surgery

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‘i’m just going to hold my breath’

Posted by petunia 20 Jul 2010

i stopped whining pretty quickly after that last post and decided that if given the clean bill of health by the surgeon today, i was officially off homebound life in a big way.  so, happily, the doc gave me the green light, and i have thus decided a few days in NYC are just what, well, the doctor ordered.  a couple phone calls, emails, online bus reservations, and voila – in 2 days i’ll be in new york.  ahhhhhhh.

my incision and i met each other unmasked for the first time today.  i have to admit, the way it looks fascinates me, especially its texture:

thanks to todd’s fascination with them and the influence of padma lakshmi‘s acceptance of her scar, i am not as freaked out as i once might have been.

i also look forward to telling anyone who may ask that my scar is the result of being stabbed in the back during a particularly tempestuous knife fight.

from wounds to….cooking?  sorry, i know that’s kind of awful.  it’s also kind of characteristic, which says a hell of a lot about this girl.  shrug.  but part of my getting ready to get out of town was using up a basket of produce that would otherwise go bad.  one of my favorite things in cooking is to have a particular ingredient i want to work with, and to work backwards to see what it is i can make with it.  today’s crop yielded loaves of banana bread, zucchini bread, and these funny little crumbly bars called squash hermits.

i lifted the original recipe from delicious living magazine and made my own modifications.  they come out looking like brownies, which made me screw up my face for a moment upon taking my first experimental bite.  however, after a moment my mouth settled into to tasting the interesting flavors and texture of this odd little concoction.  since my tastes tend to run more toward the bad-for-you end of the culinary spectrum, i am so pleased to have made something that doesn’t make me feel guilty for indulging.

Squash Hermits

1/4 cup white flour

1 1/2 cups whole-wheat flour

1 teaspoon baking soda

1 teaspoon baking powder

1/2 teaspoon salt

1/2 teaspoon ground cinnamon

1/4 teaspoon nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon ground cloves

dash black pepper

6 tablespoons butter, room temperature

2 medium-sized yellow squash, puréed

3/4 cup molasses

1/2 cup chopped walnuts

1/2 cup sunflower seeds

1 cup dried cranberries

  1. In separate bowls, combine dry ingredients and wet ingredients. Mix together.
  2. Stir in chopped nuts and fruits and spread onto greased baking sheet.
  3. Bake at 350 degrees for 30 minutes.
  4. Let cool; cut into squares.

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‘a number of things considered as a unit’

Posted by petunia 13 Jul 2010

misc:

i would like to wear false eyelashes, like, all the time.  i think they are beautiful.

gus is hiding under the coffee table because it’s thundering.  i’m so glad for the rain. i’m also learning to love the parts of summer that involve hibernating inside under the AC.  don’t really have too much choice about that at the moment, but maybe that’s just fortunate timing.

i’m going to a conference in a couple weeks in richmond.  i wish travel was more a part of my line of work.  i’m being put up in the swanky resort, the same place where the conference takes place. i feel like it’s the kind of place where people have affairs, or three-day long liasons.  hm.

this is what my back looked like until yesterday:

the drain is gone now, thank god.   it was probably the part of this experience that wigged me out the most.  accordingly, i flipped out a little yesterday during the removal and may have passed out for just a wee little moment.  i thought the end of the tube was just stitched into the incision, and didn’t realize that its removal would include pulling what felt like half a foot of tubing out of my back.  BARF.

you’ll notice the strip over what looks like a crater – the former home of my hump.  i’m hoping i do not have a permanent crater in my back.  i will save that question for my last post-op appointment with the surgeon.

i miss having a gay best, or at least, close guy friend.  in fact, i miss male companionship as a whole.  i used to be the chick whose majority of friends were dudes – what happened?  that just seemed a lot easier.

i’m excited to get back to the farmer’s market this weekend.

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‘go ahead as you waste your days with thinking’

Posted by petunia 11 Jul 2010

my post-surgery schedule is mind-numbing.  wake, eat, read, computer, tv, nap, repeat.  through the percoset haze, this all works very well.  then by the end of the day when i recognize that i have spent 70% of my day asleep and 20% of it watching “the hills” marathon on mtv.  it’s kind of like eating only junk food for a week.

tomorrow i go back for my post-op and get this gross drain out.  i’m relieved to have that element of this experience taken care of.  it’s weird that i could handle drains and ports and all that gross stuff when i helped take care of my mom, but that i freak out when i see it on myself.

my sister hasn’t called, or emailed, or seemingly remembered that i had surgery last week.  she has some really serious shit going on in her life, but the fact that she didn’t even look through all that for a second hurts.  i know that i am probably making a lot more of this surgery than i should, but it was -especially beforehand- really scary and stirred up a whole lot of emotions in me.  i definitely became aware of people in my life who truly give a shit and were there for me and those who just went through the motions.  that’s involved some major disappointment in some of those i thought i was close to, but i guess it’s better to have my eyes opened to it.

i’m ready to move on from this.

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‘can anybody find me….’

Posted by petunia 9 Jul 2010

quasimodo no longer!

the surgery went well.  or so i am told.  the last thing i remember is talking to the anethesiologist about lindsay lohan and her “fuck u” manicure.  after that, recovery room.

my lipoma was some kind of gargantuan monster, and i was told it could fairly be compared to a breast implant.  apparently i brought the funny while all drugged up, asking where the other implant was and also telling my doctors i understood why MJ was so into the propofol; that’s some good shit!

i left with a drain that stays in until monday and really makes me want to vom.  the nurse assured me that the thick red liquid pooling in the grenade-looking plastic thing is not blood, and now i really wish i would have stopped to ask what the F it is then.

percoset is my new best friend and i understand why people become pill junkies. actually i think i understood that before; i always have enjoyed a nice pill.  this one makes me feel floaty, detached, and analytical.  it also makes my nose cold, just as some more illicit medicinal friends in the past used to.  i like it.

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‘i wanna go, i wanna go for a ride’

Posted by petunia 8 Jul 2010

by this time tomorrow, i will be writing hump-free.  i have idly wondered what will happen, if in the manner of sampson and his hair, all my powers lie in my hump and i am left a mere shell after its removal.  will my grasp of language disappear?  my need to overshare run dry?  what if my boobs get smaller?!

in the meantime, i am occupying myself drinking copious amounts of fluid because the pre-surgery directive of no food or drink after midnight, coupled with the infernal weather, has sent me into a tailspin of new neurosis – in short, that i will be obscenely thirsty for most of the day tomorrow.

in the meaner meantime, i am channeling nervous energy into, of all things, the MLB all-star game and campaigning for my beardsy imaginary boyfriend, kevin youklis, to make the last spot on the american league team.  i’ll avoid the hypothetical if-something-goes-wrong-tomorrow pleas that could make this a theoretical last request, but i will ask you, nicely, to vote for him.

catch you on the flip side, kiddos.

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‘a watch is always too fast or too slow’

Posted by petunia 6 Jul 2010

this will continue.  this writing, this movement, this rebirth.  i will write again and with frequency and i’ll allow myself to do it even if i feel like i have nothing insightful or funny or cathartic to tip-tip-type into black and white.  i will write when i am pissed and happy and bored and when i am (spoiler alert!) on painkillers.  remind me when i start slacking off, okay?  it would even be okay if you yelled at me a little.

the heat is atrocious.  truly.  45 minutes on the elliptical inside in the AC, okay.  7 minutes outside throwing the ball around for the dogs and i look like i’ve been in a downpour.  gross.

speaking of gross – thursday i will have surgery to extract a lipoma from my upper back.  a lipoma is, in (disgusting) layman’s terms, a fatty hump, not caused by anything, including, cough carrying extra weight cough. my lipoma is unnoticeable to me for the most part because it, like the tramp stamp i still maintain was a cool idea in theory, is on my back.  i’ve had it for quite a few years, since i lived in nyc, but in the part year or so it’s grown larger and is a smidge uncomfortable if i lean a certain way.  and from what i have read, this fucker is pretty damn big.  so, at doctor and surgeon’s recommendation, out it goes, and the promise of this undertaking has got me kind of a-tizzy.  not like it takes much.

i’m vacillating between fascination and total pit-in-stomach anxiety about this surgery, because i’ll be fully anesthetized.  the whole procedure only takes an hour or so, but i’m interested in and petrified about being in this in-between world that someone puts me into by putting stuff into an IV.   it reminds me of the little nervous excitement bubble i used to get before taking some new drug back in the days of my ill-spent youth.  am i gonna freak out? what’s gonna happen? is it going to be cool?

as stupid and insignificant as this little outpatient procedure is, it has also gotten me all lump-in-the-throaty, at points, too.  during our phone consultation today, when the nurse told me that two family members would be allowed to go back with me at one point, i found myself just nodding as the tears streamed down my face.  i don’t have family going with me on thursday.  i have friends, dear and wonderful and amazing friends, but not people related to me by blood or a piece of paper.

i doubt my sister, far off in colorado and suffocating in her own concerns at the moment, will remember that this is happening.  and although my sweet, well-intentioned papa did initially offer to come down for this, i don’t know that he’ll even recall that the procedure is happening this week unless i remind him.  it boils down, as it consistently and inevitably does for me, that this is something my mom would be here for.  should be here for.  and it sucks all over again, and still.

for every day that passes, things are different, and for every tick of the clock they also stay the same.  plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. french people are so smart.

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Life: Four Years Out

Posted by ray 15 Aug 2009

Today my oncologist told me my blood work looks good and that he’ll see me in another six months.

It’s hard to know how to feel when I go in for these check ups. Following the last visit back in February, I sat in the car and cried in the parking lot for my father-in-law, who’d passed from pancreatic cancer a few months earlier. Many times, I feel relieved and thankful. Others, I feel guilty, knowing what a truly horrendous fight is faced by so many countless others. And then there are the people I can count.

Because, as cancers go, I got lucky.

I remember the voice of the nurse on the phone in July, 2005. She called back after telling me briefly the results of my biopsy: malignant melanoma. Sounds a whole lot scarier than ‘wonky mole that may or may not metastasize.’ Perhaps I sounded a little shell shocked when I hung up, because she called back to tell me this was “the best malignant cancer you can have.” In my messed-up head, I always imagined that line on the side of a cereal box, or some bad movie poster:

“The BEST malignant cancer you can HAVE!” Tah dah.

But she was right.

I keep seeing cancer gobble people up.

And I feel guilty. I feel guilty for not knowing exactly how to feel about a 1x1x4 inch diamond of meat being taken out of my leg, taken from me, tested and then incinerated. A pound of cure. A price I know so many would gladly pay. I would, too, again. But at the same time, I don’t feel free of it, as if it has its finger on me, saying just wait.

In those first months after feeling the doctor tug the sides of my leg back together for stitching, I didn’t know how to feel. Elated, okay with it, guilty. I do know that back then I was pretty sure I’d have it all figured out by now, that time heals all. I don’t and it doesn’t. Now, I’m just able to think about it less.

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