Life as an Extreme Sport

Not a Privilege but a Right

...and everything else, Duct Tape and Prayers, life and living

A version of this post should have been up before Christmas, but technology decided to take a holiday a bit before the rest of us.

…and then there was the time the WordPress wasn’t actually publishing posts, and things got behind, and then it all just seemed like such a big mountain to crawl out from under. Also known as “what I like to call the last two weeks.”

First and foremost – and with apologies, since I did really drop the ball on notifying people – I did receive word that my biopsy results were negative and I am, thankfully, cancer-free. My doctor was also able to rush the results, so I found out prior to the holidays, which was also a relief.

It was a very strange experience, though, in that it forced me, for a week, to once again contemplate mortality and the specific desires I have for life. Also, as a friend of mine noted, it was one of the instances where, all things wrong with the American health system that there are, the fact that I was being treated here and not in the Canadian health system was a blessing, because it was a fast process.

And actually, still is a fast process. There are obviously still “body is not functioning right” issues going on, and this afternoon will hopefully resolve a lot of that. So I’ve gone from concerned issue to ultrasound to biopsy to results to treatment inside a month – that’s a time frame that really is enviable…and it’s a time frame made possible by virtue of having startlingly good health insurance and living in a place where, while I do have to pay for that health insurance, one of the benefits is access.

That access is an important thing, because just a few years ago, I didn’t have that access. I didn’t have health insurance for a few years, and prior to those years, what I did had didn’t even cover a wellness health visit outside a very overcrowded campus health center that wasn’t equipped for anything but colds, flus, and sexually transmitted diseases. I shudder to think of the process then – deciding whether or not to seek out care, or if this is just a discomfort I could live with. What if the biopsy result had been positive? In my current position, it would have sucked, but I have family nearby and loved ones willing to come take care of me, and access to top-of-the-line hospitals and people who will make sure that I receive excellent care (or else).

A few years ago, none of that was necessarily the case – especially the access to care.

I am privileged. I didn’t have to live with the stress and concern and fear that happens when you get a bad test result back and fall into that wasteland of waiting. I knew that, should the result be a bad one, I would have excellent and aggressive health care waiting for me, and that I would ultimately be in charge of the decisions made, and that what happened to me wouldn’t be based on limited services or access or my ability to pay (or not). These are the sorts of privileges a lot of women don’t have – especially low income women living in states where legislature is actively working to shut down what is often the only existing source of women’s healthcare: Planned Parenthood.

I was able to usher in the start of the year with toasts of “fuck cancer” – and it is the memory of that relief and that privilege that, in part, continues to motivate my political activism, support of the Affordable Care Act, and donations to various women’s health and activism organizations, including Planned Parenthood.

Because no woman should have to wonder “cancer” without knowing that, if it is, there is easy access to care and support. “My body is broken and needs fixing” should not be a privilege but a right.

Found Those Million-odd Pieces

...and everything else, Duct Tape and Prayers, life and living

Oh, I was doing so well until I wasn’t. But at least when I wasn’t, I was really committed to it.

I’m not sure what threw the anxiety into overdrive today, but by about 10am I was a quivering mess. And once again, it wasn’t so much the potential diagnosis as it was not knowing what was going to happen in the afternoon. I suppose my primitive brain assessed threats and figured that not knowing this afternoon was a more immediate concern than what may come from that test.

As for the biopsy itself – well, I had been tempted to live tweet it. Let’s all be grateful I didn’t, as I would have had to expose you to proof I’m a sailor’s daughter (I certainly swear like it), and then probably just would have slipped into somewhat mindless screaming. It seems that my cervix is as contrary as the rest of me, and a procedure that should have taken five minutes took closer to 25, and involved seeing stars at several points – and not the fun kind.

Never have I been so grateful for the deep breathing practices of my religion.

Of course, all this means is that the first step is done. The ob/gyn was honest: she’s not sure what’s going on, but the ultrasound images are concerning. The next step is the biopsy results, and from there we’ll figure out options. The results themselves won’t be in for a week, perhaps more at this time of year. I’ll call Thursday and she’ll either have the results or know when I should expect them.

Which yes, means that at minimum I have several more days of riding the roller coaster of anxiety, wondering if my bitchiness is the inherent or stress-induced variety, and trying not to overreact too much in the opposite “experience all the things” way.

A Million and One Little Pieces, Minus the Million

...and everything else, blog as therapy, Duct Tape and Prayers, life and living

I expected to fly into approximately a million little pieces, give or take, by about 3pm Friday afternoon. In fact, I was so convinced that this was going to happen I began pulling things together to go home, because I am constitutionally incapable of falling apart at work, and I figured the strain of that was going to be more than it was worth (especially given the amount of sick time I still have). It’s not even so much anxiety of what may be, as it is anxiety at whether or not there even is an issue. There’s a bit of a running joke in my life right now that I generally make a decision and then act on it within 24 hours, and if I don’t, things get Not Pretty fast. Right now, I’m stuck in that zone of needing to make decisions but not having enough information to do so, and I anticipated it doing a real number on me, leaving me gnawing on my liver with worry and spinning into tighter and tighter circles of bad thoughts.

To my surprise, that hasn’t been the case.

I think that a large part of the reason I’m not looking for a good chianti to accompany my doom and gloom is because I’ve been learning better coping mechanisms. A few weeks ago I watched someone “crowd source” an emotional/personal problem. This was a cute term for a simple concept: reaching out to friends for support. And frankly, within my life – and experiences over the last half a dozen years – about the last thing I would have ever considered doing, had I not seen how beneficial this crowd sourcing was firsthand.

It would have been very easy to simply sit in the middle of my bed, squeezing a cat or – if they got irritated, a stuffed animal – and rocking, between sleep cycles, but that doesn’t really help anyone, let alone help me. In another of what appears to be a series of hard events, I reached out and said “here’s what’s going on, by the way,…” and received back precisely what I needed: quiet support, from being asked details of everything to come to getting a recommendation for Booker’s and the distraction of getting to the bottom of the bottle, and everything in between.

Bravery and anxiety are two words that have been repeated a lot to me the last few days. I must be so anxious, I am so brave. They’re understandable and kind, and in that order – but not entirely accurate. I am certainly anxious if I focus and dwell, and I suppose I’m brave – at least by the standards of the people who say so, although I certainly don’t see it as such. But mostly, though, I’m surprisingly okay. And I think a lot of this is because I took the time to simply be honest, to not hide behind the social niceties that say we don’t talk about it when we’re maybe sick, waiting on a diagnosis, hanging out in limbo – and especially if it’s a limbo around lady bits because ew, who wants to talk about THAT in polite company?1

And if you can manage, I highly recommend having someone around whose voice alone soothes you, and whose conversation successfully distracts you. I am fortunate enough to have someone in my life who has this, combined with “being there,” down to a science, who can easily shift between talking about fear to discussing effective bioweapons disbursement,2 pop culture and movies, or even traditional religious things like, say, seppuku.

Then again, there’s also the sheer practical: I’ve been getting by on only about 90-120 minutes of sleep for the last three or four weeks; by Saturday evening the pleasures of seeing friends who had already planned on being in town, combined with other stress from my family, knocked me out and I actually got a solid seven hours of sleep.

Tomorrow is a work holiday luncheon; I go straight from there to the ob/gyn. Here’s hoping they can do the biopsy immediately, and that I’ll have results before Christmas – for a lot of reasons, sooner is so much better than later. Not in the least of which is, that while I am not chewing on my liver, my nails are another story entirely.

I Had Two Ultrasounds This Morning

Duct Tape and Prayers, life and living

I had two ultrasounds this morning. Your standard, fill-your-bladder-and-let-them-press-really-hard-because-haha, ultrasound, and a transvaginal ultrasound. So, obviously, the intent was to stare at my uterus. I’ve been suffering from menorrhagia off and on for a while – more on than off of late – and given the family history of fibroids, it seemed likely that was the problem. Perhaps endometriosis. Either way, the fix was simple and convenient (a Mirena); I just needed the ultrasounds to get that rolling.

I had two ultrasounds this morning. The radiologist is on-site, and the technician thought it was likely that my scans would be read by this afternoon, although the doctor probably wouldn’t look at them until Monday. Fair enough. I already had an ob/gyn appointment scheduled on Monday, so timing worked out well – electronic health records can be a pain in some regards, but in this case they were certainly working out in my favour.

I had two ultrasounds this morning. I was done at 8:30am. My doctor called me at 11am. It’s not fibroids. It’s not endometriosis. It looks like polyps. It looks like endometrial hyperplasia. It looks like a lot of things that were in the 10% or so category I didn’t even consider. It looks like my ob/gyn appointment will be discussing biopsies and curettage and a lot of things I don’t know enough about to spend time on the internet researching because I’m going to give myself WebMD Syndrome.

My primary care doctor did her best to adopt Doctor Voice, steady and reassuring. Hard to say, could be bad, could be benign, the important thing was to get the process started quickly and to be prepared for this to move very fast, if necessary. Hopefully it wouldn’t be – hopefully this will be a monitor and treat (with hey, a Mirena – see an on-going theme?), but I needed to be prepared.

It’s a Friday afternoon and I’m not entirely sure how I prepare for this. I tried to see if I could get an appointment today (lesson learned – no more diagnostics on a Friday), but my ob/gyn wasn’t available. Monday was the soonest, and hey, I have that. So now I have the weekend to prepare for I’m not sure what – while they typically do biopsies the same day/in office (at least per my sister), there are just too many factors to know and “prepare” is such a vague and frankly ominous word.

So instead I have to sit, and think, and be with my thoughts. For a good Buddhist, this might not be an issue, but as we have discussed in the past, I am a very bad Buddhist.

I thought about just staying quiet. A few people, I told – the ones I would interact with over the weekend and know me well enough to know something is off. But I could just swallow everything with this, the fear and terror, the memories of my mother, and wait it out. I’m already not sleeping, so what is a little more stress?

And then I thought, of all people, of Xeni Jardin. I don’t know Xeni. I don’t tend to read Boing Boing. But you cannot live on the internet without knowing how she faced the possibility – and then diagnosis – of breast cancer. In fact, I had been thinking about how Xeni live-blogged her first mammogram as I was walking in to the ultrasound suite, and joked with the technician that I should tweet the ultrasounds, a sort of “what’s it really like” thing, because of the politicization of transvaginal ultrasounds this year.

I don’t pretend I am a Xeni Jardin. And I will be honest: I hope that I will have at most a week of uncomfortable rattling around in my head, thinking about how Mom was diagnosed with cancer almost – no, I’m sorry, exactly six years ago today. That? Is actually – I’m not sure if I’m laughing or crying, but I kind of suspect both.

In some ways, that’s a bit of a confirmation of what I was going to say, which is that I hope I will have at most a week of uncomfortable rattling around in my head, thinking about Mom and her cancer diagnosis, which is probably going to kick me to do a bit more writing of the kind I was doing six years ago. More narrative and emotion, more reflecting and self-reflection. And I find that what I wrote six years ago, to the damned bloody day, still holds true now:

I wasn’t going to write about this, not at first. It doesn’t belong here, it’s a personal experience, it’s not what people expect, if at this point there are any expectations. But I realized, while talking with GM this morning, that we don’t have the language to express what we’re thinking and feeling when someone tells us that their loved one is very ill. And I’m not sure we have the language to talk about it, either. We certainly don’t have the culture, in either case. And maybe this isn’t a healthy thing. Maybe it’s just another symptom of a sick society, and the cure is to challenge the norm of ‘I’m so sorry” “thank you” and actually move towards something more.

Once again, I found myself having to make a choice, having to decide how to define my interaction with important people in my life. With blogging. With Twitter. Once again, I could step up to the plate, be more aggressive than I might normally be inclined towards, and be honest — painfully honest — or I could simply walk away. Turn into a ghost and just disappear.

This is one of the hardest things I think I will have ever typed.

I had two ultrasounds this morning, and I am afraid.

Yet Another Rape Apologist in a Position of Power

...and everything else, Politics

It’s been a banner year for rape in the media, and apparently December just felt left out. Joining the likes of:

is Orange County Superior Court judge Derek Johnson, who said that the following litany of amazing things when refusing a heavier sentence for a man convicted of rape by a jury of his peers:

I spent my last year and a half in the D.A.’s office in the sexual assault unit. I know something about sexual assault. I’ve seen women who have been ravaged and savaged whose vagina was shredded by the rape. I’m not a gynecologist, but I can tell you something: If someone doesn’t want to have sexual intercourse, the body shuts down. The body will not permit that to happen unless a lot of damage is inflicted, and we heard nothing about that in this case. That tells me that the victim in this case, although she wasn’t necessarily willing, she didn’t put up a fight. And to treat this case like the rape cases that we all hear about is an insult to victims of rape. I think it’s an insult. I think it trivializes rape.State of California, Commission on Judicial Performance

Of course, in some ways it’s unfair to lump Johnson in with the above quotes, because his ruling actually happened in 2008. That’s okay, though — there’s an awful lot of horrible that’s been spouted off in the past, too, and he’s just clearly gravitating towards his own:

  • Stephen “rape causes women to ‘secrete a certain secretion’” Freind (1988 Rep, R-PA);Freind’s Rape-pregnancy Theory Refuted
  • Henry “the facts show that people who are raped—who are truly raped—the juices don’t flow, the body functions don’t work and they don’t get pregnant. Medical authorities agree this is a rarity, if ever” Aldridge (1995 Rep, R-NC);Lawmaker Says Rape Can’t Cause Pregnancy
  • Clayton “if ‘[rape] is inevitable, just relax and enjoy it” Williams (1990 Texas Republican gubernatorial nominee);Texas Candidate’s Comment About Rape Causes a Furor
  • James Leon “concern for rape victims is a red herring because conceptions from rape occur with approximately the same frequency as snowfall in Miami” Holms (Federal Judge, 1997);In Judicial Twist, Republicans Seen Stalling Bush Pick
  • John C. Willke, a physician who was once president of the National Right to Life Committee, whose statement is astonishing and bears repeating in full:

    Finally, factor in what is is certainly one of the most important reasons why a rape victim rarely gets pregnant, and that’s physical trauma. Every woman is aware that stress and emotional factors can alter her menstrual cycle. To get and stay pregnant a woman’s body must produce a very sophisticated mix of hormones. Hormone production is controlled by a part of the brain that is easily influenced by emotions. There’s no greater emotional trauma that can be experienced by a woman than an assault rape. This can radically upset her possibility of ovulation, fertilization, implantation and even nurturing of a pregnancy. So what further percentage reduction in pregnancy will this cause? No one knows, but this factor certainly cuts this last figure by at least 50 percent and probably more.Rape Pregnancies Are Rare

People being horrible about rape, since forever.

With thanks to Katie J.M. Baker for her Jezebel post Fuck You, Rape Culture, which served as a comprehensive list of spoken justifications for rape that made the news this year.