Yesterday I cried several times at work. Big, splashy tears. It felt so strange to have my co-workers think my IV bruise was a spider bite, like life is that normal. I ended up telling a few more people because I thought I might scream.

I made it through the day, and last night I stood in the shower for 45 minutes with a bar of soap gently trying to work off the dressing stuck on with dried blood like superglue. Finally it came off and I was do relieved the incision didn't start bleeding I cried again. This is a wet business, DCIS.

I put a ton of Neosporin and five butterfly bandages on the gnarly incision (frankly, it makes me kind of queasy to think what is gone) and went to sleep with my arm in a pillow. I dreamt someone wanted to sell me a grand house with an inside swimming pool and I said to Greg we couldn't afford this place if one window broke because the ceilings are fifty feet high and woke at five in the morning wondering what that meant.

My girl and I have clashed a bit, which has always been my biggest fear with maternal cancer. I worry I'm rising too much to her teenage criticisms, which are unfair in the way of teenage and not personal, though it feels that way. I wish I could say I'm such a big person I don't mind if challenges arise when I'm less than a week out from losing an ice cream scoop of breast tissue, but you know what? I'm not. I still feel pretty damn sorry for myself, I admit it.

My doc called this morning to say there was no DCIS left in my pathology, which is way good news for my health but also there is a touch of "so I went through all that for nothing?" And even though I know it's not for nothing, we needed to know the margins were clear, I look in the mirror at what I am now and remember what I was a week ago when unbeknownst to all of us, the cancer was taken by the biopsy.

Bygones.

But props to the biopsy guy, right? Here's to you, dude, because those were small samples. WTF? Get down with your bad self.

There seem to be many steps left. My girl is mad at me. The road feels long and rather lonely. My incision hurts. My pride hurts. My mothering instinct hurts.

I guess I'm not the poster child for doing breast cancer parenting right.

Fuck it.

ONWARD.

[Editor's Note: This is gross. Feel free to skip. However, one in eight women will develop breast cancer in their lifetime. I personally know four, including me, under age 50. Get your mammos, ladies.]

After the biopsy, they left a metal clip behind to sort of guide my surgeon in. Most people have an actual tumor. I don't have that. I have these invisible calcifications that only show up on a mammogram. They took some of them out in my biopsy, but what is left is scattered.

Usually, women have one wire inserted in their breast prior to surgery, X marks the spot.

They put the little calf pumper sleeves on me (if you haven't had surgery, they inflate one side at a time during surgery to prevent blood clots in the legs). Good stuff, but the tubes drag. Then they hooked me up to an IV. Also good stuff.

We went back to radiology to get my wire inserted. I was in a chair, which they pumped up like at the salon. I offered to stand, but they said it would be awhile and also, some people pass out.

They put me in a mammogram machine with a hole in the plate and shot in the burny numbing stuff, just like the biopsy. The breast care woman whose job is to be a human was there at my side as the nurse and radiologist fed in wire #1. It was very similar to how you would feed a wire through a wall, with all the jamming normally involved. A few times during the entire procedure they hit spots not numb, and I would yelp and more numbing burny stuff would be applied.

More pictures. A second wire. More jamming and the pressure that indicates that right now, you might be a gristly and somewhat difficult piece of meat.

By now, this is all happening a foot below my head, but I don't want to see wires jammed in my body, numb or not, so I close my eyes and cry, and the breast lady removes my glasses and wipes away my tears and asks me if it hurts and I say, no, but this is so weird. And I am, you know, a human. Humans have feelings.

Then we think it is done and they tape a Dixie cup over the wires that protrude three inches out and they take another picture and it's as though there are far right Republican calcifications who have fled Nippleopolis to settle on my chest wall far from the riffraff. Even in my body I have to deal with boundary wars. The radiologist declares he needs another wire to triangulate what needs to come out. So now we need to shove my boob and its two wires back into the mammography machine and through the hole for the third wire.

The surgeon comes to see what is taking so long and I curse the Republican calcifications.

Finally, me, my IV pole, my calf tubes, my Dixie cup and the beginnings of a barbed wire fence are rolled back to surgery.

As we roll into the OR, one of the students is on her phone and I have a brief and completely irrational fear of ending up on Snapchat.

I spent yesterday in a hydrocortizone haze and today am down to Advil. The pain is not bad considering the bastards on my chest wall and what looks to be a two-inch incision.

I won't go into further detail, but I don't look the same. I had a good cry. My chest has never been a point of pride, but it was, you know, symmetrical.

For now, I focus on healing. I get my initial radiation scan before vacation and start radiation in late June. I couldn't get in for genetic testing and counseling until August, which sucks, because BRCA could change everything. I haven't fought for something different because I need to not control this one. I need to show up and let the professionals handle it. They didn't take lymph nodes or do a MRI because my surgeon says it's aggressive overkill with DCIS and I chose to believe him. I'm not a doctor and I need to not feel any level of responsibility in this. If I die because I trusted a board-certified medical professional, I won't blame myself. Or him, really. I don't think we should blame doctors short of gross negligence. Our bodies are loose cannons, and we're all terminal. It's just a case of what you'll die of, and when, not if. Never if.

I go back to work on Monday so I'm not doing shit this weekend. I slept most of today. Texted with a friend who has a friend who just had a double mastectomy. That is worse. Yet I'm sulking today, because no one wins in the Suffering Olympics and I really didn't see this one coming. At all. They might be small, but they used to match. Fuck it.

Onward.

I used to have a ceramic cupcake. My sister and I got in the habit of putting our worries in the cupcake and, you know, letting the cupcake deal with it. I gave my cupcake to my girl when she needed it, so Sister Little just sent me this new one.

I put cancer in it.

Tomorrow I get measured so I suppose if I swell or shrink dramatically after surgery they can tell.

Today I went to a big work meeting and didn't tell one person I'm out on Friday to have just a touch of breast cancer removed.

Some of them know. They've been cool. If anything, it's a high level of privacy compared to the culture I used to be in so I float between various ways to interpret the people around me.

So you act like it's nothing at work, so they'll take you seriously (which I very much want), and you minimize it at home so as not to scare your daughter. When do you get to acknowledge it's real? Like OMG the pink ribbon thing happened? I'm going to act like this is totally cool, yo, even though lasers are going to attempt to kill certain cells in my body every day for weeks and I'm going to have to go to work and take care of my kid and deal with my husband's travel like it's business as usual.

The most unfair thing isn't the cancer. It's having to act like I don't care I have cancer.

This week I met with two oncologists: the medical one and the radiology one. The medical one is Russian-American and a petite woman. The radiologist one is American- American and super-tall-big guy who barely seemed to fit in the room and flipped pages and said "nowadays" a lot, like a farmer would.

I don't really understand my hormone receptor results yet, but it seems like hormone-receptor drugs probably won't work for me.

It seems like I'll have higher-dose radiation for 3-4 weeks instead of the 6 I was anticipating.

I'll start radiation after the vacation we planned when I got my job and we thought 2016 was all we had to put behind us.

By August, I should be over this obstacle.

Sometimes I feel like God is plotting my life to make sure it's worth reading, because obstacles make for better books. Or that's my chosen interpretation.

Otherwise, it might seem like a tough row to hoe.

Better to see it as a solid plot.

Next Friday is my lumpectomy. I admit I'm slightly worried about imbalance, because my rack is not all that large. Subtracting a tablespoon could make a difference. But would I really say don't take it out and get clean margins? No.

I feel like a medical specimen and not a woman, I admit. My breast has become a medical ham hock, and I am just attached to it. It was not impressive to begin with, and now it is diseased.

Not really looking forward to any of this but having it over. My friend Ann once gave a speech about her breast cancer being perfectly ordinary, and I get it now. Except for the bizarre and realistic ladder dreams, breast cancer feels like middle school gym class. Smelly and inconvenient and useless to my big picture.

Just get through it.

Onward.

I didn't want to go on a walk after work. I didn't sleep well last night. I have an appointment with my first oncologist tomorrow. I'm scared. Beloved and the little angel made me go.

As we rounded the corner and walked past where the road separates the silt pond from our neighborhood's larger lake, I saw a mama duck standing on the edge of the spillway that dumps overflow from one to the other. She was quacking frantically and staring into the hole.

I made a joke about chatty ducks and we kept going.

Then I turned back, because something about the tone of her quacks was something only a mother can recognize.

"Guys," I said, "I think her ducklings fell down there."

We went walking back, and sure enough, we could hear the ducklings chirping.

I immediately started freaking out. The little angel was very calm, saying something about nature taking its course (who is this kid?) and Beloved dutifully started calling numbers. Because it's apparently Truman Day, he had no luck with the Jackson County sheriff, Lee's Summit Fire, Lee's Summit police, Animal Control or the property owners' association. However, the Lee's Summit police dispatcher kept trying Animal Control, but nobody was home. Finally, she sent us back to LSFD and they said they'd see what they could do.

We hovered on the edge of the lake, watching the mama duck get more and more and more frantic. She flew down into the hole and we watched sadly, knowing ducks don't exactly have talons with which to grab their young.

I was just about to give up when the association truck showed up, assessed the situation, and then left as ... OMG ... yes, that is a huge yellow fire truck, complete with three firemen and all the toys you need to save somebody.

We cheered. And then this happened.

Ten-foot ladder and hero number one.

If you listen, you will hear what sounds like cheeping and a very worried mother duck.

Hero two, complete with badass scuba suit.

Hero three, with a different but equally badass suit.

Our heroes prepare to descend into the spillway to save the frantic ducklings.

Helpful random guy pulls over and offers a winch.

Down they go.

Ten-foot ladder

Looking for a bagful of ducklings.

That is a bagful of ducklings.

Our heroes!

You can just barely see the eleven ducklings inside the bag.

Cheeping all to hell for mama.

Mama duck hears her ducklings and comes running toward the fireman.

She rushes down to the water, quacking to her babies.

Y'all, I was practically bawling at this point.

The first few ducklings hit the water and looked like cartoon roadrunners as they practically tipped over headfirst paddling toward their mama.

Mama duck counts heads. Oh, no! Someone is missing.

The last duckling makes a break for it.

Now that everything's fine, their good-for-nothing father shows up.

Awesome day's work, lads.

Off go mama duck and her eleven ducklings, quacking excitedly to each other.

BEST. WALK. EVER.

Huge props to the Lee's Summit Fire Department and the dispatchers who wouldn't give up on eleven ducklings and one frantic mama duck. Really needed a happy ending today.

It seems like more than one day ago I found out I've been diagnosed with Stage 0 DCIS.

Yesterday, I was all, I can totally handle this. This? This is like nothing. I've always assumed I would get cancer because my mom did and this is the totally easiest cancer. This is going to be fine.

I told people my biggest relief in all this was that I didn't find out I had it when I was unemployed, because my head would've exploded. I am being totally sincere in that. God made the insurance refuse to cover my mammogram until after March 15. I started my job on February 13. That is so not a coincidence.

If I had found this out when I was unemployed, I'm not sure I would be in the same place mentally I am in today. Thank God for small favors, because these calcifications were totally in me a few months ago. I know they were. I just did not, at that time, know they were there.

Tonight I went to see Sheryl Sandberg talk about her new book, OPTION B. It was a good talk and she's an amazing person, but at one point she said, "If you want to shut down a room, just say yesterday you got diagnosed with cancer."

Yesterday I did get diagnosed with cancer.

Of course I started bawling there in Unity Temple.

And of course people came up during the question and answer period with stories so much more horrific than mine that I felt bad, but we've all been down the road of the Suffering Olympics and know they don't give out medals at the end. My suffering is mine and yours is yours and the poor pregnant woman whose five-year-old had died of cancer LAST MONTH WHILE SHE WAS PREGNANT CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE has hers. All we can do is lift each other up.

The thing I didn't realize that I'm sure other people do is when you tell a bunch of people who care about you something scary and dangerous has happened, the response can be a little overwhelming. I have always adored people paying attention to me for good things, but I'm finding it extremely uncomfortable to have them pay attention to me for bad things. That is super interesting to me. I wonder why that is? It probably means I'm really arrogant and don't want anyone to think I'm weak or something for having like ductal carcinoma in situ with necronic asswipey cells that are determined to dance the cancer tango if I don't annhilate them like the little rat bastards they are. And that's true. I don't like people thinking I'm weak, though I am so totally weak. Especially not after they just had to be nice to me in 2016 because I broke my leg and wrecked my car and lost my job. It's like I can't even navigate basic life skills or something.

Damn, this is embarrassing.

But in some ways, the cancer thing is slightly less embarrassing than the leg, or the car or the job, because this one is totally not on me. I couldn't have headed my asswipey cells off at the pass any more than I did by getting yearly mammograms. For once, it wasn't my lack of foresight or tendancy to stay put in a company I liked or lacking brake pads or eye-hand coordination that got me here.

I swear I did not bring this on myself.

That's actually one of the things Sheryl Sandberg talked about that I really liked, that you really shouldn't take trauma personally. As much as I'd like to why, me this whole thing (and it is so beyond tempting, because seriously, 2016, how did you follow me into 2017 just when things were looking so up?), cancer isn't personal. Why not me? Actually, I'm a good person for this to happen to because I have an amazing support network and I have insurance and paid time off. There are millions of people who don't have access to treatment or insurance or even running water. Why me? Why not me?

Sheryl said journaling really helped her, and I've blogged through so many hard things and great things in my life, I'm going to blog through this even though about twelve people still read Surrender, Dorothy. I'm going to do it for me, just as I started it for my daughter, WHO IS THE SAME AGE THAT I WAS WHEN MY MOM HAD CANCER AND HOLY SHIT THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I HAVE FEARED WOULD HAPPEN THIS WHOLE TIME SO MUCH I EVEN WROTE A BOOK ABOUT IT WHAT THE FUCK?

Sorry - sometimes the voice in my head is super annoying. That's the voice that wants to play the victim and say I told you so, life, I knew this would happen, I was born doomed, but that is not true and even if it were I'm not that Rita anymore who always finds the worst in everything and then makes out with the worst because the worst is so damn sexy.

This is the new 2017 Rita, as Steph said, who is made up of the eating disorder 1992 Rita and the anxiety-disorder-crazed early 2000s Rita and all the other Ritas who came before those two. 2017 Rita is RESILIENT, DAMMIT and is thus going to blog this stream-of-consciousness bullshit and have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up because ruminating WILL NOT HELP.

Onward.