Lakeshore

Still in durance medical here. Diagnosis has been made, and critical treatment successfully administered. I'll give more details later, after some more consults and test results are back. I'm afraid y'all are stuck with me a while longer. With a tiny bit of luck, I am going home today.

More things I have learned in the hospital:

1. I have many new colorful phrases in my vocabulary, such as "my hat is full of poop." Which sounds like a sentence from the second week of Introductory Conversational German.


2. Hospital gowns are one size fits none, and I am a threat to common decency and public order while wearing one.


3. There is an inverse relationship between the quality of airline food and the quality of hospital food. Thank Ghu the airlines have been going broke, because the chow around here is pretty good.


4. It is in fact possible to tattoo the inside of the human body, and no, you can't see mine. Ever.


5. My room has a view people would pay very good money for in a resort, but my bed faces the wrong way. We writers call this irony.

More here when I have firm information.

The diagnosis is now in. I am officially a cancer survivor. Early stage Tubulovillous adenocarcinoma (a/k/a cancerous polyp in the colon) with suspected lymphatic involvement (a/k/a possible lymphatic cancer).

( Medical information )

Why am I sharing this so publicly? Because it isn't shameful, it's annoying. It pisses me off. A little 4 cm piece of flesh shaped like a macaroni could have killed me. (I got copies of the colonoscopy imaging...if you people don't behave, I'll post them.) If it hadn't ulcerated and incited bleeding, it would have killed me. I have surgery and some serious annoyance in my future, but I'll be around to write books, annoy conservatives and make snarky blog posts for a long time to come, even if it kills me.

Meanwhile, you, and I am talking to you, go talk to your doctor about getting scoped. Especially if you're a little older or have any family history. I never would have known the cancer was there until the autopsy report, if the damned thing hadn't started bleeding.

I'll keep blogging about my experiences here, and I suspect I will find most of them funny. I don't feel very funny right this minute. But life is for the living, and I am alive. Nothing is funnier than that, my little monkeys.

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Department of Weird Ironies: I went to the ER the day the mass market paperback edition of Mainspring [ Powell's | Amazon thb | Audible ] came out. Everyone may rest assured that I will not be celebrating future book releases this same way.

...is photos of the paperback of Mainspring [ Powell's | Amazon thb | Audible ] in the wild.

Phone cams ready, people. We'll have a voting poll for the best image, with valuable prizes.

(Why yes, I am shameless. Why do you ask?)