Here I go again…
It’s pointless, of course, but I have this occasional (and when I say occasional, I mean whenever my hosting service notifies me my annual domain subscription is about to expire) itch to change my domain name and start a new blog. I say it’s pointless because I could simply use the domain title that scratches my fancy to create a subsection to my existing web site. But I’m hoping against hope, and of course I have even less free time than ever to make it happen, that one day I’ll publish something with my cleverly chosen domain name, and won’t have to pay someone else through the nose for the web rights. My publication could either take the form of a book or a podcast, or possibly one following hot on the heels of the other. Right now, I’m on break from college, and can proudly say I’m no longer the world’s oldest college freshman – I’m now the world’s oldest college sophomore. It’s progress, I suppose. Since I’m on break, it means that I have some time to think about writing. And, looking at my current site, I realize that I have been documenting my life for some time through domain names.
My first domain, ”Techvisions”, was a misguided late-1990’s attempt to cash in on the primed-for-detonation Internet boom. Alas, I have about as much aptitude for business as I have for peeing into a urinal without splashing – possibly less. Also, the name unfailingly reminded me of the word “televisions,” which I found terminally annoying. The next domain name I purchased was much later, circa 2006, after my cancer diagnosis and treatment which left me scarred on many levels. “Deathtocancer” was a great name, but I liked the word play of Topicsofcancer, so that became the name of the site. I also thought DtC was a little harsh, and wanted to encourage other survivors to post their experiences, not make them skip the site over, horrified at the thought of so bluntly connecting mortality/fatality to the disease, in their Google search results. Sometimes I think I worry about such trivialities far too much. Deathtocancer was born of rage, pure and simple, that cancer had forced me to drop my life to fight my death. I truly wanted to kill the son of a bitch. Topicsofcancer failed, like so many great concepts, to attract a following (my fault for not rabidly promoting it, but again: me + business = utter failure).
The next domain name I purchased, after being laid off from work in 2009, was Realityfromhere, which I think was chosen subconsciously as a podcast title rather than one for a book. It lacks my usual love of punning and word play. I should say that I have a boom and mike, sound mixer and software to immediately start cranking out high-quality (in sound, at least) podcasts. The thing is, it’s really difficult for me to even look at much of my writing post-partum, much less read it out loud. It’s bothering me less with time, but I still find it distasteful. I have a high, girlish voice that clashes jarringly with my sarcasm, cynicism, bitter words and black humor. I always think, upon hearing my recorded voice, that it’s particularly unsuited to my personality and to my writing. So podcasting remains an unpursued option.
In almost perfect timing with my annual subscription renewal notice came an incident at work where the bile rose so high that the mere sight of my face made my tormentor (from another department; my co-workers are utterly wonderful) pause in mid-sentence and verbally backpedal to prevent interdepartmental homicide from ensuing. I won’t go into the grisly details here, but the fatal straw was a thinly veiled insinuation that I was incapable of simple logic because I failed to correctly interpret instructions written for production plants (I work in a business center, which is a much different environment, the hackneyed night-and-day sort of comparison is appropriate here). And it’s funny, because I hadn’t said a word to illicit this reaction. All it took was a glance at my infuriated visage to prompt a hasty de-escalation from a person of a superior rank in the company. That, my friends, is the power of rage. Even when restrained, it speaks for itself. This incident, along with some truly volcanic eruptions at school towards the end of the last term that earned me no small amount of enmity among the staff, caused me to focus on the condition known as rage. And, more to the point, what’s a nice middle-aged lady like me doing with these unseemly, highly conspicuous spikes of fury? Well, bloody hell, is it my fault people can be such gopherheads?
So yes, I’ve purchased another domain name. It’s called actingmyrage.com. Egad, yes, another pun. Raging and aging. Some things never change, except I’m getting older while they’re not changing. No one said I had to like it. And I don’t. It’s just giving me more fertile raging fields to plow. Depleted energy levels, competing at work and school with younger people (heh, even the college instructors are younger than me), the elasticity of my skin giving way (well, I’m too fat for wrinkles, but that’s another story), gray hair under all this dye, the unlikelihood of retirement until I’m too disabled to function for money. All this and more. The new Acting my Rage site will appear one of these days, probably some time between college terms, and it’s likely to replace this one. Maybe I’ll dust off the podcasting equipment and commit my Reality From Here writing to sound files, to be downloaded at anyone’s leisure. We’ll see. I guess it will depend on how many fuses I manage to blow between naps.
Pulled the Trigger
I did it. I enrolled as a full-time student at Baker College in scenic Auburn Hills. “Full-time” at Baker (for me) means three 4-hour classes per week. I’m taking them at night so I can get still get a full-time job if I can find one. If this week, with its “Colossal Waste of Many Applicants’ Time” Job Fair, is any indication, I’ll be having lots of time to study…
Had a little surprise at class registration this morning. I had believed that the certification program I wanted, being slightly over half the credit hours of completing an Associates degree, would be completed in one year. Nope. You’re expected to take two classes at a time over the course of two years, because the core classes are only offered during one quarter per year. I signed up for an additional standard course, Composition I, because 12 credit hours = full time, and my suggested classes for the Fall quarter only totaled eight credit hours. This is about the time I discovered I had gotten myself into a 2-year program. I went stomping down to the Admissions office, and went around in various circles, getting more aggravated by the minute. One “advisor” suggested I may as well complete a full Associates degree, since I’d be hanging around for two years anyway. Finally, I lost it. “You mean I’m going to have to TORTURE MYSELF for two years instead of one???” This did not go over very well with the advisor. She didn’t threaten to call security or anything, but she did sort of say that she hoped I wouldn’t think of the coursework as torture. Okay, so maybe it won’t be torture (unless I manage to find a concurrent full-time job, in which case it’ll be right up there with waterboarding.) However, what it WILL be is TWICE AS EXPENSIVE as I’d planned-even if the tuition rate doesn’t increase, which isn’t likely. That’s not good from any angle. Especially from my husband’s, who’s thinking I ought to just demand a refund and forget about the whole thing. And I most likely would, except for my mother. She’s been after me to take college classes for eons, and she’s tremendously happy about the whole idea. And I’d like to make her happy. Someone around here ought to be happy, one would think – it may as well be her.
Recalled to Life
It appears that I’ve reached another seedy crossroads in the land of fear and loathing. A rusty, pitted stoplight hangs twisted at a cockeyed angle; the light shines red. Actually, it’s been stuck on red since I got laid off over a year ago, and maybe even before that. After all, it wasn’t a surprise when it happened. The real surprise was that no one wants me as an employee. After all, I only busted my butt and braised my mind jumping through hoops for nine years of what could be best summarized as a real-life Dilbert comic strip. I proved to myself and everyone I worked with that I could learn and do anything they could throw at me (which was diverse and plenty), and do it very well. Since then, I’ve lost myself in games and dreams and simple pleasures (my cats in particular) in between the countless fruitless resume-flinging sessions. Now, suddenly I feel I’ve stagnated quite long enough, and I’m carefully considering my next move. Since I lack the curb appeal to hire as-is, I’m determined to increase the property value by adding on a certification or two. Yes, folks, 50 years old and I’m about to enter college. Well, it’s not a “done deal”, as I keep reminding various people, including myself. I have to take an assessment test, go through orientation, and see if there’s some way I haven’t heard of to help finance the comparatively-low but still-significant cost of this endeavor. And then enroll. Thank god my husband’s job has flourished while the rest of the population seems to be circling the drain career-wise. We do have bills though…
So I’m gunning for a “Microsoft Networking Professional” certification, and maybe one or two more that this program allegedly prepares you to “sit” for. I’m done with website design, it’s all too subjective-most people can’t decide on what best suits them (“I don’t know what I want, but THAT’S NOT IT,”) then they expect you to make changes free of charge every time they hear of some new bell or whistle. Also, a lot of businesses are moving towards content management systems like MS SharePoint which provides pretty much foolproof web design and content updating, unless it wasn’t configured correctly in the first place. I had, at one point, planned on taking the hardware-based A+ certification tests, but lacked the confidence to spend $$$ on exams covering subjects that I’d only learned out of one book and minimal hours of experimentation. Time went by…and one day I found myself writing some technical articles that are currently up on ehow.com, mainly just to see if I could. The experience was like being (poorly) paid to do homework. From there, I decided that maybe I hadn’t forgotten how to do homework after all.
After some searching around on the programs/degrees offered by local and online learning instititutions (and also the tuition fees, heh), I have settled on the above mentioned certification at a local “career-oriented” college, Baker. Computer networking is a growing career field per “experts” in such matters, and I actually find it interesting for some reason. So that’s where I am at the moment. I’m looking at this as paying for a short-term job that will get me into a full-time job, where I’ll happily grow old sitting in a server-filled utility closet full of winking lights and snaking network cables. Either that, or I’ll be playing help-desk bingo, trying to master phones on steroids and fussy issue-tracking apps. The other option, that I’ll have wasted our money on a certification that I am either too slow to learn or too inept to master, is just something I’d rather not think about…today. Not when that light’s about to change to green.
CT Scans and Cancer Wards – original post 2/12/2007
I read a bit of news on the health risks of excessive CT scans this week that produced a shock of recognition. In my late teens or early twenties, I had discovered a book recommendation in some magazine or another, and decided to follow up and read it. The novel wasn’t a new one. It had been written in another language (Russian), so as is common in these cases, the quality of the translation could make an enormous difference in how the reader experiences what the writer is trying to convey (I bought a second translation to overcome this).
To be honest, at that age, a lot of the subtleties of “Cold War”-era Russian society were lost on me. This was an important part of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s “Cancer Ward,” and the murky relationships of the characters and the words they spoke to one another were that of a chilling and alien culture. These portions of the novel, I admit with embarassment, I initially scanned over quickly in confusion and intellectual laziness.
The other part of the novel was, of course, the topic of cancer, in the early days of modern oncological procedures. Radiation, that nearly universal cancer diagnostic tool/treatment that focuses its immense and mysterious power directly onto the tumor/lesion site, had already been established for maybe ten years or so. In “Cancer Ward”, written in 1968 but based on the author’s personal cancer experiences in mid-1950′s Russia, the long-term effects of radiation therapy on its initial subjects were just coming to light. “Light” is not a condition found easily in this somber novel, even from memory. Perhaps it is better to say that the concept of “acceptable risk” in cancer treatment took its first myopic steps at this time. Acceptable risk was a recurring theme in “Cancer Ward”. If the bodies and faces of irradiated infants matured into stunted limbs and grotesque contortions, well, they were alive, weren’t they? And, should an adolescent girl, with the morbid self-consciousness of body associated with the age, develop a malignancy in a young breast destined for “the trash bin” as a result of gross childhood radiation exposure, wasn’t she a lucky young lady to have modern medicine on her side? Modern medicine, that has become ever more “modern” with each new generation of patients personifying “acceptable risk”, how far it has come from those dim, charmingly naive days of the 1950′s! Or so one might think prior to reading this latest bit of news: researchers from the Columbia University Medical Center of New York estimate that CT scans can cause as much as two percent of all cancers in the United States alone, in the next 20 to 30 years.
Now, health insurance companies will shell out without question for CT scans, of course. Meanwhile, magnetic resonance imaging that won’t add to the accumulation of medically-applied radiation received during your lifetime that is increasingly found to POSITIVELY! CAUSE! CANCER! is “too expensive” an alternative for Big Medicine. I have my own MRI/cancer story, but I’ll save that for another day. Here’s a hint: there are some things that an MRI can “see” that standard, radiation-based cancer detection methods can’t find. Remember, there are alternatives to x-rays, be it for cancers or kidney stones. You can only accept so many risks before one morphs into a deep and ugly regret.
Topics of Cancer site no longer available
Unfortunately, due to financial restraints, I’ve mothballed my Topics of Cancer website, topicsofcancer.com. I did, however, save the posts from that site and will be adding them to Reality from Here as time permits, under the category “Cancer Survival and How to Survive it”. The first one, “Oncological Hypochondria,” just went up a half hour ago. I do still own the domain name for Topics of Cancer so who knows, someday it may be active again…
Thanks millions for reading, hope you enjoy.
Memories of my 44th birthday (or, Happy Mastectomy to Me) – original post 11/17/2007
I’m swiftly approaching my 48th birthday, which also is the four-year anniversary of my mastectomy. It should have been performed three days sooner, but the surgeon (who had missed my diagnosis fourteen months earlier) had unexpectedly abandoned my PPO and I refused to allow her to do the surgery out-of-network. There was no way of knowing immediately how much extra money that would cost us, and we still had a long way to go with the treatments.
That was a scene to behold: dangling my legs like a fidgety child from the bed in pre-op while the young aide who’d brought me the prerequisite paperwork ran frantically around the room alerting the staff , “She didn’t sign the release! She didn’t sign the release!”
You should have seen the look on the face of the other surgeon who’d been brought in to insert my port when he found out I wasn’t going to let him operate either. What was the point? I knew that the (2nd choice) surgeon who would ultimately perform the procedure was at least competent enough to do port insertions on her own. Why subject myself to two surgeries/anesthesias/recoveries when I could get away with only one?
Anyway, the surgery took place three days later in a hospital half a mile from my house.
My husband, mother and sister accompanied me. My sister gave me my birthday present early: a heart-shaped silver watch with a black leather wristband, sentimental and very much to my taste. My family was shooed behind a curtain while a nurse with a thick Middle Eastern accent painted a purple “X” on my left nipple and swiftly inserted a needle containing radioactive material for the detection of any cancer cells that may have spread to the lymph nodes in my left armpit. The pain was intense and I cried out with the shock of it. I regretted this audible reaction immediately as I didn’t want to upset my within-earshot family any more than they already were. This was the last sight and sensation I was to have of my left nipple and breast. “You’re not having reconstructive surgery?” the nurse asked, somewhat curiously. “No.” “You’re very brave,” she responded. No, I’m not, I don’t want to have to be brave, I thought. Please, please, don’t make courage a prerequisite.
Waves of incoherency began passing over me as first Benadryl then the general anesthetic was introduced into my IV tube. I was lying on the bed covered with warm white blankets, surrounded by family, struggling to converse and finding nothing to say…
“Mrs. Morris?”
“Mrs. Morris?”
“Mrs. Morris?”
I came to, slowly, to the sound of my name repeated over and over by another nurse. While still unconscious, I had been wrapped into a stretchy lavender “tube top” garment that covered the bandages that absorbed the fluids escaping from my incisions. Two clear plastic bulbs attached to drainage tubes inserted into my chest wall were pinned to the tube top.
I was pushed out to the curb as soon as they could fold me into a wheelchair (it was late Friday afternoon and the staff was apparently eager to begin the weekend). We all drove back to my house, where my mother duly produced and lit up candles on a birthday cake and the whole family sang “Happy Birthday” to me with my two fresh wounds and dangling drainage tubes and all. I seriously wanted to be in bed, alone, curled up and holding myself motionless while the day’s events turned inevitably into memories.
My mother often tells me to this day of how pretty I looked in that lavender tube top, pale from anesthesia, fresh out of surgery.
The Journey of Rheinfrid / Post-Christmas 2007
Strangely enough, with all my wretched cynicism of anything humankind has created in the name of, well, a “higher authority”, I find some of the associated writings and works of art oddly appealing at times. And so it was, overfed, well-rested and sated with my usual internet amusements, I visited a favorite web site, www.gutenberg.org, which contains hundreds of literary works from a time before…well, let’s just say you can read for days tales of the Great War with its doomed Archduke, Czar and Kaiser, but a search on the name “Hitler” yields the following message: “No record found. Please retry.” It’s rather comforting, though – just imagine a history without Hitler.
With weeks of Christmas carols, hymns and movies subconsciously setting the mood, I decided to peruse this august (in content at least) library for some light reading on the subject of…saints. Now, having been raised in the Protestant faith, such inventions of the Holy Roman Church should be the furthest thing from my mind. But, having had the happy fortune to view various astonishingly allegorical (abject alliteration alert!) and painstakingly-painted canvases that have been treasured and lovingly cared for over decades, centuries, eons, what-have-you for their depiction of the multitude of human beings who came to be revered as saints for their actions before, during and/or after death, I find myself strangely fascinated by their equally multitudinous(?) legends.
But I digress. Having entered the word “saints” as my search criteria, a lengthy list of book titles appeared. I quickly selected “A Child’s Book of Saints”, authored by one William Canton at the turn of the next-to-last century. As a rule of thumb, I’ve found that, when attempting to read up on a weighty subject on which I have absolutely no background or even less understanding, any title that includes the words “A Child’s Book” or “A Child’s Guide to” is a great starting point. This was back in the days before the ubiquitous “… for Dummies” title removed all charm from ignorance. I mean, come on. No one’s an expert in everything anymore, who has the time?
So, settling back in my leathery loveseat perch, I read through various romantic-if-cautionary tales of Christian saints, laden with archaic vernacular but containing no words as long and cumbersome as the word “vernacular”. And amongst the lepers and the beloved-of-birds and the humbled-before-God, I stumbled upon the journey of Rheinfrid. Saint Rheinfrid? Who knew? Okay, someone Catholic and German most likely, but it was news to me. Rheinfrid was a nobleman (actually a thane, technically meaning a landholder. I think.), dying nobly of the “yellow plague”, abandoned far from the more healthy townsfolk. And there it was, shining like a Christmas star outside the glaring city’s limits, one of the loveliest sentences I’ve ever had the pleasure to know:
“But in the dead and dark of the third night a beautiful Child, crowned with roses and bearing in his hand a rose, had come to the dying thane and said: “Now mayest thou see that the best the world can give—call it by what name thou wilt and prize it at its utmost worth—is nothing more than these: wind and smoke and a dream and a flower.”
Now, maybe I’ve inhaled too much incense and peppermints, but this is the sort of holy that says “holy moley” in my book. I’d gladly give assorted god-given body parts to have come up with such a vision of a sentence – knucklebones, one appendix slightly used, two ticklish tonsils (if only these tonsils could speak!), any number of fleshy encumbrances. That such pulchritudinous phrasing should be subject to such obscene obscurity! Bah humbug, indeed.
This is normally the portion of the show where I insert various insights of dubious value. I’m perfectly willing to admit that I think much too well of my equally dubious writing talent. But I’m not feeling terribly insightful tonight. A sentence like that quoted above robs me of the usual desire for snarky sarcasm, this-reminds-me-of-me narcissism, I-can-top/outwrite-that one-up-authorwomanship. For god’s sake. It’s just beautiful, in all its child-simple truth. And, as the song goes, I am a fool for beauty.
Dreamlife
oddly
my dreams have aged to elderly
where potential and possibility have withered autumn brittle into the surfaces I’ve collected
the faces reaching into me are all familiar, even the strangers
that fill each scenario, handing me objects of forgotten purpose
pulled from an archive of life’s time
we populate an impressionist pastiche of when and where until
no
my body’s changed, I don’t work here anymore, I’ve left you behind, I’m not a child, you’re long dead, you hate me now
I am today, misfit into yesterday fiction’s framework or
slip down in grateful bliss and take my place
in the gently puzzling allegory, treading the circle of compromised past
Chemo Sabe
Okay. I was in the chemo “twilight zone” again, after my 4th treatment, early February 2004. My leukopenia (low white blood cell count) had subsided according to my latest blood work. However, my gums had become so swollen and inflamed that I couldn’t fully close my mouth without chomping down painfully upon the bloated, pulsating flesh that had grown up and partially over the tops of my molars. This is when I discovered that I did, indeed, grind my teeth when I slept, as the searing pain caused by this unconscious activity woke me time and time again during the night.
Fortunately, in desperation, I had located and dug the plastic bite guard my dentist had insisted I have made years earlier out of the back of the linen closet and found that wearing it at night did offer adequate protection and comfort to sleep through the night. One problem solved – now what to do about chewing?
Eating solid food wearing a bite guard wasn’t an option; I was afraid I’d accidently choke on the silly thing. Frankly, I had enough on my plate, as it were, without that hazard to deal with. Two weeks of a semi-liquid diet was beginning to concern me. I mean, how much nutrition can you get out of strawberry jello, vanilla pudding and canned tomato soup? I’d finally resorted to having my husband run to the drug store for a case of Ensure. Ensure, in case you’re not familiar with it, is kind of Slim-Fast in reverse, generally used to supplement the diets of chewing-challenged elderly folks in danger of vitamin deficiency or outright starvation. It comes in various “wannabe” flavors like dutch chocolate, french vanilla, and pepperoni pizza (just kidding, but maybe they’ve added that to their repertoire by now). I’m sure the product is much tastier than I remember. However, the multicolored poisons dancing merrily through my circulatory system had worked their toxic magic on my taste buds, converting the carefully-concocted flavors into such novelties as “Graphite Gravy” and “Rusty-Tin-Can Cocoa”.
Starving isn’t my style; the healthiest thing about me is and has always been my appetite, no matter what grisly disease and/or condition my body was struggling with. And I was hell-bent on appearing as healthy as possible because, regardless of how wretched and weak I felt, I was NOT going to look like a corpse at work.
Oncological Hypochondria
Okay, here’s the news, after a brief hiatus.
After turning over every rock in town looking for a doctor and/or procedure to explain why I’ve passed blood in my urine periodically, the general consensus is that I’m appallingly healthy and may never know just what caused this mildly alarming symptom. I was cystoscoped (?), ultrasounded, palpated, x-rayed and MRI’d, and they found nothing even remotely life-threatening. So I can put my paranoia back in park and carry on with my career as cantankerous cancer survivor.
For the “uninitiated”: one of the myriad of joys that come packaged with cancer survival is that any time you experience any kind of odd oozings, lumps, aches/pains, rashes, digestive issues, etc., you have this soft little voice in your head (well, in my head anyway, and it has lots of company) calmly whispering, “IT MIGHT BE YOUR BLOODY CANCER COMING BACK!!!!!!!!” This is not exactly what you want to hear after going through THAT glorious adventure at least once in your life. But it’s a very effective incentive to make (and keep) doctor’s appointments that you otherwise would’ve blown off indefinitely.
One thing that did turn up was a mildly painful inflammation of the cartilage connecting my ribs to my sternum. According to my primary physician, this condition is a consolation prize from my 30-odd rounds of radiation therapy back
in ‘04. He said it may get worse with time, and suggested OTC pain relievers, heating pads and, if all else fails, physical therapy to lessen the discomfort.
The inflammation at this point feels like a bruise, as though I’d been hit
square in the chest with a softball a few days ago. It’s only noticeable if I
bend a certain way or press against the area. I’m hoping it’ll stay that way.
Oh, and he also said that moving to Florida would help (warm tropical climate and all that). So to all my darling in-laws currently residing in the Sunshine state: there may be a little cranky-yankee stormcloud littering your horizon one day.
P.S. the big kid comes with me :)
