Kathleen, Kage and the Company

Kage Baker grew up in an era of educational shorts. (As did I, for that matter.) They were tiny mini-movies with abysmal production values, used to illustrate all manner of the aspects of modern life – dating, driving, grocery shopping, drug use, sex. How to brush your teeth, make jelly, interact with farm animals, survive the coming nuclear apocalypse.

They were especially shown to adolescents in junior high and high school. I think they were made by people who had a secret nihilism agenda, and were designed to discourage us from ever breeding. Or possibly, they were intended to get us to kill ourselves before we got the chance or privacy to reproduce.

The government made thousands of them, for both civilian and military education; some astonishing epics of propaganda and poor film-making came out of WWII. But the Feds had a vague idea that indoctrination films ought to be watchable, and so they hired some actual film makers: Disney. The Warner Brothers animation team. Walt Kelly, Chuck Jones, Hanna-Barbera. The run of the mill films, though, were usually produced by police forces, departments of social services, and industry promotion commissions. They employed an awful lot of film students, brothers-in-law, and guys someone knew who happened to own a movie camera …

The most famous of these nowadays is probably Reefer Madness, resurrected during the 1960’s and shown to general hilarity on college campuses. I know that’s where I saw it, and you could barely make out the screen for the pot smoke … not many of us managed to get high during it, though, because we were laughing too hard to inhale. Whether or not you agree with the film’s anti-drug stance, it is one of the worst movies ever made – they could have been working from the script of Gone With the Wind, and it would still be an awful film.

Another all-time favourite, shown to millions of kids in Driver’s Ed classes, was Blood on the Pavement. That one began with a warning that sensitive kids shouldn’t watch it all the way through (no one ever left), and ended with  blood flooding across a highway from a crushed car … I forget if the accident was due to DUI, loud rock n’ roll or prior sex when the car had been parked somewhere, but one thing was clear: it was the driver’s fault and now they were dead.

Even in those more innocent days 45 years ago, even in an audience composed entirely of Catholic school girls, the main response was giggles. Though Kage carried a small tattooed blot on one knee for the rest of her life, where a snickering classmate lost control of her fountain pen and stabbed Kage in mid-thrash.

I’ve been writing this between hysterical laughing fits of my own. On this dull, grey, cold Saturday in Los Angeles, we are whiling away the afternoon with a Mystery Science 3000 DVD. It’s entirely made from these ridiculous shorts, just the sort of wretchedly made and acted B&W film we were forced to watch in assemblies in our school years. My nephew Michael treasures this DVD – it’s his only experience with this particular genre of educational movie (kids watch other things in forced assemblies now) and they are reducing him to helpless jelly. Tom Crow and Company make the films a hell of a lot more entertaining than our whispered asides to one another in darkened auditoriums decades ago.

MST3 was one of Kage’s favourite shows, as well. Talking to the screen, making your own narrative, was a game we’d played all our lives – as most people have. Growing up in an industry household, and then spending our adulthood immersed in improvisational theatre, we were used to an exceptional standard of commenting on the screen. Heck, we were regular devotees at the old Tiffany Theatre screenings of Rocky Horror on Sunset Boulevard, which was surely the very crown and flower of interactive audience participation! MST3 is a worthy descendent of those insane nights …

So here we sit, laughing until we’ve scared the cats and Harry is bugling happily from the back of a chair. Nice way to spend a dull, grey, cold Saturday. Nicest day of the week, in fact. No heavy philosophy, no bad news, no serious discussions – just laughing until our ribs hurt, Turkish Delight to hand and bagels with cream cheese in the offing for dinner.

Sloth and comfort, sugar and butter fat. Way to go, man.

Kage Baker always declined to deal with bureaucracy. She spent many, many years being Customer Service for an insurance company, and she said she had therefore dealt with enough evil in her time.

She never anticipated needing to deal with a bureaucracy again. By the time she did need to, she was too sick to manage. She honestly regretted that the task therefore fell to me, but she also knew full well I was the better one of us to handle it. I was healthy, I was much meaner, I always did better fighting for a cause. Kage was a little too reasonable for real berserker rage. Though had it been me instead of her in that situation, she’d have summoned the necessary ferocity. She had to leap to my defense a few important times in our lives, and it was always awesome.

I keep her image in the forefront of my mind these days, when faced with clerkly stupidity. I think it must be working, because fewer and fewer people are willing to meet my eyes. I think Kage is sometimes staring out of them, wreathed in righteous flame.

Medi-Cal continues to nibble viciously at me, throwing up yet more unneeded complications to my life. Today , though, I won the battle: not the war, but an important battle. The war is progressing as it should at this point, but I had to go see a woman about not cancelling my claim. Quite unrelated to the argument over which kind of Medi-Cal I have, this was because the end of the year is fast approaching. Apparently when it does, the default position all Medi-Cal claims is to be cancelled – which I have at least managed to convince them not to do.

I had a small amount of difficulty getting into the office, when the 5 platinum stents in my chest set off the metal detector. Once assured I could not remove them there in the lobby (No, I am quite sure, Mr. Security Guard), I was allowed to pass. I am honestly not sure if he was afraid I could whip them out like Wolverine’s adamantium claws, or if he just though that maybe metal stents should not be carried indoors. But he was happy enough when he realized I couldn’t reach them.

I spent the rest of my appointment explaining to Ms. Armine Pogosian that No, my family did not charge me rent to live with them – though that took some doing; she just could not comprehend that I live in their house as a member of the family. I guess she doesn’t have any pets. Or maybe any family. Ms. Pogosian apparently thinks Kimberly is a mental case, though, for letting me stay in the house rent-free, and I had to sign an affadavit stating solemnly that I did not pay her.

It also took a while to explain to her how the payment system works for a self-employed writer; i.e. rarely and little.  She finally grasped that I was, essentially, selling something which I made from scratch and for which there is an erratic market. That was, as they say, close enough an explanation for government work.

When Kage was in her final illness, she claimed she could never explain how she earned her living to a government clerk. Turns out she was right. As usual. I should have remembered that.

The entire process was complicated by the fact that we could barely understand one another. And I learned today that you won’t get a good reaction – or a translator – if you request translation aid because you speak English. I even tried writing out my narrative – you know, like a writer – causing poor Ms. Pogosian to cry out in distress, “No! No! No write stories!”

Some people just don’t like modern writing.

Finally, though, we reached an exhausted accord. I think it was helped when she got a phone call from her son-in-law, assuring her that her grandson was feeling better. “Your family?” I asked. She nodded. I tapped my application. “This is my family.” She understood that in context.

She also understood one word in the section where I described recent changes to my health status. That word was “cancer”. She actually looked stricken, staring at me, and finally asked: “What part?”

“Uterus.”

She understood that word, too. And in just a few more minutes, she told me my benefits would continue another year and I could go. She sort of patted the air in the direction of my hand, but couldn’t quite bring herself to broach regulations and offer me comfort.

It was all right. We actually reached an understanding there, something beyond the forms and check-boxes and rules. At least for a moment, as I left, Armine Pogosian and I saw one another as human beings.

I sang Adeste Fidelis all the way home. And really felt it.

Kage Baker would have liked today. A huge, fast, furious storm blew through the Basin, and we got thunder and lightning! Wild winds! Sudden rains!

Of course, most of the freeways are a mess – drowned and covered in trees and rain. Except the 60; that burned yestreday. It gets pretty wild around here as Los Angeles approaches the Solstice. The place whirls around so many other metaphysical poles that bits tend to fly off and hit people when it gets busy.

What leaves were left on the mulberry tree today were blown straight off, horizontally, in a micro burst. Ravens and squirrels have been dive-bombing the lawn all day as they were shaken out of the camphor trees – the Corgi and the parrot are on High Alert, DefCon WTF in anticipation of an invasion by their arch enemies. Christmas decorations all over the city are – well, all over the city. It seems to have snowed tinsel in parts of West Hollywood, and a lot of plastic poinsettias are awry.

Myself, I too have had an exciting time of it. You get real busy when you really are trying to stay alive, I find. I made a quick furious trip back out to Cedars Sinai today, and completed my part of the super-secret waiver form that Medi-Cal sent my doctor. They wouldn’t send it to me … it was half a page of ordinary data (Name, Address, DOB, Gender) which I completed in the waiting room by the light of one of the ubiquitous aquariums.  It’ll be back on its way to Medi-Cal tomorrow: my doctor’s secretary, Pat, is a competent angel. All praise to her!

Tomorrow, more tests – we are proceeding on the assumption that my care will be approved the way I need it. Just so, you know, I don’t have to have a cardiac-complicated pelvic surgery done by a GP who’s never seen me before …  because, really, if they just approve the year’s extension I am asking for, Medi-Cal will end up paying less in the long run than if they let me decay into expensive decrepitude. It’s not like I’m asking for cosmetic surgery or a sex-change or coloured contact lenses. All of which they do pay for …

I pay taxes. Honestly, I do. If they let me live, I figure I’ve got another 20 years in me, easy, in which to keep paying them. I can probably last long enough to break my hip on Fezziwig’s dance floor, and by then it’ll be Social Security’s problem.

All of you, Dear Readers, have been sending me practical, useful suggestions on ways to handle this – please be assured, I am not only grateful but am implementing many of them. They are one of the reasons there has been essentially no lost time in my campaign to reverse Medi-Cal’s decision.And, thanks to you all, I have more arrows in my quiver if I need them. Some of the impractical suggestions have been nice, too. You violently-inclined little critters …

Though Kage would warn you not to give me a firearm. I’ll likely shoot myself in the foot. And just think what trouble that would cause!

Kage Baker would have stared incredulously and said, “Well, fuck all. Let’s go get some malts and sit and look at the sea.”

Wish I could. I may yet get a malt, though I’ll have to drive up to Mulholland to see the ocean. Wouldn’t be the first time for that, though.

Dear Readers, I got the results from my biopsy today. I have Stage 2 serous adenocarcinoma. This is an uncommon endometrial cancer – though not, as my doctor was quick to assure me, as weird as what Kage had. It’s also aggressive. However, it’s been caught quite early and surgery is imminent to put paid for it once and for all.

I may eventually be scared – so far, I am just enraged. This is simply not fair. But then, a hell of a lot of life is not fair. I just hadn’t expected another heaping helping quite so soon.

Luckily, my doctor is also small and aggressive, and is already working on scheduling my surgery.

*********************** INTERRUPTION ********************************

Surgery is no longer quite as imminent …

There are  some difficulties with my Medi-Cal plan. My coverage was changed by the state on December 1st, from “straight” Medi-Cal to an HMO. I have been assigned to a medical  group. They know nothing about me or my health, have never seen me, and are not the doctor who has been treating me for the last two months.

I’ve requested that the pertinent forms to switch me back be FAXed to my doctor. I need to fill some out as well, with my medical history. Then they get sent to Sacramento for review on whether or not my condition is eligible: life-threatening enough, basically. Do I really NEED to see this particular doctor? – style of thing.

How long does this take? No one knows … I was told, “There is no time scale assigned,” which is, I think, a bureaucratic euphemism for Whatever we say it takes. I asked the clerk on the line if she understood my actual condition IS time-sensitive, and she said “What?” I asked her how often this review process is fatal, and she replied that she had no information on that … seems to me someone ought to maybe give some thought to it.

This is part of why Kage died.

I, however, am not going to submit patiently. I’ve spent an hour or so on the phone with various people, getting numbers and forms and permissions and run-arounds. I shall go in person tomorrow. And on Friday. And so on, until this gets straightened out. Cedars-Sinai is a practical, compassionate place, and has other options available for those of us who have had the bad taste to both get very ill and lose their health care coverage: this will work.

I just have to be determined. And I am. That was a lesson hard-learned and never to be forgotten. It’s not that I am asking for a hand-out; I paid into this system for 40 years, and am now requesting only the services I was assured would be waiting for me. However, the system seems bent on not paying anything to anyone  – which would save money, I suppose – until the problem goes away on its own.

They are in for a surprise. The problem is ME, and I will not be silenced.

Kage Baker was keenly, personally interested in the processes of extinction and survival. She loved the mysteries of cryptids, animals lauded in song and story who one day turned out to be real; or even better, the really odd ones like platypussies, whom no one had imagined until they were found.

She was fascinated by the rise and fall of various species of animals; the interesting tricks animals would develop to take or hold a niche. The isolation of a mild difference into an identifying trait. The patient plodders who last for 100 million years and the comets who streak across the biosphere in blazing eccentricity.

She was rather betting on Homo sapiens being in the comet category.

The more she studied, though, the more she thought she had identified the trick that let humans conquer all lands and all living conditions. Human will eat anything. And anyone. They are ultimate, surreal, intelligent omnivores.They make art and culture out of devouring anything that moves. Or doesn’t, for that matter; we are among the very few animals who have developed agriculture, and we’ve taken it further than the ants.

Oh, sharks have a similar eat-anything reputation, based on the fact that we occasionally find Volvo parts and lawyers in their sharky insides. But really, sharks are not very bright – they are just clever enough to realize that something near blood or thrashing is likelier than not to be edible, and so they swallow some peculiar things. And except for the odd South American seal, they stick to things in the water.

But humans have eaten their way across the face of the earth, and the face of the deep.

One of the theories about the lack of megafauna in the modern world is that the entry of humans into the various continents did for them. The giant mammals all seem to have perished soon after humans made a successful stand in the countryside. Europe lost its bison, its aurochs, its giant pigs, its Irish elk. The holocaust is even more evident in the Americas and Australia, where human arrived relatively late – just before they got there, the places were teeming with ginormous beasties living wild, free and plentiful.

Within a paltry few thousand years, the megafauna of the Americas was reduced to buffalo and a few isolated, large cats. Australia squeaked by with red kangeroos, and maybe a giant lizard no one is sure still exists. New Zealand lost all its big birds, and is now reduced to fat flightless parrots and kiwis: both nocturnal burrow-dwellers, where humans cannot reach them.

While there is considerable argument about what actually did all of them in, there is a lot of circumstantial evidence – fire pits. Burned bones. Spear points stuck in ancient animal skeletons. Pictures on cave walls of anything and everything being driven, hunted and speared. Nor is Homo sapiens alone in this martial omnivory: Homo Neanderthalensis is suspected in a lot of mass bone pits at the bottoms of cliffs.

There’s good eating on them protoprobiscoids.

And on our cousins, too; Neanderthalensis or sapiens sapiens, Homo has been munching on its kith and kin for just as long.

There’s a new report out of Southeast Asia this week, that would have interested Kage – Vietnam is the newest hotspot for previously-undiscovered species. Take a look here: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/8950098/Elvis-monkey-and-coloured-gecko-among-200-new-species-discovered-in-Vietnam.html

What this means, of course, is that the locals have known about them for ages, but suddenly scientists are finding them too. Mostly by cruising restaurants and farmers’ markets. Read the whole article – it states, quite baldly, that most of these fascinating creatures are destined for the dinner table. A new species is found in Vietnam about once every 4 days, on average – but only once, and often never again. Why? Because someone ate it.

Sometimes the locals have been eating them for years, and rather understandably are not eager to have them declared off-limits by scientists. But unless these animals are protected, at least a little, they will soon not be found even by afficianados of rainbow gecko on toast – no, not though your grandfathers back to the days of Pithecanthropus (whom we probably also ate) regarded it as being everyman’s right and proper food  …

There is something so tacky about realizing we ate so many of our fellow passengers on this planet. There are 7 billion of us here now – couldn’t we have kept a few moas, and mammoths, and sabre-toothed squirrels? Wouldn’t the world be a more interesting place if there were maybe a billion fewer of us, and some thylacines and dodos left? I’d have liked to see the skies over Kansas darkened with passenger pigeons rather than dust storms.

Makes Mendoza’s super-grain project seem a little more vital, doesn’t it? Before there’s just us and the bacteria left, snacking on one another.

Kage Baker would call this a free Sunday. She looked for those; days that fell out of the regular round of duty, responsibility and requirement, and opened doors into otherwise-inaccessible dimensions of relaxation. Duty-free in all meanings of the words – nothing to pay, nothing to justify, nothing about which one need feel guilty.

That’s a good thing, because I remain steadfastly in my pajamas and the closest I have gotten to a socially redeemable action today is brushing my teeth. And I used an electric tooth brush, so my personal effort was minimal, he he he.

But it’s early yet in December, and here at Chez Famille we are more or less caught up on deco. The lights are up on the outside – a wonderful frost tree effect! – there are garlands and candles on the inside, and it’s too early for the tree. (It goes up on the 15th.) We’ve got UCB ornaments plugged into every computer. It’s cold and grey outside, so we are all forted up with warmth and flickering light sources to stimulate the primitive reptilian brain into blinking contentment. And muffins. And cookies. And red and green M&Ms.

I ought to be at Dickens, making art with my near and dear. At the very least, I ought to feel bad about not being there. But it is now the third day since my surgery, and I have hit that famous wall of Day Three Syndrome. This too was one of Kage’s theories, and one pretty well held up by experience. Round about the third day after an injury or surgery is when one feels the worst – the stiffest, the sorest, the most incapacitated.

The delirious joy of pain waning and strength waxing has died back a little. Swelling has gone down (or come up), allowing bleeding to increase or stiffness to spread. Mysterious bruises develop like demonic Polaroids. And all the anesthesia has worn off. It’s perfectly bearable – especially if one is expecting it – but it does put a bit of a crimp in one’s joyous capering.

Mind you, I’m not supposed to be capering in the first place, but come on – get real. A certain amount of capering is just unavoidable. Especially when the Christmas deco is up and blinking, and the smells of cranberries muffins and sausage are currently spreading through the house. My UCB toy is  a tiny Christmas tree made of fibre optic, which is going though lovely psychedelic waves of colour on top of Kage’s Nebula (an effect I heartily recommend for visual interest, BTW).

For me, some mild capering and a lot of sitting still is what’s needed today. I can put my feet up and trade the capering for some Yuletide hand-jive. That amuses the parrot, for one thing, and the Corgi watches intently in the hope the famed primate grip will fail and edibles will come raining down on deserving little golden dogs …

By next week, I will be restored to something much closer to operational status than I have enjoyed in months. I can go to Dickens Fair next week, and maybe actually graduate from being deco to being some sort of performer. Even the livelier babies have been outdoing me, as they grow from props to special effects … but now I’m getting better!

It’ll make for a better last weekend of Fair for my folks, too. They won’t have to worry about finding a box big enough to pack me, as well as all the china in the Welsh cabinet.

Yep, a free Sunday is good for everyone now and then.

Kage Baker utterly hated hospitals – being a patient, anyway. She was a great visitor, bringing books, music, forbidden goodies … when I was 18 and having kidney surgery, she brought me stories of hers that had me laughing so hard I nearly popped stitches. She also smuggled me in milk shakes, somehow, hidden about her person; and pizza, folded into horrible, delicious origami shapes in her purse.

When we were 31 and 30, her tonsils and my gall bladder and appendix were removed on the same day – an unplanned coincidence that really screwed up our plans. Our dear friend Athene got up at dawn to get poor Kage into the hospital for her scheduled tonsillectomy, which was nearly derailed by my emergency surgery. Nonetheless, when Kage was released the next day (I stayed a week) she came in and acted out her goodbys in an hysterical mute pantomime that once again endangered my incision.

In her final illness, though, she detested her confinement in the hospital. I brought electronic candles, home-cooked meals, toys, books, music; read to her, bathed her, cooked for her – and finally, sprang her from the place to get her home against orders, when we both realized there was no more point to it. Weak as she was, she was laughing like a maniac as I ran her wheelchair down the corridors and out the front door, urging me on lest we get caught … they didn’t notice she was gone for close to an hour, to Kage’s triumphant amusement.

The only way to endure a hospital stay, she said, was to look for the funny stuff. Luckily, hospitals always provide weirdnesses for one’s amusement.

Cedars-Sinai, where I had my outpatient surgery Thursday, is a lovely place: don’t think, Dear Readers, that I am denigrating it. It does its very best to make a patient feel comfortable and cared for: but it can’t help the fact that it is, at bottom, not a spa but a hospital. But one can have some fun with it anyway, if one just keeps a proper attitude … a companion is also vital; Kimberly and I giggled a lot during our time there.

Someone in the decorating department has worked extremely hard on tasteful colours and attractive upholstery; all the waiting areas are lovely. Each one also sports an aquarium, evidently on the theory that it will relax people. But the one in the outpatient lounge has only three visible fish – last week, it had only two, both grey. (Grey tropical fish? WTF?) On Thursday, they had added a beautiful cobalt blue fellow as well, but the two grey ones would have nothing to do with him. As Kim and I watched sympathetically, something BIG and black and white came surging out from behind a big branch of coral – an unexpected fourth fish! It had what appeared to be a lacy white fan in its mouth, though, and only after it had vanished again like a local Leviathan did we realize … it was a detached fin. From something else. I guess there was a white fish, too. For awhile, Kimberly muttered.

We were not noticeably relaxed by this. It got us snickering, though.

My anesthesiologist was a tall, thin, gawky fellow who had trouble reading my cardiologist’s notes in my chart. Initially, he told me my congestive heart failure was gone. I was unaware it could do that, but was pleased … he finally decided, though, that it actually said that my heart was, for its battered condition, healthy enough for anesthesia. (That made me even happier, as I had no intention of going through with the biopsy without it.)

However, while setting the IV line in my arm, he accidentally knocked the cap off of it. As he scrambled for a line to attach, Kimberly observed that I was leaking … I could feel the blood pouring off my hand, actually. He had essentially stuck a siphon in my vein and opened it. But he got it capped ASAP, and assured me that at least it meant the line was clear … more puddles, though. I can’t seem to get through any part of this without puddles.

However, that was all that went wrong. And we really found it rather amusing. So did my gynecologist, who looked at the mess and said cheerfully, “Oh well, that’s nothing compared to last time!” (She was right, too.)

And in their devotion to the patient’s comfort, Cedars-Sinai has some great practices. Warmed blankets, fresh from a nifty little blanket-oven. The coolest royal-blue slipper-socks ever – I took ’em home and am still wearing them. They are a gorgeous colour, and have happy-face treads on the bottom. Surgical tables with mattresses! Padding for my poor old butt! And curtains everywhere in the recovery wards, to give at least a good illusion of privacy.

Also, they let Kimberly stay with me until the very last minute and let her back in as soon as my eyes were open. My doctor briefed her, too, after surgery – which was a good thing, as I reportedly had a detailed talk with her about which I remember absolutely nothing. The reports of my surgery so far are all from Kimberly, whose brain was still online … I wasn’t really present until a nice nurse asked me if I was ready to go home, at which point I was wide awake and eager!

Why does anyone ever wear a bra to the hospital, though? One never bothers to put it on again when one gets dressed and leaves. It always ends up wadded into a ball somewhere at the bottom of a bag, and then you spend 20 minutes at home thinking you left it in a changing room somewhere … and deciding that was a cheap price to have escaped, too.

But now I am home, comfortably and slothfully in my pajamas and slipper-socks, eating iron-rich foods and feeling better by the minute. Wednesday I go back to my doctor’s office for the test results and planning for Stage II. They have a huge aquarium in her waiting area, with enough fish that no one has to eat anyone else. In full colour, too. It’ll be much more entertaining.

You gotta go for the giggles, doing this. Kage taught me that, too. Look for the laughs, and cling firmly to them. You can get through anything, laughing.

Kage Baker taught me lots of things in our lives. How to make cornbread, what little I know of German, how to play pool. In the last year of her own life, she taught me to grab firmly on to every bit of good news and success, and let the bad news work things out on its own. Cling to the good stuff; pen it up and the stuff will breed yet more.

Bad news is like a nasty drunk. It wants attention and power. The only way to get rid of it is to chase it away or leave it fulminating alone. The solutions are good guys – embrace them, make them comfy on the bar stool next to yours, and they will eventually take the bad news out back and beat the shit out of it.

Most of all, Kage taught me to throw modesty to the winds and run to the gynocologist the minute anything goes funny with one’s lady parts.

Caveat here: I am going to be indelicate. You gentlemen among my Dear Readers aren’t accustomed to having relationships with your internal organs. Until you reach middle age, you ordinarily aren’t required to think much about anything on the inside of you. It’s different with women – we’re in close, daily communication with our plumbing from an early age. It produces in us a casual coarseness about the processes. If you are feeling squeamish, please feel free to retire to the study for cigars and brandy, and get one of the ladies here to give you a synopsis later. But rest assured, today’s post has a happy ending.

Today, I feel … good. Oh, I’m weak and sore; still bleeding, and it feels like I’m pissing battery acid, but that will all pass. Overall, I feel a distinct improvement, and a lessening of the creeping malaise that was draining me. And I know why I feel all those things. It’s because the biopsy and hysteroscopy were a rousing success!

I have been relieved of three massive polyps and my entire endometrium – which, at my age, wasn’t supposed to still be lolling around the place getting fat anyway. My gynecologist assured me they looked everywhere in my uterus; they now have material to biopsy everything, and they’re on it already. They even managed a Pap smear, though that seems like small potatoes compared to everything else. And because they removed everything that was causing the immediate bleeding, I am better! My gyno even took a stitch in the nick she’d accidentally put in my cervix, which is also helping matters. As soon as the post-surgical cuts heal – and they are healing fast, I can feel it – I won’t be losing blood for the first time in months!

This is generally considered a good thing.

Polyps and endometrium can grow back, of course. In fact, they usually do. But before they have a chance, all the tests will be complete and the villain will have a face. Permanent solutions can be put into effect before the bad guys can reassemble their plans. Most of the signs are pointing to a simple Stage 1 endometrial cancer – common, early, easy to cure. If it was small enough, they may have coincidentally removed it already! Tests will show if that happened.

Of course, this being me, a few weirdnesses have insisted on coming along for the ride. The main one is my cervix. At my age, it’s supposed to be thickening; especially with the endometrium doing that already. Instead, it’s abnormally thin. My gynocologist is determined to find out why, as it’s an unusual situation in a 58-year old woman. The most common cause for a thinning cervix is third trimester pregnancy … which  can be decisively ruled out. Another possibility is adenocarcinoma, but if it’s that, we’re already dealing with it.

But I will find out next week, when all the test results are in. And then we can plan Stage Two. Best case scenario, of course, is that everything that was causing trouble was removed when they refinished my uterus to the walls. Next best (IMHO) is removal of the damned uterus to get rid of any leftover budding cancers. Luckily, my gyno shares this opinion, understanding perfectly that I am done with that particular organ … Next next would be chemo, but I really don’t think it will come to that: we’ve caught this early, surgical options will not impact my reproductive choices, and a clean sweep is so very, very effective!

My gynecologist – who is also an oncologist and surgeon – is therefore a triple threat resource. She’s wonderful. I ordinarily have no gender prejudice in medical care providers, but sometimes a female gynecologist is better. She  usually has a better understanding of the female body, she can tell the difference between cold and warm examination instruments, and she has small hands. These are practical considerations.

My doctor is a wee, tiny lady – shorter than me! – who is also massively pregnant with what she says is just one enormous boy-child. She’s not due for some months, but looks huge already. So there is also some haste to get this done before she can’t reach the table anymore … I am pretty sure she has to stand on a box as it is. But haste is good! I like haste! And so does she, thank the Goddess.

So there we are, and there I am, and I am pleased to report that at the moment – all is looking well. I will share some of the funny bits with you all tomorrow – there are always funny bits when you go to hospital, believe me – but for now I am going to go rest with my feet up, as ordered. It actually seems to be making a difference  now. At last!

Oh, someone let the gentlemen know they can come out now, eh?

Kage Baker disliked broadcasting her health conditions. She wasn’t one to actually tell you what was going on when you asked her how she was. And as she often quoted Arthur Guitarman: “Don’t tell your friends about your indigestion. ‘How are you?’ is a greeting, not a question.”

That endeared her to a lot of people. It also shortened her life. If she’d complained earlier, or at least hinted something to me, I’d have dragged her to the doctor much sooner.

I’ve never been one to go on about my health much either; even in these latter years, when we all begin to more or less publicly decay. However, I learned my lesson from Kage. So,  tomorrow I am going into the hospital for a biopsy in order to ascertain just what variety of evil is lurking in my uterus.  I’m being pro-active and careful and all that Girl Guide stuff. But after what happened to Kage, this enrages me. It is nothing but Fate giving me the finger, snickering nastily in its sleeve. I refuse to be silent about it.

Mostly I just want a bit of leeway to jump and down and throw a tantrum. I’ve been doing that, and all my friends and relations have been very patient about it. I want to say thank you to all you, Dear Readers, who have put up with my carrying on and slacking off and everything else.

If you could spare a thought around 1 PM tomorrow afternoon, I’d appreciate it. And as I am a cranky old lady, a prayer for my nurses wouldn’t go amiss, either.

More news as it develops tomorrow!