Elective Surgery

“Elective surgery.” It’s a term that makes people think of botox injections and liposuction. Maybe facelifts. Breast implants, too. Well, purely cosmetic breast implants; never the implants given to people who’ve endured cancer and mastectomy. “Elective surgery” is too pejorative a term to describe the procedures undergone by those who’ve suffered. It seems suffering is a requirement for the surgeries to avoid having a negative social stigma. That same suffering determines the insurance companies’ willingness to pay for the procedures, too. When you realize they’re the ones who determine who’s suffered, then you can see there’s a problem.

My husband’s name is Brian. From the moment he was capable of self-reflection, he knew he was a man. He had to keep this knowledge to himself. It took 20 torturous years before he could safely declare himself to be the person he knew he was. When we met in 2010, Brian was four years into hormone therapy. I fell in love with him during our first conversation. He was extremely open about his transition, but I worried he felt he needed to explain himself to me, which wasn’t the case. I got the impression he’d been hurt in the past. Continue reading “Elective Surgery”

Teeny Tiny

When I was little, Mom used to hold me and say stuff like, “oh Katie, you fit so perfectly on my lap! You’re so teeny tiny!” I loved it. She’d keep me warm and hug me and I felt so great. I’d always go to Mom if I felt sad or scared and she’d just scoop me up, saying “what’s wrong, my teeny-tiny girl?” and I’d tell her what was making me upset and she’d always always always make it all better.

The most vivid memory I have was the day I turned 10. It wasn’t of my party, which I vaguely remember being great, it wasn’t the presents, some of which I still have, but it was when Mom had me in her lap that night and had tears in her eyes and said to Dad, “Katie’s getting to be a big girl, huh?” I don’t remember what my dad said, but there was no denying it: I wasn’t her teeny-tiny girl anymore.

At 10 years old, I was about 4’10”, maybe 100 pounds. I was growing fast. Both my parents are tall. I remember being scared. The scale kept going up, and by the time I was 11 I was 5’2”, 120 pounds and getting boobs. At that point, when I was sad, mom would hug me tight and say the right things, but it all felt different. She never cradled me. She never had me in her lap. I felt cold and lonely even though I was never really cold or lonely. I just wanted to be closer to her like I was when I was little.

So I decided to get little again.

Mom started to notice when I pushed around my food on the plate, trying to pile it up on one side to make it look like I ate more than I really did. “You’re a growing girl,” she said, kindly but firmly. “You need to eat.” I couldn’t leave the table until I was done.

That night after dinner, I remember lying on my back on the bed, staring at the ceiling and feeling the food in my stomach. Mom’s words “you’re a growing girl” echoed in my mind and I felt so sick that I ran into the bathroom and threw up. I was really glad I had my own bathroom so they couldn’t hear me puking. After I was done, I felt so much better. Lighter and smaller, even.

Mom was so happy to see me eating normally again. She’d worried aloud that I might be getting the flu, so seeing me chowing down like my old self pushed those worries right out of her head. What she didn’t see was how I went to bed afterward, and while the bathwater ran, I was throwing it all up. I did this every day for years.

One of the sad truths about throwing up your meals is you don’t lose all that much weight. I actually gained more. Sure, I’d get rid of what I’d eaten, but probably twice a week I’d be lying in bed, wide awake, fingering my collar bones, hip bones, and ribs, all while obsessing over food. Something inside me would snap, and I’d run to the fridge or the cabinets and eat until I felt like I was bursting. Then, exhausted, I’d go back upstairs and pass out on my bed. Calorie-for-calorie, after those twice-weekly binges I was eating more than I would’ve if I’d been healthy. Except I really, really wasn’t healthy. And nobody knew.

All this built up to the last few months after I graduated high school. I was 5’11, 175 pounds. 17 years old. There was absolutely nothing I hated more than my body. I was constantly lonely and wanted to try to take my mind off it all. I decided to get a job. When I told Mom I found a position at a place that recycles old medical gear, she was proud of me for taking the initiative. It was bittersweet; I knew she was starting to see me as an adult. Not her teeny-tiny girl. I felt like a complete and utter failure.

The recycling place where I worked dismantled big machines that hospitals used and sold the parts. I was the receptionist. I took phone calls and helped set up deliveries. The people I worked with were really nice, and after a few weeks they gave me a key so I could get there early and have coffee ready and work orders printed out. One night, after everyone left, I went back there and let myself in.

To this day, I still feel bad about breaking their trust.

A couple days earlier, my coworkers were bringing in an old machine. They were all wearing heavy gloves and had on breathing gear like scuba divers. When they were done, I asked what it was. Apparently it was something hospitals use to give radiation therapy to cancer patients. I didn’t know too much about that, so when I got home I went on Wikipedia and did a lot of research — and then I got my idea.

When I let myself in that night, the place was empty. I made a beeline for where they had that radiation therapy machine and I investigated it. Most of it was completely dismantled. What I was looking for was conveniently labeled and brightly marked in a massive lead container. It took me a while to get the cover off. Lead’s so heavy! But after I did, I saw a round metal part that looked like a wheel. I picked it up, rotated the mechanism, and it opened a little window in the front. A faint blue light was inside. I held it up to my eye and looked in. Nothing but that light. I figured it was probably what I was looking for.

I brought the object home with me and locked the door of my bedroom. I worked to pry the thing open with a screwdriver, but it seemed locked from the inside. Eventually I got frustrated and I turned the wheel again to open the window and pushed my screwdriver into the blue stuff and tried scooping it out. It turned out to be pretty soft. A lot of it broke as I poked it with the screwdriver, and when I turned the wheel upside down, the pieces tumbled out onto my desk. Now I could see how pretty it was. It was like chunks of glowing blue clay and sand. I gathered it up as best I could and put it away, save for the little bit I was going to use tonight.

One of the things I’d read about radiation therapy was that it made the poor people with cancer really skinny. They just totally lost their appetites. I couldn’t believe it was true. I’d always had such a big appetite. I kept telling myself I needed to be really careful when I took this stuff because if I get too much of the radiation I could get cancer myself. I took a pinch of the blue clay, put it in my mouth, and swallowed it with a gulp of water. It felt warm going down even though the water was cold. Since I’d gotten home from the recycling place I’d been pretty warm, in fact. Cozy. Like a little puppy under a blanket.

That night I woke up sweating worse than I’d ever sweated in my life. The bed was totally soaked. Gross. Water weight wasn’t really what I wanted to lose, but it was better than nothing. I took a shower and changed the sheets and went back to bed. My stomach ached a little.

When I woke up the next morning, my stomach hurt and I threw up a couple times. But, I wasn’t even remotely hungry. That alone made the pain in my tummy pretty much go away. I didn’t need to eat! Mom asked if I was bringing leftovers to work from last night’s dinner and I lied and said we were going to get a pizza. I hate lying to Mom, but I didn’t want her to worry. There was no need to tell her I wasn’t hungry.

At work, they’d finished disassembling the machine and started sending it out to wherever they send those things. I’d been really careful to put the canister back exactly as I left it. No one checked to see if the little wheel was still there.

The next few days were uneventful, aside from my stomach ache getting worse and having to puke once or twice. I’d barely eaten anything since I started taking the radiation medicine. Whenever I got woozy from lack of food, I ate an apple or a fat-free yogurt and I was fine. I was still sweating a lot. When I got on the scale, it said 168.

After a week of eating nearly nothing and faithfully taking my radiation medicine nightly, my stomach ache got really, really bad. I’d stopped throwing up, but this time it felt like I needed to go to the bathroom. I went, and it was awful. There was so much – I was shocked. I’d apparently eaten and kept down way more than I thought. I got on the scale after, though, and that helped me feel a lot better. 161.

Over the next couple days, one or two people told me how pretty I looked. They asked me if I lost weight and I said yeah, maybe a few pounds. I beamed. Over my whole adolescence I’d done nothing but get bigger. Now, finally, I was shrinking and on the way back to teeny tiny. I didn’t feel too great, though. My tummy was constantly having me run to the bathroom and it still hurt afterwards. I figured I was getting rid of all the extra fat. 158.

I was in the shower about 10 days after I started taking the medicine and I was horrified to see some of my hair coming out. That was bad. Really, really, really bad. I stopped washing it immediately and let just the water rinse away the remainder of the shampoo. I got out of the shower and took like an hour blow drying my hair because I was too scared to use a towel that might pull more out. When the mirror was unfogged and my hair was dry, I checked to see how noticeable it was. There was a good-sized patch of bare, red scalp about 2” wide above my left ear. I pushed the hair around it to cover the patch. Some more fell out. It had to be a nutritional deficiency from all the meals I’d been missing. I put on my Titans hat and got dressed. When I brushed my teeth I noticed a little blood in the sink. I made a note to get some multivitamins after work.

I didn’t shower the next day because when I woke up that morning, there was more hair on my pillow. My scalp was getting pretty visible. It looked prickly and raw but it didn’t hurt. Since I was off work, I stayed at home and looked online for all the nutritional deficiencies that might cause my hair to fall out and my gums to bleed. Most of the ones were covered by my multivitamin, so I tripled the amount I took just to be on the safe side.

I had to go to the bathroom five times during the 15 hours I was awake. By the last time, I was incredibly light-headed and so thirsty. I weighed myself before I started downing water and my radiation medicine. 150. The medicine helped me lose 25 pounds in under two weeks.

Mom hugged me the next morning before I went to work. She ran her hands up and down my back and she made a remark about how skinny I’d gotten. Then, she said it: “remember when I used to call you my teeny-tiny girl? I miss those days but I love you just as much as a grown up.” She let me go. Pain, nausea, and despair washed over me. Without warning, my lightheadedness came back with a vengeance and I stumbled and fell on the kitchen floor. My hat fell off. With my head spinning, I vaguely remember Mom gasping, “Katie what happened to your hair?!” before I violently threw up on the floor and myself. It was all blood. I passed out to the sound of Mom screaming.

I don’t know how much time went by at the hospital. I wasn’t completely unconscious, but all I remember up until recently were images of doctors in the same scuba gear as the guys at work, and they were saying meaningless words like “cesium” and “sloughed” and “gray” that didn’t mean the color.

Today, I can’t move or talk and I’m writing this using a cool keyboard they gave me that can pick out letters using the movements of my remaining eye. I’ll be dead soon. I’m not too fun to look at anymore. My hair’s gone. And my jaw. And my skin. The nice doctors are giving me medication that helps me manage the pain and keep me alert. They asked if they could do tests and experiments on me to help understand what ingestion of the radiation medicine does to the human body. Apparently there was a Japanese man a few years ago named Hiroshi who got a similar level of exposure and the same stuff happened to him. They said it would help other people in the future if they could compare our two cases. Of course I let them.

I can’t eat food anymore. My esophagus got cooked away. Same with my stomach. The doctors are keeping me hydrated with a tube in my butt. I don’t really like to think about it. I guess all the excitement I get as I wait here is when they weigh me every six hours to see if I’m able to retain the fluids they give me, or if it all seeps out into the sheets. They hoist me onto a pad and a little machine voice says a number. This morning it said 72. The next time it was 66.

Mom and Dad have to wear those scuba suits when they come visit. Mom’s always crying because she’s not allowed to touch me. Dad just stares. Right before I started writing this, Mom bent down and started whispering to me some of the stuff I remember her saying when I was small. I closed my eye and imagined being warm and safe on her lap, just like a hibernating little bear. “I love you, my teeny-tiny girl,” she sobbed. I would smile if I still had a mouth.

The Wisdom of Moms

Baby was receiving his scheduled vaccine injection in his right thigh muscle ie intramuscular injection

January 3, 2016

My son will NOT – I repeat: WILL NOT be getting any more vaccines. I was ignorant about how bad they were for the first four years and I never told the doctors to leave him alone. Well, thank God he got lucky and seems fine, despite that. I got my eyes open now.  Are vaccines safe? Hell no. Sandra Barker’s child got poked with all those needles and shot through with nasty chemicals and guess what? Her poor little Eva ended up half retarded. A damn shame for Sandra and her little girl. Sorry big pharma, you can’t have my Thomas. No way in hell. And I’m going to tell the doctor that at his checkup tomorrow.

January 4, 2016

Doctors just make me sick. Funny, huh? Like it’s the opposite of what they say they’re gonna do. Thomas’ doctor is so rude and pushy. He has the nerve to think he knows what’s better for my son than I do. Me. His mother. The strong woman who gave birth to him. You know, because he went to some fancy college in New York and got a piece of paper saying he can look at sick children.

By the way, his name is Dr. Rav Mati and his practice is in Alfonse Creek, West Virginia. Don’t even think about going to him with your own boy or girl. All he’ll do is try to push vaccines on them and gets fresh when you tell him to prove the shots won’t make the kids sick. The man even said there’s a shot for chickenpox now. Chickenpox! Those pharma fat cats will take every dollar you’ve got. I guess they don’t think us parents were taught by our own moms about how to deal with chickenpox. A child has to catch it if they want to get strong! I think Earl has a point when he said those companies are trying to make kids grow up weak so they’ll vote liberal. There’s no other explanation I can think of. I married a smart man.


January 7th, 2016

As luck would have it, Sandra Barker’s poor retarded girl got chickenpox at the special daycare she has to go to. When Sandra called me up, I was relieved. After dealing with that stupid Dr. Mati the other day, I’d started to worry Thomas wouldn’t get to be around other kids who had it if their parents had been duped into getting them vaccinated. The last thing I wanted was for Thomas to be weak. God forbid he ended up that way and Earl found out he was a homosexual. I’m not even going to think about that. No need to do that to myself.

Anyway, Sandra and I set up a playdate for Thomas and Sandra’s little Eva. We’ll go over tomorrow at lunchtime so I can be back to cook dinner for Earl in the afternoon.

January 8th, 2016

Thomas seemed to have fun with little Eva. It breaks my heart to see that little girl, though. She just doesn’t know what’s going on half the time. Thomas was a good boy, though, and was very gentle and shared his toys. Sandra suggested we let them share a spoon and bowl when they ate their lunch so he’d get a better chance of catching her chickenpox. So they shared their chicken soup and Sandra and I talked for a while. Thomas and I went home around 3:30. Perfect timing to get dinner started.

January 11th, 2016

Earl was grumpy this morning when he left for his business trip. He was hollering and complaining about one thing or another, but then he left and things were quiet again. I bet his job is more stressful than I know. Hell, this trip will keep him away from home for three weeks. I wish I told him I was sorry before he went, though. I always feel bad when I feel like I put him in one of his moods.

On a good note, Thomas started to get a fever and he said he was itchy. When I gave him his bath at night, I saw the little dots of chickenpox starting to show up. I called up Sandra to thank her and asked how Eva was doing. Sandra said Eva had it bad but no worse than her cousin Duane did a couple years ago. I got a little sad that Thomas would be so uncomfortable soon, but it was worth it in the long run. He’d be good and strong.

January 12th, 2016

It’s amazing how fast chickenpox shows up! Thomas went to bed with little pinprick dots and woke up with big blotches the size of pepperoni slices. He’s scratching them like crazy and I keep slapping his hands so he won’t cut himself with his fingernails. I can’t stop thinking about all the poor kids whose parents were so ignorant about how the world works that they listened to Dr. Mati and all the other doctors like him. All the doctors lining their pockets with big pharma money so they can donate it to the democrats and whoever else hates families. Well, they’ll see. It’s families like ours who get strong and survive.

January 13th, 2016

Thomas started getting blisters on his palms. I don’t think they’re from chickenpox, but the nice ladies on the homeschool forum I started visiting last year said it was probably just from his fever. Once his fever goes down, they’ll go away. And if they got any worse, it would just have to run its course. He’s young and he’ll heal up good enough.

As mean as this sounds, I’m a little glad the blisters seem to hurt because it stops Thomas from scratching. Didn’t stop him from complaining, though! Not one bit. But it’s okay. I can take it! This is mom territory – we live to deal with kids complaining.

January 14th, 2016

Thomas’ is COVERED with chickenpox. Even when I part his hair, I see them on his scalp. Some of the older ones started to get big whiteheads on them. The one on the tip of his nose looks so uncomfortable, the poor kid. I remember having pimples when I was a teenager. These pox are like five times bigger. Maybe later on tonight I’ll squeeze a few of them to help take some of the pressure off.

January 15th, 2016

In the bath last night, I popped about 20 of Thomas’ riper chickenpox. I squeezed and squeezed and that gunk just plopped down into the water. I had to mash it up with a wire brush before it would all get down the drain. Nasty nasty nasty! But still, it’s natural. So much more natural than whatever the doctor would’ve pumped into him.

The pox I squeezed dry just look like holes now. They’re pretty swollen but he said they don’t itch anymore. The holes are about as wide as a dime. I put Neosporin on them just so they wouldn’t get infected and I’m changing his bedsheets every night. I might be being a little overprotective, but hey, I’m a mom. It’s what moms do. Well, the good ones at least.

January 16th, 2016

I squeezed out more and more of those chickenpox last night. The ones I’d squeezed the night before didn’t fill up again, at least. Poor Thomas looks so ragged. It’s like he’s covered in little, swollen volcanos. At least this is running its course and it’ll be over in another few days.

I’m a tiny bit worried about the fever blisters on his hands and feet. My camera in my phone’s still busted, but I went online and found a picture that’s pretty similar. Obviously this person’s hand is much bigger than Thomas’, but the look is the same. True to what the homeschool ladies said, he was still running a fever. 102 on the nose. Once that goes down, his hands will heal up and he’ll be good as new.

January 17th, 2016

Thomas woke me up this morning! He hasn’t done that since he would cry and yell when he was a tiny baby. But he was standing next to my bed and saying that his body hurts. Well, I took one look at him and saw why. The poor boy’s chickenpox looked worse than any chickenpox I’d ever seen. I’ll admit it – I got pretty scared. His entire body – all his skin – was just filled up with holes. It looked like the remaining whiteheads had popped when he was asleep because he was all smeared with it.

I brought him into the bath and rinsed him off. The water seemed to help him feel a little better, so I let him soak in the tub while I sat next to him in a chair with my laptop. I asked online if chickenpox were supposed to get so bad. One of the homeschool ladies asked if he’d been vaccinated. I was super embarrassed when I told her he got all his shots up until this year because I didn’t know any better. I felt awful admitting that to these smart people. But they were so kind and understanding. Then I was told what I’d assumed but didn’t want to take for granted: his case of chickenpox is worse because of the vaccines he got as a baby. Something about mercury poisoning and his body using the chickenpox as an opportunity to cleanse the toxins from his body.

While Thomas splashed around and I talked to the ladies online, I felt a lot better. By this time next week, he’d be healing up like nothing had happened.

January 18th, 2016

Thomas looked just as bad this morning. He asked right away if he could take a bath, so we did what we did yesterday. I paid more attention to his skin this time. I don’t know exactly how to describe him. Maybe the inside of a wasp nest? He’s just so covered with holes that I can barely make out any skin that isn’t part of a crater, especially now that he’s in the water and his skin is swelling.

I’m just so mad at all the doctors and corporations who put those chemicals into Thomas when he was a baby. I’m mad at myself for listening to them. Like I was just following orders like some damn Nazi. Because that’s what those big pharma liberals are, you know. There’s a reason “socialist” is in “national socialist.” Of course you know. And this country’s going down the tubes because of it. And Thomas is suffering in that bathtub for the same damn reason.

January 19th, 2016

I’m about to go ask the ladies on the homeschool forum for some help because I just went to wake Thomas and all his holes are leaking. There’s yellow stuff coming out of them and a tiny black hard thing is poking out of each one. It’s like a pebble or a seed or something godawful. When he opened his eyes, I could see more holes starting to form in the corners where his tears come out. He said he could see me but I looked like I was underwater.

I carried him to the bathroom so he could do his business, and when he sat down on the toilet, some holes in his thighs split and the stuff inside, the yellow gunk and the hard pebble piece, bulged out. He looked at me like he was scared and started to pick at it. His finger slid all the way inside.

There’s no way I’m going to the doctor who’ll just inject him with more stuff to make this even worse, but I’m concerned his chickenpox might be getting infected. I guess it’s time to go ask online. The ladies from the homeschool forum have been so helpful already. It’s great to be able to rely on the wisdom of moms.

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I was kidnapped by my girlfriend and what she did to me was beyond comprehension.

About ten years ago, I dated a masseuse named Valerie. Well, masseuse in training. She was passionate and enthusiastic and she practiced as frequently as she could. That meant I got a ton of free massages. Obviously, since we were a couple, those massages would escalate and turn into that usual thing couples do, but it was only after she felt she’d gotten in a good practice session.

After one of our, ahem, “sessions,” Val looked a little confused but also relieved. I asked her what was up. She told me the sores she had on the inside of her mouth didn’t hurt anymore. We’d talked about those things before. She said they weren’t contagious, thankfully, but she’d had to endure them for most of her life and they were intensely painful; sometimes even debilitatingly so. Doctors prescribed an ointment for her to put on them when the outbreaks occurred, but they barely took the edge off. Plus, she was deeply attached to the ideas of natural healing and homeopathy and all that, so she very, very rarely used the medication. But that night, for the first time in a while, I could tell she wasn’t powering through her pain. She genuinely felt good and had no idea why.

Her pain returned a few hours later. As always, she did her best to ignore it. Fast forward a couple days – another massage, another occasion for sexy times. Midway through, she stopped kissing me and exclaimed, “that’s it!” I didn’t know what she was talking about. She rolled off me and stuck her finger in my mouth. Not really sure what the hell was going on, I just sat up on the bed and let her do whatever she was doing. She pulled her wet finger from my mouth and stuck it in her own. I saw her rubbing the inside of her cheek. Her face brightened and she informed me, with complete certainty, that my saliva was taking away her pain. I laughed and said something encouraging despite thinking she was nuts. Then she hopped back on me and I completely forgot everything she’d said. Continue reading “I was kidnapped by my girlfriend and what she did to me was beyond comprehension.”