Vixen Chronicles

When I woke up from my surgery, I was clear as a bell. I guess the anesthesiologist did not lie when he said he was the most important person in the room. I felt no pain, but enjoyed a deep annoyance of the tubes that were coming out of either side of my body. I had Jackson-Pratt drains attached to me, and they did quite a job of making my feel like a Cyborg or a person in the last installment of the Divergent movies, floating in the air with these tubes attached. Unlike in the movie, I didn't grab them and snatch them out. (After experiencing waking up with tubes, I must tell you that those characters in any movies that do that are REALLY bad ass.) In my head, I felt as if I had been tied to the bed by the Lilliputians, so I opted for as little movement as possible. That only lasted so long. They were pumping fluids into me like I was a dry swimming pool and the fluid had to go somewhere. Before long, I had to pee. I had to get up. In fact, I was commanded to do so. I will s...

My husband laid 4 quarters on the table yesterday, lined up in a straight line, and proposed a toast. The quarters measured almost 12cm across, the size of the cancer removed from my body. He toasted the blessing of clear margins and lymph nodes, and i almost cried.  I was almost brought to tears because he gets it.  I've had two weeks of people talking in hushed tones around me, alternated with me showing my new chest to anyone who asked. People who don't know me and my family well seem Perplexed about my joy.  I met with my doctor to review my pathology report and listened intently when she told me that they couldn't see anything like this on imaging. There was no way they could see this much disease. They also couldn't see the rare melanoma that was Inside one of my breasts. They couldn't see that one of the suckers was trying to kill me and the other had been laying in wait, slowly formulating a backup plan should it's partner fail.  I am a rational woman, s...

Funny things happen when you tell people you have cancer, especially breast cancer. They give you "the face". The face is interesting, because it's not like a pity face or even a sorry face, it's a face that says "I'm scared shitless. What happened? If this happened to you, it can happen to me." And it can, for no reason whatsoever. That's where the scared shitless part comes in. Then they want to know details, not because they really want to know, but because they need to do their own mental checklist and measure it against yours, to see if we've done the same things. Then you tell people what you've decided to do, and it really doesn't matter if you have no logical other choice (like me), or you have options, a look of disbelief will come over their faces and you get either "girl, I don't know if I could make that choice" which is of course, ridiculous, because, of course they could. If someone says "you do this thing...

     Momma: Gone is fiction, but yes,it is based on my life. It is fiction because I changed the names of everyone in the book, even combining characters around a single issue. I did that to make the book read more like fiction, to give the main character more of an arc.I also changed the way the large problem was resolved in the story to make it more "fiction"-like. Without giving it away, Sweetie, eventually finds a way to fix her problem (and her brother's problem) herself. She stops watching her life and acts in it, instead. That is not what happened. I will let you wonder about that.      I also combined some of my memories and some of my brothers to show a more complete picture of the settings where the story takes place. I do not remember the KKK rally, but my brother does. That is because when my grandmother told me to come inside because the Klan was having a rally, I did. My brother on the other hand, was curious, so he didn't. While I ...