in which i tell you a secret

...and discuss how the decision I just made is probably gonna fuck up my health. C'est la vie!

Now, this is only a big secret in that I'm not supposed to tell anyone at work about it yet, but I figure the chances of anyone I work with finding this blog are about .3483 in one million.  I could be wrong about that. But it's my defense.

There's a new position being created in my department in the hospital and it was offered to me.  It's an overnight position, 40 hours, 6 pm-4:30 am, Monday through Thursday.  There are many reasons this appealed to me and made me express interest in the job and accept it when it was offered.  Shall we enumerate them? Oh, why not.

1.) Money! The shift differential amounts to an almost $7000/year raise. That's a lot--A LOT--of money for just changing your hours.

2.) I am not not NOT a morning person.  The hours of the job as it stands now, with the horrid commute, means I get up between 4:30-5 am four days a week and that is so far from what my body likes, it's not even funny.  It's been ten months since I started at this hospital and it's just now that I don't feel completely like death getting up at 4:30.  Plus, when I was recovering from surgery, then semi-unemployed/self-employed last year, and not on anyone else's schedule, I pretty much worked out that left to its own devices, my body would go to sleep around 1:30-2 am and wake around 8:30. I think adjusting to going to sleep at 8 in the morning is going to be a lot easier than adjusting to waking up at 4:30. I might be wrong. We'll see!

3.) The work itself.  My department has two divisions, which without going into too much boring detail basically are an inpatient unit and an outpatient unit. When I was first hired per diem, I was mostly in the inpatient, but as they offered me more hours and, eventually, a full time job, more and more of my work has been on the outpatient side. Which is fine, but it's also what I did for 25+ years at my old hospital job and, while I'm good at it, it's also very routine for me. The stuff they do on the inpatient unit, especially what the job involves overnight, is completely different, a new challenge, and just very interesting to me.

4.) The politics, etc.  It's a big department.  The number of people one has to deal with on day shift is exhausting to me as a mega introvert. And there's so much draaaaaaammmmmmaaaaaa.  Almost all the people I work with are perfectly nice individually, but get them together and there's always someone who's convinced they're working harder than everyone else or that they're getting the crap assignments or whatever. Or someone who takes offense to something someone else said. Or or or. It gets a little high school.  Plus--back to the mega introvert again--when we're not actually with a patient and we're at our computers doing work there, we're all in a big room and these people never shut the fuck up.  Ever. As a matter of fact, the other day two of us were in there (everyone else was with a patient at the moment) and we were both working away quietly when our supervisor comes in and asks why we're not talking and says it's too quiet. Kill me now.  Overnights right now is just one person (who are thus used to working by themselves quietly) and my new position will be to help them out during their busiest hours.  The woman who works Mon-Wed in particular is an absolutely delightful person and I know we will be able to work very well together collaberatively.

5.) Did I mention it's Monday-Thursday? Andrea will actually not be working any weekend days (aside from occasional coverage) for the first time in ten years. There are so many yoga classes and workshops that happen on Friday night or Saturday afternoon that I haven't been able to go to with my schedule as it is, so many things with friends on Saturday that I can't participate in...  Looking forward to being more in tune with other people's weekends!

Segue...so, mentioning that I'll be able to go to my favorite teacher's Friday yoga class again, plus attend some of her workshops, brings me to the on-topic part of this post. Not that you people aren't fascinated by the minutiae of my friggin' life, I'm sure. Ahem.  Anyway, one of my first thought was how all this was going to play into my fitness life. As it were.  One bad thing about the hours is that, if I take public transport, I can't actually get home at 4:30 am. However, there *is* a Y within convenient walking distance of the hospital that opens at 5 am. My thought is that it will work out perfectly for me to end my shift at 4:30, change at the hospital, grab a snack/breakfast , and then hit up that Y when they open. I'd be able to get my workout in and still be home before 7:30 and ready to collapse into bed by 8.

I was wondering, though, if there was any information on the web about how working overnights effects muscle growth or fitness, so I tried to do a little research last night. I couldn't find anything about that with a cursory search, but I did find out a whole lot of scary shit about how working overnights is gonna give me a heart attack or cancer.  The cancer thing especially worries me because apparently, melatonin is a natural cancer preventative, and people who sleep during the day and are in artificial lighting at night just do not produce the normal amount of melatonin in their bodies. And supplementing with melatonin is not the same as the stuff your body produces on its own.

It's kinda scary. But not scary enough for me to pass up what feels like a really positive career opportunity.

This all happens in September, kids.  If anyone has any suggestions for adapting to night shifts, any links to info on how, if at all, working overnights effects your fitness, or articles debunking that my lack of melatonin production is gonna kill me, I'm all ears.

xoxo

i wanna do a couple other very bad things

Well, that depends on your definition of bad and your definition of want, but we'll get to that later. First, a tanning update.  I cracked and bought a Groupon for tanning, despite my certainty that it will give me cancer instantaneously, and then I also bought some super special tanning bed lotion that cost over $20 off Amazon that some other internet friends pimped out to me (I was so ignorant of this whole process I was completely unaware you needed super special tanning lotion) and then I was so busy at, and tired from, work that I didn't exactly leave myself time to do the tanning before I have to take my "after" pictures this week. Plus, honestly, I'm still a little skeered.  But I have to use that Groupon and that lotion, so it'll eventually happen. Meanwhile I fell back on the Tan Towels the lovely Ms Bethany recommended.  I am not sure my arms are a color actually found on humans in nature and my belly and legs need another coat today, having started out extra white, but I have to say, the faux tan did bring out my definition in the gym lighting last night.  So, at least partial success.

Now, onto other matters.  One of the very bad things I want to do is only bad in the sense that I have always been against it and have come out against it publicly in this very blog. And I don't so much actually want to do it as much as think I should do it. So, with those caveats out of the way, lemme set the scene.  I have always maintained that I do just enough cardio to keep me in shape for everyday life, i.e. I can sprint for and catch a train successfully without feeling like I'm gonna die. Well, a couple of Saturdays ago I was in that exact position, sprinting to catch the commuter rail home from work.  I made the train. And so did the people just behind me, a couple in which the mom was carrying a nine month old and the dad was carrying a folded up stroller. I made the train but I did feel mildly like I was gonna die. It's not that my heart rate was that high or that it didn't come back down, but my lungs killed. And I thought, Andrea, your VO2 max must suck or something and you couldn't have even been running *that* fast. (Nothing to disillusion you about how fit you are as being paced by people carrying a twenty pound infant and a baby carriage!) So, I glumly admitted to myself that I should probably suck it up and do a little more strenuous cardio a little more often. Specifically, I should suck it up and do HIIT, which I have always maintained I have no intentions of doing, since doing sprint intervals till you feel like puking sounds like no fun at all and I think working out ought to be, on the whole, fun.  Deadlifting is fun. Farmers walks are fun. Hitting shit is fun.  Even weighted planks are fun. Intervals are not so fun.

But I'm considering them.

And now onto the second thing. People who are grossed out by potty talk and the mention of bodily functions really need to bail now.  Got it?

Are you gone?

I mean it. If you read after this, it's your own damn responsibility.

Okay.  The second bad thing I would really like to do is colonic irrigation.  I first read about this in the Globe sometime in the '90s*** and it immediately seemed to me like something I would like to try.  To delve straight into the TMI, though I would not say I am chronically constipated, I often feel like when I go, I could go more, but it won't happen.  Particularly when I am dieting and on the poverty calories.  In fact, the best thing about having a cheat day while dieting is not eating all the crap food I've been missing as much as the monster dump the next day.  That feeling of my intestines being totally cleaned out, not in an unpleasant diarrhea way but in a nothing's-blocked-up way, is extremely... pleasurable? satisfying? nice. I'ma go with "nice" because any other terminology sounds vaguely sexual and I'm pretty sure you people are already vowing never to read this blog again.  ANYWAY.  I have always had it in my head that that is the feeling colonic irrigation would give you.  But I obviously never did it in 1994 and over the years I sorta forgot that the whole procedure ever existed.  Until I recently saw it mentioned again somewhere. Being in the midst of my poverty calorie cycle and not happy with the bathroom consequences of such, I thought ah, yes! I always wanted to do that!  So I started googling.

It costs a lot of money.  Plus, I'm sure the initial consultation that goes along with my $130 first session would be all about how I'm not supposed to be eating meat or ingesting sugar or drinking beer or whatever and I'm not sure I could sit and listen to that spiel when all I want is to get that empty feeling of a mondo poop.  Not to mention that when I picture in my head what the operators of some place called ISIS Holistic Clinic must look like, all I get is this:

And then I start giggling, because Fred Armisen in that wig is never not funny.  So, colonic irrigation, i.e. hydrotherapy, probably wouldn't end well for me.  Which is just as well since the medical community is probably as against it as they are tanning beds.  Best case scenario, you've wasted your money engaging in an activity like douching or liver "cleanses" that presumes to clean an area of the body that totally doesn't need any outside help; worst case scenario, some hippie chick who looks like Fred Armisen doesn't know what she's doing and perforates your intestine.

Still sounds better than HIIT.

xoxo

***apparently this was some kind of big fad briefly in the early 90s, as it's a punch line in one of the first Ab Fab episodes as well.  Saffy's yelling at Eddie about how she outsources responsibility for everything in her life including "...and once a week someone shoves a hose up your bum and flushes it out for you!"

i wrote something

Totally off topic, but I'll just drop it here and hope someone reads it. Peace.

This morning on CNN they had a poll question for their audience: should Nancy Lanza be considered a victim along with all the other people her son murdered?  To say that my mouth literally dropped open would not be an exaggeration. In internet parlance, double you tee eff?  We’re really asking this question?

Let’s parse this.  If Nancy Lanza had been shot to death by her son who then killed himself without first going on to also shoot a whole bunch of uninvolved people presumably unknown to him, most of them tiny children, would anyone be considering her anything other than a tragic victim of domestic violence and/or the sad casualty of a loved one’s apparent mental illness?  But because her child did take out a whole bunch of other innocent people, she is...at fault?  She...deserves to be dead?  Is that what we’re saying here?

Shall we examine what exactly she is supposed to be responsible for?  Not knowing what her adult child was planning? Not stopping him?  Having weapons available for him to use in his killing spree?  Or, most simply, being a bad mother? Every time I think my feelings about this sort of thing have been blunted by time, another horrible news event occurs and the resulting coverage by people who know nothing and understand nothing brings them to the fore.

Six and a half years ago, my then-20 year old son, my only child, whom I love more than I could possibly love anyone else, was on a locked ward for two and a half months, being diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder.  Schizoaffective disorder: either a really really bad form of bipolar disorder or a milder form of schizophrenia, but in any case, not really anything with which you’d want someone you care about being diagnosed. It wasn’t his first diagnosis. Since he first became really sick his senior year in high school, various clinicians had posited first bipolar disorder, then depression with psychotic features.  But somewhere around the beginning of June 2006 during that long inpatient stay, the S word was first brought up.  It was devastating to me.  Before that, as heartbroken and frightened as I was by his problems, I was certain that all we needed was to get him on the right medication and get him to stay on it and then we’d all live happily ever after. But schizophrenia? That seemed like a living death sentence to me. That was something no one ever got better from. That was crazy dirty homeless people shouting at the voices in their heads on street corners. That was...people committing atrocities because of their delusions.

One summer night, in amongst this little slice of hell, I was leaving the locked ward after the visiting hour. (By the way? When you visit your 20 year old son on a locked ward, your belongings are searched and you aren’t supposed to have physical contact with him. It’s like prison. Prison for people whose only crime is being sick. I disobeyed the no physical contact rules regularly and without shame. Try to keep me from hugging, kissing, and holding the hand of someone I love when they’re so sad and so scared they’re shaking and crying. Try.)  On my way out, his case manager stopped me to tell me what a nice, sweet, polite kid he was. “You did a good job with him,” she said kindly.  “Apparently not,” I answered, choking back the tears that immediately welled up. “Or he wouldn’t be here.”  “Oh, no. No. You know that’s not true, don’t you? It’s not your fault that he’s sick, Andrea.”


I will never forget that woman’s kind words, both her praise of my son, and her reassurance that I was not to blame.  Because, believe me, when you have a child with mental illness you will blame yourself, and as CNN helpfully reminded me this morning, so will other people.  Because no one really knows yet what causes schizophrenia though there are dozens of theories, you will take each one of those theories you hear or read about and apply them to yourself, always with culpability.  Heredity? Yeah, it’s your bad genes or those of that person you were foolish enough to breed with. Exposure to toxins or a virus in utero? Oh my god, it must have been the flu you had in your 7th month or those chemicals at work that weren’t supposed to be a pregnancy risk.  Childhood trauma? You got a divorce. You had a house fire. Cannabis usage in adolescence? You should have somehow prevented him ever trying marijuana in high school.  Etc. And etc.  

Then there’s the blame you ascribe to yourself, and everyone else ascribes to you, in intervening.  You shouldn’t have let them put him on antidepressants in high school! No, you should have had him on antidepressants sooner! You should have--somehow--gotten him to keep taking medication and going to psychiatrists and therapy even when he was over 18 and refused to. Somehow. That’s the heartbreak just about everyone with a mentally ill loved one knows about. You can’t force them to get help. You can’t force them to comply with treatment. And except in extraordinary circumstances, neither can anyone else.  Basically you have to be actively threatening yourself or someone else before you can be forced into treatment.  Prior to my son’s hospitalization in 2006, he’d been off all psychotropic medications for over a year and a half and I’d watched him getting sicker and sicker. Watched him helplessly.

There was the summer of mania where he paced the house endlessly, read an entire encyclopedia front to back (searching for hidden messages?), went for walks in the middle of the night leaving the front door wide open, snapped at you whenever you spoke to him, and entirely stopped bathing.  There was the winter and spring of deep depression and eventual auditory hallucinations, where he just got very quiet and sad, showered for hours, watched the same DVDs over and over again (searching for hidden messages?), became afraid to sleep in his own bedroom, and never left the house at all.  And all that time all I could do was wait. Wait for him to agree to go to the doctor. Or wait for something horrible to happen.

The last few days before his admission, he was obviously getting more and more frightened and afraid to be by himself and admitted finally that he was hearing voices. The night he was admitted, he couldn’t sleep, couldn’t settle, was going from room to room, listening to the walls. I convinced him at last to call 911 so that they could “give him something to sleep” in the ED. When the EMTs came, they told him his pulse was racing and his blood pressure was very high, and he agreed to go with them. If he hadn’t, they couldn’t have made him. He wasn’t threatening suicide. He wasn’t violent. Well, not until he decided midway through the trip to the hospital to attempt to fight off the EMT and try to leap out of the back of the ambulance so he could “answer the white phone.” That sort of sealed his sojourn on the locked ward. Thankfully.

So, Nancy Lanza.  We don’t know what was wrong with her 20 year old son that made him kill her and kill himself and commit an atrocity.  Apparently he was “on the spectrum.”  He was also at the prime age to have a first psychotic break, but with him dead and his computer destroyed, we have no clear cut evidence that he was in fact delusional or, if he was, what form that delusion took. We don’t know if he was, rather than being delusional, simply sociopathic. We don’t know. We’ll never know.  But do I think that if his mother thought he was a danger to himself or anyone else, she’d have had weapons where he could get at them? No.  Do I think she was probably where I was seven years ago, watching her son struggle with an illness she could do nothing to intervene in and waiting for him to agree to get help, all the time thinking (hoping, praying), “oh, we just need ____ to happen and everything will be okay”? Yes.  Do I judge her? No.  Does my heart break for her as much as for the parents of all those babies her son shot? Yes.  

Do I think it’s disgusting a major news outlet would question whether this dead woman was a victim? Oh, fuck yeah.

One last thought: I couldn’t watch the tributes to the victims--how this little girl loved horses and that little boy liked to play with his cousins--without thinking that had Adam Lanza died when he was six, someone would have said such things about him.  No matter what heinous acts he committed, he was once someone’s little boy.

xoxo

My own story has, of course, a much happier ending. My son was never violent. He got help, is on a good combination of medications to control his illness, and is committed to complying with treatment.  As his mother I of course wish he didn’t have to suffer with a lifelong illness, but I’ve come a long way since I thought this was a living death sentence.  It’s not.  Mental illness, like diabetes or epilepsy or cancer, sucks, but all you can do is keep trying to kick its ass.

damn, hope the 401k holds out

Why? you ask.

Oh, well, see, I'm on track to live to be 95.  In fact, according to the example health survey I took yesterday in my NSCA manual, just being a human female who's reached the age of 50 in the year 2012 means my life expectancy is 83 years.  Which seems pretty rash of them to tell me considering I've just had a brush with what my pcp charmingly termed "borderline cancer", but hey! I'm sure the statistics work out somehow that even people who've survived a brush with real cancer get factored in. But, anyway, once you add in the extra points I get for all my good health habits and vital signs and family history n' shit and subtract the points I rack up from my not-so-good health habits and conditions, I end up with 12 extra years. Huh.  Frankly, I'm not betting on it.  And if my personal trainer administered this test to me and then gave me those results, I'd probably snort and ask wtf I was paying him/her for then.  (I guess it works out better as a business model if you can convince the client they're gonna die 12 years early. That'd probably motivate at least a couple months of gym attendance. WHO SAYS I KNOW NOTHING ABOUT COMMERCE?)

Oh, yeah. Anyway. Statistics. I have only a very vague notion of how they work, despite having taken two semesters of the damn class when I was 18 (in preparation for a degree that I never ended up pursuing, naturally). Taken and aced, I might add. It's all lost to me now, till the day my neurosurgeon electrically stimulates that portion of my brain while fixing an aneurysm or something. (I bet that would take a few points off your longevity score, yo.)  Being my normally pessimistic and anxiety-prone self, I tend to only believe the statistics when they are negative.  Therefore, I fail to believe that chances are good I'll live to be 95. Hell, I fail to believe chances are good that I'll live to be 83. In which case, why haven't I cashed out that 401k and taken a nice long European and/or Caribbean vacation yet? It's a mystery.

I do, however, believe the scary ones and feel free in applying them to myself.  For instance, apparently 1 to maybe even 2% of women who have laproscopic hysterectomies (which I did), especially those who have robotic surgeries (which I did not) have a complication called vaginal cuff dehiscence, which can include bowel prolapse. Often this is triggered by sexual intercourse.  (Large intestine falling out your hooha post sex=biggest mood-killer EVAH. In my humble opinion.) But it can also be triggered by the valsalva, just from coughing or sneezing.  Or, for that matter, the valsalva from squatting and deadlifting, I would imagine. Though the number of ladies who squat heavy weights would appear to be smaller than the number who sneeze, cough, or have sexytimes, so they probably are less likely to show up in the literature.  Even more terrifying, sometimes cuff dehiscence happens with no apparent external trigger.  Yup, just standing there minding your own business and the next thing you know, you're in excruciating pain and your colon's popped out to say hello.

I would be happier if I had never read this little collection of facts on the internet, including hearing horrifying testimony from women it's happened to, but it's 2012. The internet is there. You can't stop the influx of information. If you're a glass half-full type, however, you think, "hey, the chances are 99% that my stitches aren't gonna fail for mysterious reasons."  

If you're me, you think, "holy shit! one person in a hundred...that's effing common." And then you think about how birth control is only 98% effective even when used correctly, and the fact that your kid beat the anti-conception odds. So then you think, "huh, if I was one of the 2% who conceived even when I was trying hard not to, if I was the tiny minority then, I'm probably not gonna be in the tiny minority this time." Then you remember that statistics doesn't work that way and that those factors are totally separate from each other and you have the same 1-2% chance of cuff dehiscence as any other patient who had your surgery, all superstition aside. THEN you curse the fact that you remember one fucking thing from two semesters of stats class. Sigh.

Then you decide maybe you should just reject science and go with the whole superstition thing. 

To sum up, if you need me, I'll be busy chanting so that none of my remaining internal organs fall out after sex or in the squat rack or while buying overpriced yet delicious pumpkin poundcake at Whole Foods. Also so that Fidelity invests my money better in case I do need it in thirty years.  Happy Thanksgiving!

xoxo

needles, wut?

My acupuncturist, Marcy, whom my friends have heard me talk about way too much, was on an NBC nightly news segment on back pain!  Here's an extended version from the MSNBC website:

Visit NBCNews.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

I'm not sure what acupuncture does--I don't exactly buy into the concept of chi--but it does something. I've had treatments that left me so loopy and spaced I almost sat in someone else's lap on the subway on the way home. I've had the weirdly pleasurable sensation of lying on the table with the needles in and feeling as if I had a heavy, invisible blanket on me, weighting down my limbs. I've a previously sprained ankle that kept swelling up on and off for months finally stop doing that when Marcy scraped at it with what literally was a Chinese soup spoon. (In the massage world, I think we call that cross-fiber friction, but I've never performed it on anyone with an eating utensil.)

Oh, and then there was that time Marcy treated a point on the top of my head because I was feeling depressed in a flat, ennui-filled way, and mentioned casually that she would never needle that spot if I was in my much more common state of freaking-out anxiety because it was a stimulating point. Whereupon, several hours later in bed, I found myself suffering from the female equivalent of the fabled "call your doctor for an erection lasting more than 3 hours" of the Viagra commercials. Holy crap, one of the weirdest (and least comfortable) experiences of my life. I seriously wonder if the ancient Chinese treated that point on people suffering from, y'know, sexual dysfunction.

So, yeah. I don't understand exactly how or why acupuncture works, but it's pretty cool. Plus, I'm perfectly willing to pay to take a nap in a dark quiet warm room in the middle of the day, yo. It's not slacking--it's medical treatment.

xoxo

the treadmill of life

Or something like that.

Ever feel like life is an endless series of two steps forward, one step back, one step forward, two steps back?  I've had a couple very positive life things happen recently--after a bit of stressful paperwork wrangling and one surprisingly painless phone call after it was initially screwed up, I got some money that I had coming to me, and then I got some very good news on my recent biopsy. Yay, me. I barely had time to process those things and think, huh, life's all rainbows and sunshine and kitten orgasms for once, when we had flash flooding that deposited water into my basement twice in one day and then last night my dryer just died just as I was putting a load of clothes into it. (The upshot of which is that I currently have a rack full of hanging laundry in my now-dry-as-a-bone basement. I feel like a hillbilly.*** At least it's not on my porch.) 

It's enough to make a person wish that things could just run smoothly and problem-free for a solid month JUST ONCE. I mean, spending one's day off shopvaccing puddles up or having to buy a new clothes dryer are infinitely better problems than, y'know, cancer or being completely broke, but is just one month without anything breaking in the house, no unexpected giant bills, no health problems, no work drama, no agita of any kind--is that too much to hope for? Apparently so!

And thus it is with fitness.  A step forward, a step back.  I was just--just--getting back to the point with my lifting where I was prior to my hip problem when I had my little surgical procedure last week. When the nice recovery room nurse was giving me my discharge instructions which included no heavy lifting for a few days, I inquired what "heavy" meant since I lift weights recreationally.  "We usually say nothing over ten pounds, " the nice recovery room nurse said. "What kind of weights are we talking about?" 

"Well, I deadlift like 200 pounds."

Blink. "Oh. Well, I wouldn't do THAT. You'd probably start bleeding again."  She told me to check with my gyn's office since "that's such a specific situation" she didn't know what to tell me.

Turns out my gyn's office did not want me lifting for 7-10 days. Seriously? For that little procedure? Whatever. I dutifully obeyed doctor's orders, though on day 6 I decided to try some bodyweight dips after cardio.  Oh, I regretfully had to admit they were right.  I could barely do 3 sets of 8 bodyweight dips when I had been doing them with a frigging 35lb plate hanging off me the week before. So on day 7, I went into the weight room and did a workout that was probably equivalent to one I'd have done 6 or 9 months before. Completely demoralizing. One little minor surgical procedure and a week off wipes out 6 months of hard work and progress?  Now, I know it will come back. Yesterday I had a session that while not good per se was at least not humiliatingly bad.  But it seems to point out that things get worse a whole shit ton easier than they get better. Especially at my age.

Add to that that my dieting since the end of May, while successful on one level (back down to 114 as of yesterday), has arguably made me look worse. I mean (and I'll sound like a complete douche saying this, I'm well aware), no false modesty, I look awesome in my clothes now.  BUT I look worse in my underwear/bathing suit/nekkid. One step forward, one step back.  I suppose that since a lot more people see my in my clothes than do in my underwear/bathing suit/neekid, I should err on the side of that. But, like a month of no problems, crises, or aggravation, it would be stellar to reach a point where I look good in and out of my clothes. Oh, yeah. I've had that. It was called being 20 years old. Duh.

xoxo

***credit to my friend P who used that descriptor in a post the other day and cracked me up; it fits here

perspective, and oh yeah, screw you, interwebz

A couple things you need to know before you decide to read this blog entry:

1.) It's a Boring Medical Story and only tangentially related to the subject matter of this blog.

2.) Lord knows I'm down with the black humor, but some of this just isn't funny, so if you only read my shiz 'cause it cracks you up, you should probably next this muthafucka. I'll do better next time.

Something you should know if you do decide to read this blog entry, but you don't already know it:

I have a wee, tiny ::cough:: bit of an anxiety disorder, and one of the ways this manifests is in occasional bouts of cyberchondria.

Basically, with the help of the internet, I'm pretty much able to convince myself that the worst case scenario of any possible diagnosis is in fact imminent.  Even though I know I have this tendency, it isn't enough to a.) convince me in my heart of hearts that I'm not going blind from eye chlamydia and that that weird rash isn't probably scabies or b.) get me to stay the fuck off WebMD.  In fact, during a bad patch I once more or less begged someone who cared about me to forbid me from googling my symptoms, because I didn't have the strength to refrain from it myself.  

Note: Instead of agreeing to act as my Cyberchondriacs Anonymous sponsor, my loved one instead sent me a clip from The Big Bang Theory wherein Sheldon asks for a full body MRI. Why yes, people do tend to find my crazeeness hilarious.

Further Note: Just FYI, I have never turned out to have either eye chlamydia or scabies. That doesn't mean it couldn't happen. God.

Okay! Disclaimers and prelude outta the way.

As I have said to everyone who has heard this story so far, when your doctor calls you on a Saturday to discuss your test results, it's never anything you want to hear. And so when the gyn called me while I was at work this past weekend, it was with trepidation that I called him back.  He told me that there were atypical cells and hyperplasia on my endometrial biopsy and that, instead of the in-office procedure we had already scheduled, I was going to have to go into the hospital and have a d&c, so they could get more tissue to look at.  And then, after, most likely, a hysterectomy.  "Is that cancerous, pre-cancerous, what?" I asked.  Pre-cancerous.  I told him both my mom and my grandmother had endometrial cancer and, as far as I was concerned, good riddance to my uterus, it's a ticking time bomb anyways. "We need to get more tissue, make sure we're taking out the right organ," he said.  "Most of the time this is treated surgically. Sometimes medically, but usually surgically. But we'll talk about that..."  And responding, I guess, to the tone in my voice, he told me it was good that I had reported my symptoms, that we had found this.

I was kinda stunned. I had assumed, despite my jaundiced view of my womb, that this was going to be just a return of the polyps I had removed 3 years ago or else just my hormones outta whack. I didn't expect anything serious.  After all, my mom died in her mid-60s after ignoring her symptoms for far too long. My grandmother made it into her 80s before her uterus rioted. I thought I had a good 15 or 20 years before I actually had to worry about this.  And when my mother was dying, I had asked her MD about the family history and if there was anything I ought to do. She told me that, because it was an estrogenic cancer and fat women have more estrogen, I should try not to let myself get fat.  And I haven't!  That was another response, after my initial shock: I was fucking pissed off.  

I haven't let myself become obese or, at worst, more than borderline overweight, and now I'm what most people consider thin. I'm fit, I exercise hard and often, I go to my medical appointments and get every damn test they tell me to get, I eat my fruit and vegetables, I've never smoked, I don't use recreational drugs other than (despite my joking about it) very moderate amounts of alcohol, I can count my lifetime number of sexual partners on two hands and have fingers left over (and I'm old, yo).  I practice good health habits, damn it.  I do mostly everything right.  Wah, wah, it's not fair!

And then I was depressed when I realized what these two surgical procedures meant in terms of my lifting.  I was already depressed that I have to rest my piriformis for a week or two.  The prospect of not lifting for months?  All my muscles were gonna atrophy.  There went my goal of squatting 185 before my birthday or pulling two plates by the end of July. And, needless to say, bulk over!  No lifting, no eating. I felt so sad over this.  Just when I was starting to get kinda sorta legitimately strong.

Because I did not have the actual pathology report, I couldn't do much googling beyond "abnormal uterine biopsy" and some of that was reassuring.  Endometrial cancers grow slowly, or so I read...somewhere.  Four or six weeks after a hysterectomy before you can lift anything heavy.  See above.  Then last night I started actually googling hysterectomy itself and that was a little more alarming.  It was more like, four or six weeks before you can do anything.  Wait, wut?  Like, go to work?  Like, function?  No way, I can't do that.  And 3-5 days *in the hospital* after the surgery?  I didn't think anyone got to stay for that long these days.  And I have no one to help me. I'm single, my parents are dead, I have no siblings, my only child is disabled himself, my ex-husband/father of my son is beyond useless, and my close friends all have jobs and responsibilities and none of them live really close.  I pretty much rely on myself for everything.  I'll admit I went to bed and cried a little last night.

Cut to today.  Oh, I got home and in the mail is the pathology report from the gyn.  I have ATYPICAL COMPLEX ENDOMETRIAL HYPERPLASIA/ENDOMETRIAL INTRAEPITHELIAL NEOPLASIA WITH EXTENSIVE BREAKDOWN.  Yeah, it's bolded and all caps like that. Woohoo. Back to google I go.  It's like one of those horror movies where you're yelling at the slutty teenagers to, for god's sake, not go back into the house, right?

Because I had the technical words now, I got more medical/less laymen-oriented results.  After I searched the first half of that slash "atypical complex blah blah" the first study I pulled up told me that slightly less than half of the women who had that on endometrial biopsy turned out to also have cancer found (either on d&c or when the actual uterus is yanked).  Pissah.  Hence my MD's "we need more tissue to look at." Okay, it makes sense now.  Fifty/fifty. Flip a coin.  Either cancer is growing in me right now or it's not.  Then, somehow, I came across a page that listed which of a number of uterine pathology results should be considered cancerous or not. And there, squarely in the cancerous column, was the second half of that slash, "endometrial intraepithelial neoplasia."  Okay, stunned again and sick.

Why would my doctor lie to me and say pre-cancerous if it's not?  Why was his office taking their sweet time about setting up the d&c?  What if I need chemo?  Who the fuck will help me with that? Am I going to die?  What will happen to my son if I do?  (I instantly started making a list in my head of all the things I would have to do in the next few weeks to settle my affairs if I was gonna die.)  Should I call/text/email one of my friends while they're at work and say, "Hey, apparently I have cancer"?  I didn't. I baked a cheesecake.  I petted the new cats.  Then I googled the "endometrial intra...blah blah" itself.  Whereupon the first two results told me very clearly that EIN (it's got an acronym, yo) is precancerous.  If you have it you're 45% more likely to develop cancer, but it's NOT cancer. So, fuck you, whatever website made me think I'm gonna die sometime in the next few months. And my gyn didn't lie to me. Whew.

Of course, it's still 48-52 that I have cancer anyway, but that's better than a 100% chance.

I'm not worried about growing my lats anymore, I am even less concerned than ever that I have cellulite, and I'm not pissed I have to rest my piriformis.  Perspective.

Send some white light my way that I'm in the 52, not the 48, category, and that I don't need to be outta work for 6 weeks after my hysterectomy.  And that my fear of cancer and imminent death will turn out like the eye chlamydia and scabies stories.  In return I will post up pictures of the reduced-calorie, high protein cheesecake I made with the recipe and macros later.  That seems like a fair trade.  Namaste, bitches.

xoxo