TheBanyanTree: Luck

[Janice Money]

Yesterday, for the first time since 1995, I had a bath.  I'd been painting a
corridor where coolness from the air conditioner doesn't reach so, being
both sweaty and paint splattered, I really needed to wash.

 

Ordinarily, I would have jumped in the shower but I had a couple of sticking
plasters covering wounds on some very tender skin and thought that in a
bath, perhaps, if I was very careful, I could keep the plasters dry and not
have to change them.  The strategy didn't work.  At first application of the
washer to my arm pit water streamed down and soaked the first of the
plasters which, unfortunately, was half underneath the second.  Both would
have to come off.

 

Having dried myself I did, with great delicacy and patience and without
hurting myself too much, peel away the plasters and, in front of the big
mirror and bright light of the family bathroom, got my first good look at
the surface of what was done last Tuesday.  The punch biopsy site, though
exquisitely tender, is too small to see.  The other wound is about 5cm long
with the edges held together by a sub-cuticular stitch.  There are no signs
of infection.  

 

How far away is August 2nd?  Two weeks.  My sister will be 64 that day.  I
will find out if I have been lucky again, or not.

 

And I have been lucky.  There's the chronic relapsing neuritis which, unlike
MS, is purely sensory so no wheel chair or ventilator for me.  There was the
ovarian tumour that was discovered incidentally and turned out to be benign.
There were the abdominal adhesions that were divided and,
uncharacteristically for adhesions, stayed divided.  And now, because of a
skin symptom that could be eczema, I had a mammogram which showed
calcifications which indicated a form of breast cancer that is usually not
invasive.  Maybe I'll be lucky again. But if not, that's not so bad either.
At least it will give me something very firm to lean on when I tell my boss,
again, that he has to find a replacement for me by the end of September at
the latest, and when he, again, tries to persuade me to stay.

 

Janice