Category Archives: blather

“Come back in 6 months”

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On the list of things you want to hear when you’re at your doctor’s office for a second-pass mammogram, this rates somewhere in the mid-range.

Let me back up a step or two.

I’ve been going for mammograms annually since I turned 30, with the exception of the years when I was pregnant or producing milk for whichever kiddo had just been born. There’s a family history – my mom’s had breast cancer once and her sister had it twice (once when she was relatively young, too). Ever since my mom was diagnosed, I kind of had the feeling that I was probably wearing invisible pasties shaped like bullseyes.

Fast forward to now, recently having turned 41, and it’s time for this year’s pre-physical mammogram. So, like a dutiful person, off I went to get my digital snaps taken from my doctor’s practice. I love the digital mammography machines; no more of the “wait, lemme swap film trays” nonsense. The thing is, they didn’t read the pictures while I was there, due to the fact that my appointment was right smack during the radiologist’s lunchtime.

So, when I got a message on my cell phone a few days later saying that they needed me to call the radiology department, my blood started to run cold. I called the radiology folks back, and the friendly, helpful gentleman explained that they needed more pictures of my left breast. There was some “density”. Um, okay…

I made another appointment, the first I could get, and off I went yesterday morning to get new – hopefully completely boob-absolving – snaps taken. As I checked in, the receptionist told me that I had two appointments, one for a mammogram and one for an ultrasound. Turns out that they made the second appointment just in case. Oh. Okay. Just go with it.

I brought my book – “A Dance With Dragons” is long enough that I could wait for all of this year’s appointments for me and the entire family and still need more time to finish it – and followed all of the careful instructions about what to wear and where to sit. My wait wasn’t too long, anyway, and then off I went to get “square breasts”, as my mom tends to refer to it. [For those who haven’t had a mammogram, they put your breast on a metallic plate and then use another plate – a clear one – to smush it down so they can have a fixed picture without your breast wiggling, wobbling or any other kind of meandering. It’s not entirely comfortable. That is to say, at times it’s bearable and other times, you’re holding your breath not so much because they told you to but because otherwise you might scream.]

After the new snaps were taken, I was sent back to the inner waiting room…and then not very long after, I was just brought right over to the ultrasound room. I’d had ultrasounds done of my breasts before, when I had hormone-induced cysts that appeared (and just as quickly disappeared) during my first trimester of my pregnancy with dd. I found it all such a surreal experience. There were a couple of times when the ultrasound tech, who was training a new girl, stopped to take pictures of dark areas. She froze the screen on one such image and then left the room to get the radiologist. I looked at it, squinting at this amorphous void, and wondered aloud, “What are you, and why are you trying to hide?”

I remember the breast surgeon that I met with during that prior cyst incident back in 2006. I specifically recall that she told me it was a good sign that when I pressed on the spots where she felt lumps, it hurt. “Cancer likes to hide, so it won’t necessarily hurt when you press on it,” she said.

The radiologist came in and immediately picked up the paddle and started roughly moving it around, trying to find something that looked like whatever he saw on the mammogram. There wasn’t much explaining for me. It was more, “We know what we’re looking for and we’ll tell you if we find it.”

After a few minutes of this exploratory pushing and prodding with the gel-covered ultrasound paddle, the radiologist called it a day. “It’s probably just normal breast tissue,” he said. But then, he told me to come back in six months, “to see if anything develops”. I toweled myself off, pulled on my clothes, and dutifully made my appointment for early August. What else is there to do?

So, it’s likely this is nothing. Or, even if it’s something, it may be a benign something. But there’s always a possibility that it’s not a benign something, and that it’s not nothing. There’s a chance that it is something…but I won’t know until at least August. Maybe that’s better, and maybe it’s not, but the only thing more awful than him telling me to come back in six months would’ve been him telling me to go for a biopsy. I guess that’s my cold comfort.

I’ll come back in six months. I don’t know what he’ll find, but I’ll come back. And, in the meantime, I’ll just hope for the best and try not to think about that next appointment.

What other choice do I have?

It’s not “Black Thursday”, it’s THANKSGIVING

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(With all due apologies to my friends in the Great North, I’m talking specifically about the holiday we Americans observe on the fourth Thursday of every November)

Something is beyond rotten in the retail world.

Once upon a time, it was amusing to watch dh’s cousin rip through the circulars on Thanksgiving, planning her shopping route and identifying where and when she needed to go to get THE HOT ITEM(s) of the season at 4am or 6am on Black Friday. Of course, I thought she was nuts: I just couldn’t see the point in getting up THAT early just to save a few dollars. Over time, there were more and more stories about people getting into fist fights over items, or people getting trampled as the crowds rush into stores when some imagined opening bell rang out at 4am. And then the starting time became midnight.

SAY WHAT?

For those of you who haven’t worked retail before, let me explain how it works in a nutshell: in order for things to be on the shelves and displays so that you can paw through them with abandon, someone has to take those things out of the boxes in which they were shipped, check to make sure that items required to be tagged are tagged (and tag them, if that’s not the case), and then place them in their designated spot. There are no elves that do this for them. It’s not done by robots. And items DO NOT mysteriously, magically appear where they’re supposed to go without someone placing them there.

So, in order for a store to be ready at midnight, typically, employees will have to be on-site getting the store ready (and that’s a minimum of 30-60 minutes). So, you have people coming to a store NO LATER than 11pm on Thanksgiving to make sure a store is ready to go for a midnight open on Black Friday.

Now, let’s say that the stock has to be put out and there wasn’t enough time to get it all out on Wednesday. In that case, the employees may have to be there earlier – maybe even several hours ahead. So, let’s back that 11pm arrival time to…maybe anywhere from 8-9pm.

And now, let’s go even farther and say that you don’t live in one of the states like I do (the lovely Commonwealth of Massachusetts), and you have stores that are open on Thanksgiving. That means these folks are just plain missing it. Dinner with family? Nope. Traditional football watching? Forget about it. 

We celebrate Thanksgiving as a reminder of a time when we were thankful just to have survived even a small time on the land we were beginning to annex, and over decades Thanksgiving has come to be revered by many as a time to pause and visit with friends and family. But with the seeming unchecked consumerism that’s dominating our culture, Thanksgiving is turning into nothing more than an inconvenient holiday that stands in the way of Black Friday. The name used to refer to the fact that it was the day that retailers typically went “into the black” (turned a profit), yet now it’s coming to symbolize the color of our hearts – we’d rather spend our time drawing up battle plans so we can figure out how to get a game console for 50% off.

This is what we care about.

Even better, this is all done in the name of Christmas – a holiday that (if you read your Seuss, as I have) is supposed to be about something more. It’s supposed to be about spending time with loved ones and caring for others, not screwing your fellow man/woman – who makes a nickel over minimum wage – out of one of the few holidays he/she has a decent chance at actually celebrating.

To be sure, the people who work on holidays do get paid for their time, but it’s hard to say that the compensation is really paying them what their time is worth. If we, as a society, felt that it was important that everyone had access to decent wages, we’d probably be far less likely to have those who felt the pressure to take shifts they didn’t want (and anyone who thinks that all people who work on Thanksgiving WANT to work on Thanksgiving is completely deluding themselves). If we, as a society, are willing to say that some things are more important than the pursuit of the outrageously underpriced HOT TOY/CONSOLE/iTHING, then maybe we should give our friends and neighbors a break.

I know that the football I watch on Thanksgiving is put on by network staff, team players, team coaches and team staff who work on the holiday. I also know that the people who work in those stadiums and parking lots are working on the holiday. They signed up for that job knowing that working certain holidays was likely to happen. Police officers, fire fighters, EMTs, members of the military, people who work at gas stations and rest stops…these are also people who’ve signed on for the idea that they don’t get the usual days off that so many of us do. These other folks, the ones who are working retail, they’re doing this primarily because some corporate wonks saw a hole in their profit schedule and the rest of the lemmings followed suit.

So my point is this: we need to stop shopping on Thanksgiving. Just stop it. We shouldn’t have started in the first place. Black Friday is its own unique kind of nightmare that I’m refusing to participate in – and it’ll be a cold day in all the circles of Hell before I think it’s okay to stroll into a store on Thanksgiving to buy a $4 sweater from someone for whom that represented 30mins of their pay. That’s insane. That’s privilege of an order that’s beyond what’s okay.

If we want to declare Thanksgiving the start of the Christmas season, how about we really honor what Christmas aspires to be: a time when we consider the needs of others before those of ourselves. We all deserve better than to have every holiday co-opted in the name of the almighty dollar.

{interlude} In Memoriam – I hate cancer (again)

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I lost a friend yesterday, the husband of one of my close friends. I haven’t been able to figure out what words to put together on this. I want to scream and shout every obscenity there is until whatever divine justice there is reverses this insane decision and brings him back to us, but there’s just no point.

Similar to my aunt, it was a cancer of the lung that took my friend – although this was mesothelioma, most likely caused by exposure to asbestos-laden insulation when he was a lot younger.

I’m having trouble reaching for words. I want to write about how special he was, how he was always ready with a laugh or a hug, how he was a husband, a father, a sailor, a mailman, a skiier…a person who you instantly felt at ease with. I want to write about how I’ll always treasure memories of being out on their boat – where they showed me and my then-boyfriend the windmill out on Hull, where that same boyfriend would later propose marriage to me. I want to write about how much I appreciated the two of them coming to our wedding, and how they opened their house to us every summer for an annual get-together of friends and kids.

I want to write about how I wanted to come visit over the last few weeks, but how I had a bad cold that turned into some kind of insane post-nasal drip and kennel cough that made me worry I’d get him sick if I came within 20 feet of him. And so I didn’t visit. I want to write about how crappy I feel about not getting the chance to give him one more hug.

But I can’t. Because words aren’t coming very easily to me right now.

I got word of his passing while I was in a meeting, and it was like all the air got sucked out of the room. I was asked a question and, as I fumbled for an answer, I realized I’d run out of words. It took me a few seconds, a stutter…a pause that, to anyone who doesn’t know me well, probably looked like I was just trying to think of just the right, politically-correct terminology. Anyone who knows me very well would’ve seen that I just had my heart punched.

And this is nothing compared to my close friend, who just lost her husband, the father of her children, and the partner she’s had for more than half of her life. I want to give her all the space she needs while suffocating her with all the kindness I can muster…but I can’t find a clever, witty way to write that. So I’ll use what words I have.

Sigh.

My marathon walk in support of The Jimmy Fund was supposed to be in honor of Tim and in memory of Jackie. Recently, I had to add Rosette to my “in honor of” list, as she was recently diagnosed with lymphoma of the brain. I now have to move Tim to the “in memory of” list, and that just hurts. I hate cancer so much that I want to scream. And yell. And throw things.

But it won’t help.

So, I’ll remember him in my own way, and I’ll walk in memory of him because he was, like my aunt, so incredibly special and taken too damn soon. I suspect I’ll cry quite a bit as I walk my marathon. It’s easier than coming up with words. I can’t raise enough money to support the fight against cancer, not when it’s so incredibly skilled at taking away people I love. I want to make cancer hurt the way it makes me hurt. I’ll hope each step I’ll take along the 26.2mi route will be another nail in cancer’s coffin. They need to be.

Damn.

RIP Tim.