The nitty and the gritty

OK, so all of this setting up of the blog was a lot easier than expected, now it's time to write. And defining what I want to write about is the hard part. So here are the basics- I'm a 52 year old woman living in LA, I'm overweight, have been all my life but always healthy. Life was plugging right along, sometimes happily, sometimes begrudgingly, but steadily one foot in front of the other. Until one day I went to the emergency room out of sheer frustration with the nothingness I knew I would get from a regular doctor visit, I had a nagging pain in my right lower abdomen, appendicitis? probably not... probably something as unglamorous and humiliating as diverticulitis (anybody old enough to remember the SNL skit?). So I sat there in the exam room, doing everything that was asked of me (drink 4 oz of this contrast liquid every 15 minutes for one hour, etc.), had my scan, read my book, and waited for the very young doctor to come back and tell me what to do to relieve the pain (I won't make the obligatory Doogie Howser wisecracks), but all of a sudden he seemed a little jittery: "when was the last time you had a pelvic ultrasound?" huh? how often do people have pelvic ultrasounds? he made it sound like something as routinely done as a dental check-up... "because the radiology report says they see masses consistent with ovarian cancer and metastases..." yeah, that's about where time stopped. It's been pretty much a blur since then, and that was 6 months and 9 days ago...

It's not my intention to make this blog about my story, I can't think of anything more boring for my hypothetical readers out there. It is my intention, though, to talk about the isolation that is cancer. And to do my damnedest to topple that.