In The Beginning...

 My first tattoo was a tramp stamp of my astrological sign, Cancer. It was practically law in New Jersey for the tramp stamp to happen and by god it did. My mother has yet to forgive me for that one, as the sign for Cancer is basically a 69. Exactly what you want on your only daughter’s back for all eternity. But I love that tattoo, like I love all my tattoos. They’re part of who I am, and frankly I fit the Cancer “profile” exactly.

I never thought that would be the set up to the dumbest joke I’ve ever been part of, but here we are.

Because as of August 12, 2022, Cancer is more than my astrological sign or a tattoo on my back.

Yep. It’s exactly what I’m so clumsily implying.

Specifically, I’ve got Squamous Cell Carcinoma in my mouth and the lymph nodes in my neck. What does that mean? It means that I was correct six months ago when I told my dentist there was a sore on my tongue that wouldn’t go away. He said it was nothing.

Two weeks later I saw an oral surgeon for an unrelated tooth extraction. I repeated that I had a weird sore on my tongue that wouldn’t go away. He didn’t even look at it, and said it was nothing.

Last week I went to Urgent Care and told them I had a weird sore on my tongue that wouldn’t go away, and that the pain was so bad that I had lost over 25 pounds in six months because it hurt too much to eat. She told me to go to an ENT as soon as humanly possible. The next day I went to an ENT, who immediately called the head of the Head and Neck Surgery department at the local hospital and sent me there.

One biopsy, a CT scan, and a day of waiting in many waiting rooms for many many hours and I got the news. 

Yep. Cancer. I had been right all along. And just like with the avascular necrosis in my hips, I had voiced my pain and concerns to doctors who did not listen to me. It happened AGAIN.

There’s a rage a person is capable of that doesn’t make itself known for a reason. It’s ugly, and messy, and comes from a place of feral energy that is completely out of one’s control. I saw that rage in myself at about the hour mark of waiting in the radiology department yesterday. I started rocking, and muttering, and finally burst into furious tears and stalked into the hallway, where I screamed and sobbed and paced and generally made a scene. I don’t care who saw me and if I harshed their Friday afternoon mellow. I truly don’t care. That beast needed to be let out before I imploded, and if that was in the radiology waiting room hallway, oh well. 

“So what now?”

Now we do surgery, and radiation. I’ll lose most of my tongue, and the necrotic lymph nodes. That’s the MINIMUM. The doctors are confident they’ll be able to reconstruct and that I’ll be able to speak again eventually. I’ll also have a BAD ASS scar on my neck, which I plan on spinning increasingly tall tales about. 

This will mark twice in my life I’ve had to fight to keep my voice. Twice in 15 years. Is that supposed to be funny to some minor chaos demon out there? I know I never shut up and that I’m loud and brash and unrelenting with the yapping, but was THIS really necessary? It seems overly dramatic, even for me, and that is saying a LOT. Also it’s redundant, and really poor writing, which I absolutely cannot abide. 

But for now, I will write. Fuck cancer. I’m here to stay.