Storm Clouds, Off The Wall and My Camera

Ticket to Ride

Tomorrow it will be a year to the day that the whole mess of mammograms, pap-smears and pelvic exams began this Miss Cancer's Wild Ride. Don't think Huntsman has a fastpass for chemo, radiation and surgery. But they do return phone calls, and yesterday I got a pretty good one. I had a CT scan late Friday night to see if the cancer had spread into my left hip that has been giving me quite a bit of trouble the last month or so, which was one of the major signs of the original tumor. A lot of pain, limited mobility and really no apparent reason for it to be hurting so much. They still have no sure idea as the CT scan shows NO NEW CANCER!!! No sign of fracture, no growths, just my enlarged left kidney and a left hip that hurts day and night, but no new cancer. Did you get that, no cancer. Have to go in to the Huntsman rehabilitation for a hip brace next week, see if that helps. The thinking is that when they had me in stirrups for the ureter re-implantation they either dislocated my hip or there might be some vascular necrosis. Vascular necrosis. Literal dead leg. Makes watching "The Walking Dead" all the more apropos, and I will relish every ghoulish moment with wicked twisted glee.

Thinking, reading and watching the world (and my body) is so different now. Post cancer. What I would have just chalked up to Ehlers-Danlos pain in my hip has to be scrutinized with a different filter. The Cancer filter. Is that pain just a regular pain? Is that new? Nah. Should I tell myself nah? What do I ignore and what do I worry about? Careful, too careful, not careful enough? Emotional pain is different as well. Shifting from accepting choices made in the past are no longer living in my present, yet knowing those choices could mean the actual end of my life.

I went to the State Fair last week and Blues Traveler was playing. Watching people that are no longer as young as they were when they first fell in love with that band shake their asses and boogie on down, made me so thrilled, and alone. I was proud of the woman that forgot herself completely and danced up and down the aisle, which made for a better show than what was on stage. The best me party in town. Yet while I was there, I was ten different places as well. The other BT concerts I went to with Neil, the concert we missed when John Popper broke his leg and instead of our trip to Denver we went shopping and that was the weekend I got the true love of my life, The Bun. I heard how much their music had changed and I thought how much I had changed and with the choice of loving someone, I put my life in danger.

Cancer is a wild ride. So is love. I'm not going to buy the regret ticket.

Sing a Song

I telegraph most of my actions through song. Yup, when I am in the kitchen making popcorn I start singing "I love popcorn, yummy yummy popcorn. Popcorn popcorn popcorn. Gonna eat it up." It isn't the same every time, I just start singing and whatever happens happens. Just now with my Bunny Boys, I got them some hay and I started in on hay, and hay time and yummy and it ended in a big YEAH FOR HAY! This is all day long. Pickle has a jingle. Peanut has his own. "Its da PICKLE TIME!" and he knows it is time to run around like a maniac let loose in a horror film. Peanut gets a softer refrain of "Peanut Peanut Peanut, I love Peanut" and I announce his presence as you would a royal "There's the Peanut!"

I am either singing out loud or in my head at all times. Even in my sleep. In conversations, phrases and words remind me of songs and I have to sing them out (ask J.D.) so this singing goofball nonsense made-up songs when I am alone is the product of not having the call-and-answer trigger effect of interacting with other human beings. So, the saying is you know you are losing it when you start talking to yourself, and then you know you are truly far gone when you start answering back. Suppose I should look out for white coats any day now.

Word Up

I was just in the shower washing my face when I snucked up some soapy water. Not too fun, but what a great word, snucked. A combo of snort and sucked that more than adequately describes the action of ingesting flowing water unintentionally. As I finished my shower with the taste of rose soap in my mouth, I remembered my first obsession with a word. Zit. I was mystified that a group of people had somehow gotten together and decided that the appropriate name for the red protrusion on your face would be Zit. "Why Zit?" I kept asking my Mom, over and over and over. "Is it because that is what it sounds like when you pop it?" I seriously would lie in bed at night pondering how the word Zit made it into the dictionary. This is of course before the intertube-nets and now we have Urban Dictionary that could tell me all sorts of things I don't even wanna know. The English Language has over a quarter million words excluding extinct words and inflections and we are making new (and not so fancy) words every day. And yet, I have been pondering this recent colloquialism that has sprouted up; butthurt. I have heard through the years "chapped ass" "chaps my hide" and my Mom used to go so far as to say "he mucked his chaps." But this butthurt stuff, I really don't think people know what they are saying. I think some girl overheard someone having a proper conversation and when the thick of it came to "she was all BUT HURT" meaning she was everything besides harmed, not damaged, no scrapes or bruises..... the girlie said to herself "hmmmmm, butthurt? better get some butthurt paste for that." And the web snucked that shit right up.