A Bit Of A Novice Quilter's Life: Gardening In Deer Country And Mammograms

Have you ever had a post that just doesn't seem to want to get published?

Let me start by saying that Blogger’s mobile app is a real pain in the butt…I’m putting this redone part together on my PC in Word and will cut and paste and if the Blogger app acts up I won’t loose all my text....this time. It is much easier using a real keyboard instead of the iPad keyboard!

I started this post a week from yesterday by adding all the pictures and then when I was ready to add some verbiage, Sweetie walks up and hands me the phone and says that I’m suppose to call my doctor’s nurse. Now, I had just had my annual mammogram the day before and I said to myself “Self…this can’t be good news”. Y’all know if everything is hunky dory you get a form letter in the mail in a week or so and you keep going on your merry way. I stayed calm…no need to freak Sweetie out.

It took a while to connect with the nurse in between patients and she said that a mass had been detected on the mammogram and that she wanted to set up a diagnostic mammogram and probably an ultrasound. She called back a short time later to tell me that she was able to get me into Piedmont Hospital in Jasper the next morning instead of waiting a few days to get into the clinics schedule in Ellijay. Again I stayed calm…denial is such a powerful tool to stay calm…at least in your waking hours when you can busy yourself…we’re having a bumper crop of baby pine trees this year and I spent the afternoon pulling them out…I pulled out 1,200 in front of the house (really, I did) and that barely made a dent.

After a poor nights sleep, I was at the hospital bright and early for the mammogram. Let me tell you, if you think a regular mammogram is painful…I normally only grimace during a regular mammogram but during the diagnostic one I said OUCH more than once…man…I can still feel the squeeze! Then it was on to the ultrasound. A nice young doctor came in and said my mass looked to be a cyst rather than a tumor (at this point I can now say it like Arnold…tuma). The doctor wasn’t sure if it was a simple cyst or a complex cyst, but either way, he wanted a needle biopsy done. If it wasn’t a simple cyst and it didn’t go away with the needle aspiration then some tests would have to been run on the contents of the cyst. He said to go home and not obsess the cyst, that everything should be fine. And I didn’t obsess. But I did head straight to my doctors office to see about the needle procedure and by the time that I had arrived back in Ellijay, the hospital had faxed the info to the nurse and she had started working on it…she wanted to get me in with the female surgeon. She sent me home and a short time after I arrived the nurse called and said that I could get in the next morning but with a male doctor and it would take a week or so to see the female. I have no problem with male doctors…I’ve only had two female doctors in my 63 years and they weren’t for anything female oriented.

Again, I was at the breast specialist office bright and early but with a better nights sleep. After everything came together and I was on the table, the whole procedure took a minute or even less. In went the needle and away went the cyst. The doctor said I was good to go until my next annual mammogram.

An ironic thing happened that afternoon…I got an email from a dear friend in Wisconsin saying that she got to ring the cancer free bell that morning at the hospital! She has always been faithful about getting her annual mammograms and had to have occasional rechecks and biopsies, but late last year a recheck came back with Stage 1 breast cancer. After the chemo, radiation and some surgery, she is cancer free.

Ladies don’t put off the mammograms no matter how unpleasant!!!!!

On to gardening.....

Since I live in a gated community, we are over run by deer and they eat everything! So....I have rock gardens. This year I went into the woods and gathered moss...it should spread and fill in. I pulled two hundred pine trees out of here.