Wordjanitor Strikes Again

I am angry. And I am sad. But at the moment, it's mostly anger. Keyboard and reader beware. That androgynous, faceless, scourge with too many names and ways of wreaking havoc.  That invisible stalker that sneaks in at the cellular level, latching on and demanding attention.  That predatory visitor that remains unseen until  it's too often too late.  It wins again. Today, cancer won again.  It won this morning, taking a young woman barely 30 from her world, her family's world, our world, this world. Quickly. Aggressively. Ruthlessly. I want to scream at cancer, cuss it out, kick it where it hurts, be heard. But cancer is a narcissist. It doesn't care that I'm angry. It knows nothing but itself and how to propagate until it wins.

There's something about timing. It's all in the timing. Call it chance, call it God, call it source energy, call it coincidence, call it what you want. Each year, @ and I make and decorate holiday cookies. We eat a few, but I take the rest to the parents at the neonatal intensive care unit where @ spent his first Christmas. I include a letter with his picture, telling our story then and now.  This year, I made the cookies, bagged them in tidy sets of three, wrote the letter, and... didn't take them to the hospital on the 23rd as I'd originally planned. And I just plain ran out of time on Christmas Eve with work, dinner with friends, and a candle-lighting service. On Christmas we headed up to my dad's for a few days. The cookies waited patiently. On Sunday, TG and I ran errands, finishing with a trip to the hospital. As we were waiting to give the cookies to the receptionist, I offered a bag of cookies to a couple that was leaving.

Avoiding danger in the long run is no safer than outright exposure.  Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. - Helen Keller I recently decided to do something for myself. Pedicures and massages are great and all that. I guess shopping does it for some girls. OK, lots of them. Maybe even legions of them, given stacks of evidence ranging from

I got a boo-boo on my knee. A good friend invited me to go hiking yesterday. Yes, absolutely, ok, let's go. I didn't bother asking where, how far, and all of those details. It didn't really concern me. And who am I to turn down an excuse to be outside with trees and dirt and stuff? So off we went to Sunol Regional Wilderness and hopped on the trail along Alameda Creek to Little Yosemite. It looked to be a pretty mellow ambling walk along a well-maintained

Somehow or other, I've been back at work for nearly a month. Time flies when you're trying to catch your breath and remember how to tie your shoes . Within a quick blink, it was as if I'd never been gone. Except now I have this weird eating schedule and people keep asking me if I'm better now. Well, yes, better than I was before. Cured, no. But that's just how it is. In the scheme of things, I don't consider the health thing

The first signs that maybe I had the wrong gastroenterologist were sitting in the waiting room when I arrived for my first appointment. The magazines. High-end car, travel, food, and wine magazines. As far as I'm concerned, one of the primary reasons for the existence of magazines like People , Entertainment Weekly , Us , etc., is to entertain patients who are patiently waiting for their doctors. Especially doctors who set their watches according to

I went to check out Alice in Wonderland and... ended up a test subject for The Wizard of Oz . After making it about 20 minutes into the movie, I started feeling relatively horrid, went home, and my fantabulous neighbor took me to the hospital. It is a bit amusing to go to the ER on April Fools' Day with your due-to-give-birth-in-two-days friend and identify yourself as the patient. But we have good news! A CAT scan proved I have a brain An EKG proved I have a heart Morphine subbed in for the field of poppies... No answers -- ok, except that I can and I still feel icky, but I'm home chillin' on the couch. Oh, and despite the morphine, there were no flying monkeys.

A guy I work with, but whom I've never met in person, responded to my out-of-the-office auto-reply e-mail with "Are you having a baby?" Wha? Huh? Who in the h**...? My first thought was to respond, "Oh yeah, I forgot to tell you. It's yours." As an absolutely hilarious comedian* I saw last winter would say, "First thought wrong..." I didn't go with the first thought. Nor did I opt for the... 2nd: see above italics 3rd: "Been there, done that. Please donate to the March of Dimes" 4th: "Have we met?" 5th: "Please be available to field calls from HR." 6th: "Please see the attached photo from my endoscopy." 7th... * Mark Lundholm .

It's tax season. And as they say, in this country anyway, the only sure things are death and taxes. But according to some smart folks in Sweden, maybe not. Pudding might solve one of those little problems. No, no really! I came across an interesting article. The all-too-generic headline, " Calcium Linked to Longer Life " is essentially the "Consumable of Some Sort Linked to Longer/Shorter Life" article du jour. In this case, my attention was suckered by the deck (that stuff under the headline designed to drag you into the rest of the article): People who get the most calcium in their diet reduce their risk of death by 25 percent, according to new research on calcium and health. Wha? Huh? Really? Bring it on! I clicked through to the article. It gets better. The editors provide immediately accessible advice under a nice little "what you can do" heading: "Boost your calcium intake by eating healthy food sources like low-fat dairy, spinach, kale…...

Should you be chased by a polar bear down Mountain View's Castro Street while on foot, simply do a u-turn and a street fair will appear. Apparently, polar bears -- or people dressed in mangy polar bear costumes, yet still frightening when chasing you -- are easily distracted by jewelry at art & wine festivals. But perhaps only the variety of art & wine festival that appears like a pond in the desert when you make an abrupt turnaround midstreet. I'm not sure. I've not experienced another polar bear chase -- costumed or otherwise -- nor encountered an apparition-type art & wine festival . It was clear, however, that the jewelry (ooooh shiny, prett-ty shiny things) is what captured the attention of the bear. The BSO strategy works again. Four more instances where Bright Shiny Objects (BSO) work well in tough situations: Presentations that are not going well -- mention some new, obscure feature or technology and watch the eyes glitter as they quickly forget the fac...

I realized my invisible superwoman cape isn't working. I sent it to the wrong dry cleaners and they used some sort of solvent that neutralized my superpowers. That's what I get for trying to save a buck.  OK, honestly, I was never quite comfortable in the tights either. The stilettos gave me blisters. And the leotard always gave me a wedgie , which made the cape useful until I remembered it was invisible.  Why is it that superheroes always have such ridiculous wardrobes ? If they're superheros, wouldn't they have the special powers to save the world in jeans, a t-shirt, and flip-flops?  My ego has always tried to convince me that I could simultaneously climb Everest, juggle flaming chainsaws , work full time, keep up with @, and figure out how to live without snobbishly good dark chocolate as the fourth food group (the others were fruits & veggies, tofu, and whole grains).  Hmmm... There might be a wee bit of exaggeration there. But it sure sounds like a fairly...

Dead tuna do tell tales. As one friend describes it, "your stomach muscles just up and decided they didn't want to work for a living anymore." He continued on a short rant about the French and labor unions, but after 20+ years of hearing his redneck raving, I'm nearly immune. His pre-rant phrasing pretty much covers it. The medical definition of such activity, or lack of activity, is gastroparesis . (And no, it's not caused by stress!) Thanks to my lovely radioactive tuna sandwich experiment , not to be confused with Ken Kesey's Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (which was waaaaaay more colorful , man), I discovered that although my brain spins quickly, my gut does not. Whee! Having answers I don't like is better than having no answers at all. After a several months of mystery starting last fall, increasing discomfort, and entertaining tests, it's now onward into the breach of figuring out the next step. OK now, this makes sense.   That makes sens...

"Eat the whole thing, but be careful not to touch the filling," he said very seriously as he handed me a grayish tuna sandwich. Huh? OK, don't touch the tuna, just consume it? That's comforting. As was the fact he was wearing bright blue gloves. You don't want the stuff on your hands, just in your gut? Hmm... My breakfast was in fact a standard-issue hospital cafeteria tuna sandwich augmented with a lovely condiment of radioactive isotopes. Mmmmmm? Or Hmmmmm... Next task, remain absolutely still on a table for two full hours while nice people in lab coats use a screen to track the glow as makes its way through my digestive tract. I have an oddly convenient ability to fall asleep during medical tests. I actually slept through most of this one, until the last 30 minutes where I was fairly convinced my upper arms were going to catch fire from the position into which they'd been forced. (Good news, no actual scorching.) Yesterday's little snack-and-glow was t...

I've spent the first two months of 2010 growling at myself for picking the high-deductible medical plan, given how much time I've spent with the medical community thus far. I like rice and oatmeal as much as the next girl, but there's been precious little variety beyond that since November. Two weeks ago my esophagus and I had a photo shoot (think internal vogue-ing on enough valium to make a horse levitate). I expected to awake to answers, not "We'll have biopsy results in ten days." The concept of biopsy threw me; it somehow wasn't a word I was expecting. But it was less the potential of what it might mean than the nebulousness of not knowing the next step. Boy howdy the Serenity Prayer does come in handy when you're scratching for control you're just not going to get. God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the differenc e. I knew I couldn't change the te...

(I'm typing this as my dog is sleeping on my right foot, dreaming, twitching, and barking in his sleep. ) So, there was this tree. And it needed pruning. Not a very big tree, really. But apparently big enough. And I have some killer branch chompers. So I got into the tree. And well, kinda got out of the tree. Abruptly. And since I'd already done some definite damage to the tree before gravity nudged me onto the ground, I landed somewhat tangled in some branches. While flat on the ground, staring at the tree that ousted me and doing the mandatory self-assessment that usually follows such a test of gravity, @ walks over and looks down at me, very seriously. @: Mama, get up. We still have work to do. Me: Why don't we go inside and watch TV for awhile. @: No Mama, we're not done working. Me: Well, I need a little break to ice my leg. @: Well OK, but we're not finished working. Junior Taskmaster, at your service. I had a pretty good bruise on my foot and figured I'd ...

Luke brought me a holiday gift this year... I had to wait to mention it, but I think it's finally safe. I figured I should be cautious. I spent the last few weeks scouring the headlines, google news searching, and otherwise verifying that come next winter, my dog won't be responsible for going way beyond Seuss's Grinch. When we're up in G'town visiting LD , Luke has the run of the woods. No fences, no leash. He patrols the property using the house as his base. A bird -- or for that matter, a moth -- flutters on the other side of the pond and he's off to the races to check it out. He sleeps quite well at night because he spends the days in nearly constant motion -- generally at high speed crashing through the woods, circling the pond, or traversing the driveway. A couple of days after Christmas, while my dad and I were moving random slash piles to burn piles, Luke emerged triumphant from the woods carrying a branch. As my proud pooch approached, I noticed the br...

I found myself in a familiar position yesterday, surrounded by familiar sights and sounds. And calm, but not at all thrilled about it. I spent most of the day sitting in a chair next to a hospital bed while the alarm for the oxygen saturation monitor squawked at me every few minutes. @ had his tonsils and adenoids removed yesterday. The surgery went well, but recovery turned out a bit trickier. We started our morning with an early breakfast-free start and a drive up to Stanford. He had a great anesthesiologist who sang Thomas the Tank Engine songs to him while he drowsed out on the way to snoozeville. The docs had initial concerns about his history of lung damage and recent croup, but everything turned out to be fine and his airways were clear. Original estimates were an hour for the surgery, with an hour or two for recovery, putting us home around 12:30 or so. If there's one thing you learn when you have a kid in the NICU, it's that all estimates are best ignored. @ initially ...

Once upon a time, long ago, my left foot and I had a great relationship. We walked on the beach, played soccer on the fields, swam in the ocean, hiked in the mountains... until "the incident." Like many that change relationships, this incident changed the foundation of my relationship with my left foot. One day we went a little too far afield and met the edge of a sidewalk with all of the force you'd expect a soccer player to deliver in pursuit of a round spotted object. There was the realization of "Hmm... Gee, that hurt" followed by a bit of tenderfooting around for the next week. Ah, but it was the end of the season and tournament weekend had arrived. No visible injury, probably just bruised... A month or so later my first visit to the podiatrist began with him staring at an x-ray while delivering a question along the lines of "See these two pieces of bone? How did they get so far apart?" He really didn't like my answer of, "Well, I thought...

It's official. I'm tired of coughing. Or Marge is. As is probably anyone who has been within 50 yards of me since, say, two weeks ago? I'm long since past contagious, but I don't sound it. Marge sounds like hell. I almost felt bad for the guy in the seat next to me on the flight home from Seattle. Almost. Until he unearthed a massive onion-filled tuna salad sandwich from a greasy paper bag and proceeded to eat it. And then silently but stinkily belch for the next two hours. He also felt he needed to share his newspaper at full width rather than doing a polite airplane origami. I complimented him on his sharing skills (after all, I have a four-year-old), but asked him to figure out the concept of personal space before his paper ended up in little wads seven rows up and three rows back. Actually, my phrasing was much nicer. Gosh, I really miss those monthly flights to JFK. Wait, no I don't. Someone should do a study on how many people eat burritos the night before a ...

How do I say this without sounding cold, callous, inhuman, etc.? No more effing cancer. Six degrees of separation, percentage of friends/family affected, whatever! It would be one thing if it were all of my Marlboro chain-smoking, 7-11 Big Gulp gimlet-drinking, toxic-waste bathing friends and relatives, but no, it's you healthy people! The exercising veggie eaters. The fresh air breathers. WTF people?! Take a memo to your cells. Tell your cells I'm pissed. I've had all I can take and I can't take no more. Until I have to, then I will take what comes because you have to. I won't shrink away into the corner. I will drive you to where you need to be. I will buy your groceries. I will make you a damn meatloaf. I will stalk nurses in hospital hallways to make sure you get what you need. I will yell at the world on your behalf from the false privacy of my car. I will memorize your phone number and take your calls in the middle of meetings. I will. The photo above has litt...