I used to have a ceramic cupcake. My sister and I got in the habit of putting our worries in the cupcake and, you know, letting the cupcake deal with it. I gave my cupcake to my girl when she needed it, so Sister Little just sent me this new one.

I put cancer in it.

Tomorrow I get measured so I suppose if I swell or shrink dramatically after surgery they can tell.

Today I went to a big work meeting and didn't tell one person I'm out on Friday to have just a touch of breast cancer removed.

Some of them know. They've been cool. If anything, it's a high level of privacy compared to the culture I used to be in so I float between various ways to interpret the people around me.

So you act like it's nothing at work, so they'll take you seriously (which I very much want), and you minimize it at home so as not to scare your daughter. When do you get to acknowledge it's real? Like OMG the pink ribbon thing happened? I'm going to act like this is totally cool, yo, even though lasers are going to attempt to kill certain cells in my body every day for weeks and I'm going to have to go to work and take care of my kid and deal with my husband's travel like it's business as usual.

The most unfair thing isn't the cancer. It's having to act like I don't care I have cancer.

This week I met with two oncologists: the medical one and the radiology one. The medical one is Russian-American and a petite woman. The radiologist one is American- American and super-tall-big guy who barely seemed to fit in the room and flipped pages and said "nowadays" a lot, like a farmer would.

I don't really understand my hormone receptor results yet, but it seems like hormone-receptor drugs probably won't work for me.

It seems like I'll have higher-dose radiation for 3-4 weeks instead of the 6 I was anticipating.

I'll start radiation after the vacation we planned when I got my job and we thought 2016 was all we had to put behind us.

By August, I should be over this obstacle.

Sometimes I feel like God is plotting my life to make sure it's worth reading, because obstacles make for better books. Or that's my chosen interpretation.

Otherwise, it might seem like a tough row to hoe.

Better to see it as a solid plot.

Next Friday is my lumpectomy. I admit I'm slightly worried about imbalance, because my rack is not all that large. Subtracting a tablespoon could make a difference. But would I really say don't take it out and get clean margins? No.

I feel like a medical specimen and not a woman, I admit. My breast has become a medical ham hock, and I am just attached to it. It was not impressive to begin with, and now it is diseased.

Not really looking forward to any of this but having it over. My friend Ann once gave a speech about her breast cancer being perfectly ordinary, and I get it now. Except for the bizarre and realistic ladder dreams, breast cancer feels like middle school gym class. Smelly and inconvenient and useless to my big picture.

Just get through it.

Onward.

I didn't want to go on a walk after work. I didn't sleep well last night. I have an appointment with my first oncologist tomorrow. I'm scared. Beloved and the little angel made me go.

As we rounded the corner and walked past where the road separates the silt pond from our neighborhood's larger lake, I saw a mama duck standing on the edge of the spillway that dumps overflow from one to the other. She was quacking frantically and staring into the hole.

I made a joke about chatty ducks and we kept going.

Then I turned back, because something about the tone of her quacks was something only a mother can recognize.

"Guys," I said, "I think her ducklings fell down there."

We went walking back, and sure enough, we could hear the ducklings chirping.

I immediately started freaking out. The little angel was very calm, saying something about nature taking its course (who is this kid?) and Beloved dutifully started calling numbers. Because it's apparently Truman Day, he had no luck with the Jackson County sheriff, Lee's Summit Fire, Lee's Summit police, Animal Control or the property owners' association. However, the Lee's Summit police dispatcher kept trying Animal Control, but nobody was home. Finally, she sent us back to LSFD and they said they'd see what they could do.

We hovered on the edge of the lake, watching the mama duck get more and more and more frantic. She flew down into the hole and we watched sadly, knowing ducks don't exactly have talons with which to grab their young.

I was just about to give up when the association truck showed up, assessed the situation, and then left as ... OMG ... yes, that is a huge yellow fire truck, complete with three firemen and all the toys you need to save somebody.

We cheered. And then this happened.

Ten-foot ladder and hero number one.

If you listen, you will hear what sounds like cheeping and a very worried mother duck.

Hero two, complete with badass scuba suit.

Hero three, with a different but equally badass suit.

Our heroes prepare to descend into the spillway to save the frantic ducklings.

Helpful random guy pulls over and offers a winch.

Down they go.

Ten-foot ladder

Looking for a bagful of ducklings.

That is a bagful of ducklings.

Our heroes!

You can just barely see the eleven ducklings inside the bag.

Cheeping all to hell for mama.

Mama duck hears her ducklings and comes running toward the fireman.

She rushes down to the water, quacking to her babies.

Y'all, I was practically bawling at this point.

The first few ducklings hit the water and looked like cartoon roadrunners as they practically tipped over headfirst paddling toward their mama.

Mama duck counts heads. Oh, no! Someone is missing.

The last duckling makes a break for it.

Now that everything's fine, their good-for-nothing father shows up.

Awesome day's work, lads.

Off go mama duck and her eleven ducklings, quacking excitedly to each other.

BEST. WALK. EVER.

Huge props to the Lee's Summit Fire Department and the dispatchers who wouldn't give up on eleven ducklings and one frantic mama duck. Really needed a happy ending today.

It seems like more than one day ago I found out I've been diagnosed with Stage 0 DCIS.

Yesterday, I was all, I can totally handle this. This? This is like nothing. I've always assumed I would get cancer because my mom did and this is the totally easiest cancer. This is going to be fine.

I told people my biggest relief in all this was that I didn't find out I had it when I was unemployed, because my head would've exploded. I am being totally sincere in that. God made the insurance refuse to cover my mammogram until after March 15. I started my job on February 13. That is so not a coincidence.

If I had found this out when I was unemployed, I'm not sure I would be in the same place mentally I am in today. Thank God for small favors, because these calcifications were totally in me a few months ago. I know they were. I just did not, at that time, know they were there.

Tonight I went to see Sheryl Sandberg talk about her new book, OPTION B. It was a good talk and she's an amazing person, but at one point she said, "If you want to shut down a room, just say yesterday you got diagnosed with cancer."

Yesterday I did get diagnosed with cancer.

Of course I started bawling there in Unity Temple.

And of course people came up during the question and answer period with stories so much more horrific than mine that I felt bad, but we've all been down the road of the Suffering Olympics and know they don't give out medals at the end. My suffering is mine and yours is yours and the poor pregnant woman whose five-year-old had died of cancer LAST MONTH WHILE SHE WAS PREGNANT CAN YOU EVEN IMAGINE has hers. All we can do is lift each other up.

The thing I didn't realize that I'm sure other people do is when you tell a bunch of people who care about you something scary and dangerous has happened, the response can be a little overwhelming. I have always adored people paying attention to me for good things, but I'm finding it extremely uncomfortable to have them pay attention to me for bad things. That is super interesting to me. I wonder why that is? It probably means I'm really arrogant and don't want anyone to think I'm weak or something for having like ductal carcinoma in situ with necronic asswipey cells that are determined to dance the cancer tango if I don't annhilate them like the little rat bastards they are. And that's true. I don't like people thinking I'm weak, though I am so totally weak. Especially not after they just had to be nice to me in 2016 because I broke my leg and wrecked my car and lost my job. It's like I can't even navigate basic life skills or something.

Damn, this is embarrassing.

But in some ways, the cancer thing is slightly less embarrassing than the leg, or the car or the job, because this one is totally not on me. I couldn't have headed my asswipey cells off at the pass any more than I did by getting yearly mammograms. For once, it wasn't my lack of foresight or tendancy to stay put in a company I liked or lacking brake pads or eye-hand coordination that got me here.

I swear I did not bring this on myself.

That's actually one of the things Sheryl Sandberg talked about that I really liked, that you really shouldn't take trauma personally. As much as I'd like to why, me this whole thing (and it is so beyond tempting, because seriously, 2016, how did you follow me into 2017 just when things were looking so up?), cancer isn't personal. Why not me? Actually, I'm a good person for this to happen to because I have an amazing support network and I have insurance and paid time off. There are millions of people who don't have access to treatment or insurance or even running water. Why me? Why not me?

Sheryl said journaling really helped her, and I've blogged through so many hard things and great things in my life, I'm going to blog through this even though about twelve people still read Surrender, Dorothy. I'm going to do it for me, just as I started it for my daughter, WHO IS THE SAME AGE THAT I WAS WHEN MY MOM HAD CANCER AND HOLY SHIT THIS IS EXACTLY WHAT I HAVE FEARED WOULD HAPPEN THIS WHOLE TIME SO MUCH I EVEN WROTE A BOOK ABOUT IT WHAT THE FUCK?

Sorry - sometimes the voice in my head is super annoying. That's the voice that wants to play the victim and say I told you so, life, I knew this would happen, I was born doomed, but that is not true and even if it were I'm not that Rita anymore who always finds the worst in everything and then makes out with the worst because the worst is so damn sexy.

This is the new 2017 Rita, as Steph said, who is made up of the eating disorder 1992 Rita and the anxiety-disorder-crazed early 2000s Rita and all the other Ritas who came before those two. 2017 Rita is RESILIENT, DAMMIT and is thus going to blog this stream-of-consciousness bullshit and have a Coke and a smile and shut the fuck up because ruminating WILL NOT HELP.

Onward.

TRIGGER WARNING: GROSS STUFF

Today I had one of the more bizarre experiences of my life: the stereotactic biopsy.

It was ordered after a routine mammogram revealed microscopic calcifications that were not there last year. Women over 40 should have a mammogram every year for this reason, even though it is about as fun as the first level of hell to have your girls squished between two glass plates, especially when your girls are as small and difficult to squish as mine.

Do it anyway, ladies.

So today I took the day off work and went in. I'm going to describe it because hell, someone might benefit.

You lay down on this table. They told me the table can only be lifted if you weigh less than 300 pounds, and boy, would you be surprised at how many people these days are more than 300 pounds, and then since the table can't be lifted, the doctors have to work on their knees. I'm going to assume a doctor doing a biopsy on his or her knees is a cranky doctor, and you want anyone shooting needles into your lady bits to be in a GOOD MOOD, so note to everyone, make it to 299 before the biopsy.

The situation is in a stereotactic biopsy they raise the table and drop the offending area through it and smash it between two glass plates and pump it full of a numbing device that also contains some sort of ephedrine. As I lay there in a really uncomfortable position, the breast care consultant or whatever her title was put a warming blanket over me, put her arm on my back in a most comforting way and led me through a series of questions clearly designed to get me to not concentrate on the fact the doctor was extracting six tissue samples from my breast by the means of a hollow needle.

This woman was very good at her job.

I was pretty much okay until I saw the tray of the tissue samples, which they ran through the X-ray. I saw the calcifications (if that's what they are) that had been removed. And I realized I had a hole roughly the size of a pinhead that went down to the chest wall of my breast.

They congratulated themselves for getting most of the calcifications on the tissue samples and gave me some band-aids. I was feeling really weird at this point, which they attributed to the pain medication and my fairly young age (I don't get that except maybe psychosomatic feelings of immortality). We went into the mammogram room again, where the mammogram machine was LED-equipped and gave off a trippy range of LED colors while I was being smashed again and worried the bandage would not seal the hole in me.

I asked to see the metal clip they left behind to identify the area. It is really small, but it is another piece of metal in me, just like the plate on my leg, adding to my cyborg-ness.

I had a panic attack after the last mammogram. The nice lady said that wasn't so uncommon, to freak out at the end.

Then I went home. I forgot there was a hole in me and pulled in the cat cage and ended up needing a butterfly bandage to rectify the situation.

And tomorrow I go to work. Like everything is normal, except maybe with an Ace bandage wrapped around my chest.

I hope I don't bleed there. God.

I hope this is the end of it, but I'll take whatever comes next. What happened today was the most bizarre thing outside childbirth I've ever experienced. At least everyone around me at the time was willing to say, yeah, this is cray, we hear you. Because sometimes that's all you need, like, OMG, this is happening now, right? Right. Oh, well.

Onward.

I'm reading this book about willpower. Dan Wegner had read that a Russian writer bet his younger brother that he couldn't go five minutes without thinking about a white bear. The brother lost the bet.

Trying not to think about something is exhausting. Riding the ridiculous adrenaline roller coaster of anxiety disorder is exhausting. Having a good reason makes the temptation to ruminate harder to resist.

What I'm trying to use, this time, are positive role models.

At my last mammogram, the doctor told me I have a cluster of something that needs to be biopsied. The consult is on Monday. I have no idea how long I'll have to wait to actually do the biopsy and get the results.

I'm trying not to think about white bears, or as they're otherwise known, breast cancer. I think about them approximately five times an hour when I'm awake and once a dream when I'm asleep.

I've been out of the financial/job woods fewer than 90 days.

Back to the book: I have willpower fatigue. It is not in my nature to be upbeat and resilient. These are learned behaviors I am working on. Whenever you watch the show about the natural disaster, there's always the zen guy and the freaking out guy, and they're in the exact same situation.

I'm trying to learn to be the zen guy, because if I do have cancer, freaking out will be totally counter-productive.

I look to my two dear friends and one SIL who have successfully navigated this path to prop myself up against the fear. If it is, it is. I'll work my hardest to be the zen guy.

I'm grateful this didn't happen when I was unemployed, because it took all my energy to just buoy myself from morning to night then. A medicine I needed got denied at that time so I went without, and my Vitamin D fell to dangerous levels. Even now, I'm low, and the struggle is real. The thought of working with a husband traveling and adding on any other health energy drains is sort of terrifying, I'll admit.

It's exhausting to listen to myself talk, really.

So I thank you, role models, strong women who batted away breast cancer in a matter of months due to early detection, who make me think even if it's bad news I can knock it out with minimal collateral damage. You made it look good, ladies. You gave me hope.

My prayer is not that I don't have breast cancer, but that I possess the resilience to deal with whatever comes my way.

I'm trying to become the zen guy. But yes, I would also like a rest break, do you hear me, God? It's me, Rita.

Don't think about white bears, He says.

Today I ate my lunch from a Tupperware-like-thing branded The Pioneer Woman. As I ate soup from this vessel, I mentioned to my new co- workers that I know Ree Drummond, have met her on a number of occasions and she is modest enough to introduce herself as someone who writes about cows, which is what I remember from the day when I sat beside her at BlogHer speaker training years ago, before the cookware line and TV show.

It is so weird trying to reconcile those days to now.

Trying to explain blogging in its heyday to nonbloggers who don't still get pitches for things I have no platform nor professional reason to cover. To explain that PR people still have me in some Guy Kawasaki list when I haven't covered Mother's Day in years.

I hit unsubscribe and feel weird that this is no longer my beat after spending a decade covering just that.

To read the MediaBistro headlines of another series of journalistic layoffs.

To realize that time has passed.

But it's okay. That was fun. It's time now to embrace AI, VR, a new generation of influence. I'm not primarily concerned with the bleeding edge now. I have a biopsy to schedule and a new job and a new career to manage. I'm not really your girl for Boppy technology. I'm more into YA novels and parenting a teenager. Please update your lists.

I look now to the female leaders in their third act, as I approach it. Show me Sheryl With the Rich Hair. Show me how to be mentored and to mentor. Show me what is next, now.

I'm only 43. I have a lot of career left. What do I focus on now?

I'm beta shopping my next novel. ritajarens@gmail.com if you want to weigh in. Onward.

There are so many conversations that have transpired since I've taken a "normal" job that I'd like to process here. But my girl ... she is 13. She gets to curate her online self. There are lines as parents we should not cross.

Perhaps it'll work its way into a novel someday, as so many of my existential thoughts do.

Suffice it to say, I always thought I'd use her real name at 13. Let her own her identity. But now I wonder if the world has moved on to the extent that who I am matters zero percent to who she is. My identity is different now. It's just not that important to make any sort of statement.

I'm kind of glad.

The world has moved on. I listen to short stories on my commute and I don't read Facebook because for some reason it always makes me sad and I have realized that my girl is her own person who has only by birth to do with me and that is a cause for celebration, not remorse.

I'm changing, again. Not sure what happens next, but I know two things: I am her mother. I am a writer. I will find a way to safely reconcile those things.

Earlier this week, my publisher at Chicago Review Press called me. Hearing her voice reminded me of the thrill I felt ten years ago, standing in a conference room at H&R Block corporate HQ hearing my first book had just been bought. And I sold it all by myself.

She was calling to say it was time. There were three boxes left, total. Did I want to buy them?

I reveal this with the intention of giving aspiring authors a gift. Sometimes you hit the five reprint lottery, and sometimes you are lucky to help start a category but don't own it. Hey, them's the breaks.

I can safely say I'm in a good mental health place because being asked if I want to buy the final physical copies of SIFTW didn't make me cry. I just bought them. I'm going to do a workshop on publishing of which they'll be part, but mostly I hold them to treasure the memory of the excitement and wonder and pride I felt in 2008 because I told myself when I was 12 I'd publish a book, and now I've done it twice. And I gave a copy of SIFTW to my new co-worker with twins and he said his first book had come out goddamn never.

SIFTW lives on now only digitally. But it still happened. OMG, you guys, that was the best. I'm not even embarrassed to admit how excited I was at this thing blogging that would give normal
people a platform from which to jump beyond themselves.

Those were lovely days. I was lucky to participate.

So I have 64 pounds of books in my library and my husband and daughter are rolling their eyes, but I've given up Rita the blogger and Rita the speaker. I don't care if my books go out of print. I remain Rita the author.

Goddamnit. It is glorious. And it is not yet over. I will it so. Onward.