Friends:

At long last, I have a date for rejoining the living. Unless something awful happens to upset the wrist doc, or the paperwork overwhelms Personnel, it's looking like 4/24.

The burns got worse before they got better (and the artificial skin was changed -- that was so fun I considered pulling out all my eyelashes while we were at it), so I hobbled around clutching myself, like an anatomically-confused Michael Jackson. But everything is healing very well now. I will soon reclaim my fundaments, and stop scaring the horses.

Then: The wrist surgery itself went smoothly, but recovery has been the pits. I had the TammiFaye look for awhile, and ate a lot of corn dogs, and exercised my vocabulary a lot. At this point I'm okay with things that have no weight or pressure, if I don't do anything for very long. Pistachios are out, cookies are in.

I feel a bit like Rip Van Winkle. I had to call SamTrans to see if the buspass price has changed. I dread, DREAD, being seen the way I've become. Let's all not mention it, like the elephant (literally) in the living room. Pretend we're still e-mailing. On the bright side, my hair is recovering. I passed the Susan Powter and Commish phases and realized this morning, looking in the mirror, that I look exactly like the Unabomber. His hair is longer than mine, but it's exactly the same texture and style. For a Million Dollar Woman, I ought to look better than I do. But, if I can get 200,000 miles on my odometer, I'll feel I've gotten my money's worth.

Speaking of which, friends ask me again & again, "Are you allright now? Did they get it all?" I was shocked to learn that there is no answer to that question, for any cancer patient. Just last week they came out with the very first allegedly reliable test for breast cancer, but it's said to only be good for stages II and above (though that's better than nothing). Mammograms can miss cancer, self exams can miss cancer -- medical "science" doesn't have the answers I'd thought it had. They give you numbers, and that's all you get. They're pretty meaningless, in a way. For instance, if you have a 60-40 chance of making it another 5 years, you still don't know whether you're one of the 60 or one of the 40. So you just find ways to live with a more conscious uncertainty than you had before.

But, onward. I rejoin you soon. There are no words for how grateful I am. I will expect lots of help opening Frito & cookie packages.