I would...

is one of my favorite Jane's Addiction songs, but as usual, I digress. It isn't about music today, it's about how I would do anything for my mother aka Mama.

Like so many out there, it's hard for me to put into words (even though I know so many, haha) the total affinity I feel for my mama. It's also difficult to describe what I felt this morning when she told me she was going to the doctor to get a biopsy on a lump she found in her breast, not to mention the news upon her return that there were actually 2 lumps & whether they turn out to be cancer or not, she'll have to get her breast removed. Yeah. It's a good thing I had just finished some serious exercising right when she got back. My sweaty fingers can easily type this, but my adrenaline-filled brain can't really process it all yet. I hate to think about what will happen when it can.

Or maybe I'm just in shock.

Battle Scars & Spots...

usually come with a memory until they eventually both fade away. The one from slicing my leg on the corner of a glass coffee table this summer finally did. Yet I have a few that never will.

Now don't get me wrong, what I have is "the best kind" of cancer. While it can return in a different place once removed, it can't kill me. & as they (who are they anyway?) say, what doesn't kill you, makes you stronger. Sure I almost went insane working with insane people just to get health insurance to pay for surgeries. Sure I saw my actual skull before they stitched up the hole on my forehead. Sure I had my left eye sewn shut for 3 weeks following one of the many procedures I had done. But I'm still alive. & while a piano can fall from the sky & kill me, cancer will NOT.

Still, it sucks. Like seriously sucks. & I rarely complain about it b/c as soon as the "why me" starts, I think of others who have it worse & then I feel guilty. Like one of my best high school friend's mother who died from it this year. Or my friend who lost her high school sweetheart/husband of more than 20 years a few years back. Yet there are times, like this morning when I woke up & felt the huge sting of the tiny spot on my back that I'll either have to get cut out or scraped off, that I take a full 5 minutes for myself & wonder what the fuck I ever did to deserve all this.

& then the guilt kicks in...