Monday, August 18, 2014

WTF?? Bizarre Russian cartoon defies explanation




I should call this sort of thing Ick at Night: it's a tendency to find bizarre things very late, when I really should be in bed. This thing is just so inexplicable, like a Russian Wizard of Oz on acid, that I sat there slack-jawed trying to take it all in. Usually I wouldn't watch the whole thing, but this time I stayed with it, hoping I'd find some clue as to what it's about.

This is an ick day. A couple of weeks ago I got the dreaded "call back" on my routine mammogram. Something is wrong, or at least needs to be investigated further. This has never happened to me before. I've kept my mind off it, pretty much, but today it just pressed in on me. My mind ticktocks back and forth like a metronome: I have it; there's no way. I have it; there's no way. And so on. So tomorrow I have to "go back in" and they'll try to see, I guess, what is there, or not.

I stayed off the internet until last night. My husband has been begging me NOT to go on breast cancer sites. There's just so much misinformation around, and the subject has been shoved in our faces for years, to an extreme I think. I just saw a Facebook thingie, status card or whatever, that exhorted women to "set their tatas free" and have a braless day. "SUPPORT BREAST CANCER!" the thing screamed. Is that really what we want to do?

Do we want to support the disease, which is what the message looks like, or support the cure?

Since Robin Williams died such an awful death, I've seen FB pages and things like that popping up to "support depression" and such-like. One such page-creator claimed that most of the stigma from mental illness comes from the sufferers. I had a hard time mustering much support for his cause.

I could say, I'll go in tomorrow, get my ultrasound and be done with it. I've had ultrasounds before, and CT scans and all that (in fact, in the past 18 months I've had every test you can think of, trying to pin down the source of considerable pain), and they're a piece of cake. What isn't a piece of cake is the waiting. Generally speaking, if a test comes out OK and they don't find anything, they don't call you. You are left hanging, and wondering if maybe just maybe they FORGOT to call you (as has happened to me a couple of times) and you will end up untreated until it's too late.

These things happen. Hell, doctors have been known to take out the wrong kidney or amputate the wrong leg.

I will take it a step at a time, of course, tell myself as usual that I never get sick (which I don't - it always turns out to be "nothing"). I'll go home and try to forget about it all, not hear anything for weeks and weeks while the whole nightmare issue recedes into the background again.