Still Wandering, Debatably Lost

I’m not great about listening to my body - chronic pain and working manual labor jobs for thirty years mostly make me want it to shut up, because pain is very loud sometimes.

But last June when I was at the doctor for something else (which we still haven’t figured out) that hurt a lot more, he asked if I was having other problems, because he doesn’t often see me.

‘Eh, my left breast has been kind of uncomfortable for a little while?’

Fortunately, he not only listens, but takes things seriously. Diagnostic mammogram, several years before I should have needed them for routine testing.

‘Hmm,’ said the mammogram techs. ‘Let’s biopsy that.’ (‘That’ was an abnormality in my left breast that appeared to be shaped like a piece of macaroni. Amused concern about boob noodles abounded.)

As much as I try to ignore my body is roughly how successful my body actually is at ignoring lidocaine. The biopsy - which was mammogram guided and from a medical technology standpoint, really cool! - hurt like blue blazing fuck.

‘Hmm,’ said the folks who examined the biopsy. ‘That’s weird but doesn’t appear to be cancerous, at least?’

(It still hurt. It continued to hurt worse as time went on.)

It turns out - because there was a history of ovarian cancer from my father’s side of the family and gene testing was done to check for other factors - that I’m also positive for a BRCA 2 mutation that increases my lifetime risk of breast and ovarian cancers to roughly stratospheric levels.

Thanks, dad.

So. Boobs off? Boobs off.

As it turned out, boobs off was going to take a length of time that was becoming increasingly unbearable since the pain in my breast was continuing to get worse.

‘Can we just get the noodle out?’ I asked, rather despairingly, and apparently we could!

Having a section of my boob the size of half a deck of cards excised did not hurt at all, despite my worries following the biopsy.

It did, however, show that I had cancer.

So, boobs are coming off - in a week and a half, actually, which is engendering very complicated emotions (none of them about gender, funnily) followed by chemo, possibly radiation, then reconstruction, since I’m getting it done with my own tissue rather than implants.

It’s going to be a really long year.

So, yeah, listen to your boobs, regardless of sex and gender. Breast cancer hits plenty of men, too.

And if anyone wants to help make my recovery a little easier I have a wishlist?

I’m literally donating my boobs to science.

Again.

Cue the ‘two nickels but it’s funny that it happened twice’ meme.

There was no evidence of spread to the lymph nodes, so gods willing it never got a chance to spread and never will. I’m on ‘chemo light,’ a course of Taxol and herceptin - twelve weeks of weekly Taxol, herceptin every three weeks for a year.

They put me on beta blockers to protect my heart from the meds and my blood pressure went up twenty points, which seems both illogical and somewhat unfair.

It’s exhausting but not horrible - I’m on week three, officially one-quarter of the way through my Taxol. (I’m told I may be allowed to ring the bell twice - once at the end of the twelve weeks and then again next March at the end of treatment.) The ‘short’ infusion appointments are three hours and the long ones are five, and I have to wear ice mittens and booties during infusion to prevent neuropathy.

I haven’t started losing my hair yet, although that will probably happen this week. I got it cut at the beginning of March to the shortest and boldest I’ve had it in my life, a pixie cut dyed vibrantly pink. (My least favorite color - figured hating it would make it easier to see it go.) My roots are already showing - honestly I didn’t think I’d have my hair long enough for that to happen.

The reconstructed face of the “Cheddar Man” (c. 7,000 BCE) compared to his living descendant, Adrian Targett    

The Cheddar Man is a Mesolithic skeleton that was recovered from England’s Cheddar Gorge in 1903. At around 9,000 years old, the Cheddar Man is the oldest complete skeleton ever discovered in the UK, and has long been hailed as the “first Briton.” DNA analysis on the Cheddar man from 2018 indicated that he was lactose intolerant, had light-colored eyes, dark brown or black hair, and had a dark to black skin tone. Although the discovery of the Cheddar Man’s dark skin tone was surprising for both scientists and the public alike, it corresponds with recent research suggesting that genes linked to lighter skin only began to spread about 8,500 years ago - approximately 32,000 years later than what was previously believed.  

In addition to the development on his skin tone, the Cheddar Man surprised scientists in 1997 when DNA analysis revealed that he had a living descendant -  a retired history teacher named Adrian Targett. Targett and the Cheddar man share the same mtDNA, which is passed down from mother to daughter. In other words, they share a common maternal ancestor. What is even more remarkable is that Targett lives in Cheddar, only a half mile away where his 9,000-year-old ancestor was discovered.

Targett was not invited to the initial reveal of his ancestor’s new facial reconstruction, but he has since seen it and has commented on the family resemblance. “I do feel a bit more multicultural now,” he once joked in an interview “And I can definitely see that there is a family resemblance. That nose is similar to mine. And we have both got those blue eyes.”

I am a raccoon biologist and one of the few people in the state allowed to take in captive bred raccoons that had been possessed illegally. The raccoon in the photos is Moonshine, but she is currently at the animal sanctuary where I work as I had been quarantining multiple new intakes from an abuse case. I still have two males (Rum Tum Tugger and Electra) left in my home enclosure as we are getting them neutered and then hopefully sending them to an AZA accredited zoo.

Lost my mind a little and added (if my math is correct) 5,615 beads to Nim Teasdale's Odenwald pattern. Anything worth doing is worth overdoing!

The goal was “soothingly weighted but not uncomfortable to wear, even as someone with chronic pain.” It could have been a little heavier, so maybe I’ll make a shawl with larger beads another time, but I’m very pleased with this one. I used size 6/0 seed beads, applied as I go with a .6mm crochet hook.

Yarn-wise, used 2 cakes of YarnArt Flowers. I knitted the fully purple sections from both, then knitted all the way through the yellow-oranges with a single ball. When I hit the beginning of red-oranges, I used yarn from both cakes, alternating between them. (Not the entirety of both, I played it by ear to make sure I made it through the full rainbow.)

I do have edited charts with bead placements. I will only share them with Nim's permission.

May I present the best apple: