#AND MINE ARE LIKE. 2CM AND I FUCKING HATE IT

[beastwars-transformers]

They weren’t lying my nails definitely look healthier and I don’t even have much of a desire to chew them off but. WHY ARE THEY SO LONG ITS FREAKING ME OUT

[chibioniyuri]

So, I wanted to share my current medical status with y’all, but only if you want to actively read it, so I’ll be throwing it behind a cut. Plus it’s pretty long. So there’s that.

So, I have a brain tumor.

Only, technically not. It’s within the skull but outside the dura mater, the protective membrane around your brain itself. So, technically not a brain tumor.

But let’s start from the beginning.

Starting around summer of last year, my grandmother was in and out of the hospital. Falling without being able to get up on her own, leading her to spend the entire night sitting on the floor waiting for someone to visit her because the phone was out of reach. Pneumonia extending her hospital stay. Getting home and refusing the home health care my uncle and aunt set up for her. Falling again. Repeat.

Around August-ish, my aunt was cleaning her apartment for her and found pain killers stashed all over the apartment. In bottles. Free pills on her walker. Next to the phone, in the kitchen, in the bathroom, stashed in both nightstands. Turns out she’d been asking nearly everyone who visited her to bring her bottles “because she was running low.” Including us. We could get large bottles of Excedrin from Sam’s Club for cheaper than were available in her country. We’d bring over two extra large bottles. We didn’t think anything of it; our visits were spaced roughly four years apart. But concurrently, some tests were showing the beginning stages of liver and kidney damage that could be caused by self-medicating in the way my grandmother was.

Cut to me. “Wa-oh,” says I.

For like two and a half years, that I could remember, I’d been having trouble sleeping. Beyond the normal, that is. Taking over an hour to fall asleep, sleeping roughly three hours at a time, eventually needing to take naps on my days off just to function safely on my work days. I didn’t think much of it at the time. I was finishing school. Looking for a house. Moving back into my parents’ house so I wouldn’t have to break a lease when I finally found “the one.” Exposing myself back to my dad’s special brand of tough love. I figured it was just stress, and that it would go away when things were less hectic.

They didn’t.

Right around April of last year, my headaches starting spiking. Again, I didn’t think much of it. For most of my life, I’ve dealt with headaches. I’ve become a pro at the art of ignoring the headache away. But suddenly, I was having migraine-level headaches, frequently. I explained it away as lack of sleep. This was about a year and a half into the lack of sleep saga. It seemed reasonable to me. And I was more concerned about the nearly-falling-asleep-while-driving and the crying on the way to work and the endless feeling of “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

But these new headaches were debilitating. So... I started self-medicating. A lot.

I really should have been more aware; I mean, as a medical professional, there were so many red flags. But nothing like that could ever happen to me, right? I was just weak. Attention-grabbing. I just needed to suck it up and get back to work. My dad, after all, had never taken a sick day in twenty years, even if he was sick. He’d had some baaaad headaches, too, and he just powered through. I needed to do the same.

My grandmother was a wake-up call for me.

I finally convinced myself to do something about it September of last year. I thought it was just my thyroid. It controls so many things: your sleep cycle, your metabolism, your temperature regulation. My doctor initially agreed with me, and blood tests corroborated it. My thyroid hormone was low.

Something must have niggled at my doctor though, because she ordered more tests. Then more. First blood tests. I was stuck so many times, it was ridiculous. I counted 9 vials in one sitting, which.... personally, is a record. I can’t speak about the standard levels for anyone else. Then an ultrasound of my thyroid. Nothing too abnormal. Some nodules that were enlarged, but nothing alarming. An MRI of my brain. Just a precaution, she said. Some of my medical history meant that she wanted to fully rule some things out.

I had my MRI on a Wednesday. That Friday, her nurse called me. Said that my doctor wanted to talk to me about my results. That I should just name a time that day and she would make sure it was available.

Oh shit.

I called my mom. I remember thinking that I wasn’t reacting the way I thought someone who received bad news should. I was acting like I had a particularly juicy piece of gossip. Jovial, almost.

“Hey mom,” I said. “That thing I was joking about, back when she first mentioned the MRI? Tumors and cancer? The thing I said wouldn’t happen to me? Pretty sure she found it.”

“What?”

“Her nurse just called. Told me to name a time I can come in today. Whatever time, and it would be available. That only happens with bad news, right? She found it. Mom, I have a brain tumor.”

My mom told me that I had to hear the actual words from my doctor’s mouth before I could worry. And that if it was real, we would deal with it. And that I should call my dad so he could come with me.

So I did. He told me roughly the same thing, that I couldn’t be sure until the doctor said it herself. And that I should schedule it so my mom could go with me.

“I scheduled it for roughly an hour from now.”

“Oh. I guess your mom can’t go with you, then.”

No mention of him going. I was too afraid to ask.

I found out later that he had already started drinking and was too afraid that someone would figure it out. He’s the type of alcoholic that feels like, since he named himself an alcoholic, that’s it, kumbayah, crack open a cold one, but instinctively lies to medical professionals about his level of intake. He excused it away by saying he wasn’t really an emotionally supportive guy anyway, and he didn’t offer because he didn’t think I wanted him there. Plus, he said, he would’ve started crying and that’s not being emotionally supportive. I agree that he would’ve. I also think he fell into a mild depressive state because his employer declared bankruptcy and he was without the job he’d worked at since being honorably discharged from the military in 1995 and was having an identity crisis because so much of his personal identity is tied up into his work, and without it, he’s nothing. But you’re not here to read about my analysis of my dad.

So I sat alone in that room while my doctor told me I had a tumor on my pituitary gland. That it was pretty large and probably the cause of a lot of the lethargy and difficulty sleeping. That I should let her know if I start having headaches.

“I’ve got those,” I said.

“You didn’t mention it to me?”

“No. I mean, I’ve had them since puberty, really. They were more frequent, recently, but I thought it was the not sleeping thing.”

She made sure I walked out with a referral to the neurosurgeon in my hand and advised me to call him right away. Well, as soon as my insurance cleared.

Since October, I’ve struggled to feel it was real. I’ve sort of stepped aside from it, I guess. I’ve viewed it as one of those interesting case studies from nursing school. “Mary’s MRI results show a 2cm growth on her pituitary gland. Her growth hormone levels are __. She complains of headaches, lethargy, insomnia, and weight gain. What nursing diagnoses would apply to this case? What interventions would you consider implementing?”

I’ve analyzed my reactions and compared them to the stories I’ve read, fictional and anecdotal, about others dealing with serious medical issues and found myself lacking. I’ve thought of how I would write this situation. Definitely dread, I decided. Fear. Worry. A sense that suddenly, the world is crashing down around you. And alternately, a sort of freeing feeling. Suddenly, you can go out into the world and really live like it’s your last day.

And then I looked at my bank account. I looked at my insurance paperwork. I decided that I couldn’t afford the surgery to remove it until next year. Definitely couldn’t take the time off to process it. Gotta make that money, pay those bills.

“You’re so strong,” one of my fellow nurses tells me. I want to tell her I’m not. I’m just incredibly aware that I’m financially precarious and that I can’t afford anything else. And it’s so much easier to fall into routine and focus on caring for someone else. Avoidance at its best.

So why am I sharing this all of a sudden?

My surgery is in less than two weeks: April 4. And it’s definitely real now.

Suddenly, all that stuff that I imagined writing is happening to me. The closer that date crawls, the worse I feel. At first, it was mild concern. It’s approaching absolute terror now, though.

I’m about to let someone send some tools up my nose, poke around in my brain, and remove some bits of myself that have gone renegade. I’ll be in the ICU in case of complications. I’ll need someone with me for a while afterwards, when I finally get discharged. I have absolutely no idea how I’ll pay for it, considering my credit card has wracked up a truly impressive balance due to my car breaking down last year, and then all the lab work, diagnostic tests, and specialist visits, which let me tell you, are a special sort of expensive hell. Add on my mortgage and my student debts, and I squeak by every month. I’ll probably pick up a second job to help out with whatever costs I accrue.

One good thing about this is that my dad has stopped asking me “do you want mine?” when I mention I have a headache. But now he’s joking that I’ll be in the hospital for ages because, “I hate to say it like this, but you don’t do so well with the pain thing.” Fuck you.

The truly good thing: my brother got leave from the Air Force to come home for a week. We haven’t seen him since last July, when he came home for our it’s-been-four-years-time-to-go-to-Germany trip. I’m so happy about that, I could cry. I probably will before this whole thing is over.

So, there you go. The full update.

I’ll probably be typing more things up to work through this. Typing all this out has been oddly cathartic.

[travelforone-blog]

Slagelse

#ckringenisforthechildren

Date Location Discipline, club Result 2017-04-01 Slagelse, Denmark Landevej, CK Ringen 21/28 and about 15 dropped

Pre pre race

Waw, it's been a while since cross ... I went to Tenerife after last cross race, you know, because everyone has to go to Canary islands to cycle, right? RIGHT? Fuck that shit, one night we got so drunk we lost a friend, he never made it home, we assumed he was dead ... I guess that's what happens if 5 shots cost 5 EUR AND you get a bottle of shit champaigne on the top ... #carbloading? So ... experiencd looking for a corpse with a massive hangover in weird piss smelling corridors under bars in party alleys. He was ok, he went to an afterparty with Norwegians. Fucking Norwegians ... Never planned to touch a bike that week, would probably punch it after .... also, beer costed 1 EUR. Ah yes, I was pretty fed up with bikes by that point, I counted 15 cross races and 13 road races from last season ... I should probably write a retrospective post ... By the looks of it I spend ... 28 days racing and ... at least twice that amount training, AT LEAST ... so ... FML ... wait, I have no life ... UGHHHH Come January I hooked up with a coach and this new super system called xert which has numbers and graphs and these projected values and shit and I started training again ... Indoors, in front of a fan ... soooo muuuuuch fun I like having a coach, I lack the discipline to be my own coach ... Ola, you the MAN! So January, February, Marchuary was a combination of 3 - 5 - 5 - 1, XSS here, XSS there ... What this means is: 3-5x hard session per week, rest, contemplate dying, train, rest, can one die from exhaustion, train, hate life, train, hate bike, train, recover, cook, eat, cook, eat, eat, WHERE IS MY CHOCOLATE??? Let's buy some chips ... I will totally start eating healthy when the season starts ... repeat Nothing new ... So I spend ... way more than 30 hours training in jan, feb and march ... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ In the meantime we shot a promo video for a company to earn some money for the kids in the club. See screen grab above ... we had fun ... At some point I get a VO2max and lactate threshold test, best numbers ever. I was in a shit mood tho, work got in the way that day, it got in my head, IN MY HEAD ... But then I also started riding outside, like ... well, - 130km with my cross bike in rain with dry chain lube (now THAT was funny) - 120km and 100km with my road bike - 1x lågtempo intervallen with klubben - 1x shitty attempt at solo intervals that resulted in my knee hurting and me feeling like shit for 2 days Ah yes, my knee started hurting on my bike, I guess the saddle went to shit ... Get paycheck, buy licenses (plural, this shit is real yo!), sign up for Slagelse, let the tension rise ... Shave legs, best 2 hours of the week ... Contemplate cutting hair, but after a comment from Glenn: 'Dude, I am losing mine, so you are definitelly keeping yours, I encourage long hair' I decide to keep it ... Stop by Musette and SLAM THAT STEM (thanks guys, you're the best) Avoid alcohol whole week, yeah right, stress at work, meet deadlines, amazing, have 2 beers on Thursday, friday night ... well, I had a hof after 3 alkoholfree beers, let's leave it at that ... Wait, are we doing the whole alcohol thing again this year? FUCK ...

Pre-race

Play this and read on ...

Yodh by מזמור

Samling klubben kl. 8, ahhh, the little perks of racing in C Jonte shows up all wet, got cought by rain cycling form Lund #hardcore We take a trashcan full of cans and a bag of cement out of the van and off we go, TO DENMARK! Arrive at location, wait in line to pickup numbers, Jonte is shaking because he's cold, I take my jacket and cover him His parents observing: Aaaaawwwwwww, rigtig bra vannër ... situation almost gets emotional for a second Observe some TreBerg pros just chillin on their expensive bikes, observe some other pros chill on some other expensive bikes ... fuck me I am poor .... ehhhh Marcus is coming by in D so we go and watch, the mandatory D break passes, mhm, he did not make it ... peloton comes by, he's in there HEJA MARCUS KÖR HARD ... Me and Jonte: he looks tired ... yes, he does, he was sick whole week ... how was his training this winter? ... Well, not so good ... ah, he's a student, right, so just partying and shit, girls, booze? ... Haha, no, does not drink or party at all ... WTF? ... Yeah, he just plays videogames ... Ehhhhhh Get to van, grab bike, try to register, system says I am a Junior, some dudes laugh at that, me too, hahahaha det ikke dig? neeej, det var ikke mig ... HAHAHA ... fuck me I'm old ... Eventually, things get sorted out ... Notice the registration trailer is made by Adria, #ifeelslovenia Also notice the bed inside has a sticker that says: MAX 70kg ... well, that's kinda pointless ... Warmup, lineup for start, observe Jonte has no arm warmers ... take off arm warmers ... observe Jonte has no gloves ... take off gloves ... Jonte's dad: wanna take off the shirt too? Nah, forgot to shave chest ... Observe a random Swedish cyclist from ... Jönköpings Cykelklubb ... Observe the Sagan look and the lack of interest in marshall talking ... All photos by: Tim R. Larsen

Plan

Plan before today: exchange in chasing down attacks, stay in front, don't attack unless it gets really booring Plan today: Jonte - I'm just gonna chill for the first 2 laps, me: DEATH BEFORE DNF, AARGGGHHHHHH, you're kidding Jonte, right?

Race

We start, I stay up front, good job Miha There is this huge ABC dude who is like all over the place, looking back, talking loud ... jerk, I hope you get dropped After first couple of rolling hills we enter into a big road and KANTVIND YES, I WAITED ALL FUCKING WINTER FOR THIS BRING IT OOOONN!!!!1! booom, attack, couple of riders go, I am in front of peloton, normal pace, waiting for Jonte to launch behind ... nope Pace picks up, I wait ... nope EVERYONE SPRINTING FUUUUUUUCK Chase, chase, chase ... ok, we're goood, contact regained Right turn, again, pace picks up, as we hit the first smaller climb attack, uphill, kantvid Left turn, kantvind, downhill, attacks keep coming, we're chasing, I am chasing for my fucking life here ... Jonte? Nope ... Random Swedish dude goes, for like 2 seconds ... Big road, kantvind, new break of 3 is like 15s ahead, I lead the pack, try to chase ... I tire myself out chasing and then everyone starts springintg again AGAIN ARE YOU KIDDING ME???? ... well, it was painful but I got back in pack, in the back Oh, there's Jonte ... (later, the xert graphs show it was like really painful, like, lines were crossing and shit ... amazing) Final climb - kantvind, attack again UUUGHHH Start-finish straight, kantvind, attacks again ... Lap 1 done Internal evaluation of the situation: This is gonna hurt ... Lap 2 mellows down a bit, but it's still fucking crazy in kantvind Big road, we're all over the place, avoind oncoming traffic by like 2cm just to have that wheel RANDOM RANT: Hey douchebag driver, I wonder if you would be so fucking brave enforcing your right of way against an oncoming truck in your lane. Or a tank. Or a plane ... Yeah?!? ... I thought so ... fucking arrogant cunt, fuck you ... I mean there is this downhill section with kantvind, we're going all out, really ALL OUT just to keep the wheel of the guy in front ... Insane ... Jettison an empty bottle just after the finishline #feelingpro Lap 2 done Notice Random Swedish dude is dropped, so is large ABC loudmouth ... haha Internal reevaluation of the situation: Well, actually, this is manageable ... ASS CRAMP FML At some point there is an attack and Jonte joins GO JONTE ... but we all accelerate, so they're caught Lap 3 is fun, we actually form a chasing group up front, we're 5-6 cyclist chasing a group of 3 that made it at some point I even shout a bit since people stop working after a right turn Mmmm, shouting at people ... By the end of lap 3 just before the climb noone wants to really pull, so ... little break, we're looking at eachother ... NOTE: last climb is a small road, so it's important how one is positioned, so about 2km to that intersection all hell breaks loose when people want to get into right position There we are, just looking at eachother ... and BOOOM, people start going, all over the place, chasing here, there ... I do a bit of too much effort, shoft to the wrong side in the wind ... Try to catch a wheel but everyone is zooming by, no gaps, no nothing 20 like riders pass me FUUUUUCK Chasing, chasing, chasing ... ok, contact Last climb, finish straight fast pace ... I'm dead ... I definitelly burned my last match there Internal reevaFUCK THIS SHIT, FUCKING WIN IT OR DIE Death metal song plays in head ... Last lap Plan - keep things under control, stay up front, whatever happens, stay up front ... It hurts, but I stay up front I slide back a bit on the big open road and BAM, CRASH, BIKES FLYING AND THERE IS A RED TREK COMING MY WAY IIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIII OK, AVOIDED Aftermath ... chase, chase, chase ... Internal thought: Maybe the DIE methafor was too much? Close every gap, EVERY FUCKING GAP Enter last climb, good position, all good, let's see if we can get the final attack in LEG CRAMPS I guess not ... Ease the pace, nicely get to the finish with another dropped dude

Post race

Get to the van, change, barely walk Buy a chocolate milk, cake and water with money I won at a cross race #feelingpro Look for bottle in grass, no bottle, it's gone ... Get in van, get home Foam roll, eat, have 2 beers, watch a documentary titled 'The Swedish theory of love', sleep

These help me do what I love, go pay them a visit: Musette 184 RACEDAY