Congratz! It's Cancer!

Yeah.

Fuck.

I dunno in what sort of mindset I'd be if family members would leave me the fuck alone to get used to the idea. But the thing is, they don't.

My mom keeps telling me how it's nothing and I can just do one more operation to remove what was left of my thyroid after the first operation - they've found cancer in the removed right lobe so all of it must go - and then get some radiation and all will be fine and not to worry.

I'm scared shitless. I got through that first operation by sheer will. The first two days I had severe nausea but I told myself to just survive this, after that I can go home and I'll be left in peace.

The hospital was horrid, the beds were impossibly uncomfortable, unless you liked to imitate a hunchback, you could not raise your upper body, and since they pushed a tube down my throat during operation I kept coughing up the residue from that for days.

Also, they left me in my own stink. I didn't piss myself, but severe coughing fits... well, they have the side effects of letting a few drops out - and they didn't change my bedding until I left, which meant the smell was also upsetting my stomach. And yes, not only did I throw up as soon as I woke up, but I also threw up after the first time I got some food in me - because they kept to light little nips and my stomach was moving too much. The only way to feed me when I have sea-sickness or anything similar is to give me enough food to weigh my stomach down so it stays down. Proven correct by many rides spent in the backseat of our car.

What else? Ah yes. The bed was slippery and creaky. They've covered the mattress in some kind of thick thing that was so slippery my sheet and pillows kept slipping down - with me along for the rise and it was extremely uncomfortable to fall asleep.

Oh and there was no hot water. Only ice cold. After a serious operation I had to bathe in ice-cold water in winter.

See, this is why I'm scared of the operation. Not because of the operation itself, but because of the rest of it. Unless I can for over a crazy amount of money for a private hospital, there is no way I could comfortably spend my days recuperating.


And that's just the operation. I have no idea if I will still have my voice after it - well, what's left of it anyway. Because my voice is already damaged from the first op. I can't shout for instance, can't even really raise my voice, so I'm the ideal rape/robbery victim.

And after the operation, I've still got the radiation therapy To get rid of the cancer. 6 months, my doc said.

There go my plans and dreams and everything in between.

So back to my mindset. According to the Kübler-Ross model there is
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance

What I felt was
Shock
More Shock
Fear, a lot of it

I'm not in denial and I'm not angry with anybody, because hell, who is to blame? Chernobyl? That's where my cancer comes from, but really, it's just terrible bad luck and fuckery. I'm not bargaining, I'm just terribly, terribly scared and sad and afraid.

Maybe if I got five minutes to myself I could cry myself out - technically what I'm doing right now - and maybe after that I could actually come to terms with what I'm feeling, but right now I'm just scared shitless, harried and wish my family would stop bugging me so I could SLEEP and curl in on myself and sob myself hoarse. Well... more hoarse, if that's even possible.

If I weren't due to a damn blood test tomorrow I'd stuff myself full of chocolate, and pass out in a sugar-coma. (the good kind, not the real kind)

You know, I think writing this helped a bit. And maybe, if I would say the Kübler-Ross model worked, maybe I started with Depression and now I'm slowly sinking into Acceptance.

Maybe.

Client List, the most sexist show of the decade

While recuperating I've started watching this show. I've seen 2 episodes so far and I have to say, while it's certainly interesting, the whole Texan thing turns me right away.

Just a few things that piss me off:

• "The Lord never intended for women to be on their own."
  
  Now this is the kind of sexist crap I could never stand. Why couldn't a woman be alone if she wanted to? Why the hell would we need a glorified chaperone? Are we lesser than men? Fuck no. I'd sue these bastards if I were an American woman. I'd sue them for everything they make of this crap.
  
•  "The gay rodeo? Is nothing sacred?!" (spoken by a woman with a huge-ass cross hanging 'round her neck)
  
  Really. Apparently treating women like second class citizens wasn't enough, now they need to hate on the gay community too.
  
• "A man does not go looking elsewhere if he's getting what he needs at home."
  
  So women have to spread their legs whenever their "man" wants some... or else? I really wonder why they haven't yet tried to burn the scriptwriter ten times over. This is so very, very wrong. What does this teach people?! Hell, if a guy tried to pull that with me he would be missing both balls and dick on first try.

I could list a couple more, like the little girl called Twinkle and her beauty pageant and so much more, but this... was quite enough. Really, just yuck.

Now this is why, even if offered, I'd refuse to set foot in the Bible belt.

Yeah, had the operation. Yeah, my neck looks bad. There's a semi-horizontal slash on my neck in bright red, and the inside... let's not talk about it. Suffice to say I'm alive, healing, and my neck looks bad. And my vocal chords are not exactly as I left them.

Just because

An update just for me. Feel free to skip it.

Uhhh. Facebook is an evil, evil thing. Made me forget all about my pretty pretty blog.

Sniff.

Alas. The important bits.

Feel free to tune this out, this is for me. An update of sorts.

I finally know with 100% certainty what's wrong with me. I have PCOS. I got some medicine, Mertformin (Merkformin, really) to take twice... thrice daily. Side effects include diarrhea and an upset stomach (the insane urge to throw up everything in your belly).

I'm also on a diet.

I've lost 7kg so far. It was 8 during the heat wave, but that was probably just the loss of fluids. Still, there is hope.

Bought a bunch of bikinis. I'm told by reliable people they look OK on me. "As good as swimwear possibly can on your figure." is what I'm told, but we'll take it. A girl's gotta take a compliment where she can.

My periods are back too. I mean 6 days of seeing RED, cramps from HELL, and after that, blissfully blood-free. After almost a year of perpetual PMS, you have NO idea how good this feels. Literally NO idea. At all.

And this one you'll really want to ignore. Today I pooped 3 times. o.O. I'm still on the strict diet. I ate only these today:
- 1 slice of bread (with meat on top)
- 1 apple
- 1 slice of bread (with meat again) + 1 peach
- 1 apple
- 1 small bowl of salad with cheese and one small slice of my mom's Bday cake

I was way under the 160g carbohydrates mark, but... well. I have NO idea where it all came from.

True, I have to eat more than I used to, but I'm losing weight and well... expelling a lot of stuff too.

This is so very weird.

Needle felting

"You've been protected and pampered all your life, and you don't know what fear is. Not real fear. Not gut-wrenching, piss-your-pants, do anything… You know what it is? It's a dark tide sweeping in and pulling you out into the deep. Way out. And you go with it even when you know you should fight, even when you know the end will be your destruction, because you're too afraid not to. You'll trade your soul for one day, one hour, one minute more of safety. It's why people do the things they do—that dark tide dragging them along like an undertow.”

-Josh Lanyon

General Update

I probably should list all that has happened to me so far.

No such luck. Let it be enough  that I have found a doctor, who, while being a perfect definition of a curmudgeon, explained what's wrong with me (although they have no idea what went wrong and why it is still going wrong) and prescribed some sort of hormone roundhouse kick for me. Which will fix most of the things that went wrong - yay! Only... it's a pretty dangerous medicine, so... I'll have to take precautions.

But hell, at least somebody knows and is trying to help!!! Words fail me, I'm so thankful.

Alas. I also got pushed into a special diet that miiiiight get my hormones back on track. It's the good old 160g carbohydrates diet that is usually forced on diabetics.

Truth be told I can't stand eating that much, at those times and in that order. For one thing, I'm hungrier after I wake up and am less and definitely less hungry in the evenings. Which stands to reason, as you burn calories and anythign else you eat in the morning, but you don't burn as much in the evening.

Morning and evening used in regards to waking up and going to sleep, as I usually am on a "from afternoon till early morning" shift myself.

Alas, thanks to all this strict plan, I usually just skip the last two meals and usually average around 70-100g carbohydrates per day.

Thing is, the diet lady I am supposed to go to for consulting wants me to jot down every meal down to the last gram of food so she can see I follow everything to a T...
But never fear, I do jot down everything, but she will get the doctored version, where I will be shown to eat over 100g each day, so she won't bug me.

But hell... this is so crazy. I eat more thanks to this diet than I ate before it!!

Alas. Not anymore. Fuck the docs. I'm on a diet and I'm still fat, so why would eating more help any?!

So...

What do I do besides my frikkin annoying diet?

These. I have gotten my hands on a bunch of new beading books and Bead & Button magazines, which really improved my mood too. So now I'm amusing myself with the herringbone stitch and colours.

"There ought to be a law that a guy has to leave a rose on your pillow to let you know he enjoyed the labor you put into his walk of shame."

A few days ago I found this tutorial by chance. Random browsing once again. And while I experimented with it for a while, I came up with this colour combo yesterday.

Waaay to colorful? Hell yeah. Am I gay? Nah, don't think so. :)

Hats

I wonder if I have posted about my babies. Nah, not real ones. Just my latest creations that took a looong while.

A hat for my dad for his birthday... (on my mom, because my dad is camera shy... as usual)

...and a hat just for me. Because I still love purple. Especially with greens.

Both are crocheted. By me. Both crochet patterns were done by me as well. Not the granny square tho, that's pretty much universal. But... the design is all mine. ^^ I'm proud!

Oh bugger

Well. I guess I got down to finally writing this post. But I still don't wanna.

Maybe I didn't want to write this because I'm still a bit numb about the whole thing or because I'm still waiting for a lot of test results... maybe I don't want to translate all that shit... or maybe I just don't want to accept the whole fucking thing. Or hell. Maybe I hate whining. (Ha, no. Well... depends.)

So anyway. What we (me and my docs) know so far:

• I have hormonal issues... major hormonal issues
• one of my ovaries is half the size of the other
• I have struma nodosa, aka goitre, small and not so small swells and knots in my thyroid, and there is a teeny tiny healthy bit left, which is not enough for anything
• the doc doing my ultrasound told me my thyroid looked very ugly... and that I should have a long talk with my doc about how to proceed
  
• still waiting for my blood test results
• still waiting for my ovarian cancer test results (really hoping for a negative)

So this is it in a nutshell. I'm scared shitless, I think. I don't really know what to do. I don't know what option to choose.

Glittergasm

I ordered a few bottles of nail polish on the 4th of December, as my dad's Christmas gift for me. (He paid, I picked what I wanted. Best idea ever.)

They arrived today. One bottle was a mix up. I ordered China Glaze's Snow Globe, instead I got Polar Ice. Similar look, bot not the same. Polar Ice has small, same sized glitter, Snow Globe has multiple sizes and denser glitter.

Last time I contacted the seller (on Amazon's marketplace) they took their sweet time answering. It took them 2-3 days and they didn't concern themselves with niceties... or manners, much. They were brisk and almost, but not quite rude. So this time I didn't write to them, I just put two stars in my review and told them I can't even send the bottle back to get the correct bottle as it'd cost me more than the bottle's worth.

Lo and behold, they answered me not 5 minutes after the review went up. A belated Christmas miracle, you say? Nah. I guess I got them by the proverbial balls. Anyway, they apologized, hell, they were laying it on so thick I could have been their only buyer (not true) and offered to send the bottle of Snow Globe over as gift. I accepted gladly. (Hey, I was a return customer, this was my 4th time shopping there and they were pretty damn decent so far... save for the time the bottle wasn't properly closed and some dribbled out, if you remember my post during the summer.)

Aaaanyway. Got my pretty nail polishes and gonna get my other one too. Yay!

I feel a little guilty for whining, and I don't feel I deserve that free bottle of polish (I would have agreed to buy it at half-price, or maybe some other polish), but my mother told me if people offer you stuff you accept them gratefully - and take them.

Happy New Year

Well. The new year kicked off with a blast. A blast from the past, to be precise.

I had a long, awesome talk with an old flame. Or maybe the. In many ways I still compare guys to him when it comes to being easy-going, badass and having excellent taste in music - if not clothing and hair products. No... really... not clothes. But he has pretty good taste in everything else.

Gods, I haven't even realized how much I missed him. He was... well, the guy who got the pop culture references, who liked the music I did, and some! ...and he was undisturbed by my hissy fits. Trust me, that counts as something. Something big! I can have hissy fits you can't ever imagine. :D

Anyway. Just talking with him for a few hours made me think that the guys I had, some friends I had since then... they were just pale shadows compared to him. You just can't find a guy with a wry sense of humor, knowledge in all jokes geek and all those pesky pop-culture references like his. He's just awesome. And he lifted my crappy mood like nobody else had been able to do for about a year.

That guy's a gem. And while I have no plans of begging myself back to dating, because god knows I'd drive him out of his ever-loving mind, or he would humour me no matter how annoying and impossible I am (which would be a bad, bad thing), it still made me a little wistful and nostalgic. But nah, we are still not compatible that way.

But hell. It was so good to have my friend back.

So Happy New Year to any and everybody. My new year had a few good moments already, and I wish for (a lot) more. :)