Boobs

Boobs ... tits ... hooters ... Lots of names for them. Right now, what they are is full of cancer. Both of them.

It's so strange, so unreal. I've probably had cancer for years. I just didn't know it. Three little words from the doctor: "You've got cancer." And the world turns over.

I'm supposed to be "a cancer victim." The whole idea of being a victim is repugnant to me on every possible level. I find it insulting. I find it unnerving. I find it frightening. Until people starting telling me not to worry, that everything was going to be okay, I wasn't worried.

I figured I would get past this. These days, most women survive breast cancer. They have come a long way since my mother got it back in the 1950s. In those days, they hadn't even invented chemotherapy. They just removed the offending breast or breasts, all the surrounding muscles, then zapped you with so much radiation that you were more or less guaranteed (as it turned out), to get cancer again. They didn't have a light touch with the radiation or the scalpel. My poor mother was mutilated and eventually died or resurgent breast cancer. Ultimately, it became cancer-of-the-everything. It invaded her lungs, her stomach, pretty much every internal organ and she died slowly and painfully. But it took about 15 years, even with the primitive treatment available then, so I figure that I've got at least that much time and probably more.

Something will kill me. Death is inescapable, right? We are all going to die of something. It's just a matter of what's going to get us and when it's going to do it. Hell's bells, I could be run over by a drunk driver tomorrow.

I am not exactly happy about losing both breasts, which is going to happen and very soon. I am hoping that I'll turn out to be a candidate for reconstruction (isn't THAT a word!), but I won't know that until later this week when I meet the plastic surgeon and she can assess if I have enough undamaged, unscarred skin to build me a nice new (and if I have any say in the matter, perky) set of boobs.

The were the first visible symbol of my womanhood. They were big and guys liked them. I suckled my son and for a brief period, they were what I dubbed "working breasts." Actually functional.

And now they will soon be my ex-breasts. I shall have no real breasts anymore. I don't know how I feel about it. Not good is about the only thing I'm sure of.

We were watching, me and my husband, a television show tonight and the heroine of the piece commented that she was considered a genius because she had an IQ higher than 150. When I was in 6th grade, I got a look at my records and discovered I had an IQ of 169, which was actually as high as the scores would register, at least back then in 1959. Who know what the tests are like now. Been a long time since anyone bothered to test me. I'm probably a lot dumber now than I was back then. But what, I wonder, has my super high IQ actually ever done for me?

I'll tell you. I talk WAY too much and WAY too fast and I'm a really excellent player of Trivial Pursuits. I have a head full of information on all kinds of things and I'm clever at solving problems. Here I am with a problem I can't think or talk my way out of (sorry about the dangling modifier there). I wonder. If I were dumber, would I be happier too?

Back to watching TV. Need my laughter fix, so I'll just go watch Leno do his thing.

Labor Day 2010. Wordsmith signing off.