fred_mouse

last update was 25th March and I'm not going to attempt to remember everything done.

Healing: nipple is still very sore, still using the rubber (teething) rings inside my bra to keep the fabric off it (it is still noticeably swollen compared to the other). The rest of the skin has healed, and I think I've finally finished peeling. Most of my armpit is bald, which as a texture experience feels different from having shaved. I continue to have reasonable and exhausted days and have not correctly balanced how much I can get away with doing.

study: I've got lots of good books that meet my criteria, and I've been poking through them. Other parts of the project are going slower. I am frustrated by my inability to buckle down on one, but I am also aware that I'm working through the tasks that I said I was going to need to do to do it properly. I got an email from the ethics board about corrections, so that will be Monday's task.

weather: there has been a startling amount of rain. There was a cyclone that didn't get this far south, but did push a front through. Jandakot recorded 77.4mm on one day, which is a 51 year maximum for March*, and a total of 87.6mm in the five days of rain. Plus we got 16.2mm to 9amm Wednesday, and 6.8 mm to 9am this morning.

music: I missed the last rehearsals of term for the Monday night group, and that goes back this coming week. I have not practiced anything, not least because bowing was painful for a while. I have made it to two of the Wednesday night rehearsals - one to discover it was the end of term open practice / concert, and one where it was a greatest hits and I didn't get access to the music before the rehearsal, and so sight read everything (I did try a practice on the night before). I failed to go to the sunday recorder group last weekend because apparently when I updated my calendar to the new alternating fortnight I didn't do it right, and I'd been successfully doing it from memory up until now.

con: we are at not enough week's before the con. I have been dropping the ball more than I like and I have to find a solution. I have one I would like, but I don't know whether anyone will take it on. We have some fabulous guests. Plus we have both GUFF and DUFF winners attending. I know Farah Mendelsohn is one, but I can't pull the name of the other out of my head. I'm presenting in the academic stream, and at this point I don't have enough to say. argh.

*I use an aggregator site for my rain information, rather than the BOM, so they are going off their data set; they claim this as 'probably a record maximum'. They report 17.0mm as the March average (1973-2026), the previous monthly maximum as 83.6mm in 1992, and the previous daily maximum as 37.8mm, also in 1992. At the opposite end, 2011 had no rain in March -- that would be the year of the big hail storm, if I remember correctly.

• two more radiation treatments to go; I have a mild (and itchy) looks-like-sunburn across a roughly 20cm square running between my armpit and my midline
• the new medication I'm supposed to start after radiation is back ordered until May. need to contact the specialist on monday
• general body health alternating between 'ow' and 'fatigue'. but i'm getting some stuff done
• mental health - struggling with the cognitive load of daily treatments, but mostly chill.
• i have started the 'reading fiction' part of my project; the first book has a lot of details, but suffers from coming out in 2020 and thus is showing a lot of the pre chatgpt tropes surrounding AI
• I am knitting a tiny fifth doctor scarf as a decorative item; it is getting less and less accurate to the pattern as I go on. I only have six of the seven colours....
• reading? not much.
• walking home from the hospital? did it the once. have not had the spoons since. have been using the cane more than some.
• other exercise? bugger all.
• garden: birds have eaten all but one pomegranate. hoping that one gets ripe enough. guava are ~2cm across; I thought i had done a good job of thinning, but nope. have not thinned the feijoa even that much so argh.
• family: youngest has a job contract signed; to be starting in ?august.

not much in the way of medical TMI this time, but still, content note for cancer treatment details.

• Healing (external) looking good. The scar is as long as my little finger, and quite dark (almost like a lightly faded black permanent marker). It is no longer raised or itchy. Little bit red either side, possibly because it is difficult to get the breast in a position to see the scar, and it means I was pulling on the skin. I continue treating with the scar therapy gel, in hopes that that decreases my chance of it going stiff (I have a history of cheloid scarring on my knee, which the doctor that did the surgical tidy up of the scar attributed to issues with the original stitching / treatment)
• Internally I'm assuming there is still a bit of healing to go because there is infrequent discomfort, mostly if I end up in an odd position and the breast is not supported. Also noticeable last night while chopping veggies, so I may need to look at what is wrong with my posture there.
• I'm still wearing the surgical recovery bras; I've now moved to not using them at night because my skin was getting quite irritated under the band. Of the four I started with, I have misplaced the good one, and one is a size too large. Fortunately, I have found an old sports bra which is appropriately soft and has no underwire to wear while the two are in the wash. A couple of times I have tried wearing one of my usual, which I think of as soft, but have underwire; in each case the surgical area has become noticeably sore. I'll keep doing that every few weeks until it isn't an issue, then transition back to my usual bras. I have decided against going to the specialist bra shop to get more, mostly because I don't have the necessary time + energy.
• radiation: appointment one with the radiologist, who was all 'this is your choice, ...' and then gave info that summed up approximately to 'given your age/situation, I'd do it anyway'. Also implied, I think, was the fact that there were cancerous cells further from the cancer site ('the margins'), necessitating the second surgery; my take from that is that it was moving quickly. Thus I am skipping over the expensive test and going straight to radiation. I think if the cancer site had been elsewhere in the body, it might be different, although I did not get a feel for which way the likelihood went. But being in the breast duct, there is a lot of potential for cancer cells to have moved a long way and be starting up again. Thus, radiation of the whole breast.
• Appointment two with the radiologist is Monday. They can treat me at the local public hospital (literally next door to the private one I had the first surgery at). It will be three weeks, multiple sessions. Likely noticeable side-effects are sun-burn like sensation and some other minor discomfort. Slight change in the breast tissue (ongoing) may occur, so it might feel different to the other, but as it already does, eh. And there is a slight chance that a small bit of the lungs behind will be damaged, but in a way that I am not likely to perceive.

I am a little bemused to discover that it is more than a week since I last posted. I am entirely failing to work out what has been going on. Surgery recovery seems to be going better than the first time, although there might be some contribution from the fact that staying nearly flat on my back is the best way to not irritate the pulled shoulder muscle.

The last two days have been having Weather! with yesterday's temperature (in the city, so 15km north) peaking at 43°C. Today is quite mellow; it is currently 20°C and I'm resenting the breeze for not being warm enough. We have, however, swapped the warm quilt/doona for the very thin one made by Artisanat's mother.

There are fires, with friends currently hosting parents who have been evacuated (D&F, D's parents, I believe). The gold mine at Boddington is listed as on fire. I am choosing to not go down the rabbit hole of working out what that means, although I suspect it is actually bushland on the same site that is on fire.

Youngest finished up their internship on Friday last week, and is beyond bored. Fortunately, they are reasonably good at keeping themself amused (although, if it weren't that all retail and hospitality work is already grabbed for the season and winding down, I suspect they would be out there trying to get another job).

I have been working on two low energy tasks - digital decluttering, and finishing books. Over in the Discord for the Habitica Book Club, I signed up for a bingo card with 16 books that I have abandoned ('paused') over the last however long. The challenge runs December/January, and I've finished three and progressed two. Which isn't really as much as I would like, but is well within the goal of 'make progress'. I probably won't get around to writing those up, and I'm kind of okay about that.

I do have a stack of other notes that might get turned into blog posts at some point, but I'm very much allowing life to just happen, and if the enthusiasm hits, that is a win.

As for uni: I took this week off entirely as recovery / summer break, and I'll go back (work from home) on Monday. I have to have a stack of my ethics application done by mid-January, and before that can be written I need to have a solid theoretical framework for what questions I want to ask. Which means reading about 50 papers next week ('reading').

Craft wise I have abandoned hope on getting Eldest's quilt top done by the end of the year. Not being allowed to do much with the right arm and having upset the shoulder has meant that sewing has been Too Hard. I do have thoughts about just getting the pieces cut though, and maybe I'll do that this evening.

• surgical recovery continues apace. The incision has mostly healed, although the knot of dissolving stitches at one end got caught when I was trying to clean it and pulled it slightly open, so I've now cut off the knot, put a fancy steri-strip over it to hold it together, and a little circular sticking plaster over that. Internals still noticeably sore, externals are itchy; have been putting 'scar therapy gel' on which seems to help (it was in the cupboard; I do not know what any of the ingredients are). I see the surgeon on Tuesday for follow up.
• reviewers comments for my candidacy proposal are in (received late on Friday). I'm not actually sure what the next step is -- I'll work it out tomorrow. I think it said 'no edits' which is a surprise, given that I have been reading and annotating weekly since submitting, and there are a lot of 'this could be clearer' and 'what did you mean here?' notes. Also, I found another answer to one of the reviewers questions from the presentation about why books and not films/tv, which is that I'm hoping to get a wider range of cultural influences (and I have a paper from Italy in which almost all of the TV/movies that the kids reported was from the USA, which very much supports my 'this would be an issue' argument)
• there was an HDR and supervisors lunch run by the school I'm in on Monday. This was very interesting and I met a lot of people. Including one who I was unsurprised to discover is an acquaintance of Youngest. Very queer (not very surprising) and neurodiverse (should not have been surprising) bunch that I met.
• weather has been Warm. To the point that artisanat has been volunteering to put the air-con on.
• There have been some changes to the mix of South Asian grocers on High Road. One of the two north of Bunnings has gone (and the one still there no longer stocks palak paneer in their shelf-stable preprepared meals; not the regular nor the tofu/vegan option. They do, however, still have some vegan options). There is a new one that is further south than the ones I was aware of -- nearly to where the petrol station is. To the point that it is still so new that not all the shelves are stocked; we couldn't find the box meals there at all, but we had to rush because we ran out of time. Thus there are still three that I'm aware of.
• Monday's rehearsal I went with the intention to play pizzicato, which was mostly fine, but I got there to discover the C string broken (spare was at home) so had to transpose some of the work up an octave, which ah, that needs practice. As does one of the sections we hadn't got to that I'd failed to realise has a lot of fast notes.
• craft has stalled
• reading - one of these week's I'll get around to doing another reading post. Over on the Book Club of Habitica Discord I've joined the TBR Bingo challenge for Dec/Jan and set myself a bingo card of 16 books from my 'paused' list. So far, I've finished 1, which is progress but not as fast as I want.

PSA: everyone please remember to do your breast self-examinations. This is absolutely a half-arsed is better than can't be arsed situation.

Earlier this year a friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. So far so good, chemo seems to have done its job, etc etc.

It made me realise I wasn't reliably doing my breast self-exams post endometrial ablation, because I no longer have a menstrual cycle to remind me. And so I've been doing them somewhat regularly, possibly more often than once a month, because more frequent is better than less, and time is a slippery concept. Also, my breasts never ceased to be lumpy post teen years, and I'm never entirely sure that I'll remember what the lumps feel like, so more frequently is better for me. I'm aware that my breasts get more tender cyclically. However, the left one became continuously sore on the outside edge and into the arm pit, so I raised it with my doctor, who sent me for mammogram and ultrasound. Which was this morning.

Surprisingly, the medicos were not concerned about the left breast. I was called back for additional imaging on the mammogram for the right breast. And then there were a lot more images taken of the right with the ultrasound, and the sonographer went and got the radiographer to declare if they wanted more done. The upshot is that I have something that wasn't there on the previous scan. They were discussing wait six months and rescan vs biopsy; I made a flippant comment about also having had a benign nodule in a lung, and one about how bright the bit on the image looked. One of those two things flipped the radiographer to 'right, biopsy, get a referral from your doctor'.

This is on the side I'm not feeling anything wrong at all. Which is why the reminder: keep checking for these things.

Also, I'm having at least a mental health half day, because the idea of reading about imaginaries of genAI is Too Much.

Backdated entry

Three of us got our annual flu vax today; this was slightly less organised than it might have been, and if I'd realised that the web page wasn't going to send the bookings through correctly (we got our confirmation SMSes after we got home) then I might have just tried walk-in (which the sign out the front says they are doing). Very much appreciate that for this month and next flu vax is free for everyone so we don't have to do the 'who is covered' thing. Reminder for Aussies -- flu vax! Get one if you haven't!

addendum Youngest attempted the walk in option, it was even less organised, which I didn't realise was possible.

In an encapsulation of how I feel my week is going - today I cut myself with a fork. Which is one up from the acquaintance who managed to cut themself with a spoon. Twice. But still, it is a thing that happened.

(yes, I am fulling expecting people will laugh at this. It is ludicrous).

• many moons back I requested suggestions on published romance that might be of interested given that a) I quite like romance in fanfic, and b) I've bounced off most of the romance I've organically encountered. I refound the list, and from alexseanchai's suggestion have followed up Courtney Milan - there is a three book series available from Libby, so I've borrowed the first one. Now to see whether I like it any better (The Duchess War)
• Parkrun achieved! Walked 1km in <10 mins, alternated run/walk in the second km (average 8.5 mins / km); walked the third, ran tiny bits of the fourth, walked the fifth except for trying to run the last ~100m (actually achieved the last 20m, and about 15m of the rest).
• expedition to Cockburn to the Jeans West to see if we could acquire good jeans before they close all their stores (expected time frame: 8 weeks). Sadly, the styles have changed, and nothing looks good on me. The least worst was a size ten (most everything I tried was a twelve, so I am bemused; I am an eleven, but nothing I liked had odd sizing), but it was also $100. There was also a pair of green capri pants I liked at $30 but were $70. So, I won't be as sad to see them go as I was expecting. However, if I find myself in the centre again, I'll check whether they have any decent sale prices (everything I looked at was full price. Youngest complained that everything that looked like suitable shorts turn out to be skirts).
• had lunch at Health Freak, I struggled to find something I wanted to eat on the menu, and Youngest didn't find anything (Eldest was busy, so it was the three of us).
• body threw a wobbly, and I spent all afternoon managing symptoms, including slightly elevated temp, headache, nausea. Cancelled on Middlest and chaosmanor coming over, which was the right choice. Second attempt at napping worked; had to do the hot shower thing first. Youngest made dinner, which was much appreciated.
• listlessly reading Stuff! on the internet, with little focus, but it is too early to attempt sleeping (I have, however, taken a melatonin, in the hope that it will help when I run out of steam).

Spent a bit of time yesterday talking about shoulder flexibility with the offspring. And it turns out that yes, both Eldest and Youngest can scratch the bit of back that I have issues with, and that Artisanat is repeatedly bemused that I want scratched, because I should be able to reach it.

And then Youngest was 'left hand is fine, right I struggle with a bit' (although they can still do it, just not as effortlessly) and it turns out that yes, I can scratch it with the left hand. It just isn't one of my left handed behaviours. And, if I think about it very very carefully, I can get to it with the right hand, but ah, it pulls unpleasantly. I think this might be a long term consequence of whatever it was I did to my shoulder when I was 20 (I was nightclubbing; the next morning I could barely move it; I had no memory of a fall or a jar; I was entirely sober).

So, what I'm learning from that is that I need to do more shoulder flexibility Stuff.

Also, Eldest, the one who doesn't look hypermobile, can both join their hands between their shoulder blades (one down from the top and one from below), but can still (almost?) do the trick where one then brings the arms up over the head and to the front. I can barely touch finger tips in that position with either hand at the top, and in both cases the right shoulder hurts. So, if I ever get back to seeing a physio, I'll go back to 'the shoulder is the thing I need help with'.