In my last post, I said the doctor told me she’d dig out the carcinoma on my back, and on Friday, she did just that. She took a surprisingly (to me) large chunk out of my back. “We have to get a clean margin.” Yes, please. A clean margin sounds good to me. The stitched-up incision, which I just saw for the first time today, is about four inches long. It looks nice, though. As nice as a stitched-up incision can look, I suppose. She did a good, clean job.

You think doctors (or Nurse Practitioners, who you’re more likely to see these days) are always going to do a good, clean job, but that’s often not the case. Sometimes you take the bandages off their work, and they did the job, all right, but ‘good’ and ‘clean’ were not usually on their minds.

It must be a weird job, cutting into people. Eventually, it has to become routine, like attaching a bumper to a car 50 times a day. When you cut things off or out of people over and over, at some point, your mind has to wander, just a little bit, even though you’re cutting into a living human being. Anyway, they don’t really tend to clean up after themselves; it’s all kind of gross, really, and I don’t know why I’m talking about it.

I talk a lot on my other blog about how HRT is changing me, or has already changed me, and one of the things that’s changed pretty dramatically is my squeam factor. Or squeam tolerance – however the scientists would say it. I’m about a thousand times more squeamish than I used to be. I can lie there on the table in a doctor’s office while they cut into me and stitch me up, and my mind is just saying, Okay, we’re doing this thing, and there’s nothing to do but do it, it’ll all be over soon, lah dee dah dee dah.

But sitting here now, if I think about what she did, or even the stitches, my legs just get wobbly. Ha ha. It’s like doing the things themselves is just whatever, but when I think about them, I get squinky. After she cut the slice out of me she said, “Do you want to see it?” and I kind of did but kind of didn’t, but I must have said ‘yes,’ because she dangled it in the preiphery of my vision and I was like, “Wow,” because seeing something like that tends to make you go wow. But thinking about it now as I type this, I’m wobbly again. Because a big chunk of your diseased skin dangling a few inches from your face is fucking gross! I’m queasy just typing about it. Ha ha. Yet here I am, typing about it still.

I watched a movie recently, Skywalkers: A Love Story, about this young couple who climb to the top of the world’s tallest buildings to make YouTube videos, and they’re always in places they’re not supposed to be, standing on things that don’t look big enough or strong enough to stand on. And of course, the videos always include pictures of their feet and how far they are dangling out above the hard ground below. Those scenes, where you can see their precarious stances and the ground below – well, my stomach just falls to my feet. Then my legs get wobbly as a bonus.

Perhaps all reasonable responses, but they’re new responses for me. In the past, those scenes wouldn’t have affected me. Or if I thought about the big hole in my back, it wouldn’t be a problem; I would just find it interesting. But now my body or my soul or my spirit or my essence or whatever I am just says, Nah, we’re not going to let those things pass by without comment.

All of which means? What? Nothing, I guess. You’re different now, we get it, Hannah. Yawn. Anyway, I go back to get the top stitches out in a couple of weeks (there are also internal stitches that will dissolve on their own), then they’ll look me over thoroughly for other spots that could be trouble. I don’t know if there are any, but I don’t think there are. There are no spots back there that look like the recently removed piece. But it’s my back, you know? None of us truly knows what goes on on our backs. We have to rely on our intimate partners or health care professionals to fill us in. And who knows if they’re telling us the truth?! I mean, I trust Ayin, but not the others.

If this is the end of my cancer story, such as it is, good. I’ll count myself as profoundly lucky and try to forget about it. Like I said last time, I know how to do that. How to forget. But I know that the older I get, the more these things will happen. Doctors telling me they have to cut off this or that. It’s just part of the deal, right? The long life deal. A hundred years ago, Americans died at 53 or 54 years old. Now we might live 20 years longer, but those last 20 years – maybe they’re kind of a drag. Ha. Have we made the right deal?

But I feel good. I certainly don’t ever feel my age, even when things like this happen. What it comes down to in the end, I suppose, is doing what we have to do. Surviving. Doing our best with what we’ve got. If we can do that – I mean, what more could you ask for? Every year past 53 or 54 is a good year.

WRITTEN BY A HUMAN