the story of how I DO NOT have cancer

One of the reasons I took my blogging hiatus is that I knew that Mr. P and I had a battery of medical tests to undergo due to our ever increasing age, and with my colleague dying of cancer and my friend's diagnosis being very poor, I was not in a good headspace to relay what was going on with us. Today I will tell one of those stories now that my brain is functioning a bit more clearly and because the time for my shameless begging for money has finally arrived....

On Mr. P's birthday I went in for my first mammogram. It was relatively uneventful, and the tech told me NOT to freak out if they called me in for more tests because they need a solid baseline and the radiologists really want to get to know my breasts.

I leave, feeling pretty okay about it, and proceed to make a lasagna and Boston cream pie (FROM SCRATCH) for Mr. P's birthday dinner.


That was all on a Tuesday. On Thursday I get a call that the mammogram was abnormal for my right breast and I needed to come in for some spot compression tests. I slowly begin the freak out. I google. I read extensively, and for the MOST part all indicators point towards 'need more baseline info', so while I am nervous, I am not FUHreaking, just regular vanilla freaking.


The next Tuesday I go admit myself into the hospital with bracelet and all to get my spot tests, which were about 30 more pictures of the right breast. The whole time the tech is chit chat chatting about the 5K we BOTH did the Saturday before. SURELY if she sees a ginormous lump she wouldn't be just chitty chatty about her super annoying kid, right? After she is done, she takes the pictures to the doctor, and then comes back and says, "Well, come with me, he would like you to have an ultrasound." gulp.


So they get me situated and my boob all lubed up and the tech says to me, "Let's see if we can find this thing."


fuck. there is something to find. fuck me. I am really glad we bought the car so that I have reliable transportation back and forth to the medical school a few hours away. I am glad my sister lives here so that she can help Mr. P take care of me while I die. I am SO glad that I have been running so that my strength is somewhat built up to withstand all the treatments. fuck. fuck.


The tech focuses on something that I am going cross-eyed trying to see and then she gets up and leaves the room to show the doctor and says he will come and talk to me. What feels like an eternity, while I am cataloguing everything in my mind that I need to tell Mr. P about how I feel about him and our life together, and where our money is, and how he will have to be for our kids, the doctor comes in to tell me...


NO cancer. NO nothing actually. There was a lymph node he wanted a closer look at, but it was perfectly normal. Clean bill of health, see you next year.


I never had cancer, but in my mind I did for 10 minutes and it was excruciating. I thought I could imagine what my colleague's family had been through, and I realize that I felt the extreme tippy tippy top of the iceberg. So, because one day I may actually get the news I was petrifying of receiving, or because one of you might, or because ANYone might, I am participating in Relay for Life on our campus, not this weekend, but next. We have a team and will be walking and walking to raise money. So, what I am now asking of all of you, is help me? HELP me, HELP you. (shameless stealing from that movie with Cuba Gooding and he plays sports and has an agent, with Tom Cruise?)

So here is the link to my Relay "page":
http://main.acsevents.org/site/TR/RelayForLife/RFLFY10MS?px=13125969&pg=personal&fr_id=22286

Note the picture of the kid on my page is NOT me or anyone I even know, I just can not figure out how to change it. Back to begging: I know everyone is feeling the pinch, BUT, if you want to donate and can afford a $10 donation, let me know via email or comment and I will enter you into a drawing to win an awesome item from

http://www.runningfunky.com/

If you win the drawing, I will buy you something from this site (in the $40 ish range). I picked this as a prize because I am working very hard with running and working out to get healthier to lower my chances of getting cancer, or increasing my odds of beating cancer, and I want all of you to have some super snazzy pants/shorts/capris to get healthy in too!

Blog Action Day: Climate Change

Last year I participated in Blog Action day because the topic felt so REAL to me, poverty. Mr. P, the kiddos and I lived under the poverty line for several years and in many, many ways it was horrible. But last night, the College Kid asked me what my favorite years were. Interestingly, they are those same years, and the pain of sitting at the Food Stamp office, having our power turned off, and writing a bad check at Kmart for Christmas toys is starting to give way to the memories of starting our Christmas Dinner tradition, two tiny kids in life jackets in the apartment complex pool for hours on end, dollar movies, and studying at McDonald's so the kids could play and we could have free drink refills.

But that is not what today's topic is. Today's topic is Climate Change, which is interesting because I have been in the midst of my own climate change experiment ever since visiting the Museum of Natural History in NYC in August. I do not have a car. I have been bumming rides and riding the U's transit system. I am walking much more. I am burning less fossil fuels. I am reducing my carbon footprint.

I am miserable. I want a car for myself. I want to go back to playing tennis two mornings a week, without having to get up an hour earlier so I can walk to the tennis courts if I don't feel it. I want to be able to go get pedicures. But yesterday was the deal breaker...sorry climate change, I want a car. Yesterday morning I got up at 5am to run and it was pouring and dark. Couldn't go. BUT, if I had a car, I could have just gone to the gym. WHAT? I want a car so I spend time at the gym????? Yikes. I also want to be able to go to lunch at my favorite place and sneak off to matinees on weekdays. I want to be MOBILE. Yes, I could do all of these things with advanced planning and taking the FREE public transportation, but I want to live on a whim. Not very GREEN of me.

Even though I will be quitting my public transportation experiment after only two months plus whatever time it takes me to find a sufficiently sweet ride, Mr. P and I will continue to recycle. Mr. P will still follow me around and turn off lights and televisions that I am not using. Next summer we will do the same thing as this summer (we kept our A/C up TWO degrees from last year) and we will rarely turn the heat on the winter.

What are you doing to reduce your carbon footprint?

Body fluid removal kit

yeah, that sign attached to a teensy white suitcase looking dealy attached to the dashboard of the transit bus didn't instill much confidence in me this morning.

Yes, I am still doing the transit thing. I am still working on healthy, healthy, healthy...am actually in my second week of 10K training...not to do a 10K at any pace per se, but to complete one whilst completing the jogging motion the entire time on November 7. I am doing well on POINTS for the first 4 or so days of the week, then comes socializing all weekend and when I socialize I tend to drink beers and eat food. All this together means my weight is dropping ounces per week, but the key term is DROPPING and I can live with that for now.

I turn in my tenure dossier a week from today and am working on my teaching philosophy and research philosophy as well as revising a few papers and starting a new one, so my writing energy has been directed towards those endevours....I end up having no words left for blogging or commenting.

I have fun stuff coming up that should offer blog fodder that is not "whoa is me, I am fat", or "whoa is me, trying to get tenure sucks". Maybe tomorrow I will lighten the mood and tell you about how Mr. P has discovered farming on Facebook and posts PICTURES of his farm nearly daily. Or how my son just wrote a script and he and some friends are going to film a movie---they are even trying to convince one of the sub-managers at the movie theater to show it once. How my daughter got to have dessert with a Nobel prize winner yesterday...she was selected from an entire college due to her research efforts. Or how my nephew is dreaming of the day he can get tiny again so that he is free to poop in his pants. naaaahhh. "Whoa is me" is much more how I roll these days.

I don't even know myself anymore....

Yesterday Mr. P informs me that he has to leave the house at 6am to be on a job site at 8am Eastern time (we live in Central time, but very close to the border). I do some quick time math and realize that if I relied on Mr. P for a ride to work, I likely would not get my run in before I went in to work, and that just wasn't going to work for me. WHAT?!?

So, instead of getting up a bit later and just skipping my run, I got up EXTRA early (WHAT?!?)and ran under the stars for the first half of my morning 5K, then watched the sun come up for the second half, showered, fixed my BREAKFAST (WHAT?!?) and then walked to the bus stop (a mile away) and headed into work.

Taught my classes, then remembered there is a catered work lunch. I went in, chatted for a bit, then promptly left even.though. there were chicken salad croissants. and brownies. (WHAT?!?) Instead, I am about to take a quick walk downtown with my book and enjoy a 6.5 point lunch because my sister just texted and asked if we wanted to meet for dinner (YES) and I want to be conservative with my lunch points.

There is some other stuff...I had a work thing last night and at the end there was an ice.cream.cart. I easily picked strawberry sorbet (but then sadly came to realize has lots of points anyhoo), and then came home and ate a packet of spinach and a packet of corn for dinner...no, NOT balanced...but I was hungry, and it was that or split a frozen pizza with Mr. P. Then I even passed up Diet Coke, because I wanted to skip the nighttime caffeine so I could sleep well to get up and be ready to go today.

Are all my choices coming this easy? NO, but for some reason they are today.

OH, and I know you all think I am a bitch for being mean regarding my mother's decor, but DUDES....come on....you know it is bizarre to put up wallpaper in an APARTMENT that you are renting for just a few years. Maybe it would help if you knew she got the wallpaper for $.99 a roll AND nearly every wall in that apartment is painted a different color. Doors too. And that she dug my sister's husband's old boxers out of her trash to use as 'rags' and that she still has clothes my sister wore in 8th grade that she wears.to.work. My sister is 32. 32.

going GREEN, err, purple?

When the baby bird left the nest on Wednesday, he took the car that he and I had been sharing for several years. That leaves me carless, and while Mr. P is all prepared to buy another vehicle, I asked him to put on the brakes---

When I went to the Museum of Natural History, specifically a special exhibit about the effects of human action on the climate, I pledged to work on decreasing my carbon footprint. I turned our A/C up a degree, I took my shopping bags to the store today, and I have decided to go the next two months using public transportation as much as I can. Now that is a bit more difficult in my town due to lesser public transportation options, but there is a university transit system and I have purchased my bus pass for the next two semester and have investigated the bus stops closest to the gym, my house, my office and my nail salon. My office is on the way to Mr. P's office, so I will take Mr. P's bus service to work on Monday and Wednesday mornings, because I teach fairly early, 9:30, and I can't risk being late to class, even for an environmental cause!

Here I come Purple line!

Friday Hotch Potch

I am WAY too anxious to write a real post, but I didn't post at all yesterday and that is compounding my anxiety, so here is a bullet list of the goings on:

• I am waiting for a publication decision that could be HUGE for me. In academics we have to "publish or perish". So, I write a paper, send it a journal, then an editor sends it to an associate editor (AE) and reviewers...all of which do not know who I am, and I don't know who they are. Then they critique said paper. Then either the paper gets accepted, rejected, or you get a revise and resubmit decision. The paper I am talking about is my best academic work. I sent it to the VERY VERY best journal and I got a revise and resubmit letter last June. I revised. I resubmitted, and according to the editorial system, I am waiting on the Senior Editor to make his decision. His name is Alain. I really think I will get the decision today, so send "Man, that Hotch Potch is freaking brilliant" thoughts to Alain so he accepts my paper. I need 10 papers to have been published to feel comfortable about going up for tenure in September and this one would be so good it could almost count for 3. My guts are in turmoil. (I only have 6 so far.)
• We are getting up tomorrow morning to run a 5K. On Valentine's Day. Who ARE WE?
• I have become an international financier. I loaned money to Maria Isabel Zapata in Nicaragua to expand her grocery store. (http://www.kiva.org/)
• My sister got word that her husband got into the PhD program at the university where I work which means they are moving to where I live. With the baby. This summer.
• My high school kid got accepted into the Honors College yesterday.
• I can now jog 1/2 mile in a row.
• The grocery store has been out of spaghetti squash the last two times I checked. That seriously bums me out. I have, however, purchased a lovely can of Spotted Dick Pudding so that I can do more thorough research.
• I am out.

I am such a loser

When I took my fat test this morning, I scored a mere 95.11%! This translates to a loss this week of 4.6lbs, which wipes out my gain from last week, and takes another 2ish pounds with it.

A great thing about weighing in on Mondays is that the Biggest Loser results get posted on Sundays, so if anyone is stopping by to tell me to get my giantish ass in gear...too late. Done.

So, when I did Weight Watchers 6 years ago, and again for the last month, I read about this thing called spaghetti squash. Supposedly, it is this squash that once you cook it, it "turns into" pasta like threads that you then put butter, cheese or marinara on for basically NO calories, but with protein, fiber, lots of vitamins. It really seemed too good to be true. The other day, I saw a display of said squash at the grocery store and bought one. I decided to make it yesterday since I had an eating explosion on Saturday. Here it is.

Cut in half lengthwise That was HARD. Think pumpkin. Scoop out the seeds and the membranes, also think pumpkin. Kind of weird. Put cut side down in a baking pan, in a 350 degree oven for 40 minutes. Oh, and pierce the rind a bunch of times with a fork.

Then when it is done, you scrape it with a fork for the "spaghetti" to appear...what the hell do you know?Put in a bowl and serve with your favorite pasta accoutrements. I chose REAL butter and salt and pepper for my first bowl. (Then later I had the rest with some melted cheddar, a la Squasheroni and Cheese.)

So far, this might be my favorite "healthy" discovery! Here's to another good week!

I am drinking that Kool-Aid, baby!

Last Saturday night I went to dinner with a friend I hadn't seen in 20 years. After about an hour of talking I told her that I get a bit trepidacious reuniting with "childhood" friends because you don't know their journey, you only knew who they were, you don't know who they have become, and what if you come to realize you just. don't. like. them. but you have kind of made a commitment to revive the friendship? Perhaps worse, what if they just. don't. like. you?

Anyway, that didn't happen, but there was one thing that she said that made me pause. She was talking about filling out her match.com profile and one of the questions was, "What are you passionate about?" and for the life of her she couldn't figure it out. She is a VERY even keel person, so she wasn't sure she had much passion. So she called her BFF and said, "Am I passionate about anything" and her friend said, "Well, we fight about politics, a lot. So I would guess you are passionate about politics." At that point in her story I laughed and said that guys dig girls who love politics so she should absolutely put that on her profile, and then my friend said, "Well, that friend is just drinking the Obama Kool-Aid."

Hells yeah, baby! I love that Obama Kool-Aid!

Tara posted the weekly Obama YouTube on her blog, and I am going to post it here as well.


Going along with the message, my first Habitat for Humanity meeting is Tuesday evening. I have volunteered my money, but I have never volunteered my time. I am very excited to get started.

As an added benefit (not that I needed one at all), I found on WeightWatchers that "sawing by hand" burns 100 calories in 10 minutes. So for every 20 minutes of sawing, that equals one beer I can drink and break even for the week. I am totally signing up to saw by hand. Maybe even a bit of hammering.

So drink up, my friends. (The Obama Kool-Aid, not beer.)

We have a nation to change!