Tag: Health

Home Repair

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How many times
Can a body be cut open?
How many times
Can that body bounce back?
What is the limit—six times? Seven, eight?

A body is so much more than just a body—
It’s a home.
It can grow other bodies,
Shelter them from harm,
Sustain them.
A body is a temple,
Made sacred by the presence of a soul.

But a body cannot be
Continuously sliced, sampled,
Diced, drilled into.
There is always pain attendant.
A body can only withstand so much.

Some pain never goes entirely away.

(c) 2022. All rights reserved.

A belated find

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Looking less tired already!

Looking less tired already!

The challenge for Day Thirteen of Writing 101 is to write about something you’ve found, in contrast to Day Four’s challenge to write about a loss.  For day four, I wrote about my loss of sleep.  Today I think I’ll write about how I found it again.

It’s only just happened, see.  Ever since my surgery in January, I’ve been having more trouble than normal sleeping – getting to sleep and then staying that way.  I thought it was just because of the hot flashes, because they’ve been awful, and worse since I stopped taking hormone therapy in April.  It wasn’t working as well as I thought it should, so I decided to try a different doctor.

The only hang-up?

Best Monday ever

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IMG_20140125_172459

Two of my favorite comforts after surgery.

So about my surgery…

I had every girl’s favorite doctor appointment at the end of October.  I’ve been having a lot of on-again-off-again cramping since Cricket was born, and Thumper’s arrival only made it worse.  Intimacy has been difficult, to say the least.  When I went to the doctor, they did an ultrasound and found that I had a cyst on my right ovary.  My doctor wanted to keep an eye on it, so I scheduled a follow-up appointment in early December.  That ultrasound showed no cysts.  Yay!

But then a couple days after Christmas, I started cramping again, and it was worse than ever.  I was dizzy from the pain, and sweaty and queasy to boot.  I tried walking, I tried lying still, but nothing eased the pain.  The only reason I got any sleep that night was because I took some Tylenol PM.  I cramped all through the night and most of the next day, then I was sore for two days afterward.  It was miserable.

I managed to get an appointment with my doctor the Monday after Christmas…

The post of many feels

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I found a lump in my breast.

It could be nothing – Dear God, I hope it’s nothing.  Please let it be nothing! – but it could be something.  And if it’s something, then it will be my very worst fear come true.

My mother died of breast cancer at the age of 31, just one year after diagnosis.  Hers was an advanced and aggressive cancer; her doctors offered her little hope.  But she took what little they offered her and fought bravely for a year for us, for my dad, my sister, and me.  She battled hair loss and weight gain and nausea and everything else that goes with being a cancer patient, and when she finally succumbed to death, she was smiling.

I am not as brave as my mother.

Finding a lump in my breast – and worse, finding I had cancer – has always been my deepest fear.

One of those days

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Yep, today has been one of those days.  It all started on Monday.  Cricket and Thumper started a new daycare on Monday and as I was talking with their new babysitter for a minute before I left, one of the other kids came running up and wrapped herself around the woman’s legs.  The poor girl’s eyes were goopy and crusty and generally icky-looking.  Of course, that’s if you looked closely, which I didn’t until the babysitter, we’ll call her Melanie, mentioned it.  “Oh, don’t worry about Kimmy’s eyes,” she said.  “She’s had this eye infection since she was born and no one knows what it is, but her parents are gonna take her back to the doctor and get it checked out.  It’s not contagious; we’ve never had a problem with other kids getting sick.”

Okay, I thought, unconvinced.  Cricket has his mother’s immune system.  What in the world does that mean, you ask?  It means that I catch everything and since we have four kids, all of whom are in school and/or daycare, it means we are exposed to a metric crap-ton of germs in this house.  If the kids come down with something, it’s only a matter of time before I catch whatever it is they have.

Pink eye, I hate you.