Day 1 – 40DOW – viewpoints on vaccines

This morning was a struggle. 

I am trying my damnedest to get this to happen:

If you can RSVP for a Phoenix event click here.

I struggle because I want it to be successful 

The team I am working with has been UNBELIEVABLY supportive… but it is so hard to get buy in from other folks.

I struggle with that.

But it, my sense of struggling, may have been that I had an unscheduled visit to my oncologist today. 

Bleeding.

Something I am not supposed to be doing at this point.

So I went in and saw my doctors nurse practitioner. Who performed a biopsy. 

I have had biopsies before, in that area…  it hurt like a motherf*&%#r. 

Even though she told me that it was my job to assume it was due to scar tissue, she also told me it was her job to rule out recurrence. She reassured me that it looked like granulation (BTW – don’t Google it).

What makes this situation even crazier is that the woman who did my biopsy is also a woman who will be on the panel for the movie screening.

Following up on the fact that I am helping to host a conversation about a preventable cancer
and that one of the panelists will have seen my girly-bits, I just got word who a second panelist will be and…. guess what??????

She has seen my girly bits too.

She was there when my son was born, as in the room… standing right between my husband and my mother.

So, I am trying to find the beauty of all of this. So, “this” being a weird place in my life (waiting for biopsy results) the week before I am helping host an event. The event which happens to be about something that most likely got me into the biopsy situation in the first place.

Anyway, the big shift for me has been to try and be kinder, gentler, more gracious… and yet stay my own person. Hard to do when you are in pain.

I lay there waiting for the biopsy, pretending to be under a fancy kitchen heat lamp

The biopsy was really painful, it still hurts as I type this some 12 hours later.

I still have so much to be grateful for, But it is kind of nerve wracking to be in my position, again… you know, waiting for results. Not the most fun place to be.

Anyway, after my ridiculously painful “procedure” I yelled out “fuck, that hurts” and immediately apologized and lay on the exam table, in tears, for a while. The nurse practitioner who took the biopsy was so very kind and seemed very distressed by my reaction.

I was pretty shocked by it too. It was, however, really painful. I have had biopsies of my girly bits before, without any numbing agent, and it was nothing like this.

At one point, during the second “grab” for tissue I screamed out “oh fuck that hurts”, and then immediately apologized. I am generally not one to curse much… I was embarrassed.

I lay on that exam table, tears streaming down my face, trying to get back to a normal breathing, staring at the bright light above me wishing there was something like a rainbow pooping unicorn to look at…

The nurse practitioner held my hand, asked me how I was feeling, helped me get some of my ibuprofen and drink it down. She seemed very concerned. All very kind considering that she had just learned she would be speaking at the HPV movie thing and that I was involved.

After my breathing got back to normal and the tears stopped falling down my face, she told me to lay there as long as I needed. She, and the other NP with her, quietly left the room. I lay on that exam table, and the tears came back.

It was a pity party I suppose. I lay there crying and trying to remember to be thankful that this was an experience in which I had had tremendous luck. No chemo. No radiation. a tumor the size of a grain of salt.

I lay there looking at the light above me. Trying to make it something more than just a light, making a distraction from the pain in my internal surgical site and the pain in my heart.

My heart did hurt, I had a vaccine preventable disease.

Let me say that again, I was diagnosed with a vaccine preventable disease.

One that would have prevented everything, a sub-total hysterectomy, worry, agony… and today’s darn biopsy.

It is a vaccine preventable disease.

Granted, I was born before this miracle vaccine was developed. But it is a vaccine preventable disease.

And as I ran through a list of people I do not particularly care for, not one of them and not one of their children were eligible for my wanting them to suffer what I had suffered through, I AM suffering through.

Vaccinate your children. In some cases yourself. Your boys. Your girls. This alternative is not fun. not fun at all. The HPV vaccine is good for kids aged 9 to adults aged 26.

It is a vaccine preventable disease.

..