The Big C

Today I had a CAT scan and a PET scan. I drank barium and had iodine put into my veins. This is to see how far the cancer that has sprung up on my tongue has spread.

It started the middle of November with a raw spot on my tongue. As I was under considerable stress at the time, and have had raw spots before when stressed out, I didn't think anything of it until it not only lasted a week but got bigger. Then I thought, well, I've had warts on my tongue before (twice. I know that's gross) I figured it was going to happen again. Instead, I got what at first looked like a canker sore on my tongue. That didn't go away either. One day I looked closely at it in my magnifying mirror and saw it was a deep hole. So I went to urgent care, and they gave me antibiotics.

Didn't help. I figured I needed an oral specialist, so first I had to make an appointment with a dentist to get a referral. So wait 2 weeks for the dentist appointment, then get the referral and wait another 2 weeks for the oral surgeon. Meantime this thing on my tongue is getting bigger and terribly sore. It hurts to talk and hurts to eat, and I'm losing weight and feeling like I'm starving to death. I'm shaky.

Well, I have no risk factors for oral cancer, so the oral surgeon gives me different antibiotics and sends me home, to come back in a week. When I go back, it's no better, so he does the biopsy.

It's cancer.

I have never smoked, never chewed (gag) and have always been a social drinker. The biopsy oddly showed no trace of human papillomavirus, so it's not even related to the warts as I would have thought likely.

Now I face surgery, reconstruction, speech therapy, radiation, and maybe losing some teeth. As the hospital I'm using is a teaching and research hospital, I've agreed to let them have the tumor for medical research. Since due to the complete lack of risk factors I shouldn't have cancer at all, my cells could help them figure out why people get cancer. I'm glad to do it. It's not like I'm going to keep them! They'll be removed while I'm under anesthetic so I'll never notice.

I'll take any chance of something positive coming out of this.

Life can turn on a dime

People think they understand how fragile life is, but I don't think they really get it until it's pushed into their face. I sure didn't.

My husband just went to having a pain in his shoulder that we both assumed was a pulled muscle (had that before) to fighting for his life because the abscess that was causing the pain had sent bacteria and toxins throughout his entire body. He was in ICU for a week, and will probably be in a regular room for at least another one.

I went from having a raw patch on my tongue that I assumed was from stress (had that before)to a diagnosis of oral cancer. As it's related to human papilloma virus and not tobacco, I've got a pretty good prognosis. I'll know more when I see the oncologist next week.

When my father died, it was a long, drawn-out process. But I have a friend who was sitting in the living room talking to her mom, who suddenly put her hand over her heart, said "Oh, my," and was gone.

It's impossible to seriously live each moment as if it were your last. We have jobs to go to, bills to pay, and every couple and family has disagreements. I'd rather be lying on a beach drinking Pacifico with lime than going to work most days. Even though I nearly lost my husband, he still has habits that grate on my nerves. Some people have a brush with death and are completely different people, others of us just carry on in the same old way.

But maybe just a bit more aware that our lives are like soap bubbles.

Computer crazies

Once upon a time, when I wanted to read a news article online on one of the many news websites, I clicked on the link and read the article. Now, instead of an article, I'm frequently faced with a Bing page that lets me read what I already knew and requires me to click on five or so other links to read what I clicked on the first link to find out. On each of those links, I find more links to articles rather than the answer to the question. And on each page (mind you I've gone through at least 3 clicks just to get a piece of what I wanted to know) I have to wait for all the pop ups, pop downs, slide overs, and video ads to completely load before I can read what I came for. Takes at least 4 minutes a page, and I can read the article when I finally get at it in less than a minute.

I hate this. I'm going to stop reading news online and resubscribe to the newspaper. I can read it front to back in less time than following all the links to read about 4 articles online. This is silly.

Becoming an indie author

The digital age is revolutionizing publishing. The e-book market is growing quickly, and the print publishing system has stagnated. Trying to get a book published traditonally is virtually impossible. 999 books are rejected for every book published. Were all these books badly written? No. Many just weren't what the publisher wanted at that moment. But when an author has to write a different style/length/content synopsis for every publisher queried, and publishers will reject a book because they didn't like your font, and even when they publish a book are very likely to let it languish on the shelves of bookstores for a whole month before it goes out of print.

Enter indie publishing. After a lot of searching and research, I've decided on Smashwords. (Google it.) You have to do your own formatting, but once you do, your e-book is available through just about every single e-book vendor there is. They even give you a list of low-cost, experienced e-book cover artists.

I've chosen a cover artist and sent payment. She has a waiting list, but looking at her highly professional website and her portfolio, and her incredibly good price, the short wait will be more than worth it.

Look for Blood and Moonlight, a paranormal romance, available online everywhere in February 2012. To be followed by many more. And for a preview, to to www.wattpad.com/MarlaShin.

Jigsaw puzzles

Jigsaw puzzles can be a metaphor for life, especially in hard times.You start off with a big mess of what looks like unrelated pieces, and gradually find connections and make sense of it. Often, just when you think you’ll never solve it, you find a key piece or make a connection you didn’t see before, and it all comes clear.

Then there are the times you know the cat ate a few pieces, and they'll never be seen again.

Best Friends

I miss having a best friend. I had one for the last 4 years of grade school,Vickie Grimm. She was three years older than me, so when she became a teenager and moved, then I moved, and we drifted apart. I had another one for the three years of junior high, Kathy Midkiff. She was a talented artist. I still have an ink drawing she made for me of Mr. Spock. But when we got to high school, we lost each other. In the last three years of high school, my best friend was Ava Nietsche (I'm sure I'm misspelling her last name). But we both started different colleges, and she got married after one semester, and I never heard from her again.

In college I hung with a constantly shifting group of girls. Some of us kept in touch by a round robin letter for a few years after college, then it stopped coming. I stayed in touch with two of them, Rosie Lindbergh and Naomi Berggren. They both got married and I didn't. I still hear from and visit with Naomi now and then. When Rosie got married she dropped me because I wasn't married and she and her husband (evidently joined at the hip) wanted to do everything as a couple. Later she dropped Naomi too, because she and her husband decided not to have kids, and after Rosie had her first she could only be friends with married couples with children, because she wanted to do everything as a family. Neither of us have heard from her since.

My best friend Mary lived with my parents and me for a while. Then she went away to school, got married, and moved away. Neither of us has money for long distance phone calls. She doesn't write letters and doesn't have a computer, so there's no way to keep in touch. I had a best friend named Diane for a while, but she moved to Colorado and I moved elsewhere, and we rarely communicate these days. In El Paso I had a best friend named Lee, but after I moved away, it didn't last long. I don't think it would have lasted much longer anyway because our values had gotten so different.

My last best friend would still like to be, but she hates my husband. I miss her, but I can't be around her because of this. I won't have anyone driving a wedge between us, no matter how good intentioned.

So, currently I'm lacking for a female best friend. My husband could use a male best friend too. No matter how good a marriage is, no one person can be everything to another one. You gotta have friends. I wish there was a match.com or harmony.com for friendship.

The Angst of Aging

They say your 40s are the old age of your youth, and your 50s are the youth of your old age. I'm 57, and all I can think is, "Holy crap, it's going to get worse."

My mother, age 86, has survived the following in the last 10 years: Pneumonia, a partial hip replacement, numerous broken teeth (she now has a partial plate), and macular degeneration. Slightly before that, she survived a bowel obstruction requiring surgery.

Old age is not for sissies.

Someone once told me, "After 40 it's patch, patch, patch." I'd agree. In my 40s I got bifocals (I've always worn glasses), had my first hearing test revealing that my hearing was fading, and got the first 2 crowns on my teeth. Now I've got trifocals, 4 crowns, and am shopping for hearing aids.

My hair, which has always been very thick, began to go white in my 20s. Now it's gotten very thin, and my hairline, always high, has gotten even higher. So now, rather than wearing my hair long and off my face, which I've always preferred, I have to wear the curly mop short with bangs. Looks cute, feels weird. My neck took 2 winters to adjust to being out in the cold. I have a new appreciation for knitted scarves.

The memory loss is the worst. I've always been absent-minded, but now I'm so forgetful I'm beginning to scare myself. Twice in the last month, I've driven off without my purse. I have never done that before in my life.

My husband and I joke that we'll be sitting in the old folks' home not recognizing each other, but still flirting. This could happen.