Hi everyone!

I've been immersed in politics for the past two weeks because of my job. And yes! I am very, very excited the conventions are ending tonight! For even though I'm very passionate about my politics (I apologize if you read my Twitter feed or its flowthrough to Facebook), I grow weary, too. It's all so big and so hard and what the hell, those numbers have more zeroes than my daughter has toes.

Part of what I've been doing this week is sitting on Twitter to see what people are saying about this or that. And so, this afternoon/evening, I found out two of my bloggy friends are doing some very cool stuff.

If you're sick of politics, why not go fight cancer with Charlie at How to Be a Dad or fight hunger with Mr Lady at Whiskey in My Sippy Cup?

Why not, indeed?

DJ Nibbles Celebates Helping People

I was talking on the phone to my best friend when it happened. We were chatting about swimming pools and barbecues as my family hurtled along I-35 toward Des Moines.

The little SUV two cars ahead of us swerved and rolled, ending up in the ditch, two of its wheels straight, two bent, the back windows blown out.

Three cars stopped, including us. I hadn't been paying attention when it happened, just heard Beloved mumbling and noticed our rapid slowing. "I've got to go," I told Steph. "I think I need to call 911."

Beloved and I were not thinking clearly -- neither of us took the little angel, who was still in the back seat. I was on the phone with the 911 dispatcher, no idea if the man driving the car was hurt or not, just wanting some authority figure to show up as soon as possible. They asked where we were. I thought we were in Missouri still, but we'd passed over the state line and were near Lamoni. I ran back to the closest sign, but it was a rest area sign, not a mile marker sign. I really had no idea where we were. I tried to use the GPS on my phone, but it wouldn't leave the screen I was on since it was an emergency call.

Finally, we figured out where we were with Garmina in our car. The little angel had gotten out of our car and crawled down to my husband, who stood talking to the man in wet shorts with a cell phone pressed to his head and shaking hands. I tried to get the man to sit down, but he kept talking about how his wife and 19-year-old daughter had flown to Minnesota and he was driving the car up from Houston to meet them because his daughter needed the car for her vacation because she was too young to drive a rental. His face fell. "I've ruined everything! I've ruined her vacation!" he moaned, his hands still shaking.

"I'm sure she won't care. She'll be happy you're okay," I said, trying to calm him down.

"Oh, I don't know. There's stuff she needs in this car. She's nineteen."

"Even a nineteen-year-old will be relieved her father isn't hurt after rolling his car," I said. "Please sit down. Please don't worry."

He wouldn't sit down.

A Lamoni police officer arrived and said an ambulance was on the way. The man seemed okay, but I think he was a little bit in shock. I worried about his neck. 

The first car had left after we assured them we would stay with the man. The second car was a woman driving to Wisconsin to see her daughter dance in a competition. She was from a little town in Missouri just down the road from us. The Lamoni cop said he would question her, since she had been directly behind the man. He said we could go. I kind of wanted to hug the man and the woman, but it would've been weird. I wish now I'd hugged the man.

The man kept thanking us, but I felt bad leaving him there, all alone, states away from his wife and daughter with a totaled car and maybe some sort of injury. But the woman had searched through the grass and found his cell phone, and he'd talked to his wife. The woman told the wife her husband had been in an accident.

"Can you imagine it?" Beloved said as we got back on the road to head to my parents-in-law's house. "Getting the call from a total stranger?"

Oh, of course I can. I catastrophize about everything.

I've thought about the man several times since then. It's a miracle of car safety technology and smart people who wear seatbelts that he was as unscathed as he seemed. It seems unbelievable you can roll a car at highway speed and come out of it with nothing more than a pair of wet shorts. But I did the exact same thing when I was 14 driving on a school permit, except instead of a complete roll I was stopped by a fence post and ended up hanging from the ceiling by my seatbelt.

Every day is a gamble and a gift.

My brain is easily led to intrusive thinking. In the past, this has led me to restrict my eating, to exercise obsessively, to spend hours Googling sleep solutions for my toddler, to become obsessed with sunscreen for my daughter, to worry about the health and well being of my family. When I was a kid, I would become obsessed with the idea of my house burning down during fire safety week and couldn't go to sleep until I had mapped out exactly how I would escape my burning home with all my stuffed animals even though my window opened directly onto the earth.

When my daughter was a baby, we lived in an eighty-year-old home with huge wall grates. The holes in the grates were decorative and large enough for, say, a snake to climb through. So I became obsessed with the idea that a snake would get into our leaky, stone basement and somehow find its way straight up through the grate and up my daughter's crib. I thought about this a lot.

In my first apartment in Kansas City, I became so obsessed with the idea of someone climbing in through my first-floor window I nailed the windows shut. A fire hazard, for sure. But I couldn't sleep until I did it.

I'm a lock-checker, a make-sure-the-oven-is-off fretter. I've been known to turn around five miles from home to make sure I shut the garage door.

The bat thing was funny until someone pointed out my husband could've been bitten by the bat and not even know it. Then I made the mistake of looking up rabies and found it is fatal in humans if not treated immediately. I made Beloved call urgent care to see if they thought he should get rabies shots. They said no. He is not about to do it anyway.

I have thought of nothing but rabies for the past three days, of him dying two months from now and leaving me and the little angel all alone. 

I know these are intrusive thoughts. He was not bitten, he swears he didn't touch the bat, and I believe him. He is not an idiot. He swatted it down with a broom, stunned it, captured it under the broom and got it between the broom the bag without touching it. I believe him.

I've got to stop thinking about him dying.

These are intrusive thoughts, and when I think of them, I can feel the adrenaline downloading into my bloodstream as it is this very minute. My heart is pounding, I'm breathing shallowly and I feel like I might throw up. 

My daughter is watching Veggie Tales in the next room and I have work deadlines. I have no room in my life for intrusive thoughts. 

There. I just took a deep breath.

Last night, I had a dream about having to cross five train tracks set very close together and traversed by high-speed trains that came within seconds of each other. You had to memorize the patterns in order to cross the tracks safely. I was sitting on what I thought was the ground before the tracks and someone turned a light on and I discovered I'd been sitting on a set of hidden tracks. I backed up and made it across, carrying my daughter, who was a toddler squalling to be let down.

That's what anxiety feels like, actually.

The anxiety operates the trains I'm constantly worrying about. They're not ghost trains -- there's plenty in life that can go wrong. Sometimes I think people with anxiety are actually just pragmatic realists -- you could die from just about anything. Thankfully most of the time, we don't, but it's true, you could. It's far better to operate under the illusion that nothing bad will happen -- that you'll get through the entire day safely and in one piece, because ironically, the more you worry about bad things happening, the more likely you'll make a dumb decision thinking it will make things better and actually endanger yourself in some other way than the danger you were trying to avoid in the first place. The fact Keith Richards is still alive proves God protects fools and children.

It's true my husband could've been bitten by a bat and not know it and end up foaming and leaving me a widow by the time my daughter enters third grade. The man drives 1500 miles a week -- it's far more likely he'll get plowed by a semi or choke eating a cheeseburger in the car. If I allow myself to think of everything that could happen to him, or my daughter or anyone I love, I'll spend my life rocking and crying.

I refuse to live that way.

Intrusive thoughts can be paralyzing. I'm forcing them out now, because I have no control, really, over when my cards or anyone's cards get drawn. Bad things can and will happen in the course of my life, because that's life -- the bad comes with the good -- and it does no good to anticipate everything horrible that could happen. Anticipating those things will most likely cause stress hormones to clog my arteries and overtax my heart, lower my immune system and perhaps bring on a terminal disease.

In the end, it's probably safer to fiddle dee dee and go look at talking animals on the Internet.

Just not talking bats.

My doctor told me I should do yoga for my upper back pain. She told me this on the same day that she gave me a referral to a surgeon and a gastro doctor. Me not really being the yoga type, I bought Jillian Michael's version. It's a half hour of teeth-gnashing, panting hell, and that is the beginner version. For someone who has been lifting weights for the past fifteen years, Jillian Michaels can be quite humbling.

I had to take about two weeks off from Jillian due to the incisions in my leg. Of all things exercise, I was most concerned yoga would actually stretch the areas so much it would cause problems, so I waited until it was way healed before I tried it again ... yesterday.

I did not realize you could lose muscle strength so damn fast. I took five days off after my surgery before walking a few miles. The minute my surgeon cleared me after ten days, I went back to weighted squats and all that jazz with The Firm. I didn't expect any problems from Jillian, other than you know, her being JILLIAN.

As I was attempting not to fall off my hands during the side planks, the little angel walked over to me. She sniffed and stared at the sweat rolling off my red face as I sucked in air like a vacuum cleaner.

"You know, Mommy," she said. "It's a choice to do that to yourself."

I started laughing so hard I did fall. Off my pride. Ouch.

I'm not going to go into details, people, don't worry. But many commenters mentioned having tummy problems often amped by anxiety, and I've had really bad tummy problems for the past several years. Two years ago, I got a colonoscopy and we never quite solved them (but at least I know I don't have Crohn's or celiac disease or colon cancer, at least I didn't two years ago). 

Around the time I told my primary care doctor about The Lump (cue DJ Nibbles!), I told her about my tummy problems and she sent me to another gastro doc. The man was wearing a full-on, two-piece, blue-and-white pinstriped seersucker suit. With a bright blue tie. He reminded me of Bert Cooper on Mad Men.

His suit looked like this, only imagine it on a man of about 50 with little round glasses.

The suit was so distracting I nearly couldn't describe my symptoms.

So as I told him, yes, this problem is worst in the morning and it happens right after I eat anything and yes, it's really interfering with my life. He listened and started spouting something I totally didn't understand about bile malabsorption, which is a totally nonthreatening and mostly annoying problem that happens when some bile doesn't get absorbed in the small intestine (natch) and goes shooting into the large intestine, where it is the equivalent of Mentos in Diet Coke.

Guess how they treat it? CHOLESTEROL PILLS! Of course!

Don't ask me. SCIENCE.

So I have these four huge horse pills that I take each day, and I can't take them at the same time as my other meds because of ABSORPTION, so now I have to go buy a BIGGER daily pill pack thing because I swear I can never remember if I took the blasted things or not and I don't want to be the writer who dies from cholesterol pill overdose. I haven't even published my damn novel yet.

But ... so far it's working. It's not a perfect solve yet, but I just went jogging without fear. And that, my friends, is worth seersucker any day. So if you're having chronic tummy problems, don't give up. It might be as simple as ABSORPTION.

Hello, friends. I'd like to introduce you to a new character at Surrender, Dorothy. Meet DJ Nibbles.

The little angel introduced me to DJ Nibbles last night when she was getting ready for her bath. He was rocking it old school on the manual turntable/hipster baby belt buckle I got when I used to review stuff for the ever-fabulous Liz and Kristen at Cool Mom Picks.

DJ Nibbles didn't even know what he was excited about last night, but he knew it was going to be big enough to bring back-up dancers.

Would you like to hear why DJ Nibbles is excited? He's excited today because it's my sister's 35th birthday, because it's the little angel's last day of second grade and because the pathology report says The Lump is BENIGN, baby. Which is good because I couldn't handle one more day of wondering if I was going to have to reschedule summer plans around my chemotherapy. 

It may happen someday. BUT TODAY IS NOT THAT DAY.

What is DJ Nibbles celebrating for you today?

I feel ... pummeled. I went back to work too soon on Friday, still high from hydrocodone, glued together, sore. Ma and Pa left for home on Friday, then I realized I needed them to come back because Beloved had to make a last-minute trip. They turned around and came back, bless my wonderful parents. It got better, then it got worse, then it got better, then it got worse. This morning I had pain of a new kind, a more normal kind, but pain all the same. I hobbled downstairs at six to get ibuprofin then back to bed to apply counter-pressure and wait the twenty minutes for the Advil to kick in so I could stop moaning and get out of bed, because today is Monday and I need to go back to work and Beloved has another two-day trip. The poor guy stood there this morning no doubt wondering if I would indeed get out of bed and get the little angel on the bus and go to work or if I would just lie there and moan all day. I admit I was wondering, too.

I don't find out what was in my leg until a week from today. Until then, I'm not supposed to exercise, which I shouldn't want to do because it would hurt and might tear the glue and stitches, but that is how I regulate my anxiety easier. 

So I'm sort of sitting here looking at this list of shit I have to do and giving myself the best pep talk I can, because there is no one else here to do this life for me. I want nothing more than to lie down and dissolve into a puddle of needs, because there is nothing like having the guy in the coffee shop ask you if you got bit by a spider while gesturing to the black bruise on your hand and having to tell him, no, that was just where they put the IV two days ago to make you feel old and tired and sore. It wasn't major surgery, but the in and out and the forced ejection back into normal life before the shock even wore off has spun me around and left me wandering, disoriented, through my house, wondering if the cat has been fed. 

I don't want to push off the little angel, who wants to have all her friends over tonight for a Play-Dough party in the driveway. I will let her have it, of course, but there is a huge part of me that would prefer to scream FUCK PLAY-DOUGH. LIFE, PLEASE JUST STOP AND LET ME CATCH UP, THANK YOU. 

I know the truth is that I'm just allowing myself to have these few minutes wallowing in my pity party because I'll hit publish and open my email and dry my tears and maybe go take a shower so I don't feel like such a worthless blob and try to find some pants that don't squeeze my incisions and figure out how to haul myself through today and tonight and tomorrow when I have another doctor appointment to try to figure out what's been going on with my gut for the past three years. 

I feel so old and so tired today. Accomplishing something will probably help a lot. God, I can't even stand to read my own writing, I sound so whiny.

I first felt it when I was pregnant with the little angel. I got scared, even though I know legs are often filled with random lumps that mean nothing, because my mother found lumps in her leg twice when I was just a little older than the little angel, and those lumps turned into years of fear, chemo, radiation, vomiting, pain and shuttling back and forth between friends and relatives.

I went to the dermatologist then. I was hugely pregnant. Because of its location on my thigh, the nurse told me to depants and sit on the chair. So I did, feeling vulnerable and exposed, for an hour and a half while I waited for someone to see me. When the doctor finally arrived, he poked at my leg, told me it was nothing and smirked at me. I started crying and insisted he take a baseline, which he did, but I never went back or called him again, because I was so mortified at the experience.

So then I tried to ignore it, because it's nothing.

This past winter, I was doing one of my aerobics DVDs when I had to do a weighted squat and tap my elbows on my thighs, and I happened to hit The Lump. And it HURT! I felt it and it was noticeably bigger than it had been before. 

For months, I would feel it in the shower. I noticed another one that kind of hurt near my knee, but it felt different. I worried.

Finally, over Easter, my family convinced me to go to my doctor with my laundry list of minor complaints. My gastro problems. My neck and back pain. And The Lump.

My doctor took them all seriously. She felt The Lump and sent me to get an ultrasound, where I saw The Lump. The ultrasound tech said it looked normal. My doctor said based on my family history and the fact that it was growing, she wanted it out.

Yesterday, I went to see the surgeon. I had to explain my life history to the med student -- the past surgeries, the eating disorder, the anxiety, the gastro problems. I had to take my pants off and I had to wait an hour for the doctor to come see me. When he did, he explained that cancer of this type is very very very very very very rare and the fact that I had someone in my family with it made it just very very rare. 

Then he told me BUT he had a friend who'd had a lump at a lipo incision and it turned out to be some other very very very very rare and bizarre form of cancer and she'd had to get chemo and radiation and the whole nine yards. I think he was trying to help me justify the expense and inconvenience of removing something that was probably nothing, but instead he just freaked me out even worse, which isn't hard when something very very very very very rare has already happened to your mother TWICE.

Fuck your very very rare.

So then he asked me what I wanted to do. And I said "I've been worrying about this for nine years. Get it out of me." And as I said it, I realized I was going to start crying again, thus completing the humiliating flashback to pregnancy. All three of them -- the doctor, the nurse and the med student, watched me try to make it through the doctor explaining what would happen next without letting the tears actually fall off my eyelashes. I made it to the last sentence, and then I couldn't contain them any more. 

Nobody said anything. The nurse handed me a box of tissues and they all filed out the door. I wondered what they were saying about me in the hall, because I've been listening to med students whose voices are louder than they think discuss whether my problems are serious a lot in these past few weeks. 

It's pretty awful.

But I'm getting The Lump taken out, because it's growing and it hurts and the little angel is almost the age that I was when I found out my life was going to get derailed for a few years. Now on the other side of things, I know I would probably handle cancer even worse with an existing anxiety disorder and no family in town to shuttle to. I've been kind of a shitty mom in the past few weeks anyway what with trying to handle adjustments at work and Beloved being on the road and the little angel and me getting sick for a week. I've yelled more than usual. I've looked up from email and realized I didn't know which yard she was playing in. I've made dinner late and it hasn't contained vegetables. I've gone in to check on her after she went to bed and realized I hadn't said I love you that day. 

I'm sad and I'm scared and I want it out. So it's coming out in two weeks.

I have to go to the doctor today. The surgeon, actually. I might post later. I might not. It's nothing serious, I don't think. I hope. I'll feel better once I know more.

Since I'm not feeling chatty, I finally put up my Get Moooooving gift pack giveaway on Surrender, Dorothy: Reviews. Hint: contains Cuisinart and iTunes, get on over there.