My Mom Was Treated Better Than Me

I woke to another snowy day. There are soft floating puffs of snow drifting down from the light gray sky again today. It snowed all day yesterday too. It was a much brighter day yesterday though. Lots of sunshine yesterday. Today looks like it's going to be a Cleveland Gray day.

Some artists friends and I were talking one day and we decided it would be a great name for a water color. Just pick up a tube of Cleveland Gray and you know just what color of gray you are going to get. I really like that. There is already just a tad of snow on the ground so there will be just a tad more today I think. I don't think even with snowing all day that there will be much. I'm not at all ready for the winter yet. I better get ready though. It's here.

I have spent all morning trying to update and fix my blog the way that I want it. I have another blog that I have worked on for two years. I have not had a single problem with adding a slide show and photos to it, yet now when I want to do it here I have had every problem you can imagine. I simply can not make either one work. I have tried over and over and over to put a slide show here of my work and I keep getting someone eles work. Not just one someone else but other peoples, yet never mine! Even when I keep using my own flickr account I get other people. It's so frustrating I can't use the words here. I'm about to give up, but I never give up. The slide show there now is kind of pretty so I think I'm leaving it there for now. lol. I like it. But be asured, it's not mine and mine will be there one of these days!

Even the photo I wanted to post by itself of my hat will not post correctly! ug. But eventually it will all work out. I have a friend that worked on her blog for 6 months before she got it right and told people about it.

I have not told people about this blog yet. I have told one single friend about this blog. She is a very good friend and I wanted her feed back and some help maybe, but I'm not ready to tell anyone else yet. I wasn't sure what I would be saying here either. I don't want to censor myself knowing that friends would read this. If they did of course. lol. It's a lot of reading sometimes.


I had the surgery and staid at my sisters for two days. That frist day was so long I didn't know it was only one day. At the end of the day I was talking to my sister and I was so tired of the pain and everything and I wasn't sure if I should take more pain pills and we were talking and then suddenly I reallized it had only been yesterday that I had had the surgery. I was so shocked. It had felt like eons.

I think part of that was because I had already had surgery a week before and I hadn't had time to heal from that yet. I'm getting tired and I just want to move on with my life some how. That's not going to happen though and I know it. I'm starting to get frustrated and moody. The pain under my arm is bugging me a lot still and then my breast and there is still that knowledge that we don't know if the surgeon got all the cancer out even this time.

If she didn't get it then I have to have yet another surgery and have a mastectomy. I really don't want to do that. I really don't want to now, not only because of it being a mastectomy but just between us, I'm getting really tired of this surgery stuff. I'm tired of hurting. Now I have a bigger scar but it is healing much better than the other one. That's good at least. I got a tighter bra and bound myself in so that it couldn't pull apart this time. I just had to take it off today though.

I don't know how in the hell the Japanese women ever bound their feet. I have a book on that with photos of it. Oh my god. It's horrible. It's criminal. It really is. When I was living in S.F. and I rode the buses, there was a really, really old woman that would get on the bus. She wore cloth draped all over her body so that you really couldn't see any form of her except that there was a head, body and feet. She walked very slowly, head down with a cane and her feet were bound. I never thought I would ever in my life see a woman with her feet bound. I felt so bad for her, I wanted to help her every day I saw her and ask her questions, but I never did either. I think I would these days. I was young and chicken back then. She must have had an amazing story.


I think I have mentioned that my mother sort of freaked out when I told her that I had breast cancer.

She freaked out in several ways, but one of them and very typical of her, was that she decided that she must have breast cancer. That is my mother for you. Well, many, many months ago she had gotten a notice that she was due for a mammogram but she ignored it. I'm talking maybe 8 or 9 months ago. She decided she was too old for those things, being 87. Now she had changed her mind.

Of all things that damned mamogram came back that she had to have a diagnostic one. Can you believe that? We didn't. It was for a Saturday too. We didn't think they did them on Saturdays either. I had to check on it and sure enough it was on a Saturday and it was for a diagnostic. Man!

She was sure she had cancer. She was driving herself and us crazy thinking she had cancer for almost a month. I was kind of mean, but I told her I couldn't deal with her cancer until after I had my (first) surgery. The very day after my surgery she was talking about it and worrying herself and us crazy. It was really hard for me to think of us both having cancer at the same time to be very honest. It was really hard. Very.

So we went in yesterday, Saturday, and she came out fine. She does not have cancer, thank God. She was very happy, but she came out saying, "Now all I have to worry about is having a stroke or a heart attack." That's my mom.

My sister came too, so we all went to a really nice lunch to celebrate. While we were sitting there waiting for our food and my mom was just talking casually of course. I was still a little frustrated and mad that she only had to wait a few weeks for her diagnostic while I had had to wait two months. I couldn't understand it. I just don't understand it. I really don't. All that still upsets me to be very honest.

Then my mom says," Well they were trying to schedule me and I said I wanted it at the Strongsville office because it was so much easier. Then they said ok, but I had to promise to be sure to show up because they had to schedule me for an appointment within a month of my first mamogram."

WHAT? WHAT? Did I hear her right?

She was sitting right next to me. I turned to her and I asked, "What did they say to you?"

She said it again in little different way. I asked her again and I said, they told you that you had to be seen within a month? She said yeah. I asked her that three times!

My mind was spinning again. I was looking at my sister across from me and back at my mom
over and over again.


My sister just kept saying, "Get a lawyer."

Maybe I should. Maybe if I hadn't had to wait so long the cancer would not have broken out of the milk duct. That's a photo of one cancer cell there. Just one tiny one. Think how many of those were working in my body. Breaking out of the milk duct. How long did that take? What if I had not waited so long? Would it not have broken out?

Could that be true? How would I know? How come no one felt that way about me, that I had to be seen within a month? I had an actual lump right there that you could feel and no one felt that it was important. Not one person cared. How come? It was getting bigger and I was just left hanging in the wind. The Cleveland Clinic just didn't give a crap about me for some reason. How come? I called two other places to try and get an earlier appointment and I couldn't get one. I wasn't even told that there was a third place that I could call...a bigger place that did diagnostic mamos. I found out myself later when someone else...a patient mentioned it months later.

I'm really upset. I really am. I'm not sure what to do about. Do I just let it go or do I do something about this? Will I always wonder about this my whole life? Or do I do something about this? If I knew a lawyer I know I would ask questions right away. But I don't. I don't know if I want to bother with all that or not. But this really upsets me.

My own mother was treated better than me.

How come? The very same place. The very same people. And I was told to "let it go. Go forward and forget about it." The surgeon actually took me by my arms and held them down and told me to forget about this and move forward. "let it go.", she said holding my arms.

I'm really upset. I just might talk to someone at least.

Anyway I'm really glad that my mom does not have cancer.