WTF, Houston?

Remember the heat compresses that were supposed to draw out the fluid in my left breast area? It drew them out, all right, and here is a photo of the resulting blister, next to an adult male bear for scale. The blister is a whopper, and Laura and I did an impromptu freak out dance when I undressed last night and saw this staring back. I imagine when I send this to Evelyn, our RN lifeline at the doctor's office, they'll want to get out more fluid today. I will want to get it out.

This drive to get out foreign bodies has to be an evolutionary thing -- my favorite theory to try on for any given phenomenon. That person who pushes in line? Okay, maybe her ancestors got to the rabbit carcass (see the need for one in entry entitled "kind of a bust") first, but the stress did them in later, and they were discussed judgmentally around that evening's fire. Maybe even ostracized and left behind on a successful hunt. Upshot? Pushing in line is bad for the gene pool.

But I am sure that needing to get out foreign objects is adaptive, overall. This brings to mind the time T'ai had a tick on his penis. He was about 3, young enough to still need a hoist onto the toilet at the Route 84 rest stop we were visiting. I spotted the tick. "Oh," I said, as calmly as possible. "You have a tick on your penis." T'ai went wide-eyed and said, in one of those sing-song and panicky tones, "get it off, mom!" So, that's pretty young: 3. To be wired to go wide-eyed and say "get it off!" That's evolution doing its thing.

I think the cave dwellers who looked down while doing their business at a rest stop, saw a tick on their privates and thought, "huh. look at that," then kept on peeing or whatever, have not done so well. Sure, a few of their descendants have made it through time, but they have something sticking out of their nose at a party, and the evolutionary writing is on the wall.

I had some worries that people would think I had done something pretty drastic in getting the double mastectomy. I don't have that worry now. I want to be as aggressive as possible with this cancer, and I think I scored convincing points with the first step of the surgery. Today's small job is to get this fluid out, but it's all connected. It's an evolutionary thang. Yeah, yeah, I've already reproduced and my offspring are successfully wired to get ticks off asap, but still. I'm a product of the ancestors who did a brief freak out dance, then plucked out the foreign object. For my part, the boobs had to go.