Getting Fresh

Earlier this month, I found this funny someecard and it just made me giggle and giggle.

I posted it to Pinterest and counted myself lucky to have found such a perfect sentiment.

Fast-forward to the following Tuesday 8am and I am feeling just a wee PO'd.  My Monday afternoon baseline "Yeah, you are 40!" mammogram didn't go quite as planned.  First, I wasn't able to get out of the office anonymously.  As my dear husband, Eric, is one of the radiologists that practices in the Women's imaging center, I knew it was possible I'd be recognized if for no other reason than my next of kin and insurance card sport his name.  I kept my maiden name so often I fly under the radar as his wife (and more importantly at times, he as my husband). So when I was outted (by the man himself who was being consulted on a case with the radiologist doing mammo), I assumed that I was being given special treatment as a  'wife'.  The extra pictures and personal consult didn't really click until "Looks great EXCEPT..."  

The mammogram itself wasn't tough.  I scheduled mine during a time when I generally had no extra sensitivity issues.  And generally, I have a good tolerance for discomfort though I adore complaining about it.  I was shown to a locker where I put my shirt, bra and valuables but left my necklace on.  I donned their cape, not a cool "Super Boob Woman" kinda cape but a soft if ugly blue and pink thing with a button at the neck.  I waited a few minutes in the secondary waiting room, which had a few other women in ugly capes, before a tech took me into one of the rooms and placed two strips of tape like material over my nipples.  These had some metal stud on them and I recall thinking that this was about as rock and roll as I was ever getting with my boobs.

And then we danced!  The tech had a machine to place in a very specific place.  She was a pro but imagine having to swing a terribly expensive and heavy machine around 15 or so different pairs of breasts, all attached to 15 different bodies with varying heights and weights, in a single day.  She had me lean aft, then fore, tilt here, reach there.  There was a moment when my lack of youth hit me as I had to hold my right breast to prevent it from slumping into the frame with the left one like a pornographic photo bomb.  All the while, the tech had ahold of my breast, gently but firmly making sure it hit the plates at the appropriate spot.  Then the plexiglass was lowered, my visions of my youth marred again as my breast was easily pan caked, and the X-ray taken.  This we did many times.  8 or so on each side.  And then I sat and waited to be released back into the wild.  Instead, I was recalled, the winner of a second set of pics, ones I assumed I was getting because I had moved or breathed during an ill timed moment.  

I am, like most, a total novice at X-rays.  On occasion, a friend will bring one by and we will stand around Eric's light board ruminating until Eric flips the X-ray right side up and makes his scholarly declaration.  My buddy Nicole is something of a savant considering her lack of medical skills. If Eric brings home a teaching case, she is always amazingly accurate at pointing out what one spot "isn't like the other".  But even without her savvy, looking at the enhanced magnification mammo pics I could see the pretty white spots in my otherwise beloved boob and I suddenly realized that while the staff might adore Eric, I was getting special attention because of me.

So I am barely 40, just there for a baseline and now facing what?  Micro-calcifications, it turns out.  Since I got to grill a doctor, let me give you a little TMI on these puppies.  They aren't anything other than what their name says.... tiny bits of calcium.  They can get all layered in a woman's milk ducts or near them (aka in your boob) and create white specks on a mammo.  If there are lots of them, it could mean a girl is particularly good at making them.  But if they only appear in one spot (as did my collection), they might mean something else.  They might be DCIS, a stage zero cancer.  A pre-cancer.  An indication that the cells there might be interested in swapping their colors for something meaner in the future.  And there is only one way to find out for sure - grab some of those cells and give them the equivalent of a pat down from a Pathologist.

Let me stress, as the wife of a radiologist, that the average person (or even doctor) cannot read an X-ray.  My dear husband and his colleagues trained for a minimum of 5 years after their 4 years of medical school.  Some, like Eric, trained for a 6th year.  And a neuro-interventional radiologist trains for 7. Your most basic radiologist has spent more years in mandatory training than a surgeon (4 years) or an ob-gyn (4 years).  They read X-rays, CT scans, MRIs, fMRIs, PET scans, DEXA scans, all of which are very different beasts with terribly different talents as an exam.  They learn to read most of these tests with contrast or a nuclear tracer as well.  Additionally, radiologists are the doctors who typically biopsy the craziness they find somewhere in the layers of our bodies.  Some will also put in ports or access tubes for chemo or drainage or dialysis or food.  They coil aneurysms, deploy balloons and stents and embolize or clot bleeding.  Give these folks a picture and watch them get dirty and get it done.  They are, though I may be biased, THE most important doctor you rarely ever see.  

So when my radiologist said, "microcalcifications" I tried desperately hard to shut up and listen.  She recommended a biopsy of these tiny specks, something I was surprised to hear.  I assumed they were too small to yield up results. But Dr. H., a multidecade veteran of the breast v cancer wars, has done this before, maybe a bit more than a few times.  She was clear that, no, they are definitely not too small (I cringe at the thought she might have taken my comment as an implication that her skill was lacking). And in her opinion, they should be biopsyed. I signed up.

There was the option to wait and see and sometimes you will hear that from your doctor.  I heard it from my husband later that day.  He looked at the scan and said he wanted it biopsied but his co-worker, who was in the reading room with him, said he would have gone the follow up route.  As an attorney and wife of a rad, I will interpret the "wait and see" for you.  I always ask Eric, "Did you see anything interesting today?"  In a wait and see case, Eric is likely to answer my question with something like "Yeah!  I saw this thing in this person.  It really looks benign.  But there was this one characteristic that I have never before seen.  So I recommended a 90 day follow up". What he is trying to say, "Every human is in fact unique.  I have seen this be benign 50 times and never not be benign.  But in this guy, this small variation of size or location or density or ???, I would hate for that variation to be the indicator of a problem and to have it get missed."  For micro-calcifications, the wait and see approach is usually taken when the shape, number, and layering properties lead the doctor to be fairly certain it is benign.  In my case, the shape was too amorphous and the layering was not evident and the calcs were not big (which often means benign).  Further, I had them in only one localized spot, at a fairly shallow depth. They were more suspicious than not.  They deserved a biopsy.  

Before I left Monday, a technician took me into the biopsy room and showed me the layout.  She explained the procedure and gave me some standard requests... no aspirin or Advil therapy until well after the biopsy was done.  And so Tuesday morning, bright and early, I headed to the hospital.  It was time to get fresh with a growing number of my husband's co-workers.

To Be Continued.....

Everyone ELSE is sharing travel tips.....

Thoughts of Traveling with the Kiddos. 1) Get a late start. We are NOT morning people, though we go through phases when we can do nothing but wake up in the early hours - rarely am I ever happy about it. So on vacation, we all sleep in as much as possible and try to add in evening activities to 'make up for lost time' - not that that is a real thing. So far, this has worked well. In Europe, we started at noon and ended at 9-11pm. The kids got to see some of the nightlife and we were prevented from over-exposing them to 'culture'. Since museums and such generally close early, we had fixed time to force it down their throats and they appreciated that. 2) Check for evening hours. Aha! Just because we don't get up early doesn't mean we CAN'T do culture late! The Louvre and Musee d'Orsay had evening hours until 9pm. We started late, missed the crowds and enjoyed the evening vibe. The Smithsonian does this too in summer. 3) Use apps! We downloaded a TON of apps (mostly free) for our last trip. While internet when we were out and about was sporadic since we were not using cellular data, when we were within Wi-Fi, we used our apps to plan and I used the screenshot function to save the info. When those bits showed up in my PhotoStream, it was quite nostalgic for me. Maps were often not accessible offline either so I used screen shots. In the US, we use an app called Roadside America that shows you crazy and odd things near where you are at the moment. World's largest ball of twine? Foamhenge? I keep a folder for current event apps on my phone which helps with getting into the local swing of things. Favs? Smithsonian, Roadside America, Maplet, National Park Service And don't be afraid to delete and reload apps. Disney's Wait Time app is only useful on the 2 days a year you are in the park, but man those days are much more awesome with it than without! 4) Cameras, cameras, everywhere! My kids LOVE taking photos. So everyone had a camera. My teen had an old Nikon D40 and my littles had their ipod Touch and iphone cameras. We all took many photos and since they ended up in the same photo library eventually, it was cool that our snaps came from everyone. And a side note, why not do family pics while on vacation?  I read about this online and found an American photographer in Paris who gave us an hour of her time for a very reasonable price.  We got family photos, something we had not done since before my 7rd old had been born, with the Louvre and Eiffel Tower in the background. Brilliant?!  Yeah, I think so!  

5) Prepare for the worst. Before doing much, I searched online for the most miserable experiences people had and then tried to figure out who to circumvent them. I expected to spend all of our 2 weeks in Europe soaking wet. I bought umbrellas (coming from AZ we never had these before), rain coats (stylish ones since I knew they would be in photos) and even an adorable rain poncho for the littlest monkey. It was cool to have new things for the trip and made the little rain we did encounter kind of fun! 6) Hang it up. For our trip abroad I bought the London and Paris Passes, cards that give free or line cutting admission to places. We also got the travel card option so we also had train tix. But what to DO with the darn things! In the end, I bought lanyards from Hot Topix with cute phrases for the three kids. Each had a plastic ID holder that we used to hold 1) the city pass 2) the metro tix 3) a business card with all our numbers preprinted and our flat address handwritten. The kids had room to put a paper bill but chose to use their pockets for that. I was surprised but we didn't lose anything big (on the last day, one metro tix went missing because it did not make it back into the lanyard pocket but that was a cheap fix). We hung them up the moment we got in and everyone helped by checking everyone else. I had peace of mind that the kids wouldn't lose their location info in a strange land and it was a blessing being able to visually see those lanyards and knowing that everyone had their passes. 7) Make the most of travel day. We were flying on a red eye which made the day we left feel odd. In the end, our good buddy offered to let us leave our vehicle at his house near the airport so we made a day of it and went to his place early. There was a great park nearby so we bought a lunch and had a picnic while our kids ran amuck. The kids were happy and exercised (like puppies, see!) when they finally plopped onto the plane. It was nice they had that time since it made the plane ride itself less confining. 8) Figure out the day pack in advance. We have a rule that since I plan, I do NOT have to tote. So I am exempt from having to carry anything I do not want to carry. But there is stuff I want to take (bandaids, tummy tamers, extra SD card). I prepacked our day bags so I was sure they wouldn't be too heavy and would have all the essentials. My eldest is old enough to be a Toter so was assigned a day pack. I consider these to be the essentials - weather modifiers (rain gear, coats, or sun screen/hats), maps/guides/tickets, medical (advil, moleskin, tums, bandaids, anti-allergy), water (1 bottle for emergencies), snack (we bought local candy bars because by the time you realize you waited too long to get a meal, the only thing that will get into a kid quick and easy is candy... and the kids loved trying out different brands of candy). Additionally, we carried my camera and sometimes an extra lens (depending on where we were going). 9) Don't be afraid to splurge on one thing that is awesome. I had this idea that England should be all about castles. But the ones I remembered were from a driving trip I did with my folks as a child, not the fancy schmancy "do NOT touch" ones you find in the cities. And we were spending most of our time in London. But it nagged at me long enough that I investigated online, searching for 'best castles to take kids' and 'try not to miss this in England'. The online folks were brilliant and led me to a very isolated ruined castle that was amazingly intact - Old Wardour Castle. The kids went nuts! The gift shop sold foam swords and the kids spent several hours defending the castle from each other. It was a trip highlight. Further investigation led me to a castle that had been turned into a hotel and was offering a Sunday night April special. We drove (an experience in and of itself) to Stonehenge then to Old Wardour and then to Thornberry Castle where my children slept in the room that King Henry VIII and Anne Boylen stayed in while on Progress. We finished the experience with a stop in Cardiff at the Doctor Who Experience and spent sunset at Oxford. I got some amazing deals, but over all this WAS a splurge. And I think it really made the trip for us all. There ya go! Our travel tips, based on our European adventure.

Remember EVERYTHING? Eh, maybe.

This weekend I embarked on an ambitious project, convincing the OldWindbag (OW) that he should join me in EVERNOTE - wonder of the OCD world. Here is some context. OW is a paragon of organization. He is awesome when it comes to finding tidbits of info that one (of his daughters) may have forgotten. AND he does this despite being an OCD nut and absolutely refusing to keep practically anything! Really. Alas for years he has being using an archaic system of Microsoft Word documents to keep his personal notes - everything from his will (which covers how my sister, Natalya, and I will split up our inheritance of 1960's and 1970's vintage albums) to driving directions. And this method works. Certainly, when he started using Word it was the only game in town. But it has a huge flaw, a lack of searchability. Say OW needs to know the exact name of his anti-farting prescription medicine. With his current system, OW must remember which .doc he wrote and saved it in. Was it filed under "OW visits the Quack 2009" or "OW visits the Quack 2011"? Certainly you can search for a filename easy enough. But if you can't remember what document you saved that info into, well expect to spend some time crawling through old data. SO this weekend, I attempted to wean OW off of Word as a note-taker. Word was designed with document creation in mind and it does a fine job for that. But OW is really keeping notes, not documents. And he needed an intervention. And in steps the BIG HERO - EVERNOTE. I was a fairly early adopter of this little app. Frankly, I just fell in love with the green elephant symbol. I used it sporadically at first but, like other relationships in my life, we really hit it off once gadgets join in. More on that in another post... no, not about THAT. About EVERNOTE and gadgets! EVERNOTE (skip if you are a believer already) is a free service/application that let's you take and make audio, photographic, textual notes and keeps them updated across all your devices (iPad, iPhone, computer, Android). You can clip webpages to EVERNOTE and you can send emails straight to your EVERNOTE account. Within the app are personalized Notebooks which can be kept private or shared with others. There are many many many developer add ons that help make EVERNOTE even more productive, all found in the Trunk. For instance, Skitch lets you draw and annotate photos. Scalar performs calculations, which can be saved into a Notebook. Hello creates a facebook (little 'f') in your account, complete with snapshots of your contact's business cards. So you are sold, right? I sure was. But OW was a hard sell. See the man had wanted THIS product back when computers where brand spanking new. He knew that carrying around paper was an old man's folly. But since it wasn't available, he invented a complex system of computer hard drives, floppy disks, zip drives (remember those?), and now thumb drives that he meticulously updated on a regular schedule, backing each and every copy each and every time. Now that one simple program could do ALL the backing up automatically, it scared the pants off him. To trust or not to trust? To ease him into it, I carefully copied and pasted each and every note from his travel thumb into his brand new EVERNOTE account. What I mean is I opened each document, selected all the text and then copied/pasted it into a new note. It was time consuming. OW was hoping he could just keep on with updating his .doc and then save those into EVERNOTE. While I was willing to let him have a little bit of both for a while, I was pushing to get him switched over so that he could see how easy it could be. He wasn't easily convinced. In fact, I wasn't sure he would do anyting more than erase the whole mess once he got away from me until this afternoon when I got a tech support request. OW wanted to know if EVERNOTE could password protect his individual notes. Not exactly EVERNOTE will let you look at any Note if you are logged in. But you can Encrypt certain text within a note, which is essentially the same result. That's when OW grudgingly admitted that already EVERNOTE had come in handy. He had been trying to remember when a particular script had been first prescribed (anti-farting, perhaps?) and had tried, on a whim, to search EVERNOTE. Since we had imported all the Word Documents, including the meticulous notes OW keeps on family members with medication conditions, he found it in a snap. EVERNOTE will search through not just the Note names but also the text content, including the text content of web pages. Indeed, EVERNOTE, in conjunction with my favorite gadget ever - a scanner - will search the OCR'd text of anything you have ever uploaded. Just a few minutes ago, I needed my checking account routing number so I searched for my bank name and low and behold, EVERNOTE found me a photo (A PHOTO!) I had taken of our checkbook! So OW is a tentative convert. For the moment. He is going to LOVE this, eventually. It helps that doing this just cost us an afternoon and nary a penny. EVERNOTE offers a generous free account that so far has been adequate for the kids and Eric. But once you try it, you'll find yourself wanting to change your life by going paperless. At 45$ a year, the Premium account allows many more uploads and offers more bells and whistles. After purchasing a recommended scanner, I was able to take 5 feet of file cabinet paper to the shredder, not to mention the stack of school work and art that I scanned and saved (and was able to justify letting go!) So EVERNOTE is our friend. Mine more than OW's but he is catching on. It was a productive day. PS Can I say how proud I am of the OW who is always willing to try new technology out, provided it is free or nearly so?

What Not to Read "WARP Book 1 The Reluctant Assassin" Eoin Colfer

I should be forgiven for assuming I would love this. With a subtitle like "The Reluctant Assassin", who wouldn't want to read and love it? But I have tried Mr. Colfer before and I wasn't impressed then and I am not impressed now. Simply put, he is patronizing. The story standards are all there in their trite glory. There are a few orphans, Americans obsessed with guns, a few Dickens rip offs and - what annoyed me the most - a teenager who works for the FBI but is sooooooo good that she can disarm any full grown officer and lay him down flat. Really? Sure we all KNOW this is fiction but this is beyond fiction and absurdly fantasy. To boot, the writing is simplistic and that makes me feel like Mr. Colfer just doesn't respect his young audience. Give us some artful imagery, some culture with the crass fight scene. Be an artist and slip some ART into the story. If it were not for the time warp aspect, this would have no redeeming qualities. Actually, it doesn't. Just the name. I like THAT.

Oh Have I been BAD!

My friend, Lisa, recently chided me that SHE still looked at this website even if I never added anything to it! So today I am going to bust out a few of my recent favorites so she has something new to look at the next time she visits.

The latest in the series of books I have had to buy in multiple (because I am constantly giving them away) is The Hindi-Bindi Club by Monica Pradhan. This is both a multi-generational story and a multi-cultural story. It is written in the voices of 6 women - 3 daughters and 3 mothers. Now, all grown up, the entire lot of women tell their tales, giving the reader perspective that they themselves don't have. The writing is wonderful, humorous and serious in the right spots. The voices are all different, which makes the transition from one women to another much easier than it would seem to be. And the cherry on top is the entire book is sprinkled with recipes for classic and Americanized Indian dishes. I made the Chicken Curry and it was exactly what the book had me craving :) More than the recipes though I really enjoyed the history and perspective of the older generation. My Indian history is very sparse. But without lecturing, this book conveyed both the complications that occurred during the partition of India, Bangladesh and Pakistan and how women to who lived through and near that experience learned to relate. At some point the author points out that these Indian women, as we lump them in America, would never have been friends in India.... there they would have been too different, from far too varying backgrounds.

I don't want to scare you away here! The thrust of the book is the realtionships between women and there are many layers to explore.... the differences from within India, the differences in ages, the differences between the immigrant generation and the 1st generation (and in many ways, the differences of those 1st genners to native born Americans).

"The Thirteenth Tale"

Ok -I am again pushing a book I am not done with yet, but I have enjoyed it so much thus far that I am recommending it. Will it stay in the top 100... that remains to be seen. This novel is a story within a story. Our lead, a young woman who works in her father's bookshop in England and is an amateur biographer, receives a letter requesting she meet with a famous but reclusive old novelist - to write her biography. Why our heroine is chosen, she is not sure. Whether she wants the job, she is not sure. Who this novelist is, she is not sure. So mystery abounds.

The author's voice here is lovely. If you liked the author's voice in the The Historian, this book deserves a home in your bookshelf. The narration is direct but really carries the wilder moments of the inner tale forward. There is something very mystical about 13 - so the title invites you into that possibility. But thus far, the author has repeatedly edged right up to the supernatural, really made you believe in the boogey-man, then calmly explained why it is all mere fantasy. Does she mean it? Is there a ghost story to hear? Hmmm.... I don't know if I am being desensitized to the fantastical or the opposite. Rest assured the story within is wild enough that dropping the supernatural element wouldn't bug me at all. This is a very well-told book... I expect the story will live up to the high bar the author has set thus far. Oh, and while it is still hardcover, it is currently all over at deep discounts... Costco, Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

PS. Lovely website too ...http://www.thethirteenthtale.com/

"Make Me a Match" by Diana Holquist

UPDATED!

Make Me a Match

This is a shameless plug. My 2nd cousin twice removed (or some such thing) wrote this book and I just found out it was released this month. It is absolutely Chick Lit and so far quite cute...... The basic premise is that while hosting her engagement party to a busy Baltimore lawyer, our main Chick (Cecelia) finds herself also hosting her gypsy, slightly psychic sister, Amy. Amy's psychic ability is that she can hear the name of an individual's One True Love. And she is certain that her sister isn't marrying him.

I admit to not not being quite done - though I read the first half last night. But thus far, I love the idea, the voice and the humor peppered throughout this novel. It won't set you back much - straight to small paperback. So go ahead and grab a copy and support the family....

UPDATE.... I finished this book last week in another mini-marathon reading session and I thought it was quite consistent throughout. Love stories aren't always happy - certainly in real life there are obstacles and the ones encountered here can certainly put your own love life into perspective. This book has exactly what you expect from a good romance. .. and I won't say anything more than that ;) Oh, I forgot, we are calling the modern romance novels of our generation Chick Lit! Heck - works for me :) Great Chick Lit, then!

"The Historian"

You are indeed lucky! Today my favorite BOTS of last summer is on sale at a Bargain Price of 7.99 from Amazon for the hardcover. Now, some of you won't - because you travel or are tight on space - but I actually like this book in hardcover. It is a weighty book and it is a dark tale.... so having heft in the physical book lends a certain amount of atmosphere to this novel. Not that it needs much. Consider the back cover...

"My Dear and Unfortunate Successor : It is with regret that I imagine you, whoever you are, reading the account I must put down here. The regret is partly for myself - because I will surely be at least in trouble, maybe dead, or perhaps worse, if this is in your hands
. But my regret is also for you, my yet-unknown friend, because only by someone who needs such vile information will this letter someday be read. If you are not my successor in some other sense, you will soon be my heir-and I feel sorrow at bequeathing to another human being my own, perhaps unbelievable, experience of evil. Why I myself inherited it I don't know, but I hope to discover that fact, eventually-perhaps in the course of writing to you or perhaps in the course of further events...."

Set in multiple time lines (something I am drawn to) this novel is of a father, his mentor, and his daughter all seeking answers to the age old fable of Dracula. Now I am NOT a vampire person. I have tried a little of this and a little of that but I never really enjoyed that scene. What I love about this book is not the vampire possibilities but the constant tension they created in the storyline as you move from decades past to countries far away. You are always worrying and always wondering, always fearing for the characters in all three time lines as the pages turn closer to a nexus. For a book that was not particularly fast paced, I was amazed at how much, once begun, I felt I needed to read this book. I admit, I did more than 1 lunch from a drive-thru, sitting in my car, reading this book in the parking lot. The author's voice is lovely and compelling and her research seems quite complete (with the caveat that I have not been to most of the countries involved and certainly not during the time lines involved). Should you be willing to give it a try, compelled perhaps by the back cover text as I was, I doubt you will be disappointed.