Have you ever had a post that just doesn't seem to want to get published?
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.
On to gardening.....
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!
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.
None of the rocks in all the pictures are in their original location.
Moss just sort of happens too. That hint of green in the mulch....more pine trees!
If you do put a bush in, you need to cage it until it grows much taller than the deer can stand on their hind legs.
Or, you have to plant something really prickly and painful.
