weeks. We had nurses, and Bruno learned how to work the feeding tube, I had a cast on my arm, I couldn't take a shower,  fungus was being discovered in the least likely, or probably the most likely, of places. I seemed to be getting blood tests every other morning. I was full of drains and pipes going here and there and then there was that insatiable feeding tube, 3 times a day, 3 bags each time.

As I write this today, I don't even have a band aid on! Little by little the nurses left, the tubes were removed, the bandages came off, the grafts are supervised and determined by two out of three handsome doctors to be "superb" and by the third to be "perfect, but don't forget the story of the woman who...." In other words in one month I have pretty much recovered. From being in the hospital.

Do you know that my cancer was discovered in November of 2013, and I still don't know if I know what cancer feels like? I'm not sure it feels like anything. I think it just does things.

I know what it feels like to wake up post surgery, and to keep trying to do something with something that isn't there anymore. I know what it feels like to have the shit radiated out of you and the inside of your mouth charred black.  I know what if feels like to wonder if it's possible to die of anxiety, and to believe that it is not possible to survive another hour of stress while waiting for test results. I certainly know what it feels like to feel doped up, and to wish you were more doped up. And I know what bone deep exhaustion feels like, too, which I prefer to insomnia, and it's late night demons, which also makes the list.

I know what it's like to see your husband cry, and to never want to see it again. I know what it's like to cry yourself, because your life is never going to be the fucking same. I was delighted to learn what it feels like for the love that you always knew was there for your family to turn in an instant from a gas to a solid, to take on form and substance and develop the power to hold you up and make you feel like your life had a point.

 I know what it's like to feel happy, I know what it feels like to have faith. I definitely know what it feels like to believe in nothing except for the inevitability of your own misery. That one sucks, let me tell you. When you go there, it is a bad place.

I finally know what it's like to be the same weight as the chart says I'm supposed to be

 I just don't know what Cancer feels like.
.

Waiting

Honestly? That's what I get for growing old, is one way to look at it. Although it seems as though there's plenty of new stuff going on around the world to kill people, a lot of the old stuff has been eradicated, and people are just living longer, and getting illnesses...like mine...that come along with it. Which is not to say that this evil scourge hasn't been around since Ancient Egypt,
 if you believe the papyrus, and it's been mankind's cheerful companion ever since. But let's face it, we've invented all kinds of stuff since then to cause it, and as a trade off, gotten rid of stuff like measles.

Oh.
 
 Anyway, I'm a healthy girl. I pay a lot of attention to eating good food, I exercise, I read Oprah. My friends and I are that kind of woman. But it wasn't always that way.

  Several people have mentioned that there was an absence of posting for several days. It's not like I got cured or anything. What was going on was that I was trying to get my healthcare somehow moved from the private sector to the that of IMSS, which is the Mexican insurance system. That move was the ultimate objective. Between that and where we started, there were steps to be taken. Many, many steps. Many exhausting, we are going to kill you while you arrange for your healthcare, now that you're here you have to go there, now that you're there you have to go back,  steps. By the time Bruno dragged me home from these exertions every night, I was so tired I could barely even text my Mom, which I like to do in the evening.

   That, my friends, was a segue. One of the silver linings--there always are some, no matter how tarnished!--of getting this shit is that it reminded me that writing is good for me. I have stuff floating around that I might as well get under one internet roof while I'm recovering from last week's ordeal. More to come on that. I think. I was emailing with a friend who has been through a similar escapade, and the thing is, it seems like there's a lot going on when you're living through it, but when you reflect back all there is is ....waiting.

 Tomorrow is Mother's day, and since I still can't quite wrap my head around what we accomplished and how we accomplished it this week, I want to republish an article I wrote after we'd lived here for a very short time that is my Mother's favorite.

 The only relationship it has to my illness is that it may give you an insight into my former lifestyle. As I have written in this blog, the thinking now is that it's pretty much just bad luck and living long enough that is to blame for me being sick. But it's also possible that I laid some groundwork with an exuberant youth that my Uncle referred to as "always happily juiced up." That was the least of it.

    I smoked, I drank, I did a lot of other stuff. And when I first moved here, I was given an opportunity to remember one of the more vivid times of that era. Did it give me cancer? I don't know, it's been twenty years since I gave up drinking and drugs, fifteen since I quit smoking. But if you'd like to read the story, it is here.

  And we'll get back to the Mexican Insurance System later, dear reader.
 

Although Bruno is used to the absurd crushes I have on any and every white coated Mexican Doctor,  he was  still surprised to see me flip the hem of my dress up over my head and pull my sensible panties to one side. Turns out, he had completely forgotten that during the operation, an incision had been made at the very top of my leg. Where the rubber meets the road, so to speak.

    This incision, if you can believe it, provided the necessary ductwork ( nothing is going to make me start using words like "veins and arteries") to replace the ones that were removed with this sizeable patch (do NOT click if you're not the kind of person who likes medical stuff. In other words, me.) of skin, that was then transferred to the place in my mouth causing all the problems.  Honest to God, it's kind of incredible, but because of all that, blood is being carried back and forth from old skin to new, and the new skin is settling into it's new home and doing nicely, thank you very much, and the horrible fistula is....fixed. I can eat, I can drink, I can sit around and feel sorry for myself...oh, oops. Lost my train of thought. I know everybody thinks I spend all day dancing on my tip toes and counting my blessings, but frankly, that is seldom the case.

   
   So, back to Bruno's shock at what seemed to be a sudden fit involving indecent exposure This happened in the private offices of our plastic surgeon. I love him with the same fatuous giddiness that is my response to all the white coats, with their olive skin and haughty Conquistador attitudes, but my feelings for him are tinged with hostility. The other guys just tell me I'm doing awesome.
 " I think that it is perfect" they say to each other in their devastating accents, adding a sort of latin gesture that in Alabama would be a chest thump. But Dr. Hector likes to throw in a scary story, a little morality tale.

Dr. Hector is on the right. That's Dr Santiago Hernandez
to my left. He's my team co-ordinater, so I get him in all the pictures.

  I was born in Germany, and my brothers and sister and I were raised on a book called Der Strewelpeter,  Dr. Hector could have written it. Every story in that book ended with the most hideous end coming to bad little children who broke the rules....eaten by sharks, getting set on fire, having their thumbs cut off...and that's the kind of thing Dr. Hector likes to throw in after telling me that everything is fine. When my horror at how mean he is shows up on my face, that's when he throws in the Latin shrug. "Well," says he "It is for you," as though I've got some nerve to look terrified at his awful fables.

    So, because of Dr. Hector, Mr. Wolf in sheep's clothing--I mean, look at that face! You can't imagine him being scary, can you?--because of him, I'm back on silence. I was given permission to talk normally by the oncological surgeon, but apparently the women in his life are too dazzled to talk much, so he didn't know what normal talking is. And Dr. Hector told Bruno one of his dumb scary stories about what would happen if I didn't shut the hell up right now, and stay shut up for an in definite period, and so... I'm back to my whiteboard.

This is me, using old school face time with my Mom

 So this is how I'll be winning friends and influencing nobody for the next couple of months. But listen to this...He ALSO said, in front of Bruno, the chief custodian, that I can't type with my left hand!

   Um, hello, I'm trying to write a blog here because I can't talk! But see, just when I get snippy like that, I see Dr Hector's face, and I hear him say "Well,"( latin shrug,) "It is for you."

And I think of all of you...Oh my God, what this community has done for me during this time! And I think "Well....it is for them."

I gotta work on that shrug, though.

All right, all right, my teeth aren't like totally black. I admit that last post was a little on the melodramatic, "Why Me, Lord" side. We all know that the likelier question is "Why not me?" It's not as if we're talking about a prize, either blue ribbon or booby, that somebody wins. Or one of those lottery type things so popular with the young adult set these days, where if they pull your name out of a bingo hopper, you get to spend the next two months of your life training in parkour before being let loose in a jungle full of people that hate you with nothing but a can of sardines and a sewing kit. You know,cancer, shit like that,  you just get 'em. Or you don't. And you get well. Or you don't. But I aim to have some influence over that last thing.

    Bruno has Type 1 diabetes, insulin dependent. He was 38 years old when it arrived in his life, just to mess with an otherwise very nice existence. I should know, I've met his first wife. Seen some photos. It didn't suck.

      His doctor told him that there were eight variables that had to line up just so in order for the result to be Type 1 diabetes at age 38. A little shift to the right, a rearrangement of a molecule to the left, and he wouldn't have to know how to spell insulin. Same with me. It just is.

    Although I will say that any insurance company would  look at my family history and think "Wheeeee!" as they brought out the big red rubber "Denied" stamp. I'm just sayin'. Not the first case of cancer in my family.

      One of the things that has worn me down, chile', is that I haven't been allowed to talk since the surgery. Do you realize what that means? Exactly! It means Bruno can say whatever he wants to me with no fear of one of my razor sharp comebacks shredding his pathetically ill constructed logic to ribbons, as is usually the case around here.

          Oh, take the talking out of a relationship,my dears, and what you have left is very interesting indeed. What you have is "tone", which has nearly deafened me on more than one occasion this past month. I will say this however. Wordless it may be, but I'm pretty sure that there have been times when Bruno and I have managed to have fights. Yes! He has argued with pitiful,blue-eyed, hollow-cheeked, lace hankie-and-smelling salts wielding me! As if I could somehow, in my present condition, be annoying. It beggars the imagination.

( This seems like a good moment to share that I overheard one of the nurses say, in Spanish she didn't think I could understand, "Boy, it's a good thing she was so fat to start with!" I mean, in my imagination I have ringlets and wear beribboned bedjackets, but that's not what Bruno is looking at )

   Well. It turns out you can fight without talking. It also turns out that having cancer, before, during, or after, doesn't make you absolutely right absolutely all of the time. Although it should. It seems like that ought to be the very least I get out of this, the right to be always right. However, it seems that the longer this goes on, the less likely my husband is to instantly do my silent bidding, which I write on a white board. But when I have to explain why? When it's not immediate, unquestioning, but requires an explanation? The whiteboard is not that satisfactory.

 It is impossible to argue using a whiteboard! He says whatever he wants to say, and then by the time I have written my scathing reply, or my ironclad arguments as to why he should do whatever it is I'm after,  as often as not he has drifted out of the room, wondering what to have for dinner.

   Today, we go to see the surgeons in Guadalajara, and I am hoping that the embargo on my talking will be lifted. Oh the river of words I have stored up for him!

Mostly, they are "Thank you."
 

No photos, please!

I cannot imagine a greater indignity, on top of every other little indignity that is being visited upon me,than to have my teeth turn black! Now how am I going to explain that going around town? "Oh don't mind my black teeth, I haven't actually been eating charcoal, it's just ANOTHER side effect of radiation!" Oh, how I loathe side effects, minions of evil.

     Do you get that in addition to the surgery and the cancer itself, I have fungus in my butt and black teeth? I'm a Real Housewife of Ajijic, dammit, not some serf lolling around in the streets of Olde London Towne, about to have a bucket of sewage dropped on my head while I beg for alms. Give me a break.

   Oh well, never mind that. I just wanted to vent a little bit. My friend Linda has been leaning on me to let her buy me a wig, and I totally gave in when I realized that the one I liked has little holes where the arms of your eyeglasses go...how cool is that! Jesus, anyone who isn't marketing to the 50 and up is crazy.. that little selling point totally won me over. The reason she wants me to have a wig? Right. Chemo.
   
     Chemo came at me out of literally nowhere. I knew that while I was in surgery having skin taken from my groin to replace the skin that was being taken from arm to replace the skin that our evil foe cancer had chewed up pac-man style from the inside of my mouth, it had been mentioned that if there were cells remaining after Dr. Senor Rockstar cut what he could locate out, well, then there would be chemo. They told us that. But I thought they meant, like, down the road a ways. In a bunch of years. Maybe never.
  That's not what they meant. They meant now.

     My stepdaughter once apologized to me for not responding to the original news of my cancer diagnosis with suitable gravitas. But she was right! The only person who did respond properly was my sister, who responds to any and all news with gravitas suitable for a car wreck, regardless.
   
      At the time however, when someone finally said "cancer" in relationship to the painful sores that felt like fever blisters on my tongue, I was pleased. I'd been to four different doctors, and they'd all said it would fix itself, but it definitely was not fixing itself. It hurt.
 
      So when Dr. Edgard said cancer, I was relieved. What's the big deal, right? Gee Whiz, who hasn't had cancer? If it's on your tongue, you laser it off, or something, and there you go, good as new. I'm a modern woman, and I did not react as though I had just received serious bad news.

     Turns out, I'm a modern woman and kind of an idiot. Because, I had just gotten some really, really bad news.
   
  There was a great deal of emotional terrain to be covered, it turned out. When they start talking about surgery and your tongue, how your life is going to change--I just wrote about that, right? the certain knowledge that you are never going to be "you" again, --on and on,when they're tosssng out words like "malignancy" and "tumor"  and money, money, money, money, you start to realize, you've become one of those people that you've always thanked God you're not. I felt blindsided, suckerpunched.
 
 I had surgery on my tongue in November of 13, and it was deemed to be a big success, wide margins, everybody happy. ( see, you know what I'm talking about when I say margins, don't you. We've ALL had experience with this bitch, whether our own, or someone close to us.) My follow up appointments became less grave, more social, less frequent. Annual trip to Virginia? Why not!?
 
 Well,that trip almost killed me, what with it's hillbilly cousins and lyme disease ticks and an abcessing tooth. I was there for two months, and there was some hideous redneck complaint plaguing me every minute of every day, but it wasn't cancer. So I came home.
 
      And found out that I needed radiation. because the abcessing tooth and a variety of other unpredictable factors kept returning unclear results. Bruno and I spent two months in the most abject misery, endlessly driving, getting tests done, waiting forresults, (Does she? Doesn't she?) waiting for an appointment with the Doctor to go over the results, and then finding that we knew nothing. Except that something wasn't good. Another test, more waiting. and then finally, the diagnosis.

        I need radiation. No more surgery, the tongue has a finite amount from which to cut, so the choices were radiation and radiation. To find this out when I had been living in the bliss of having put it all behind me?  Suckerpunch.
   
       This blog has always been intended to be a tribute,to my friends in Ajijic and how they stepped up to make the impossible possible.. I will tell that story, but to do Pam and the rest of the crew justice, it will  have be in an entry of it's own.

The "Real Housewives" that got me back and forth to Guadalajara for
Radiation, and has kept me fed all this time.
Crew Boss  Pamela is second from your right.
 There are so many more (for instance, all the husbands) who
shown here, but I hope time and more pix  will give them the credit they deserve.

So you know, however, during the radiation they got me through 36 trips to Guadalajara and back, and through the same amount of sessions of radiation.

     After that, tests, and waiting and consulting. And then more tests to compare to the first batch and then...Yes! "The mass" was shrinking, it was softer it was smaller it was going, going, it was going....

      And then there was the morning when the coffee leaked out of my neck. That was because suddenly, a tunnel had been created where one didn't belong. Terrifying and mysterious. But, Bruno and I were positive, not cancer. This time we knew I had been cured...I had just been through radiation, which everyone knows makes your skin weak and weird and likely to do weird things.

      So it was determined, mostly by the internet and my husband, that we were dealing with a side effect from the radiation, although we never quite got the doctors to sign off on that theory. They didn't reject it exactly, but they wanted  a PET scan as soon as they got back from Holy Week. A PET Scan is the top of the line of the tests, and costs about twice as the regular varieties. And we'd kind of had enough of the scan-wait-results loop.

     But here's the thing. I could not wait a week to get fixed. And I definitly couldn't wait a week to be in the hands of someone with authority who could give me some information and reassurance on why stuff was leaking out of my head.

       So by the time my team of doctors got back from vacation, I was ("Surprise!"), recuperating from an 8 hour surgery performed by a team of surgeons I'd never met before vacation week started, and where they found some cancer causing that nasty tunnel. Suckerpunch.
   
  Before this, I had been starting to feel good. Healthy. In the morning, it had been taking me a minute to remember "Now wait,there's something the matter with me, what is it, what is it.....oh yeah!"
    The food that my friends have been blending, first to go through the feeding tube, and now for me to drink as soup and smoothies has been really giving my body what it needs, and my body has been responding.  I have been getting better, feeling better, functioning better. I'm cured!

    Except I need chemo. Suckerpunch, you motherfucker, suckerpunch.

But honest to God...the black teeth? Give me a break.