things you can't blog about

     There is so much you are not supposed to blog about. The other night we were reminiscing about Bear, our beloved dog who died in January. Sometimes he was a real pain. He simply was not interested in pleasing others. It was all me, me, me to that dog. He wasn't one of those dogs who felt guilty or needy or desperate for approval. He was interested in laps, a walk, other dogs' food, and barking. Arghhh, the barking sometimes!
     "'Come?' Hold your damn horses. I'm doing something," he'd say.
     "What a jerk," I muttered, mid-reminiscence. Sometimes he really could be.
     "What a jerk!" echoed Laura. Then: "Don't blog about that, p! Diane reads your blog and she and Dan loved their dog. And they loved Bear. She'd be mortified."
     "What?! Diane knows Bear could be a jerk. You can grieve someone's absence and still remember their character flaws."
     "Still. People don't understand things like that. Once a dog is gone, you're supposed to remember him as a good dog, I think."
     "Really? Not Bear. Not yet, anyway. He could be an asshole."
     "It's true. Such an asshole."

     I figured I'd lead you gently into truly off-limits blogging territory -- by first confessing to the no-no of judging the deceased. I'm embarrassed that I have been critical of Bear's personality, if that helps. And to use such a bad word! As someone who tends to say, "Jiminy Cricket!" instead of its many alternatives, I am embarrassed to have it in plain text that I sometimes speak less delicately.
     Anyway, here's what else you can't blog about, and it's ever-so-slightly more taboo than using a bad word to judge your dead dog: your (my) remaining genitalia.
     These days, with the BRCA2 mutation, I have doctor's appointments more often than most women shave their legs. Well, most Chinese women. More often than I shave my legs, anyway. Let's just say I have a lot of appointments.
     Last year I switched to a new gynecologist. I left my previous one because I felt like I was invisible to her -- especially when I got cancer. Cancer makes you choosier in lots of ways.
     This new ob-gyn walks around in stiletto heels -- not a point in her favor when I first met her, but neither is it a meaningful point against. If stilettos help you feel better about peering into vaginas and palpating breasts all day, more power to you, say I.
     "Careful in there," I ask. "I've been downsized. I think some of the stitches didn't dissolve."
     "How can you tell?"
     Here I want you to imagine a brief silence.
     "I can feel them."
     "How?"
     Here I want you to imagine a long silence.
     "I...felt them. You want to check out the basement once it's been renovated, you know."
     She goes in. I hear her stilettos clicking around as she pushes around the light, the speculum, the furniture in the basement. Tock tock tock tock. Tock....tock.
     "Hmm. Those aren't stitches. That's scar tissue." Here she draws me a diagram; a real keeper.

     My favorite part of this diagram is the eyes that are looking into the vagina. See them there on the bottom? No, not on the bottom; haven't you taken human biology? The bottom of the page. Those are eyes, plus eyebrows that are zigzag with keen interest. The eyes are looking in, a little close up for my liking, and they're thinking "Hmm." On the left is a potato, which is what the vagina looks like once you are standing in there, I guess. Those hatch marks are stitches, I think. Pay no attention to the canal in the middle of the page; that goes back to what I called our beloved dead dog.
     "So the scar tissue has just kind of sealed you up a bit. Sometimes that happens," she says with an affable shrug. She seems very proud of her drawing, like this is the part of being a gynecologist that she really likes. Then she says:
     "If you were still using your vagina, we could do something about it. But as it is, we can just let it go."
     Case closed, apparently -- and vagina, too. Weeks later, I still shake my head (see diagram for general location) at her cheeky assumption.