strike that

introduction

It’s been bugging me lately, how my blog has become a silly recounting of day-to-day shit. My past blogs about the Balkans and Burning Man and marathon training all seemed more interesting or informative or something, and this one is basically just random musings about boys and bikes and I don’t mind, it's fun to write, and I like reading this kind of thing in my friends’ blogs. All the same, sometimes when I post yet another entry about my really pretty ride to work I gag a little on the inside. Too bad I don’t have anything of consequence to say, I think. Be careful what you wish for, right?

I had a pretty crappy day today, and I’m going to tell you why. And it’s going to make some of you uncomfortable and I’m sorry to switch gears like this, to get maybe a little too personal and a little less light, but this is what I do to feel better, and anyway maybe it will be useful to someone. Why does it feel so important to be useful? Don’t know. I’ll work on that some other time.

Anyway I had my annual a couple weeks ago. Do most guys know anything about annuals, besides that they somehow involve stirrups? In case not, this is how it goes: once a year you go to the ob-gyn, and you sit on a table in a little blue sheet and talk about breast exams and birth control, and then you lie down and the doctor looks around and takes a very tiny sample from your cervix, and the whole thing lasts hardly any time at all and is not actually all that uncomfortable. Then a year goes by and you do it again.

(Are you ready to go back to reading about bikes?)

Last year I got a call a few weeks later, which doesn’t usually happen, and the doctor told me that the cells on my cervix were looking a bit abnormal, and I should basically have a retest in six months. You wait because once in a while cells just go a bit wonky, and then they clear themselves right up. It’s happened to several of my friends, and it didn’t really faze me. I went back in December and things were fine.

So a couple weeks ago it was time again, and I had just sprained my ankle so Nikki drove me over to Planned Parenthood. We giggled in the waiting room and talked about sex. Everyone was nice the way that everyone at Planned Parenthood is always nice, and as I was filling out my paperwork afterwards, the Doctor said We’ll call if anything is abnormal – no news is good news. Today I got some news.

My cell rang in the middle of the afternoon, and the number said Restricted, and it was a woman telling me in an even tone that I have High Grade Squamous Intraepithelial Lesions. Also known as H-SIL. This means my cells are more than a little abnormal. It means that I have to go back for a procedure called a colposcopy, in which the doctor looks at things with a microscope and takes a few more significant samples. It means, according to one website, that there is a seventy five percent chance that those samples will show these sort of pre-cancerous cells, and I will then have to go back for another procedure in which these cells are removed. And then I will have to go back a few times after that, to make sure they haven't returned.

I was a little thrown and I started to cry a little in the conference room where I was taking the call, and I got my shit together enough to make an appointment for the next part. The woman said, We recommend you have this procedure done within sixty days. It costs three hundred dollars. Do you want to make an appointment now, or is this something you will need to save up for?

And that moment, right there, was the saddest moment of all. Because Planned Parenthood is the kindest healthcare in America that I’ve come across, this is our best case scenario, and can you imagine? Can you imagine hearing that little precancerous cells might be multiplying in your body, and having to say, I can’t make an appointment right now. I’m going to have to save up some money first.

It was enough, though, to make me feel lucky, which is not exactly what I was feeling just then. Because I have three hundred dollars on hand, and because I have a job that I can easily leave for the afternoon, and because I have a friend who will drive me to the clinic, even the one that’s in a distant suburb because they had an appointment available one week sooner. Which is still three weeks away, which is kind of unbearable. I would like to know, for sure, right now, and I would like to deal with it, right now, in whatever way it needs dealing with. But for these things I feel lucky.

In the mean time I’m just going to hang out for three weeks, I guess, and nothing is really different. It feels different, though. It’s kind of scary.

That’s why I wanted to write about it here. I apologize to those of you who swing by during the work day for a laugh, and who just ended up reading about my cervix. I get that it’s not something people really talk about. But so many of my friends are going through Big Things right now, trying to get pregnant or trying to fix something with a spouse or trying to deal with a medical issue, and many of us try to do these things all on our own. But not talking about them makes them scarier. And it’s lonely.

Thirty is an age where things are sometimes hard. Big Things that most of us didn’t have to deal with in our twenties. And I think it’s catching lots of us off guard, and it feels Wrong. This isn’t the way life goes, we think, remembering our twenties. It feels like maybe we are messing up, or getting stuck with unfair burdens. But I’m pretty sure that this is how it goes from here on out, and I don’t mean that in some negative way. I just mean, this is the Life part. You don’t have to talk about the bad bits but they’re not going away, and personally I prefer to live them with company.

So my cervix will be a new character on this blog, though hopefully not for long. Thanks for your good thoughts.

posted by tortaluga @ 10:15 PM