Teaching blog wars.

I am curious to know if any of you who are teachers have taught about what happened with Seal Press, Jessica Valenti's books, and/or Amanda Marcotte's book. I'm going to be teaching a class that will look at conflicts in feminism/Women's Studies and where the movement/field is headed, and I'm thinking about looking at one or two of these moments. If anyone else has done this, I'd love to hear how you did it.

Facebook Fun.

You know how Facebook will suggest friends for you? Lately, it's been looking like this on my Facebook page:

PEOPLE YOU MAY KNOW
Ginormous Asshole
Add as Friend
You and Ginormous Asshole both went to Random High School.

You know what I just realized?

My surgery was eight years to the day from my miscarriage. There has got to be some meaning in that. I don't know what it is, but it seems meaningful to me, and not in a bad way.

The "f-word."

7-year-old Bean has been hounding me for days to tell him what "the f-word" is. Apparently, the issue came up at his afterschool program, where the kids were working on a list of rules. Some of the older kids suggested that not using "the f-word" or "the bad finger" would be good rules; for the littler kids, however, this raised more questions than it answered: a bad finger? What could that mean? And what, on earth, is "the f-word"? (Some guesses: "fart" and "fool.")

So, finally, when he started asking me about it yet again and pleading with me to tell him what it meant, I sat him down.

"Bean," I said, "I'm going to tell you. But this means that I'm treating you like a grown-up, and you need to understand that you can never say this word at school or at afterschool program. If you feel like you want to say this word, you can go in your room by yourself and say it quietly. That's it. Because it is not a nice word."

"Okay," he said, seriously and expectantly.

"The 'f-word' is 'fuck'. Remember how I told you about the man putting his penis in the woman's vagina? That's called 'intercourse,' or sometimes, 'sex'. The word 'fuck' is a very rude way to say that. You might hear me and Daddy saying it sometimes, but it isn't nice and we shouldn't do it. Putting up your middle finger at someone - no, not that way, like this - means 'fuck you.' It is very rude and not nice and we don't ever do that. Okay?"

"Okay," he said, still serious. Then, thoughtfully, "You know, I bet I would've ended up saying it by accident, if I were just fooling around and saying silly words." (In fact, he has.)

So that's where we are. So far, so good.

Lost and Found.

Tenured Radical writes about a stranger returning her lost iPhone; her story reminded me of the time I accidentally left my wallet in a rest stop women's room in South Dakota and got it back - in Omaha, Nebraska - by the end of the day. Here's what happened: I was taking Bean and my parents to the zoo in Omaha, and we were driving from Sioux Falls. When we got to the zoo, I realized that I didn't have my wallet (nor did I have any way to pay for us all to go to the zoo, which became a problem at first because my parents couldn't find their credit cards). I remembered putting the wallet on the window ledge in the large restroom stall where we had stopped on our trip down and called everyone I could think of to try to alert the rest stop staff to check the bathroom. I actually did get through to someone who searched the bathroom twice for me (it turned out to be the wrong rest stop, but anyway), but he couldn't find it. So, I called Mr. P., who had stayed home to work, gave him the task of cancelling all of our credit cards, and resigned myself to having lost the wallet.

About an hour later, I got a call from a good friend, who had gotten a call from a woman who had found my wallet on *her* drive from South Dakota to Nebraska. My friend had recently written me a check, so the woman who found my wallet called the phone number on the check. Fortunately, my friend had my cell phone number and was able to reach me; the woman had told her she would leave the wallet with a ticketing agent at the airport (she was in Omaha to catch a flight). So, when we were done at the zoo, we swung by the airport and picked up my wallet (with everything still inside).

An odd epilogue to this story:
My friend had gotten the name and number of the kind woman, and I called her a week or two later (after she had gotten back from her trip). Unfortunately, the gentleman who answered the phone was somewhat rude - I asked for the woman and he wanted to know who I was and what I wanted, and after I explained, he told me she wasn't home. I asked if I could leave a message, but he seemed confused and surprised that I was calling for this woman. In fact, he sounded a bit like he was trying to be funny, but he ended up exasperating me. I got off the phone and called her again some time later and left a message on her voice mail, thanking her and offering to take her to lunch if she were ever in the area, but I never heard from her.

ANYway. What are *your* unlikely lost and found stories?

Reconstruction thoughts.

First - I don't miss my breasts. I'm not thrilled with the scars, mostly because right now they aren't scars but healing wounds, but I don't miss the breasts themselves. I'm considering not bothering with prosthetics, but I think what will most likely happen is that I'll buy a pair and wear them for special occasions, like dressing up. (This is less because I want to make any kind of political statement about breasts as accessories and more because I am extremely low-maintenance when it comes to my appearance.)

But second - it occurs to me that the only reconstruction options that were discussed with me were for female breasts. I wonder what my options would have been had I asked simply for a flat chest. Would there have been any additional options? Do men with breast cancer have any reconstruction done following surgery? I'm not sure that I would have wanted anything different than what I have now, or that I would have been a candidate for anything else, but it's interesting to think about how breast reconstruction options may or may not be limited due to assumptions about gender.

So, here's the deal.

The chemo didn't kill all of the cancer cells. Specifically, they found cancer cells alive in all of the nodes and the tumors they removed. I don't know exactly what that means, but Beloved Oncologist has been reassuring. Apparently, when you have estrogen-receptive cancer, which I do, the hormone treatments can sometimes work better than the chemo. So we'll hope that that happens in my case. Apparently, we are still talking about curing my cancer, so that's a good thing. And Beloved Doctor Who Diagnosed Me was, as always, very sweet and upbeat and assured me that I was going to be ok.

But I was not really thinking of this (incomplete cancer kill) as a possibility, and now I'm finding it difficult to process. Fortunately, I meet with both Beloved Oncologist and Beloved Healing Coach tomorrow, and I will set up an appointment for next week with Beloved Therapist.

In other news, the drains are out (the second one was removed today), my arm is still quite sore, and my hair is growing back. Oh, and now that they've removed the surgical tape, I can see that I actually have two enormous scars and not just one humongous one.

After seeing Bint's scar pics (see comments on my last post), it's occurred to me that my left scar will probably permanently change color from the radiation. Which is ok - not what I was necessarily hoping for, but something I can get used to. It helped to see hers and to have an idea from that of what mine might look like (which is reason #15 why showing scars is a good thing).

I am home...

...and looking a bit like I've wrestled with a shark, but I'm getting used to my new self. I found that the narcotic pain meds they gave me were more trouble than they were worth (whatever happened to Tylenol #3?), making me nauseated, so I stopped taking them soon after the surgery, which was fine, as everything was numb enough from the surgery that I wasn't in much pain. Now, as the nerves are waking up a bit, I'm taking tylenol and ibuprofen. But mostly, I'm not in real pain, just some discomfort that is more annoying and distracting than anything else. The pain from the Taxol was worse - more intense and more constant. What I have now can mostly be alleviated by lying down.

You all may get to see some scar pictures in a few weeks. I'm not sure about that yet. I have this intense desire to show people, though, and I'm pretty sure flipping up my shirt at social gatherings or in public wouldn't be appropriate. I don't know if this need to share is about sharing trauma or simply thinking the scar is cool or what, but in my case, I think it's partly about normalizing not only my body but the whole experience.

I also wanted to see scar pictures before my surgery, and I had trouble finding them. Mine is, I think, more extreme than the ones I did find.

TMI follows here - turn back now:
I confess that I actually find the drains kind of cool at this point. There are long tubes that drain fluid beneath the outside of the scar (I think it's a uniscar, but can't tell for sure) into little rubber grenades that hang from a rubber ring around my neck. What comes through the drain tubes initially freaked me out, but now it fascinates me. It is like watching those images of a fetus developing in the womb, where there are all kinds of fluids and things floating around it, or like watching the bits and pieces of life under the sea.

(If you've just now lost your lunch, I apologize, but I did warn you.)

See ya in a week or two...

I have no idea when I will next feel up to posting. Everytime I do a "I'll be offline for a while" post, I end up posting a few more times before I really go. It's like trying to get out of the house on those mornings when you keep leaving your wallet, your car keys, your books, etc.

On Tuesday, I will have my surgery - both breasts, ovaries, fallopian tubes. I don't know when I be ready to sit up in front of the computer and type. I'm guessing it'll be at least a week. But, you know, it might be less time, or it might be more time, depending. So don't worry if you don't see me here - it just means I'm recuperating. I'll be back to tell you about it.

Meanwhile, I am hopefully done with my surgery nightmares and nearly done preparing at work for my absence. I have managed to catch a cold, which will hopefully not upset the surgery schedule - I'm hoping I can be done with enough of it that we can proceed as planned (thank you, Zicam!)

See you all soon.
PF

My head.

Media Education Foundation distributes "The Price of Pleasure."

I promised back in November that I was going to blog about "The Price of Pleasure," and I don't think I ever did. While I appreciated the film's critique on some levels, I was left disturbed by several elements of the film itself.

The main issue I have with this film is that it is manipulative. I use that word very intentionally: it is a film with a particular political argument to make, and yet it presents itself as a neutral exploration of the porn industry. When porn performers are included, their words and images are carefully shaped to make them appear either insincere (acknowledging some criticisms of the industry but continuing to work in it), unintelligent (not seeming to understand that they are exploiting / being exploited), and/or selfish (being concerned with personal success and not the political implications that the filmmakers want to present). Several of these performers, and notably, Ernest Greene, have protested the way they appear in the film and contrasted this to the "unbiased" presentation of the issue that they were promised by the filmmakers.

The film includes a few sensationalized dramatizations with voice-overs of women talking about their experiences with a partner who used pornography. These dramatizations are badly done; they reminded me a bit of the ads for products like the Snuggli or a specialized kitchen tool, in which actors are shown having tremendous difficulty talking on the phone while keeping a blanket on their shoulders, or trying and failing to peel a carrot without cutting themselves. The music employed throughout is discordant and unsettling, and it is used to make the viewer associate negative emotions (the music particularly evokes anxiety and fear) with the images that are being shown. Further, with the exception of the porn performers and clips from some porn films and magazines, there are no interviews with women who use porn or whose partners use porn and who feel empowered or at least NOT disempowered by it. This is not because such women do not exist or are hard to find. This is because the film has a particular message - porn exploits women and teaches men to abuse women - and these other perspectives do not fit into this message and would undermine it.

What all of this means to me as a feminist and educator is that the film is not going to be useful, generally, to me in the classroom, and that it would best be paired with additional perspectives to round out the experience for students.

What motivates me to write about it today is that I received a catalog from the Media Education Foundation, an organization that has distributed some excellent films (the "Killing Us Softly" series; "Wrestling with Manhood: Boys, Bullying & Battering") and some pretty mediocre ones ("What a Girl Wants"). MEF films do present pornography as exploitation, so it is not the affiliation that surprises me, but the fact that "The Price of Pleasure" continues to be presented as something that it is not. For example, Michael Kimmel, who I otherwise respect a great deal, is quoted in the MEF catalog as saying (taken from a review or cover blurb, I believe) : "I've been waiting for a film about pornography that was neither sanctimoniously scolding nor callously celebratory. And, finally, there is THE PRICE OF PLEASURE." The film's description reads: "the film moves beyond tired and often paralyzing liberal-versus-conservative debates to offer a nuanced take on the cultural implications of pornography."

Ladies and gentlemen, "The Price of Pleasure" is sanctimoniously scolding and fails to move beyond tired and often paralyzing debates of any kind. There is no nuance in this film. While it is true that it does "forc[e] us to consider how pleasure and pain, commerce and power, liberty and responsibility have become intertwined in the most intimate areas of our lives," it does so without giving us enough information to *fully* consider this information.

What I've been waiting for is a film that presents arguments from a variety of perspectives on this issue. I'd like to see a film that does not so obviously have a stake in the porn - anti-porn war, but rather one that presents arguments from sex workers who are working in the industry and allows them to share both the good and bad of their experiences; from people who use or have used porn and can share with the viewer a range of experiences from abuse and addiction to empowerment and sexual access; from people who have important cultural critiques of porn and sex work; from people who are working to legislate against sex trafficking and who see porn as inherently connected to this problem; from people who argue that trafficking is best approached inclusively and who advocate labelling sex work as "work"; from people who have experienced what unionization, or legalization, or decriminalization has meant for sex workers, whether it be good, bad, or in-between; from other people whose perspectives I am forgetting as I write this.

In the meantime - Renegade Evolution, Ernest Greene, folks who are working in this industry - if you are reading this, I hope that you will consider making your own film, specifically for use in the Women's Studies classroom...

My sagging social life.

Today, I had coffee with a friend and then met some others for drinks after work. I had a really good time. Being with them reminded me, yet again, that one of the side effects of chemo that is less visible is that there is less energy and time for one's social life. I have really missed that.

Obama's controversial middle ground.

The other day, the local paper ran a headline that went something like, "Obama takes controversial middle ground in abortion debate." What he was doing was focusing on the reasons that women need abortions in the first place, hoping that by concentrating on addressing these problems, he could reduce the number of abortions. This is not a bad thing to do; when I lived in SD, I met an amazing woman who raised money for women who needed abortions, and she said that she very frequently heard, "I just can't do it - I have two kids already and my partner just walked out, and I don't have the money." So, certainly, I support all of the things that will pull women and children out of poverty and grant them access to health care and education and help them to prevent unwanted pregnancies - all the things the Republicans oppose, in other words.

But here's what's weird to me. In SD, Obama's approach was pretty much the same as the pro-choice activist approach. In much of the rest of the country, however, this stance is perceived as being not committed enough to choice. And even more interesting - in SD, the anti-choice movement was completely opposed to such an approach, while in the nation, at the moment, it seems that the anti-choice folks are hesitantly encouraged by Obama's focus (though they are far from happy about some of his other moves).

I don't really have anything to add here that I haven't said already, many times, but I thought this was interesting.

Unarmed people killed by police.

A commenter shared this with me. Please check it out.

I don't know yet if I agree with T that police officers shouldn't carry guns, but I'll admit that it really changes my own perspective to think about what it would feel like to know that I myself might be likely to be killed by a police officer. I don't walk or drive down the street living in that reality. I know of a female college student who was beaten up at a protest by a cop who was known for violent behavior. I had a student who was raped by a police officer at gunpoint. A friend of mine watched a cop shoot and kill a puppy during a power struggle because he wanted to show he was in control. So I have a healthy fear of the police, but at the same time, I also live in a white body and I am the person that cops are supposed to be protecting and I know this subconsciously. And to protect me, don't they need to have guns? This is what is going on, almost below the radar, in my head when I think about taking the guns away. And that is a hard thing to admit.

But Black men are at tremendous risk from the justice system, and at some point we have to ask ourselves as a society, at whose sacrifice are some of us being protected by cops having guns? And then it becomes pretty obvious that that's exactly what's going on - we are sacrificing people of color so that whites can have an illusion of safety. (Not unlike our foreign policy, actually.)

I'm also thinking about what happened here this past fall with the RNC and how quick people are to use weapons when they have them. This certainly isn't unique to police officers, but it does give me pause.

Thanks, T, for making me think about this in a different way.

The chemo is having one last go at me.

I've had a pretty good run with the chemo and really feel like I have no business complaining. But this DAMN TAXOL has decided to mess me around this last time as much as it can.

I had my last chemo one week ago, and the pattern has been that I get it Friday and have fairly severe aches, mostly in my legs and feet but in other places, too, Sunday - Wednesday, with Monday and esp. Tuesday being the worst. It was the worst the first time, better the next two times, and a little worse this last time. But what sucks is that, this time, having made it through the achiness earlier in the week, I'm getting aches in my fingers, hands, wrists, and forearms yesterday and today and probably tomorrow unless I get lucky. For a while, I was really worried it had to do with typing, and I have a ton of papers to finish grading online. But then, I noticed some hives on my leg (Taxol can also cause hives) and figured that it was all the Taxol. Another helpful symptom is that the pain goes away for a bit and then comes back - if it were typing-related, I think it would either be more constant or happen when I held my hands in certain positions. And the Taxol-related pain has done this disappearing every so often (which is actually quite helpful).

I'm glad to be done with this. Though apparently, the medication I'll be taking in a few months can cause some of these same symptoms. Yay!

Perspective and possibility.

So, as I contemplate my upcoming mastectomies, I'm finding it very helpful to broaden my perspective. Hopefully, this is not an exercise in cis privilege. But I've found trans theories and writings to be extremely helpful and soothing. From the perspective of a cis woman with cancer, mastectomy is not a positive thing. From the perspective of a transman, though, it could be liberating. And I've found it really helpful to reflect on this and to think that the same surgery that I'm having might be something that someone else would be happy to have. Not that I'm not happy to have it - I think it's a pretty good trade. But I mean, it changes the way I see the surgery to recognize that the reaction to it is really about perspective.

I'm thinking about doing a ritual before my surgery. I am someone who does not participate in ritual on a very regular basis, but when big things happen, it's important to me that they be marked in a meaningful way. I think by claiming this as a ritual moment, I'm helping shape my own understanding of it as well as my healing.

Interestingly, when I did a Google search on ritual and mastectomy, I came up with a few links to Jewish poetry and mikvah rituals. I started thinking about a mikvah - a ritual bath for Jewish women. The technical problems here are that I'm not so much Jewish as JewISH, so I'm not sure that the Mikvah Association here will let me in. A friend suggested I do it myself in a friend's hot tub, but some of the side effects of the chemo are exacerbated by hot water. I decided to call my oncologist to ask about this. I wanted to know if I needed to worry about making the side effects worse or about my lowered immune system in either a hot tub or a public facility (that, I'm guessing, wouldn't have chlorinated water).

I called and left a message for a nurse to call me back. How do you leave a message for something like this, when you know that the person you're leaving the message with is not going to understand it at all? This is Minnesota, after all, and while there is a sizeable Jewish population in the area, the odds that the person answering the phone was Jewish were pretty small. So I said I had a question about baths. "A bathing question?" the receptionist said. "Yeah," I said. (I wonder what on earth she thought.)

The nurse who called me back was not the nurse who I had left the message for. The nurse I'd left the message for is one I have had a good relationship with - and she's pretty quick. The nurse who called me back was Weird Nurse, the same one who freaked me out prior to my chemo treatments by droning on and on about nausea.

Weird Nurse was not terribly helpful. She was concerned that I could burn myself because the numbness I'm experiencing makes it hard for me to know the temperature of the water. So I assumed the hot tub was out, and asked about the immune system issues. She told me to be very careful, which confused me, because if I'm going to be immersed in a pool of water, how exactly am I going to be careful? And of what? I needed some more specific advice.

So I said, "look, could you just tell my (Jewish) oncologist that I am thinking about doing a mikvah...no, a mikvah..m-i-k...no, m-i-k-v-a-h...MIK - VAH...right, tell him that, I'm pretty sure he'll know what that is, and ask him if that's a problem given my immune system. Thanks."

So I get a call back and she says, "Wow, I had to look that up. You're right, he knew what it was."

And I said, "And what did he say about the immune thing?"

She said, "He said be very careful."

I said, "Um, of what? The water temperature?"

She said, "The water temperature primarily."

I got off the phone and told Mr. Plain(s)feminist, who said, "Clearly, G-d doesn't want you to do this."

So I may hold off on the mikvah for now. But I'm still in search of a ritual.

The worst review ever.

I happened to read a theater review yesterday because it was near me and I needed something to read - and I think this is, hands down, THE worst review of a play that I have ever read. Here are the opening two paragraphs:

"Planting Shelly Anne," the newest offering from the Workhaus Collective, is a play that ought to be buried deeply in the ground.

Jeannine Coulombe's narcissistic, jumbled, 95-minute whine-a-thon is dreadful in almost every respect: Its storytelling is bloated, infuriating navel-gazing exacerbated by a playwright in love with her own voice. Its staging is affected and ineffectual. The performances are the best thing about it, but — obviously — that's not saying much.

There are many, many other negative comments in this review, but the one that stands out is this: "John Riedlinger and young Renee Roden do no harm completing the cast as Shelly Anne's inattentive husband and bratty, neurotic daughter."

I wonder, is it really conscionable to write such a nasty review? On the other hand, was the reviewer left any choice? I felt bad for the playwright and director (the actors mostly seemed to be treated more kindly, as the critic focused his displeasure on the staging and the play itself).

The entire review can be found here, for now.

Mammogram misinformation.

I was shocked to read this on a blog I link to:

No, I refuse to have a mammogram.

It’s a dirty little secret of the medical profession, with all the scare talk and big shiny posters about how “mammograms save lives”, that the health benefits of mammograms are not scientifically proven. There is no proof that they save any lives at all. It is, however, certain they make some people a lot of money.

Furthermore, breast self-exams - you know, that thing we’re supposed to do every month and feel guilty if we skip? Doesn’t help us either.

You can click on the above to see the links she includes as evidence. Here's what else she says:

A common way to justify the nerve-wracking, expensive, fear-inducing body self checks and mammograms is for doctors to repeat ad nauseam “Studies prove women who get these exams survive an average of two years longer than women who don’t!”

BUT BUT BUT:

Think about this logically.

If your cancer is detected two years earlier than it normally would have been… you haven’t really lived two years longer. Instead, what you’ve “gained” is two extra years of medical treatments that fail to save your life.

In other words, as the above articles show, “early detection” - that is, detection of cancer at a stage a woman wouldn’t ordinarily notice any differences in her breasts - does not save women’s lives.

Yet a slick, brilliant, fear mongering media campaign has been aimed at us for years. “Mammograms save lives!” “Early detection saves lives!” “Every woman over 40 needs to have a mammogram!”

All lies.

This, combined with the constant stories from women who have them on how uncomfortable, painful, and humiliating mammograms are, make me suspect the entire purpose of this mammogram scam is to sexually torture women and get away with it. I can’t tell you how many times people have looked at me - I am very large breasted - and made some comment like, “Wow, it sure is gonna hurt you when you have to go get a mammogram!” They always look shocked when I tell them I have no intention of doing so. “But but but - you HAVE to!” People with no reason to have any interest in my health get upset when they discover I will not fulfill their sadistic fantasy of having my large breasts clamped into a giant vise and irradiated. It reminds me of the sort of sadistic glee I would see on people’s faces when they would look at my hugely pregnant stomach and tell me the worst labor horror stories they could recall.

I'm not going to go digging around for stats (and I would really appreciate if, if you would like to do so, you don't post them here), but I will share my own experience, which is diametrically opposed to the above claims. I will also note that I've been working with some of the most esteemed breast cancer specialists in the country, and I think they would take issue with some of the above.

I don't really know that mammograms or self-checks are effective in picking up breast cancer. If you have dense breast tissue, as I do, those buggers can hide out. My cancer wasn't easily identifiable from a mammogram, though the mammogram indicated the need for further tests, which eventually led to an ultrasound guided biopsy and a cancer diagnosis. And, while I did eventually find a lump and may well have found it sooner had I been doing self exams, it's also true that the lump was likely present but missed at my annual exam in June.

But I will also point out that I have large breasts AND I have had quite a few mammograms. News flash: in my experience, they don't hurt. Or, rather - if they hurt, then 1) the technician is incompetent, and/or 2) you need to cut out the caffeine before you have your mammogram. But the mammogram, just as a procedure, is not inherently painful, just as a cervical swab is not inherently painful, though it can be if you have a condition that makes your cervix sensitive or if you have a GYN that isn't well-trained. Women should be angry that mammograms haven't always been sensitively and carefully administered, certainly, but recently, it seems that they have become a better experience for many, if not most, women.

But none of this really frustrated me about Amananta's post. The thing I found most upsetting was her assumption that women with breast cancer are going to die of breast cancer. Of course, when I was diagnosed, that's what I immediately assumed. And, of course, I still worry about that. But what I'm learning is that more women survive it than don't. There are some oncologists who even talk about being able to cure it (which is the hope for me), and my surgeon talks about it as a chronic condition, like diabetes, that can be treated and managed for years and years and years and years (and I'll take that, frankly). But a huge factor in survival is early detection, and that's what the self-checks and the mammograms are all about trying to do.

Determining what health care services one will or will not avail oneself of, just like determining one's course of treatment for a particular illness, is a very personal thing, and I support Amananta's right to make these decisions for herself. What makes me sad in reading her post, though, is that the women who are at greatest risk are the women who don't have access to healthcare, women who can't afford mammograms or don't have access to them. Women of color, particularly African American women, are at enormous risk. Yet Amananta has revisioned mammograms as a plot to make money at women's expense, as a form of "sexual torture," and such a ludicrous statement seems to me to make light of the struggles that women with breast cancer or who are at risk of breast cancer face (not to mention making light of actual sexual torture).

There is plenty to be critical of when it comes to the Breast Cancer Awareness Industry - absolutely. But spreading misinformation about breast cancer is not an ethical response.

Because I enjoy making myself crazy.

Let me start by saying that the chemo has caused me to have some embarassing effects that I won't go into here, but that have necessitated me visiting my GYN once already and twice showing my nether regions to male doctors who are not GYNS. In part, this is one of those stories. Don't worry, I won't go into detail. I seem to have recovered my modesty after that post a while back that I'm not linking to. Anyway.

So, I noticed on Monday night that something was going on that needed to be checked out, and I was a little freaked out about it because it was not something I'd experienced before, and anytime that happens on any part of my body, I usually worry that I have something that will be a big hassle, require many doctor visits (potentially embarrassing ones), be very uncomfortable, and difficult to get rid of. I determined to call my GYN the next day, which was distressing, because my GYN is actually part of a huge healthcare system that does not give me good care and that in fact caused my great trauma in the process of diagnosing my cancer. I need to get out of that system, because the way it's set up, I can't even call my doctor in a pinch - I need to call a central appt. line for an appt., and I get whoever is available when time is of the essence.

Anyway. Meanwhile, sometime last weekend when my immune system was at its weak point, I came into contact with some sort of stomach/intestinal bug. I discovered its presence at 5:45am on Tuesday morning, hours before my first class of the semester (which I cancelled, because there was no way I could make it there with various stuff coming out of both ends of my body).

As stomach/intestinal bugs go, this wasn't so bad. However, because I usually don't get the intestinal part along with it, and because my stomach, while not *horribly* nauseated and upchucky, was still nauseated and upchucky, I simply was not able to keep the fluid balance in my body at a healthy level. So, I got dehydrated. But I didn't notice, because I was just aware of being thirsty, of sipping my ginger ale, mildly aware of "A Mighty Wind" on t.v., and of sleeping much of the day. I did notice that every time I got up to use the bathroom, I felt dizzy, but I attributed that mostly to the fact that I was lying down all day.

It did dawn on me to take my temperature, and it was over 100.5, which meant that I had to call my oncologist's office to report in. By the end of the day, my temp was up to 101.7, and I was told to report to the ER for IV fluids and some tests to be sure that there weren't any other infections going on. I realized how awful I felt when I contemplated getting up, dressed, walking down the stairs, sitting in the car, and going to the ER - not nauseous, but just completely drained and exhausted.

Once there, my fever was 102, and they tested pretty much everything they could test. Everything was fine - I had a stomach/intestinal bug, as it turned out. I began to feel much better after they gave me the fluids and some cold water to drink. They did forget about me for about an hour, while I was lying down on my back, weak, with a blood pressure cuff on one arm and a (stopped) IV in the other, but I managed to reach the call button after listening to the nurses talk for a while about their favorite vacation spots.

But while I was there, I mentioned the embarrassing thing, because I was worried that it was some sort of infection that might be causing all the other problems. So, the male doctor who was not a GYN (as opposed to a male doctor who IS a GYN, which is a different story), and his male resident (also not a GYN), took a look, and I managed to not feel too uncomfortable. They didn't see what I saw and told me not to worry about. So I felt better until a couple of days later when I noticed that it was indeed there. And now I was back to square one. By then, my fever was gone and I was back to normal, so I knew at least it wasn't a dangerous infection. But I still had to deal with the GYN appointment. I made a mental note to get a referral when I saw my oncologist the next day.

Now that I wasn't worried that my vagina was going to kill me, I relaxed for a bit and read the paper...about brain aneurysms. Turns out that three of the symptoms of brain aneuryms are - symptoms I have! So now, I had something new to worry about.

I came armed with the newspaper to see my oncologist. When I mentioned aneurysms, before I could even point to all the symptoms in my handy article, he said that if I had headaches, that was reason enough to go for a brain MRI, and that he didn't think I had an aneurysm, that the symptoms (which he patiently let me describe) could be caused by numerous other things, but that if it would make me not worry, he'd be happy to have me go for an MRI. (And so I shall).

I figured I'd just mention the embarrassing other issue and tell him that I was planning to follow up with (sigh) the GYN, and maybe ask for a referral. Instead, he jovially said, "well, let's take a look at it. I AM a doctor, after all. That IS my job." So male doctor number 3 who is not a GYN took a look, but with a lot more capability and sensitivity than male doctors #1 and 2 who were not GYNs, and this time, I trusted his call that it was nothing to worry about because he saw exactly what I saw.

So - no worries below the belt, no worries above the neck (probably - I feel relieved just knowing that we'll be checking), and the space inbetween is responding well to chemo.

And I am not reading the paper anymore.

Do something about the BART shooting.

Oscar Grant, a Black man, lying face down, subdued, surrounded by (apparently white) cops, and with one officer's knee on his neck, was shot in the back and killed. The cop didn't even draw his gun until AFTER Grant was face down with the cop's knee on his neck.

As Kevin says at A Slant Truth:
What the hell did this cop think? That Grant was going to all of the sudden summon his super-human negro strength ala Hancock and suddenly toss the cop with his knee on his neck a good 200 yards and go flying away?

More from A Slant Truth:

New Video of BART Shooting is Clearest Yet

5 Things You Can Do Right Now about The Oscar Grant Shooting

Here's what I'm thinking. What do you think the story would be if there hadn't been witnesses? Need I even ask that question?