So, when I decided to do this "after" pic with the same outfit, I thought the "before" pic was only about a year old, because I frequently get stuff like that mixed up in my head. But then I saw the length of my hair in the first one and realized that this was our first summer in Logan, so it must have been about 2.5 years ago. The tumor got a lot bigger in that amount of time. In the first pic, I couldn't even feel it and I had no idea it was there. But I now know that it must have been there since at least 2006, which is when I noticed that my belly button was off center. It's not off center any more, and I now know that the tumor was pulling it off center. For some reason, this is extremely amusing to me now.
OK, so I don't like my expression in the second pic. I was squinting against the snow and posing while Shayne fiddled with the camera, and he took the pic when I wasn't ready. Then the battery died and we were late to a thing, and we just gave up on the picture and left. But seriously. Can you see the difference? Can you? To me, I look pregnant in the first one, and in the second one I've already given birth to a bouncing 18-pound alien.
In the weeks following my surgery, I would catch Shayne staring at me and I would be all like, "Can I help you?" and he would be like, "You're so much thinner!" And it was true. I'm still getting used to it. Also, when we hug, we can get a lot closer. And I can bend over without holding my breath. And I can exercise without pain, and I want to start roller skating again, and so many, many things are different now. I've selfishly availed myself of the services of a slew of physicians even though I knew I couldn't pay, and I feel intense remorse for that - in fairness, I told them all I couldn't pay and that I wasn't insured, and they did it anyway - but my body feels so much better that it's getting harder to feel guilty about it. My mom, who talked to the docs while I was indisposed, told me to expect about two years to pass before I feel 100%. I already feel a ton better, so I'm really excited about feeling my body heal even more.
WARNING: this post is a very candid battle plan for Christmas shopping at a particular retailer. It may be offensive at times, and it is completely honest. Read at your own risk.
OK. The big-box retailer where I work normally hires a small army of seasonal help to staff the store for the holidays, but not this year. We only hired five seasonal employees, and of those five, only one is a cashier. So. You know what that means. We are shortstaffed for the holidays. There aren't any noticeable additional cashiers. And regular employees are working very few hours. I'm at fifteen hours per week right now, and I'm cool with that because my scar tissue, which is swirled throughout my abdominal cavity, hurts when it snows. I'm OK with only working a few hours per week because I hurt, but lots of other employees are feeling the pinch.
The store is what we call "light." It helps amp up profits by keeping the overhead low. Keeping the overhead low by not paying very many employees for very many hours allows the store to keep rolling back prices and being one of the cheapest places in town. What this means for the customer is that, if they want those low prices, they're going to have to put up with some hassle. And the employees on staff, as stressed-out as they are, are not going to be forthcoming with a whole bunch of sympathy toward nasty people. The store is staffed with members of the Cache Valley community, for one thing, and Cache Valley people don't like whiners. For another thing, the empoyees there are working at 100% capacity, and they don't have any extra energy for sympathy. It won't help anybody's case to moan about all the empty registers. The only day of the year that we use them all is Black Friday. We don't even open them all the day after Christmas. Either shop there or don't. Your choice. If you choose to shop there, you'll have to pay with some extra patience.
There are, however, things you can do to alleviate your hassle.
1) The best solution is to shop in the morning. I know how hard is is to get up early (believe me. I know.) but it's the best way to avoid crowds. When I get to work at 10am, the cashiers are all standing around, bored. By 11am, they are hard at work. So if you get there in the morning, you have a good chance of checking out without a problem. Whatever you do, avoid shopping in the afternoon. You'll have to fight your way to the register, even with me directing traffic.
2) If you can't get out there in the morning, the middle of the night is a good plan. 3am is a good time to shop. But only one cash register is open during the night, and it's the one right in the middle. So plan to walk to the middle register, and get a scooter cart of you can't walk it. Just kidding. We all know you can walk it. I walk that stretch of concrete hundreds of times during my workday. It's fifty feet of smooth floor, so quit whining and just get it done.
3) If you're up to it, shop on Sunday. It's the slowest day of the week. If that's not your bag, at least avoid shopping on Saturday and Monday. Those are the busiest days. Shop in the middle of the week, in the morning, and you should have an easier time.
4) Somehow or another, the cash registers are subject to a rush at any time of day. The place will be dead, and then all the customers will show up as if someone blew a whistle and called them all to the front. For most of the year, I would recommend dilly-dallying for a few minutes, check out the jewelry display case, do a little dance, and in a few minutes the lines will die down. But this is Christmas, so normal rules don't always apply. My best advice for this situation: bring a book, or headphones. Plan to wait. Know that it will happen, and make it playtime. Sing along to your favorite song. You're not any weirder than anyone there.
5) Choose to be nice. You'll get better service that way. My job is to direct people to the shortest lines, but I literally walk away from nasty people. I apologize for the inconvenience with my voice, and then I go help someone else. I get paid minimum wage, and it's not enough to charge the beast. I run away. And I don't care that people judge me about that, because here's the thing: my job is to help people, not to take abuse from them. I'll bend over backwards and walk all over that store to help nice people, but as soon as they start to be abusive I stop caring about their problem. So the most efficient way to interact with me and get your needs met is to just be nice.
6) Shop somewhere else. Go to DI and get everyone books for Christmas. Make the kids a homemade coloring book with simple drawings and make copies of it. They don't know the difference between good and bad artwork anyway. Give goodie plates instead of presents. Last year I made a huge batch of soap for everyone, and it was easy. I don't know if anybody really liked it or if they were just faking, but it filled the gift obligation. Get gifts online during the year instead of waiting for the Christmas shopping season. Give the "five hands": handmade, second hand, a helping hand, time hand in hand, and hand me down. Your loved ones, for the most part, already have too much stuff. They have cupboards, closets, garages, backyard sheds, and storage units bursting with stuff they never use. They don't need or want more cheap crap that was made in China. They're not going to like the smell of that bath products set, or the colors in that cosmetics set, and it's just going to sit there and get all gross until they throw it away. UNLESS! you're one of those lucky bastards who can afford to give high-end electronics for Christmas. Everybody likes TVs. And cars. And boats. If you can afford it, you can buy people's love with that stuff.
So. My point is, you don't even really have to do very much shopping. If you must go do Christmas shopping at the retailer where I work, try to schedule it for a morning or late at night, and bring a book in your purse. Wear comfortable shoes, because you will most likely walk several city blocks' worth of distance inside the store, and another couple blocks in the parking lot going in and out. If you are unable to walk on your own (in all seriousness, I know that some people can't) plan to bring your own mobility solutions from home, because the more people there are in the store, the more competition there is for the scooter carts. Plan to find things on your own for the most part, because the store is light. And try to look at the positive and summon as much Christmas cheer as you can, because store employees will give top priority to nice customers.
I walked down the hill from Aggie village in a drizzly rainfall, wiping water off my brow every few seconds with my hand and then smearing my hand on my already-sodden pants, as if that did any good. I didn't mind walking in the rain, really. I mean, I'm from Seattle. But on this particular day, I had broken my own rule that states I must always have real pants on when I leave my house. I have plenty of pairs of pants, but only one pair of elastic-waisted ones, and I'm not up to wearing stiff waistbands again yet. So I had left my apartment in a pair of knit pajama pants that just didn't seem to hold up to the water as well as ordinary blue jeans. The rain collected in my hair, spilled over my forehead, and sent a single drip right down my nose. I wiped it away.
At the bottom of the hill, I entered the Tesoro station and went straight back to the restroom. I knew I needed to buy something, so I selected a spicy hot V8 and took it up to the register. I produced a payment card.
"Is it debit or credit?" Asked the teller.
Horrified, I stared at the card. I had no idea. I knew my confusion and hesitation must be obvious, so I started doing the exactly wrong thing: explaining.
"It's my husband's card." I told her. "He gave it to me to do laundry, and then I got locked out of the house. Then I had to go to the bathroom, so I came here, and..." I noticed a spot on the card where it said it was a debit card. "Oh, you know what? I says Debit right there."
"You can run it as either debit or credit." She told me, and it didn't register at first how helpful she was really being. "That way, if you don't know the pin, you can just sign." Ah. There we go. If she ran the card as debit, I would be embarrassed and stymied because I didn't know the pin. She was helping me out, I realized. "Let's do credit." It worked swimmingly and I signed the receipt. She handed me a second receipt. "Wait...do you keep one of these, or do I keep both?"
The checkout girl reached across the counter and delicately plucked the signed receipt out of my hand. "There ya go. Yeah, I'm...totally with it." I took my leave and fled out into the parking lot with my beverage, only to stand next to one of the outside garbage cans and drink it so that I could throw the bottle away properly. This accomplished, I set out to return home, back up the hill.
But now I had a new problem, because it had gotten dark. I usually dress carefully in light colors if I am going to walk at night, because I don't trust Utah drivers to really actually look for pedestrians. I cautiously crossed every driveway into every apartment complex, and a couple of SUVs really would have mowed me down if I hadn't been a defensive walker. Avoiding being hit by cars is something I've been good at ever since I got run over at age four. I learned that lesson but good. I use crosswalks and walk signals, but I was dressed in dark purple pajamas and a black SUU sweatshirt.
I hadn't even intended to leave my apartment complex! I railed and no one in particular. I just wanted to go to the laundry room and wash some clothes! But I hadn't been able to make the new card-op laundry system work, and when I went into the housing office they had told me I had to call the repair man myself. I had to go home to get my phone because my pajama pants don't have pockets, and that's when I learned I had locked myself out. Shayne wasn't going to be home for another couple of hours, and I was unwilling to ask housing to let me back in because they would charge me a dollar and I have exactly $1.57 to my name right now, and I don't want to give my last dollar to housing. I already pay to live here, and I helped pay for that spiffy new laundry system that costs more per load, and it's not cleaning my clothes because it doesn't work, even though other people's laundry is spinning merrily in the machines, and I didn't even bring a book to read while I wait for Shayne to come home.
That's when I hesitated to walk to the gas station. See, I don't like to go walking around town in my pajamas. Heck, I don't even like to go to Walmart in my pajamas. I'm not an expert in fashion or beauty, but I do have standards.
As I walked, I hoped that my pajama pants would just look like printed blue jeans under the streetlights. Maybe, with a little luck, that would happen.
Heading back up the hill to Aggie Village, I made the only smart decision I had made all day. I arrived at a bus stop just as the Aggie Shuttle was opening its doors, and I knew that if I got on I would just have a pleasant ride around campus which would culminate in the bus letting me off right in front of my apartment. Instead, I chose to walk up the hill. The docs prescribed walking as the very best form of exercise. All the squillions of docs I talked to agreed on this point. They all urged me to walk. So I pretended that I was just out for an invigorating tromp, in my sleeping clothes, on a rainy night. Yeah.
Shayne was home when I got back and was able to let me into the house, thankfully. Unfortunately, the laundry is still dirty. I'm considering driving it out to another laundromat in town.
It was the year 1999. I was working at a corporate pig farm that lay about fifty-odd miles outside of Cedar City, which was where I lived at the time. The work was very hard, but I was perservering. I was determined to succeed at the silly job, even though it was evident that the job was all wrong for me. I mean, I went to work there because I love animals, and I naively thought it would be fun. It was a factory farm. Ha.
Anyway, I came home from work one afternoon, exhausted. Even though it was only about 5:00 PM, I decided to just go to bed. I had worked my butt off that day. I had to get up at 3:30 to go to work, so it's not like I was breaking any sonic barriers with my sleep. I was too tired, so I went to bed.
When I awoke the next morning, it was already 8:00. Holy crap. I was already two hours late for work. I frantically searched for, and found, the phone number to my workplace and called it on the archaic land line phone we had back in those days. I got a recording that said this number had been disconnected.
Desperate, I dialed the operator. She tried to call the number, then she looked it up and told me it was a cell phone from California. I got out the phone book and dialed the farm's corporate office in Milford, but no one answered. Bereft, and knowing I had failed, I dismally put the slip of paper away. The phone number I needed wasn't listed in the phone book, and the corporate offices weren't answering, and I had somehow managed to write down the number to my farm wrong. I couldn't look it up online because it was 1999, and even if someone in my apartment had had the internet I certainly wouldn't have known how to use it, or how to hack into their computer without the password. I'm a child of the 1920s. So I did the last thing left to me to do. I went and sat on the stairs of my apartment and started crying.
Barely a moment later, my roommate walked in and asked me what was wrong. I told her through my tears, relating the entire story in all its gory details. I had done everything a person could do.
"It's too late." I sobbed. "I'm already fired. It's a no-call no-show. It's all over. I don't know. Should I drive in to work? Should I try to explain what happened?"
My roomie was staring at me with a very strange expression. She kept staring after I had finished speaking, and after several seconds it started to make me uncomfortable.
"What?" I demanded.
"Um, Cydni? It's 8:00 at night. Are you really supposed to be at work at 8:00 at night?"
I didn't comprehend. I probably made a very humorous facial expression, the one where my mouth falls open and my whole face goes slack.
"What?"
"It's 8:00 at night. Do you think it's 8:00 in the morning? Because I would be really surprised if you needed to be at work right now."
"It's 8:00 at night? I repeated thickly. "It's not morning?"
"No. You're not late to work. You're fine."
By now my roomie was struggling to contain her laughter, and as my comprehension dawned it brought with it crushing embarrassment. Oh, hud, I thought. (I really did think that. I hadn't met any Hudsons yet, and in Cedar City many people used "hud" to mean, like, "shit." So they weren't swearing. And I was like that back then.)
I ran back into my room. I probably fell to my knees and started dramatically praying, cause that's the kind of girl I was. The humiliation was unbearable. I had taken a nap and awakened three hours later. I hadn't slept all night and ignored my alarm. It was fine, except that I had thoroughly made an ass of myself.
Well, it took thirteen years, but now I can finally look back on it and laugh.
When I was small, my grandparents had this wonderful old Terry travel trailer from the 70's. They pulled that thing all over the heck. I remember camping with them in Oregon, going to Camp Meeting (Seventh Day Adventist religious revival meeting) or having them cozily living in their trailer outside our house for months at a time. My grandparents were entirely free.
I keep having this recurring dream in which my grampa just gives me this trailer. Free and clear, out of the goodness of his heart. In reality, he sold this trailer long ago, upgraded, upgraded again, and I'm pretty sure he finally sold the last one and retired from camping. But in the dreams, he always gives me this rad old thing.
I always feel delighted by the gift. I dash inside and relive the old glory days. There's the spot on the floor where gramma used to make a little bed for me and pad it with lots of blankets. I would go to sleep feeling loved and happy and safe. And I felt so privileged and trusted when she finally allowed me to sleep on the fold-down top bunk.
I would make that thing so cute.
There's the prim double beds in the back where my grandparents always slept, that I would extend into one big bed for me and Shayne. Of course I would redecorate a little. I'd pick a breezy aqua blue color scheme and make new curtains and little crocheted rugs and granny square blankies.
Pictured: comfort.
It doesn't necessarily have to be granny square.
but the best part would be knowing that, now that I have a Terry, I never, ever have to be scared that I won't have anywhere to live. Ever again.
The original interior, before I make it adorable.
A wild Terry in its natural habitat.
I immediately start planning to avoid paying housing bills by dragging this thing all over town and parking it in different places every week.
In reality, Shayne doesn't share my goal of living in a trailer. Also, we don't actually have one.
This one costs $2,000 in Boise, Idaho.
And yet, I keep having this dream, and the yearning in my heart rages on. What does it mean? What does it mean?
So, it's some form cancer. The GP at the student clinic told me she thought it was probably lymphoma, which was good news because lymphoma responds well to chemo and radiation therapies. She sent me over to a surgeon at the hospital along with the urging to ask Shayne to leave work and come with me to the appointment. He did.
We sat in the surgeon's office and looked in depth at the results of the CT scans. This thing...it's huge. So much bigger than what I would even think could fit in my body. It goes from my uterus to my liver and fills up almost one whole side of my abdominal cavity and it pushes my organs around to make room for itself. The bright side is, I'm probably not as fat as I thought I was.
The surgeon told me that the removal of the tumor should be fairly easy, and he felt there was a 90% chance I won't need chemo afterward. He wasn't all that concerned with a biopsy or a detailed diagnosis of what sort of tumor this is. His first priority is to just get it out, then worry about doing an autopsy on it. Shayne and I found this hopeful, but I feel a sense of doubt. The next doctor might tell us something different again.
Since part of the tumor is dangerously close to my baby factory components, the surgeon referred me to a gynecological surgeon in Salt Lake. I have an appointment in a couple of weeks to talk to her and plan for the surgery. I guess I'm assuming the obgyn can circumnavigate my other organs with equal skill.
I'm already planning the books and music I will bring with me to the hospital, remembering what C.S. Lewis wrote about how he learned to enjoy the time he spent recovering from various illnesses and injuries because it gave him an opportunity to read as much as he wanted. I intend to to the same. During the worst of it, I won't even have to take potty breaks. This will be way better than the time I spent in the hospital when I was four, because now I can read whatever I want. I probably want to avoid funny books, as the abdominal incision will make laughter painful, but...
I guess I'll see what happens. Cross that bridge when I come to it, wot.
Today marks the date of my first ultrasound, which was performed in an attempt to diagnose a weird, owie thing in my tummy that I have lovingly named, "My Tumor." It was my first serious round of testing where I didn't have my mother present, and where I didn't have health insurance. I held out a long time for the insurance, but it turned out we couldn't afford the premiums, so that's cool. Then I tried to hold out for Obamacare, but that didn't work out either because it freaking HURTS. So.
It's incredibly awkward. The girls at the front desk for IHC's radiology department are polite, but their mannerism suggests that they weren't expecting you and they're frankly weirded out to see you there. I tried to give everybody my application for financial aid (in which I enclosed our current tax returns including all schedules, our last two pay stubs for both of us, W-2 forms from our taxes for all our jobs, my mother's maiden name, a sperm sample, and the zygote of our firstborn child) which embarrassed them all until one of the office personnel kindly showed me which office to take the app to.
The ultrasound was probably routine, if you're used to that sort of thing. But my mind kept playing tricks on me. The tech would be examining, like, my gallbladder, and I kept thinking I was seeing the form of a curled-up kidney bean of a fetus in the grainy, staticky images on the screen. I'm probably just used to searching the scan my friend shows me and straining to find anything vaguely human in the dense impossibility of snowstorm. Maybe I can't shut that off. When the tech finally did scan my uterus, I was relieved to find it comfortingly empty. Although, the tech did ask me if I had a uterus -- a valid question, I realized, but it seemed strange. She could see my whole tummy. Being born without a uterus is rare, and and I would most likely have a scar if it had been removed. What would it do, turn inside out and run away?
Dunno. When she scanned My Tumor, I caught sight of a vaguely treelike form, like a placenta, heavily veined and yet strangely amorphous in the ultrasound screen. It was inside me, feeding off my blood.
She called my doctor and made a report. I heard discomfiting bits of conversation like, "She has a mass in her abdomen that's over thirty centimeters. I couldn't adequately measure it...yeah. I think she needs a CT scan. Just to see what this is." So the doc ordered a CT scan, and they managed to squeeze me in for a few hours later, which was wonderfully convenient. I went home and spent the next several hours watching the clock like a stalking cat, drinking my contrast chemicals at correct intervals, willing myself to become the responsible adult I know I should be, right at this moment.
I got the chemicals all drunk at the appropriate times, but I showed up for my CT without the paperwork I had taken home to fill out. Luckily, that was an easy fix. I just filled out new paperwork like magic. At one point, one of the front desk girls came up to me and stated, "You don't have diabetes." then added as an afterthought, "Correct?" I experienced a variety of emotions in that moment. First, I was all like, "Great! Thanks! I didn't realize anybody was testing me for it, but..." then, "Wait, what?" What I actually said to her was, "I have not been diagnosed with diabetes, nor do I believe I have diabetes." It must have sounded strange because the girl dragged out a shaky, uncertain smile. "Perfect!" She exclaimed.
A tech emerged from the bowels of the building and called me back ("Cyndi?" Always, with the Cyndi.) She was nice. But as were walking into the scan room, she asked me my weight. Rather than protesting that I'd already been asked for my weight, like, three times since that morning, I revealed the rather substantial number (I've gained about fifty pounds since we came to Logan). She gasped, balked, and led me to a different room, I assume one with a sturdier platform to hold my ponderous weight. I needed to remove anything metal, including my underwire bra and metal-buttoned jeans. That was expected. I worried about having to remove my undies and was relieved that I could keep them on, but this presented a new challenge. Would it have been worse to flash the tech and radiologist my bum, or my cheerful, brightly striped undies? I held the back of my gown closed by hand.
The next step was to inject more contrast chemicals via IV. The chemicals I drank would cause my digestive system to light up one color, and the IV chemicals would cause my circulatory system to light up another color. Excellent. I lay down on the platform with only a slight pang of fear that I would cause it to collapse and splinter into high-tech kindling. The technician began the process of finding and piercing my vein, a process with which I have familiarized myself via repeated blood donations. No big. The tech struggled to find the vein and wiggled that needle. I grimaced, but I'm tough. Then suddenly, blood welled up around the needled and streamed down the side of my arm, down the CT platform, and all over the floor. I should have thought of a bloodletting joke, but I didn't. Drat. It wasn't quite epic enough to be like a murder scene, but it was still pretty awesome. The tech apologized profusely and I was all like, "Are you kidding? It's just a little blood. I've had worse." That last bit was, of course, quoting Monty Python. Such are the jokes I come up with while wearing a hospital gown.
Then they sent me through the spinning portal, which I'm convinced is either a stargate or a door to Narnia. It's really a cool machine. I reflect on how most people who don't develop a qualifying condition don't get to see one or know what it's like. It's like, spinning backwards into the void. I lay there in the device and watched mirrored components inside it whirring, flashing, like tiny robots observing me and bustling about.
After a time, the tech came back and injected me with iodine, which, as she warned me, would produce a warm sensation, a metallic taste, and a feeling like I've peed my pants, but I really haven't. Boy, did I appreciate that warning. I told her so, too. It was a perfect description of the strange sensation I got. For a moment, I worried that I might throw up all over this beautiful machine, but I willed myself to be still and let the nausea pass. It did. I told myself to buck up and remember that if this all turns out to be cancer, this wave of nausea will feel like a vacation very, very soon.
On my way back into the bathroom to dress myself, I held the gown closed again, until I reached out to take hold of the door handle. I felt the fabric billow out behind me, backside to the tech and the radiologist. Awesome.
The tech told me to wait in the lobby for about twenty minutes while the radiologist read the resulting scans. If I didn't hear anything in twenty minutes, she told me, I should go ask. Sometimes the radiologist can...forget. (Incidentally, that was the second time I'd heard a hospital employee tactfully tell me that the radiologist basically has no fucks left to give, and I have to light a fire under him to get him to help me.) I waited for about thirty minutes of soap opera (Days Of Our Lives. I'm not really a fan.) before returning to the desk, where the polite girls assumed the posture and expressions that indicated they felt they were talking to someone very strange, very unfortunate, and very stupid. What did I need, exactly? Some sort of update? What were the results of...what? I'm used to that. Walmart customers give me that all the time. It neither bothers me nor hurts my feelings. But this situation was very different from me, standing there with a dazed expression, trying to remember where Walmart keeps the toothpicks. Like, it's OK if you think I'm stupid. It's OK if you think I'm socially incompetent, or that I'm three gallons of crazy in a two-gallon bucket (I am.) But I came in here to get a CT scan done. What else would I be asking about?
I didn't say that. I embarrassedly tried to explain what I was still doing there, when the results were already being sent to my doc anyway. The girls politely promised to "keep an eye out for" the radiologist. I milled around another couple of minutes and then left. I hadn't eaten anything since the night before due to doctor's instructions, and my cheerfulness was coming to an end with grim alacrity. I went to Wok On Wheels and got something to eat, because really, what does it matter? I've mostly managed to convince myself of -- and accept -- the idea that this is terminal cancer that has been exacerbated by my foolish decision to delay treatment in hopes of obtaining health insurance. Any result short of "Let's start chemotherapy!" or "Go ahead and make your final arrangements" would be welcome.
In the end, I don't know. I'll talk to the doc tomorrow, and hopefully she will know more. I have an idea that a biopsy is coming. If I don't qualify for the financial aid through IHC (after all, Conservice offers health insurance. Why didn't Shayne just drop out of school and buy it?) I'll apply for Obama's pre-existing condition insurance. And if not...
The End.
P.S. I bet the therapists in the next life are a lot more effective, and I bet they don't even charge any money. And I could kick it with my dead pets. They don't judge me for being crazy.
