One Week

So my parents were here, and Mom found a roller brush that's an easy way to get cat hair off the sofa and loveseat. She also cleaned the carpets and did some laundry, and helped me organize my closet. (She's brilliant at that) And we did a final dress fitting for both Jen's and my dresses. The straps my Grandma made for my gown needed the placement verified, and she had taken it in a bit too much and it had to be let out. So both dresses are off to Ohio with them to be finished and de-wrinkled.

Grandma and I hemming the dress

It's the right length now. It had to be hemmed by quite a bit, so Grandma used the fabric from hemming it to make the straps. I wanted something to help disguise the port bump in my chest. The scar I'm fine with, but the port bump is a little weird. The straps don't quite cover it, but it's far less noticeable than it would have been had we left the gown strapless.

We're not wearing traditional dresses, neither of us are crazy about wearing white since it seems to add pounds, visually, so we went with evening gowns that flatter us. Jen's is raspberry pink and sparkly and gorgeous. It's a hard color to match though, so I went with gray to compliment it. The bridesmaids are wearing black floor-length dresses. Not all of them are evening gowns, but they're all black floor-length and they flatter them.

The bouquets will have ribbons with the Metavivor colors, and the necklaces for the bridesmaids will have the Metavivor charm. I've mentioned this before.

One more week. Caity and her boyfriend are flying into Omaha on Tuesday and we'll go pick them up. On Wednesday, Micchi's flying in to Lincoln - an easier pickup. On Saturday, Rebecca, Sara, and Becky are arriving, and Amanda lives in Lincoln already. If Becky ends up staying with her mother instead of at an Omaha hotel, she'll be able to join in the festives on Saturday afternoon/evening. Grilling hot dogs, watching movies, getting our nails done. If they all show up, I can give them their Attendant gifts. Hmm. I think I'll do that anyway, even if Becky can't make it. I'll give her the gift on Sunday if she stays in Omaha. That would make for less things to keep track of.

In other news, I found out something new. Apparently I do have a family history of breast cancer. My great-grandma Timbrook had breast cancer and a mastectomy. I barely remember her. I barely remember my great-grandpa Timbrook. They both passed on when I was pretty little. But she's the only person in the family I'm related to that has had breast cancer.

This doesn't really change anything, except I need to go through all of October's posts and make corrections if this comes up. I might just wait for the posts to go live and then review them before I share the link on Facebook.

But a single great-grandma who had it is not a strong history. It doesn't change that I'm BRCA 1 & 2 mutation negative. But it's a bit of a relief to know I'm not the only one in my family who's had it. I have enough of being the only one with things in my family. I'm the only one in my immediate family (first cousins included) who's gay, I'm the only one who's deaf, and I'm the only one who has Vitamin D Deficiency Syndrome. (My body doesn't produce enough Vitamin D on its own, I need to take supplements, and without it, my bones won't absorb calcium properly and if I get too much calcium in relation to Vitamin D, I can end up with kidney stones.) But I am NOT the only one with breast cancer. Never mind I'm the only cousin who was alive when she was. Not the point.

In preparation for October, I have some blog entries incoming from guests, the deadline I gave is October 3rd, because I'm a Fullmetal Alchemist nerd. That's also the day I'm having my other tooth extracted. If I don't get things until the third, I'll work on getting them formatted over the weekend. They won't run  until the later part of the month, so I'll have time. And I'll also have time to figure out what to do if I don't get all the days filled.

And even more teeth problems

Seriously. More teeth problems. I just had a molar in my lower right jaw removed due to an abscess on Friday. By Sunday a molar in my upper left that the dental bridge is attached to started hurting. I went into the dentist today and found out it's forming a abscess there too. Really? Really? Really?

That's me and my teeth. Seriously, e-fucking-nough. So now instead of just a follow-up on Friday, I get a follow-up and a consultation for another extraction. The dentist prescribed an antibiotic for the infection, and hopefully that will manage the pain until I can get this damn thing removed, which very likely won't be until after the wedding. Why this month of all months? This is ricockulous!

As it is, the prescription hasn't hit the pharmacy yet so we're still waiting on that, and it'll take a projected 36 hours before it starts working. 

In other news, I've discovered that there is currently no live-chat peer-led breast cancer support group that is accessible to the deaf or hard of hearing community. Every single one is telephone-based. Even the ones that allow for video still require a telephone connection. I've been talking with an administrator at the Young Survival Coalition about using the forum's chatroom for a deaf-accessible peer-led breast cancer support group at 7pm Central Time, the 4th Monday of every month.

I know I'm not the only deaf person with breast cancer out there, and there's a distinct lack of accessibility for the average deaf person. Hopefully I can help change that.

Dental Woes and Whatnot

When I was four, I contracted bacterial meningitis. To save my life, I was given some powerful antibiotics that worked, but at the cost of destroying my enamel. This resulted in yellowing teeth and getting cavities and abscesses at the drop of a hat. Not to put too fine a point on it, my teeth look like a meth user's, so my mother and I have been looking into dental implants. I've been appointment-hopping, getting consults, and it turns out I currently have an abscessed molar that needs to be taken care of before I can even begin thinking about consults for implants. Fortunately, it doesn't hurt, probably because there's nothing opposite of it to aggravate it. The molar on the top got abscessed a while before my cancer diagnosis, and that's when I got a few fun facts about me confirmed.

1) My veins are shite. It took seven tries to get an IV working, and all the other attempts resulted in my veins blowing out. As a result, I spent the next couple weeks looking like I'd been battered.

2) Locals do absolutely nothing for me. After they tried - and failed - to get an IV line going for IV sedation, they switched to locals to see if anything would work. I've not had good experience with getting locals to work, and this time was no exception. The first one did work, for all of 10 minutes. The second one just made my face numb, and had the fun perk of worsening the toothache pain to the top of the pain scale. (This crisis was ultimately resolved by admitting me into the hospital and someone there was finally able to get an IV going on me, and I was put under general anesthesia for the extraction)

This means any major dental work done on me has to be done by a place that 1) does adult IV sedation and 2) accepts Medicaid. There's a grand total of one place that fits that bill, the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha. I have an appointment for a tooth extraction on the 12th of September, a few weeks before the wedding. And Jen has to drive me home since they're doing IV sedation, and she loathes driving in Omaha, especially in unfamiliar areas. This is going to be exciting.

Also, this is a teaching hospital. I think that's why the medical team was so ridculously excited to learn that I had a medical port to use instead of getting an IV in my arm. I'm sure a lot of that is because it's easier, but I'm not so sure there wasn't an element of "SHINY TECHNOLOGY!" going on there too. Most people coming in for dental work aren't going to have that.

I'm just glad that this tooth hasn't started hurting and even more that it didn't start hurting during chemo, which is hard on the teeth too. It would have been harder to get dental work done while undergoing chemo. There are false teeth of near-denture quality that can be used to give a cosmetic appearance of having nice teeth at a fraction of the cost of dentures, so I'm going to try that out for the wedding pics. You can't eat with them on, and I'm not sure how comfortable they'd be overall, but I've seen good reviews. There's a reason I smile with my mouth closed in pictures. I laugh too much to be able to remember to keep my mouth closed, which is why my mom's helping me get implants, or if I'm not a good candidate, proper dentures. It would be nice to be done with this tooth business.

In the meantime, I have other things in the works. YSC will be featuring me in an article they're going to publish on October 13, the National Breast Cancer Awareness Day. I'll post a link to it when it goes live. I'm also being interviewed by the local newspaper for an article about Wish Upon a Wedding. The journalist doing the story wants to be able to publish it on the Sunday of the wedding, September 28. I'll post a link to that article as well.

Another metster who has a blog of her own is going to be running guest articles for the month of October, and I've submitted an entry of my own to Telling Knots. I plan to try to post every day in the month of October with information about metastatic breast cancer to fight against the pinkwashing of Pinktober. I'm also using a breeding sim site I'm active on (Wajas) as a way to spread awareness. I have two customs with the Metavivor ribbon colors that I've bred for pups that I'll be selling for game-site currency in October, with a big sales post promoting them and featuring information and links about metastatic breast cancer. To help drum up more awareness, people can buy a pup for only 40k, which is stupidly cheap in site currency, to represent the 40,000 people who die each year from metastatic breast cancer if they post in the thread sharing something that they learned about MBC, forcing them to read the information provided, and also if they pledge to spread MBC awareness to counter the pinkwashing.

One of the pups I bred for myself, fairly identical to how her parents look.

I'm not going to be thrown under the bus, or swept under the rug, and forgotten about in the wave of Pink, Hope, and Cure this October. I'm gonna make some noise.