Just heard from my doctor’s office – I’m clean – no cancer on this babe!!! Whoo hoo – so I guess the whole experience was just a refresher course on what real pain feels like. It’s been a few years – and hey, it’s all in my head anyway, right? After all, it was a man who said that there are no nerve endings in the cervix…
All those calluses I’d allowed to build up on my soul to protect me from corporate America are getting rubbed the wrong way lately – a few blisters, some bleeding, but hey, I’m peeling a lot of the scars right off and reminding myself of who I was when I was shiny and new. Life smacks us all around; it’s a matter of being circumstances’ biatch, or fighting the good fight.
My e-mail notifier sound thingy at work is a quote from Dead Poets’ Society: “Never forget, words and ideas can change the world.” I have to remember that it’s OK to be sincere, despite those cynical callouses’ hue and cry against true feeling.
Seems to be a weird kind of remembrance of things past going on the last few weeks… I’ve run into two different people I thought I’d hopelessly lost touch with – Bryan from freshman days, better known as rasx, who always intimidated me with the depth of his being in the world; and Joy, who cruised through the Linguistics program at UCSB with me and who has always been a bright, shining spirit of strength and beauty.
Both of them are human beings who fearlessly speak truth to power, and I am fortunate to know them and see them move in the world.
Ouch! My kabob has been sheeshed!
Lemme say, did I mention, OUCH!!! Yup, the doctor took tissue samples (note the plural) and now I get to wait and bleed and heal and see if I have cancer. Joy. (Did I say ouch yet?) Not to mention I got a little too brave and white-knuckled it all the way to the pharmacy before I passed out. Gads, am I a fucking wimp! Disembowel somebody else in front of me and I want spaghetti and meatballs for lunch, but prick my finger and I swoon. Poor pharmacy lady – she was just happy that I didn’t puke on her. We’ve all got to be happy about something, I suppose…
OK, so word up, if anyone ever says they want to do a colposcopy, run or demand drugs first. But it’s better to have chunks snipped out of my hoo-hoo so that I can find out that I don’t have cancer of the cervix than to have my whole small intestine spontaneously invert and drag behind me on the ground. Not that that ever really happens in real life… tee hee. Did I mention I used to work in trauma surgery? Probably why I’m such a wuss – I KNOW what a rongeur and a curette are for. Gotta hurt ya to heal ya – surgery is a societally condoned form of violence, practiced by mutual consent, but violence nonetheless. So let’s all hear it for fluffy pink styrofoam bunnies and sparkly, yummy Peeps. (They come in purple kitty form for Halloween, too. Yay.)