Bye Francis (This post is not safe for work or pretty much any other respectable sensibility.)

I've started and deleted this post approximately 700 bazillion times in the past few weeks, as doctors have poked and prodded (oops, sorry about that second stick, the one that went into the muscle!) and set new appointments and "just check to be sure everything is ok" tests have been scheduled and endured. Even now, I've cut 90% of this post, because it's not useful or too angry or too sad, and because it will inevitably be taken to heart by the wrong people, and because I'm tired of the casual solutioners trying to solution shit that doesn't actually help at all. It's amazing how careful I've learned to be in a few weeks about saying the right thing to avoid being inconvenient or making anyone else uncomfortable. 

Example: the Deadpool clip in this post is extremely violent. There. You are warned. 

I'm so goddamned tired of feeling.

I'm angry as fuck that the rest of my life will have a specter of "what if it's back" every time I go to what used to be a normal checkup. I'm angry I will pretty certainly have to go on a hormone blocker for the next 5-10 years.  A demon of a pill with pretty awful side effects that may or may not get me, but will almost assuredly cause early menopause and removes yet more choices I still had about my body and my life. I'm angry and sad that until I know my staging and statistical likelihood of recurrence AFTER I know my treatment plan, I have to recognize that I may not see my niece and nephews graduate. 

I'm anxious and terrified about tomorrow, even though I know every step of what's going to happen. What if they don't get it all? What if the results are worst possible and I have to have chemo or my staging is more immediately bad? What if I pee my pants during surgery? What if I react adversely to the anesthesia? What if I'm one of those creepy people who wake up in the middle of the procedure, paralyzed and feeling EVERYTHING? What if I don't recover fast enough? What if I die on the table? 

Why not put it out of my head and focus on the positive? I suppose in the scheme of things I'm incredibly lucky. I have the same cancer 80% of breast-cancer-havers have. Francis was discovered ridiculously early and his evil, more aggressive sidekick was discovered because I decided the indignities of an MRI aren't as bad as not knowing. My ultrasound tech is an amazing woman who made certain she found the sidekick so we could biopsy it and get that little bastard included in the lumpectomy tomorrow, even though it's 0.6cm. I don't have stage IV double mastectomy 6 months to live cancer: that part my medical team seems quite sure of, and that's unbelievably lucky. 

Yeah. That didn't do shit. Maybe tomorrow night it'll help, or maybe the anesthesia will leave me loopy and tired enough that I don't care. Tonight, when I'm getting ready to take the first of two special-surgery-soap showers and my dog is somewhere else and I'm supposed to sleep (yeah right), positive is worthless. 

I actually want to learn the trick to putting worst case scenarios out of my mind without the benefit of meditation (which I can and DO regularly do). Because that's not how my mind works. 

In order to even set foot in the building, and give up all that control and just let some stranger knock me out and cut me open, I HAVE to decide when I'm capable of deciding and communicating where my boys will go if things went bad. I HAVE to have a letter written and in my desk giving instructions to the few people with keys to my house. Just in case. Is that morbid? Maybe, but my outlook on life has been "prepare for the worst and see what happens" for as long as I can remember.

It makes me feel slightly better to know I won't leave them to shelters or have any arguing over what happens in my house, because I have so little control over what's going on. I hate it with every breath in this body that betrayed me. 

It's only been, what, 6 weeks? I'm already so fucking tired. 

Angry will get me through, if I can be angry enough to blow terrified and sad aside for a while. 

Carrie Fisher said: stay afraid, but do it anyway. 

So fuck you, Francis. I don't want to be a hero: I just want you both gone.