This is a story of love and laughter, sadness and loss. Yet, even with all its power, pain does not triumph; cancer may win the battle, but not the war.
Excerpt
My plastic surgeon informed me of a procedure called the tram flap. He described it as opening a slit at the location where the breast would be, cutting a football-shaped section partially away from the stomach area, reaching in at the upper slit, traveling along underneath the skin, securing the football shape (still partially attached by veins and muscle), pulling it up (while still under the skin) to the breast area, reattaching it to the chest wall, and then reattaching muscle and veins at the new location. Some or all of the tissue might not live and would then have to be removed. Oh, and also, I would then not have a navel. It would have to be removed from the tissue attached to the breast and patched back onto the remaining tissue on my stomach area. Because my mother had ovarian cancer, putting me directly in the crosshairs for it, I wanted my ovaries removed. Since the easiest way to remove the ovaries is through the navel, I would have to do this before the tram flap was done, as afterwards my navel would only be decorative, not actual; there would be no easy accessibility to what was left of my female parts.
All that sounded just too awful to endure! What nut case would put herself through something like that? Me. And I couldn't stand up straight for five weeks.
Inside the Methadone Clinic. Addiction to heroin, methadone, and other opiates. Destruction. The primal addiction" of the child, power and control over your own life, the institutions and the characters, the love between a mother and son. This book i
