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. 

An Unexpected Unpleasant Side Quest

So, it's easier to just put this into a blog post than repeat things over and over for peeps who don't know yet. I haven't been around much the past few weeks for writing or anything else (other than horror movies and related distractions) because I'm in the middle of a thing.

It turns out, finding out I have breast cancer is a cognitive pause in brain function, followed by a weird hotdish of panic, practicality, research, and learning how to just not know what the fuck is going on.

Get your mammograms, peeps. This is not how I expected to spend my favorite season.

Facts as of today:

• I have "Invasive Ductal Carcinoma" which is the most common (80% of all breast cancers, according to the Komen website) form. It's very small, very early, and wouldn't have been found without going to a routine mammogram. 
• I've done a couple of tests and have a couple more coming up, but overall the treatment right now is a lumpectomy scheduled for early November, and most likely a round of radiation after. 
• Final determination for treatment will be decided by the pathology results after surgery, so chemo/hormone therapy could still happen, but as of today not likely. 
• I am expected to recover fully - this is non-aggressive (Grade 1) and I've never heard "you're young" so often from anyone since I turned 40, but apparently my age and the size/grade make a HUGE difference. 

This is a shitty path to take, but right now it's just another series of things I have to fit into my schedule. That's not to say it's no big deal: the past couple of weeks have been full of terror, but today is good.

Today I have a plan.
And I'm convinced by my medical team it'll be ok.
And I need a good name for the tumah (it IS a tumah, and if you haven't seen Kindergarten Cop you're probably too young to read any of this post) so I can say I'm kicking its specific cancerous ass.

Fucked Up Things I've Discovered (so far):

1. I am WAY TOO TALL for the stupid half-gown shirt things used at the breast center. Sigh. I am not a midriff-baring-shirt person...wtaf. 
2. Everything after the radiologist says "we see something, you need a biopsy asap, how's next Tuesday" sounds like the Peanuts adults mumbling. 
3. Breast biopsy needles look like an ear piercing gun's meaner older sibling, and sound equally as obnoxious. 
4. Breast biopsy procedures look suspiciously like a Xenomorph's second mouth taking super fast tiny Alien bites on the ultrasound machine. WELL OF COURSE I WATCHED IT...do you know me?
5. Breast MRIs are significantly more undignified than anything I've done outside a gyno office. Yes, I'm certain my indignity has only just begun, but you know...that was a new one for me. You sort of kneel/lie face down on an unholy offspring of a massage table and udder-milking setup, with all upper body weight on the sternum and ribcage between/under the boobs, because they have to hang into boxes for the scans. There is no full breath to be had (just re-reading that sentence made me take a HUGE breath in), and the 1/2-milker-box thing takes up any extra space in the MRI tube.So there is NO room to adjust. Related: I really need to lose some weight. Also related: SURPRISE I'm not claustrophobic.  
6. Turns out I can be in a seriously uncomfortable position without moving for 20 minutes out of sheer stubborn refusal to have to do this bullshit again (if you move during the longest scan, 9 minutes, they reschedule you for another day). 
7. I am capable of meditating while my ribs bruise.
8. Spa music and noise cancelling headphones don't get rid of the MRI noise. 
9. No amount of music can distract from feeling a troupe of fairies frantically dancing on my back during the final scan. Fucking weird. 
10. MRI dye doesn't give you superpowers. I'm sorely disappointed. 

And now, I'm off to snuggle one of my favorite babies AND have dinner and watch horror movies with some of my favorite family.

Today is good. 

An Amateur Historian's Linguistic Annoyance

I'm watching a documentary on the Etruscans. Yes I'm a nerd, this is established. I'm irritated with the historian/archaeology presenters.

First, a thirty-second background on Etruscans because I usually assume I'm the only ancient history weirdo in the room. Please ignore the next two paragraphs if you're already all well-versed in Etruscan history, or medium-versed, or even know the name...in fact, feel free to comment with corrections if I've gotten any details wrong.

Etruscans were the big-time civilization in Italy prior to Rome. They were extremely wealthy, extremely cosmopolitan, and it appears they were extremely egalitarian when it came to men and women. Greeks didn't like Etruscan women because they ate with their husbands (GASP...like equals, like a date where the dude actually wanted to spend time with his wife and hear what she had to say? What the fuck, Etruria?), they read, wrote, rode horses, they had their own names (OMFG, they weren't just named after their daddy-owners like Roman women, waiting to be passed off to their husband-owners?), they were treated as equals in parenting (as seen in funerary monuments identifying the dead as "son of" or "daughter of" BOTH parents' names), and they had the gall to be both athletic and sexual.

Etruria (now Tuscany) was eventually conquered by Rome and much of their art/customs were assimilated into Roman society...the ones they found useful, anyway. Similarly, Etruscan families were eventually assimilated into Roman society. The loss of female standing and cycle back to male-dominated society when the Etruscans were all Borg'd into Rome isn't what makes me irked. Over thousands of years and the rise and fall of tribes and civilizations there seems to be cycles of one sex dominating the other with periods of equality popping up here and there. That equality is never perfect and always relative to the surrounding nations, just as it is today.

All of these tidbits are presented in the documentary by historians and archaeologists who've studied and made assumptions/conclusions/maybe guesses about Etruscan society as a whole based on the evidence at hand.

This is not what irritates me about the otherwise awesomely fascinating documentary.

It's annoying as hell to talk about women's rights as GIVEN TO THEM by the men of the society. When a PhD or respected historian uses phrases like "Etruscan women were ALLOWED more freedom than Greek or Roman women" (emphasis is mine) the base assumption is that women don't and didn't have that power to begin with. If there is little evidence other than the facts archaeology and surrounding literature provides (reading, writing, eating, names, etc) why must the scholars make the sexist assumption that women were GIVEN these things?

Maybe they set up their society that way from the beginning. Maybe that society valued both men and women as (again, gasp) people. Maybe women allowed men the power they had.

My point is, there's no way to know, and these sorts of ingrained assumptions are really terrible in innocuous ways. It's easy to take away rights from someone if you are brought around to sincere believe that you GIFTED them those rights from the beginning, not that they inherently have rights to respect, earning and keeping their own stuff, their very personhood. Why is it so damn hard to think that people thousands of years ago might have actually valued all citizens* in their society and built their customs and laws to reflect that value?

I sincerely wish more scholars would take a step back and consider their words and basic biases before presenting conclusions. After all, science (yay science!) has now proven some of those male Viking warrior burials were actually female: undeniably female skeletons with war wounds, buried with war grave goods, assumed to be male only because the evidence said "warrior". Assuming more egalitarian ancient societies were only more equal because the males in charge "allowed" the women freedom and rights is a disservice to that society as a whole. It's important to examine and discard biases and just present the damn facts: women had more power in Etruscan society than Greek or Roman women had. Period.

Perpetuating historical sexism when it actually isn't proven only perpetuates modern day sexism.

*Yes, Etruscans kept slaves, just as many ancient cultures did. Slavery is a different treatise altogether, because if I am for agency and personhood I am for it in every case, which means slavery is both a related and different topic to feminism in historical accounts. Ultimately, just like many other cultures, I think they sucked for keeping slaves. THIS post, however, is about how historians can easily STILL say women were "GIVEN" their basic rights by the men, even when science hasn't provided proof either way.