Stella, cranky at having been outside all week, won’t go outside but gives meaning to the expression “dogging me.”
I think the way I smell, post-surgical, is making her nervous. I also think she is mad at me for shutting her out.
I also think that she went into Georgia’s closet and got out Georgia’s giant dog slippers. I woke up from a nap on the sofa upstairs to find her on the floor next to me, curled up, hugging the slippers.
This is the dog who can barely master “sit.”
I’m thinking that how we define intelligence is slipperier than I thought.
This isn’t a funny blog. I mean it is, when I can pull it off, but that’s not the purpose of it. This post is a tangent.
Well, it’s more of a critical point, mathematically speaking, because it’s not going anywhere.
I’m just wondering, when I get around to having an I Don’t Have Cancer Any More Party, what the cake is going to look like.
It can’t be worse than these baby shower cakes.
Seriously, though, Erica and my mom were saying we have to have a nipple party and serve drinks like the Angel’s Tit and the Buttery Nipple. If I invited over all of my friends who have been such a crucial part of my survival, and served them cake balls shaped like breasts, including nipples, I wonder what the reaction would be.
I think I might be curious enough to find out, actually. When did I succumb to tastelessness?
A friend of mine pointed out that the wordpress ads that pop up here included one for a for-profit cancer hospital network.
I feel dirty.
When I get around to it, I am going to spend the $29 to take ads off of my blog. There’s enough phonies trying to make money off of cancer patients without my feeding flesh to the Beast.
My dog is inside outside upright downright happy all the time and by that I mean that she stands at the kitchen door and looks longingly either inside at us or outside at the squirrels. I spend a lot of time sweeping up dirt and bits of leaves from the kitchen. Fortunately it almost never rains in Texas so mud is rarer. Sometimes, I think she goes outside deliberately to get more dirt to bring into the house, but then I realize that she is too stupid.
I’m not up for sweeping and mopping the kitchen floor 3x/day right now so I have decided to leave her outside with the squirrels. She has water.
She keeps looking at me. I’m upstairs in the TV room watching the last season of Buffy and I can feel her doggy eyes on me. Let’s see how long this lasts. I know I’m going to cave. It’s just a question of how soon.
My kids know they can’t pull that kind of nonsense on me.
What they haven’t figured out is that if they would just STFU I’d be a pushover.
I’m thinking this whole language thing is overrated.
“People” used to get so frustrated with me when I was in the middle of cancer because I failed to update them. Occasionally I would send out a mass email that said “Still Have Cancer. Not Dead Yet,” which I thought, and still do think, was uproariously funny but evidently I am a set of one.
I know a lot of cancer patients set up CaringBridge sites or regular updates because we all, or most of us, are lucky to be surrounded by one or more communities of wonderful people who care, and who pitch in.
I couldn’t even write thank you notes. I couldn’t even speak. The gift of words just went away.
I find myself in a similar situation following breast reconstruction surgery. It’s like cancer lite. It’s gruesome, and I feel terrible, but not so terrible, and all kinds of wonderful people pitch in in all kinds of wonderful ways and I can’t think of anything to say except “Thank you,” and even then I don’t say it very well.
I wish I could make a nipple joke, but those are never funny at the breast of times.
Once again, I’m in the position where I can’t lift more than a couple of pounds. I don’t know how long this will last, but my guess is at least two more weeks. Surgery is a bitch.
My kids are picking up the slack. It’s their job to clean and set the table, and tonight they are going to make dinner. Then they are going to do laundry because they are out of clean uniforms. They are six and eight.
Many, if not most, of my friends express surprise and astonishment that my kids do housework, but if you look at the family paradigm of 50 or 100 years ago, children their ages were significant contributors to household work. Now, the paradigm is that the kids sit around playing video games while mom and dad do everything.
I’m not okay with that.
Maybe it’s that I can’t, but more, I want my children to have the capacity, if the shit hits the fan in their adult lives the way it has in mine, to deal, and the beginning of being able to deal with a worst-case-scenario life crisis is being able to do the mundane chores of a day-to-day existence: doing laundry, cleaning the kitchen, making their beds, cleaning up their toys.
If that’s a life lesson from cancer, it’s a good one.
I’d post something witty about surgery and nipples and boob jobs and so on, but I can’t.
I can’t even try. I’ve learned not to beat myself up over it, though. I’ve been using this down time to watch the entire oevre of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It’s good stuff. Still.
Makes up for all the cleverness I don’t have at the moment.
Graham, about the way the fridge and ice cubes smell: “You need an onion detector.”
Me and Chris, simultaneously: “You have one. It is the middle of your face.”
I know this. I really do. I have learned this the hard way every single time.
Note to self: do not stop taking painkillers before a week past surgery has elapsed.
This time, I thought I would be fine. I thought I could handle it.
I was wrong.
I’m still recovering from surgery, and therefore blah. I just hope this is the last one.
It’s frustrating.
Dance with the Reaper 