I got busy yesterday – I got most of the courtyard planted and done, so I didn’t get to this blog. Here it is on a Monday instead! Let’s start right off with the week that was. On Sunday, as previously noted, I had clams courtesy of my clam diggin’ friend. They were delicious even though cooking them is always fraught because, eeeesh, I am not good at killing things. I’m not a vegetarian for my damn health, you know. Monday, here is Harvey looking interestedly at an inexplicably green elk. Harvey is, thank the gods, a perfect gentleman around deer and elk. On Tuesday, well, the next paragraph is going to be about Tuesday. This is the view from where I got my oil changed, though. On Wednesday I was in the college library conference room and this is the view from there. Thursday, osprey! Friday my daughter and granddaughter and I went out for a spontaneous very fancy and delicious dinner which we could in no way afford: no regrets. And it turns out that granddaughter loves clams and I love Negronis and all of us love Fede. This is the view from the pier. On Saturday, which is of course Caturday, Mr. Binks made his opinion known and on Sunday morning Harvey and I went to the beach for a lovely walk.

And now, let’s talk about Tuesday. This is the painting that is in the sonogram and procedure room, I guess you call it, at CMH. This is what I looked at while I had a sonogram two weeks ago that discovered a mass in my left breast. It is also what I looked at, or would have looked at except I had to lie in a way I couldn’t see it, while the very kind and competent and altogether lovely team did a sonogram guided needle biopsy in that mass last Tuesday. That was just as much fun as it sounds. They took four samples. Every time the needle takes a sample it makes a loud CLACK noise which they demonstrated beforehand but was still startling. It was not as painful as I thought it would be but it was not painless. Afterwards, I did not go to work. I went and got my daughter and we ate pastries at Blue Scorcher because for some reason I was starving all day afterwards. Fear, I guess. I have been in fear since the mammogram / sonogram that I had two weeks ago, the one where they found the mass. Then, in the afternoon, I went and got my car oil changed because that was overdue.

Because this is America, it cost me $100 to have the mammogram/sonogram. I have to always get a special mammogram with a sonogram because I have very dense breast tissue. Then, which felt a bit like adding insult to injury, it cost me $100 to get the biopsy. I have very good insurance which costs my employer quite a lot of money each month. Just in case you are lucky enough not to live here in the good old US of A and are foolishly considering it, consider that. I thought a lot, over the last two weeks, about how much it would cost if the results were positive (so weirdly backward, to say positive results for a negative outcome) and realized that it would probably ruin me. As in I would probably lose everything. Imagine that. What a great country.

But! It is all, I think, okay!! They called me on Saturday and the results were NEGATIVE! A positive outcome! I do not have breast cancer! They still want to do an MRI, because of the dense breast tissue and some weird ass symptoms I have been having, but I might not do it. I haven’t decided yet. Neither has my insurance, so this may be out of my hands anyway. And here we are. I get to live and not, hopefully, go bankrupt due to medical bills AGAIN, or at least not right now. And also Mr. Binks went missing for 30 hours and came home, which was also a huge and enormous relief. I love that rotten cat. And, I have said the word BOOB and BOOBS so much recently that I feel rather strange. It turns out that boob is the preferred nomenclature in the breast cancer world, which makes sense because breast is so formal and what are you going to say anyway? Tits? Bazongas? Boobs it is and yes, my boob hurt and then it didn’t and now I am just waiting for the steri strips that mark the x over the incision to fall off. Did you know that after every surgery, including a biopsy, they leave a little tiny piece of metal in you to alert future radiographers? Neither did I, but now I have two: one where my gall bladder used to be and one to say, no cancer here! It’s all okay!

And the courtyard looks pretty good. It will look even better in a month.