The Tattooed Lady

                It has been a while since I checked in with you, but that is because not much was happening on the cancer front. I can now report that I got my tattoo yesterday! This was supposed to have happened some weeks ago, but it got postponed due to scheduling problems with my tattoo artist, Tina, and then I was in Montana for a while.

                To recap, my doctors have made me a new breast pretty much out of whole cloth. Since they took out the whole original one, they had to start from scratch. They stretched my own skin big enough to make one with the aid of a thing called a “tissue expander,” which they gradually pumped full of water and which set off the metal detector every single time I got on an airplane last year.  Then they took that thing out and replaced it with a garden-variety implant. Next, they did a skin graft and made me an origami nipple out of my own flesh and appliquéd it on there. Yesterday, it was time to color the little brown circle, or areola, on there. That’s where Tina came in.

                Tina owns the Tantric Tattoo and Boutique in Sandy Spring. But she also works with the Plastic Surgery Institute of Washington and my own surgeon, Dr. Kathy Huang, to reconstruct breasts for women like me. I asked her yesterday, while she was mixing her ink, how many of these she had done, and she said, “Thousands.”

                Tattooing one of these takes about an hour. Tina does the tattooing in the plastic surgeon’s office in North Bethesda.

                Now, back when I had discussed this tattoo procedure with Dr. Huang, I asked if there would be Novocain or something. She said since they had disconnected all the nerves when they did the mastectomy, I would not feel a thing. I told her I was pretty sure I was getting feeling back in that breast, and I told her there had better be Novocain or something, or I would arrange my own pain relief and that might get ugly. I have too many memories of doctors and technicians sticking needles into my breast the last two years, which hurts like hell, to sit there quietly while someone sticks a needle in my breast, over and over, for an hour, without medication.

                Dr. Huang and the nurse laughed and someone said I should get a margarita before I came in and everything would be fine. But then my appointment got moved to 10am and a margarita appeared unlikely. The Montana solution to this dilemma:  a hip flask full of huckleberry vodka, just in case.

                Well, don’t the Boy Scouts teach us it’s always good to be prepared? There was no Novocain or anything like it. So I went to the ladies’ room and tossed one back. As it turned out, that was a smart move, because getting a tattoo on your nipple hurts. A lot. When Tina began to “break up the skin,” as she put it, poking it with lots of holes so that the numbing spray she used would sink into the under layer of skin, I about jumped out of the chair. She was about half done when I called a time-out. This hurts, I said. It really hurts. What’s the deal with that?

                She said this was actually good news. It was unusual for this procedure to be painful, but what it meant was that my nerves are regenerating, and faster and better than expected. This bode well for me regaining some sensation in that breast, and what’s not to like about that? Meanwhile, Tina went and got some numbing cream that made it slightly less painful, and she was able to finish the job. I was pretty much cranky for the rest of the day. I laid off the vodka and switched to Advil, but it was sore.

                The good news: it really looks good, and that’s now, when the color is a little raw and overdone, and I still have that malformed nipple on there. When the color settles down a little and we fix that oversized nipple, it is going to be awesome. Much of the surgical scar is no longer visible, and the robo-boob now looks a lot like the other one. This is amazing to me. If I drink enough vodka one day, I might post before-and-after pictures, because the difference is astounding, but I hope that day never comes!

                That’s all until next time, when I will report on the Washington, DC, Race for the Cure! I bought an awesome pink cowboy hat in Montana for the occasion, but already the pink is literally chipping off in chunks. A fitting metaphor for the pinkwashing of America? Check out this article in the New York Times Magazine if you want to think long and hard about Komen, the way pink money is spent, and everything:

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/28/magazine/our-feel-good-war-on-breast-cancer.html?pagewanted=1&hpw

R.I.P. The Mommymobile, 2001-2013

                The Mommymobile died Friday morning in Olney, Maryland, following a long battle with transmission problems and complications of emissions system failures. It was twelve and a half years old. It had the grace to die peacefully in front of our own house so we didn’t cause an accident or get stuck in the cold or miss the school talent show on Thursday.

                We got the Mommymobile, a 2001 Honda Odyssey in gray that looked like every other gray Honda Odyssey in the carpool line, on the day before 9/11. I remember driving it around in stunned silence the following day, thinking how messed up the world was. The whole planet was in tears, yet I was cruising around in a lovely new vehicle.

                We brought our third child, Matthew, home from the hospital in the Mommymobile.  And when he was just a baby, during the days of the D.C. snipers, I remember the morning that a landscaper down the block kicked up a stone with his string trimmer, and it shattered the Mommymobile’s window next to the baby. I remember screaming. We were certain we’d been shot at. I remember shaking the broken glass off him and crying. Not a scratch on him, although his little sleeper was full of pellets of safety glass.

                You could fit a lot of kids in the Mommymobile. Over the years, we drove around parts of more than twenty soccer, lacrosse and basketball teams. I estimate, and it is a conservative estimate, that together, the Mommymobile and I made the trip to Sandy Spring Friends School more than 5,060 times. Together, we survived years of Memorial Day camping trips. It was a great place to sit and drink wine while the lightning flashed and the tent leaked.

                We taught my son, Sean, to drive in the Mommymobile.  It ferried around my grandma and my mom, who are both gone. I wish every day my mom was there with me, riding shotgun. Mom and Grandma were amazed at my van’s size and comfort. They declared it was like an airplane. Perhaps they are cruising around in it in Heaven. Grandma’s riding shotgun. They are probably in the drive-thru of a celestial Arby’s right now.

                I have heard friends say they would never drive a minivan. That was a line they would not cross; it was one step too unsexy for them. (Yet these were people who would willingly drive station wagons! Who can understand the thoughts of man?) I loved my minivan. I embraced its boring reliability. I tried to bring out its best self with aromatic braids of sweetgrass and sachets of sage and pine. I tried to keep the smelly soccer cleats in the wayback. If you removed the seats you could fit a huge amount of stuff in there: many bikes, skanky fishing tackle, large IKEA boxes, guitars and amps, crates and crates of horse-related paraphernalia.

                We put the best bumper stickers on it we could find, and as many as we could find. Those bumper stickers got us dirty looks from New Jersey to Kentucky. They got our side panels keyed. They got the tail light smashed, right here in Olney. They got me verbally abused in traffic and once, followed into the grocery store and hassled in the dairy aisle. I stand by my bumper stickers! Yes, I DO have more foreign policy experience than Sarah Palin, actually! And more: “You can no more win a war than you can win an earthquake—Jeannette Rankin.”  “Blessed are the peacemakers—Jesus of Nazareth.” “Montana Girl—Don’t be fooled by the pink.”

                I drove the Mommymobile to the radiologist’s office the morning I found out I have cancer. I sat in that van in the parking lot and sobbed until I stopped shaking enough to drive home. I drove it to each chemotherapy session, although of course John always had to drive us home, because I’d be hallucinating by then. It was a comfortable van to pass out in. And it practically learned to drive itself to Sibley Hospital in DC, where we went daily for six weeks for radiation treatments.

                I have to decide what I will drive now. That is hard, because when I bought the minivan I knew exactly who and what I was, and I am not that person anymore. Is it time for my midlife-crisis vehicle now?  A sexy convertible? I could more easily see myself in a big old Ford pickup, but that would only lead to a gun rack and a big dog. My kid says I should get a Volt; that would be best for the environment. But,you know, I want something that is going to be fun to drive and not a pain in the ass. I am kind of tired of driving what I “should” drive and leaning more toward what I “want” to drive. Hell if I know what that is. But I am collecting bumper stickers for it already.

                               

               

Happy Two-Year Cancerversary!

Hi friends! Rieh, the flowers are beautiful! Thank you! Thanks all of you for the ongoing love and friendship, guys. It's going very well, so far.

Update, and: Guitar? At YOUR age?

                First, here’s a quick update. I just had my two-year mammogram and all is well there, so far. Yay! And gradually, the Frankenboob is looking less awful.  Things haven’t quite shrunk to a normal size, but we are definitely getting there.  We may need to do some tweaking at the end of the day, but maybe not.  I can tell that the breasts are going to look fairly normal and fairly similar to each other, when it’s all said and done, and really, that’s all you need. Don’t worry. I won’t be posting photos!

                There is one other new thing going on. The newest cancer-related bummer is serious arthritis in my hands. My right hand is particularly badly affected, and I of course am right handed. This plays hob with the guitar playing, the painting, the housework, etc., believe me. Yesterday it hurt so bad that I had trouble taking a picture or using my electric toothbrush or opening my front door. I thought I was going to die at the gym. It wasn’t the exercise my trainer was trying to get me to do that was killing me; it was the act of picking up the weights in the first place.

                I had thought this arthritis was just another fringe benefit of getting old. But now my oncologist tells me this is not old age. Rather, it is a side effect of one of my meds, tamoxifen. Now, all the studies show that a person with my type of breast cancer should be on tamoxifen for ten years if possible, to minimize chances of the cancer recurring.  I have almost two years under my belt. But if the arthritis becomes crippling, I may have to switch medications. We really don’t want to do that. So, in the meantime I am going to try to channel my badass mom, who truly knew how to dismiss pain, and put mind over matter. And I will buy stock in the company that makes Advil. But I swear, if I tell my trainer that I can’t do something she wants me to do because my hand has seized up like the engine in my brother’s Chevy Vega, I am not bullshitting her.  It really hurts.

********

                In happier news, there’s music.

                On Friday, the Washington Post Magazine ran an article about a musician, Manny Bernardo, who runs a music school in Bethesda called Middleway Music Studio. He teaches people—mainly adults—to play the guitar. I stumbled on this article while sitting in a car repair shop in Derwood, waiting for new tires for the Mommymobile. It charmed me because it was almost exactly a year ago when, at the age of 49, I started taking guitar lessons from Jeff Burnett at Rocketeria in Olney. And as I later learned, Manny Bernardo is Jeff’s jazz duet partner, and they are of course friends.

                Reading this article, it was gratifying to learn how many persons like me turn to the guitar fairly late in life. I am the only one I know of, personally. I understand that Rocketeria has many other adult students, but I am not to the point yet where I attend any of their jam sessions or socialize with them. For me, the reality is this:  listening to my fourth-grader, Matt, who has been taking lessons for a couple years and is a much better player than me. He is at this moment practicing his version of “Blackbird” by the Beatles for the school talent show next month.

                But while it was nice to learn that there is precedent for grown men and women suddenly picking up the guitar, on the other hand, this article was also kind of annoying. The writer and/or the editors played up their theory that middle-aged people who decide to learn to play the guitar probably harbor fantasies of playing in a rock band. The article was titled “Rock Dreams.” It compared the Middleway Music Studio to Jack Black’s “School of Rock.”

                This did not ring true to me. And I thought it was a little condescending. Do I have rock n’roll fantasies?  Not so much. Or at least, it is a lot more complicated than just that. But it got me to thinking about why was I doing this, anyway?

                God knows, I harbor no secret desire to rock an arena. Please. I have not taken leave of reality. I have no wish to be Joan Jett or Pat Benatar. I get that I am a middle-aged semi-bald housewife, who does not know how to sing, and has other things to do all day, and I’m fine with all of that except the bald part. But that is not why I wanted to learn to play the guitar, and I bet it’s not why a lot of these other grownups are taking guitar lessons, either, whatever the Washington Post features desk may think.

                I can’t pick out just one reason I started taking guitar lessons. There are probably three or four different reasons.

                I signed up for lessons after two of my kids had already been taking lessons for some months. This was about a year after I was diagnosed with cancer. At that point, we were not at all sure how the cancer thing was going to turn out. So I started working on my bucket list. Learning the guitar was on that list.

                I had tried to learn guitar twice in the long-ago past, once in college and once in grad school, and I totally fizzled at it. I was working two jobs and going to school, didn’t have time to practice, didn’t really have the money for lessons. My friend who tried to teach me was a great guitar player but not a great teacher. I am sure my practicing annoyed my roommates. Whatever the reasons, I washed out, twice. But when I got cancer, I realized, I can’t die without learning how to play the guitar.

                Happily, I have turned out to be a very slow learner.

                Now, in the middle of this Post article, there is one quote from Manny Bernardo that gets at something a little deeper than rock n’roll envy. He says his adult students are mostly busy professionals. He talks about how he keeps the boring practice drills to a minimum with his adult students, because they have enough boring technical stuff to do in their day-to-day life already. He says, “Music is the way for them to make a connection with something that is almost quasi-spiritual.”

                I am sure the bankers and lawyers featured in the Post article get this point. It may feel soulless to them to spend their days racking up billable hours. It certainly feels soulless pretty often to me to spend my life driving the Mommymobile around Montgomery County to soccer games and orthodontists’ appointments. But music is art, and art is the opposite of soullessness--even the art of very crappy beginner guitar playing.

                What is art, anyway? It depends on what day it is. Sometimes it is communication. Sometimes it is just self-expression. God knows, I paint many pictures that never see the light of day. But sometimes you find one that speaks to a friend, and that moment is golden. Music is a lot like this. It has the potential to be beautiful and communicative (at least someday, I keep telling myself). But maybe right now the only person on the hearing end of the equation is God himself, that’s valid too. It says in the book of Romans that the Holy Spirit intercedes for us in sighs too deep for words. I believe music can be like that. It can be a means of grace.

                Now, this year has been really hard, in a lot of ways. One of my kids has been sick, another injured. My brother and I both have cancer. And both my best friend’s mom and my mom died in the last several months. Loss is sometimes beyond words. But maybe not beyond music. My goddaughter played the piano at her grandma’s funeral. She played the tuba to cheer me up after my mom died. My friends took me out dancing after we had my mom's funeral. That’s what music is for. That's why you have music at funerals.

                Of course, most of the time, it’s not that dramatic. Usually, music is just quietly beautiful, and beauty is something to steep oneself in. Nothing wrong with that. As it says in the book of Philippians, “Beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.”  If excellence comes in the form of a song by Emmylou Harris or the Beatles or a wonderful harmonica solo or some great line by Bob Dylan, that’s fine with me. Let’s wallow in that for a while.               

                It also turns out that learning something new is just good for your brain. Learning music is good for fighting chemo brain, it turns out. Chemo brain is where the very toxic chemotherapy drugs take out mass quantities of your brain cells. It particularly messes up the parts of your brain that are in charge of organization and planning. My friends can tell you I was never good at those things and now, God help me, I am truly a mess. But academic studies are now coming out that show that cancer patients with chemo brain can help themselves regenerate the old brain cells by learning new things and engaging in the arts. Learning to make the right hand do one thing while the left hand does another and the eyes try to stay on the right line of music and the brain tries to remember what those notes are and what the words are—that is all really good for your poor brain cells. Ha!

                In some hazy future, it might also be helpful in a more mundane way. Maybe someday I will want to play a song at church. And, as I am still trying to figure out what I will do when I grow up, one thing I have considered is a program at the Wesley Theological Seminary in DC called Theology and the Arts. It prepares people who are planning to go into some kind of ministry to address the connections between faith and the arts. By “arts,” they mean music, writing, drama, visual art, and dance. And various hospitals around here have programs to train people who want to work with cancer patients, including art therapy options. Now, I am mostly a painter, but if I end up doing one of these programs, it might come in handy to be able to play the guitar and/or read music. Again, ha! Way opens, as the Quakers say. Sometimes the parts of the puzzle are falling into place before we even realize they ARE parts of the puzzle.

                And, at the end of the day, playing the guitar is just fun. I don't need to be on a stage to have fun with this. Sitting in my office playing, or singing with Jeff in his practice room at Rocketeria, is just plain fun. Nothing wrong with that, either!  It makes my blood pressure go down, I can feel it. I find myself smiling hours later. As Dr. Seuss wrote, in One Fish Two Fish, “Did you ever fly a kite in bed? Did you ever walk with ten cats on your head? Did you ever milk this kind of cow? Well, we can do it. We know how. If you never did you should. These things are fun and fun is good.”

Not even funny

                Well, forget anything I said in my last post about getting naked at Jerry Johnson Hot Springs, or any other public place, for a very long time. I guess I had understood, intellectually, that it would take a few months before this process was finished, and this stupid breast would be presentable. But I had no clue how unpresentable it would be for now.

                We are talking absolutely gross, here. Sideshow freaky. I may never get naked again.

                Stop reading right now if surgical detail makes you queasy, or if you have, or have ever had, any vested interest in having sex with me. This is nasty. And John should probably just stop right now and get on a plane and go to China for a while.

                I went back to the plastic surgeon today to get the stitches out, or most of them, anyway. The plastic surgery nurse sat me down and talked to me quite seriously before she got to unwrapping me. She really didn’t want me to freak out when I saw myself.

                Just know, she said, that we make the nipple big. Way too big. It’s going to look seriously, much too big. It’s supposed to be really, really too big. Because as it heals, it shrinks, and it’s your own tissue as well, so your body just absorbs it right up. We have to make that nipple just HUGE so that there’s something left at the end of the day. Because it would just suck if we did all this surgery and anesthesia and such and in the end, that nipple just disappeared.

                Oh, and if it turns out in the end that we made the nipple too big, we can always just trim it later.

                I have never heard the words “trim” and “nipple” used together that way, a verb and an object. I thought I was freaking out at that point, but then they had me actually look at this nipple, because they wanted to show me how to change the bandage. I am expecting “big,” as in thick, or swollen. But what is there is long. Long and dangly.

                Okay, NOW I’m freaking out.

                “It looks like a penis dangling off there,” I stammered.

                “I’ve heard it called a ‘troll penis,’ before, actually,” the nurse admitted.

                My surgeon, who I share some degree of camaderie with by this point, explained helpfully that she sewed it on the good way. Sew it on the other way, she said, and not only would it look like a troll penis—but it would have bent the other way, and actually it would have looked like a troll erection.

                Good God.

                 I mean, it was funny, but I felt like crying.

                “I promise you, I promise you, it will shrink,” the nurse says.

                It had damn well better shrink. It had better get “absorbed.” It will have to be the kind of “absorption” that happens fast and loud, like when my kid slurps up spaghetti noodles, one at a time, like a retractable cord retracting. Because this is hideous.

                I have never been unhappy with my body, ever, really, that I can remember. But I’m pretty unhappy with it now. This is by far, the worst that any part of me has ever looked. Even the radiation burns were less gross than this. I would run away screaming myself, if I could.

                Do apple trees feel like this when we graft things onto them?

                Now, the surgeon and the nurse were just delighted with how this thing is looking. Really pleased. There is no sign of infection whatsoever. Great blood flow. Everything is hunky dory. I understand I should be happy about this, and that instead of trying not to cry because of how revolting it is, I should be amazed at what medical science can do. But I’m not.

                They showed me an elaborate system for rebandaging this thing every day. It involves special sticky sealers and up to 20, yes, 20, layers of gauze, every time I shower, with a cut-out made for the troll penis with a sharp pair of scissors that I have sterilized with alcohol first. We have to keep this monster swaddled straight, too, pointed exactly front-and-center, or it could go crooked and stick like that forever.

                I am not making this up. They had to show me how to aim and focus my bra so that we don’t get any drift.

                Now I am sitting here afraid to move, basically. What if I pick up a basket of laundry and whack this thing? What if reach up on the high shelf (where the Scotch is, maybe) and I pop a seal? Maybe I just need an armored Madonna-style pointy bra, like the Amazon women in the trashy comic books.

                For the first time, I seriously wonder whether I should have done the whole reconstruction thing at all. For what? For this?

                I asked, when can I go back to the gym?

                “In a couple of weeks,” the surgeon says. “Nothing that involves bouncing.”

                Walking yes, running no. Friction is bad as bouncing, and bouncing is right out. So the fitness gains I had made are pretty much going out the window, too.

                I don’t feel like bouncing, anyway.

               

                

Post-surgery update

                Just a quick note to let you all know the surgery went very well, indeed.

                “Now, that’s a happy nipple!” said the nurse who re-did my dressings today.

                Really, it was much, much easier than I had expected. The surgery itself was over before I was aware it had started. Yay for general anesthesia! I only took the painkiller, oxycodone, for a few hours, as it made me dizzy and nauseous. I took one pill for the nausea, and I went to bed. I woke up yesterday very dizzy, and bright red. Somewhere in that IV they had stuck some steroids to help fight nausea, so I looked pretty red there for a few hours. I used to look like that a lot during chemo. By noon, it had all worn off, and I was fine, and that was it.

                The surgery was Tuesday. This is Thursday, and the pain level is nearly zero. There is a little irritation where some of the bandages are. That’s pretty much it. I get stitches out and so forth on Monday.

                My plastic surgeon explained to me that there was one sort of decision that had to be made about where the nipple went, in the end. There are two ways of locating the best place for a nipple:  1) centering it in the ideal place on the breast, so that one breast looks great, or; 2) centering it in the ideal place relative to the other breast, so they are level and such.  Now, these two spots are not necessarily the same, because people are asymmetrical and especially so, when you have been new-and-improved, as I was. So in the end, she split the difference and fudged it. I am sure it will be fine when it all gets unwrapped. This did all involve some measuring tape and a Sharpie pen and some fifth-grade geometry skills.

                The last step will be getting this Frankenboob tattooed so it is the same color as the other one. Can’t do that for a couple months, until the nipple settles down a little. The plastic surgery nurse said the tattooing really distracts visually from any scarring and really fools the eye. She said when this is all done, if I should get naked, say, in a gym changing room, and someone sees that breast, they might not notice anything is wrong.

                I should have told her, but I didn’t, that my own personal goal is that, in the end, if I choose to go to Jerry Johnson Hot Springs next time I head out west, and if I choose to get naked with the other folks soaking there, nobody will run away screaming, or at least, if they do, it won’t be because of the Frankenboob. We'll see how that turns out.

What I've been doing the last few weeks...

                Well, it has been a while since I checked in with you all. A lot of stuff has been going on, so it’s time to catch you up. Basically, my mom, Ruth, got sick in December. It seemed to everyone, for a few weeks, that she was going to get better, but a few days after Christmas it became apparent that she wasn’t. She died on New Year’s Day, in Missoula, with her children and friends all around.

As it happened, while we had all thought she just had a really bad case of shingles, it turned out that the pain from the shingles was masking pain from something more serious. She had blood clots in major arteries in her intestines, probably as a result of a cancer metastasized from somewhere else in her body. This caused her to die of a massive, overwhelming infection. We will never know where the original cancer was. She went from diagnosis to hospice within a few hours.

                So I haven’t been writing much of anything about my own cancer. The only thing I’ve felt like writing about is my mom, and I am not even ready to write anything useful about her yet. She was wonderful. I had thought I was prepared for the possibility of losing her. After all, she was 88 years old, and I’m a grownup, and I’ve lost people before. Well, I was wrong. Preparing yourself for losing a great mom isn’t something you can do; you just experience it when it happens. It is like riding a tsunami. Waves of sadness keep washing over me. It wasn’t something you could prepare for.

                I will say, I am blessed with the best friends a person could have. At each point in the last month when I thought I could go no further or my head was just going to explode, one of my friends would miraculously show up. My brother was on the same flight from Seattle to Missoula as I was.  My high school sweetheart, who I had been trying to locate for months, appeared when my mom had been asking about him. My dear friends, Dave and Natalee, were passing through Missoula on their way from Helena, Montana, to their home in Seattle, on the very day my mom died. My college roommate, Anne, saw on Facebook what had happened, and she drove ten hours from Seattle to be with me. My old friend, Steve, took me for walks when I needed to get out of that hospital room, and he made sure I ate food from time to time. He and Anne sat up with me until 4a.m. the night of the funeral, drinking Scotch and playing Ban anagrams.

                I have been back in Maryland for two weeks now. Life plugs on. My own stupid cancer gave me another scare last week, when I found a suspicious lump in my “bad” right breast. That surely got my attention. But the doctor says it is nothing to worry about, just something interesting that happened. Basically, the implant in there has flipped over, like a breech baby. Now back of the implant has a little round lump, where they sealed it after they filled it with silicone. But now it’s back-to-front, and the lump is on the front, where I managed to find it. Who knew that could happen? The doctor said turning it back around would be, basically, way unpleasant, and I should just learn to live with my little idiosyncrasy. I’m fine with that.

                I’ve had it with “way unpleasant.” As it happens, I am going in for my next round of plastic surgery tomorrow morning. I have already in hand some serious nasty controlled-substance pain pills. This is the surgery where I get to have a skin graft. They peel off a piece of me from my left side and graft it onto my right, to make me a nipple to replace the one that I lost in the mastectomy. When I met with my plastic surgeon, Dr. Kathy Huang, on Thursday, she once again asked me if I wanted to be awake for this procedure. And I laughed at her again. What part of “Hell, no!” had been unclear? I told her, again, not only do I want to be as asleep as I can be, but I would prefer to be asleep somewhere on the planet Mars.

                But she and I always have the most surreal conversations. Most of them would be pretty funny if you were a fly on the wall, listening. For example, tomorrow, my surgery is at 7:30a.m., but she was explaining why I have to actually be there by 6a.m., without benefit of coffee.

                “We have to decide where we are going to put your nipple,” she says.

                I am thinking, it would not take me 90 minutes to answer that question. I already have a pretty good idea where I would put it. But maybe I’m being too much of a traditionalist.  I will consider my other options. I hadn’t realized there were other options. I would have stuck it right about here. Measure twice, and cut once, I would say. This is more math than art, right? But possibly I am wrong. Maybe there is more to this than I thought, and this is going to involve a compass and a plumb line and a big black Sharpie pen and be way unpleasant.  And all without coffee.

                My doctor also gave me a two-page, typed list, with three columns of small print, of the many drugs I must not use as my surgery approaches. Fortunately, Scotch is not on that list. I can’t drink anything, including water, after midnight tonight. But that means I still have a good hour left…