Friends:

Well, it looks like there'll be a sequel to my opus "The Menace of the Golden Winnebagos".  Perhaps I shall call it "The Terrors of the Truculent Tata".

I had a bottle of champagne chilling for 5/18, to celebrate having made it one year.  But by that time, the mammogram had already shown something possibly bad.  Déjà vu, déjà vu:  "Don't get dressed just yet.. we'd like to take an additional sonogram."  So I kept the bottle on ice till I could get the results of the stereotactic needle biopsy (little core samplings, like they do on marine survey ships), which would surely show that it was only scar tissue.  But the samples showed cancer, tho seemingly a different, milder-mannered cancer, so I kept the bottle chilled until after the lumpectomy, when they would surely tell me that it was only DCIS, not to worry.  But then there were the phone calls.  Déjà vu, déjà vu:  "Could you call your onc as soon as possible?" -- so... anybody want a bottle of champagne?

Seems like I now have two cancers.  DCIS (ductal carcinoma in situ) is everywhere on that side.  It's normally mild-mannered, but this is "high grade", meaning it's agressive and invasive.  And I also have what we believe is the original guy, who was already known to be a bad character, and is now known to also be very powerful and persistent -- i.e., not at all intimidated by chemo or radiation.

So the right breast (I've named her Pauline, as in "Perils of Pauline") has to go.

The surgeon was pretty frightened, and scheduled surgery for this Tuesday.  But I have long been planning a vacation with a friend who is probably dying, and needs to be accompanied, and I feel like this might be the last time I could be with him (plus I really need to do something for me, that is fun, after the past hell-year).  The chemo-oncologist is also frightened, but he felt (as do I) that a few weeks will neither save me nor kill me, so we'll be doing the mastectomy sometime around the 2nd or 3rd week of July.

The odds that matter are, how likely is it that everything's contained on the one side.  If so, the surgery should take care of it, and I will eventually blossom into an eccentric and outrageous old lady (vs. an eccentric & outrageous middle-aged lady).  If not, the bottom line is that this is untreatable, at least by conventional methods.  It will be quite awhile before we would know one way or the other, but it's heavy on my mind.

On the bright side, I am shopping for new hooters.  I know many conoisseurs of such, and I thought we might stroll down the streets evaluating what we see and choosing my new form (I promise:  much odder things go on in San Francisco).  The radiation-oncologist says it's okay for us to go ahead with reconstruction, and I'm hoping very much that we can do it all at the same time, since I'm sick to death of doctors and knives.  Then, like so many of my girlfriends in the Cancer Forum, I can have a 20-yr-old top and a 50-yr-old bottom, haha.

How do I feel?  I went flying into the forum, wailing like an air raid, dropping canisters of panic and rage on all and sundry.  As always, those strong, fine, together people had much comfort and information, and I'm calmer now.  But that's relative, of course.

I'm more determined than ever to hurry up and swim with the dolphins and, fates willing, maybe even manatees.  Minutes after I got the news, Donna arrived at the office with Kevin, who now has to do all the stroller-pushing (genes will out!) and is full of new tricks.  Like, "Do 'cheeks'!" which involves blowing one's cheeks way out and then whacking them, producing a glorious fart sound.  And of course, applause is MANDATORY!  And the little hummer who lives down the bluff, who for 5 years has met my appearance with a straight-up zoom and shrieks of "Baby Raper!", as if he didn't see me every day, is now coming up into my "garden" and poking around for goodies.  And my pillaged illegal would-have-been flower garden, that you shared my tears over last summer, has become a wild flower garden (remember "Miss Peach" and Arthur's Weed Garden?) and a new amazing thing sprouts every other day.  The cascades of white rambling roses on the cliffs of Great Highway have been replaced by wilder explosions of pink ones, even growing out onto the highway itself.  Kalena's daughter Kala'i is one year today, and heart-stoppingly beautiful.  There's no explanation for all of this.

It will be a month before anything happens, and much longer than that before we need to be concerned, so I'll just keep doing what I've been doing -- trying to get well, and trying to enjoy each day.  I love it that you've been willing to join me.