When it's bad I walk like Sally from Nightmare Before Christmas.

There's something very validating about getting important findings on imaging. Like your pain isn't considered a personality flaw anymore once they can see you actually have something broken or torn or compressed. I hope you're able to get relief from your pain.

So far I've had an arch fusion, repair of three chronic sprains, and a FDL transfer with calcaneal osteotomy. All of those were successful and necessary. Now I need a peroneus brevis repair and probably midfoot fusion as well, but I'll have to wait and see what the doc says. It's a lot.

Yeah, it sucks a lot. And feet are so complicated, and all the parts rely on all the other parts to work, and when one crucial part fails you can have a cascade failure. When the injuries are gradual, so is the pain, and you get so used to constant pain that you can't always tell when there's a new problem.

It makes me spitting mad when people - anybody, but especially health professionals - tell me how they think I am rather than asking how I am.

I was an only child, so I had some pictures. They all look incredibly sad to me now, even the ones where I'm smiling. There's one where I have the face of an eight-year-old, but the eyes of someone in their 70s.

It makes sense that she's catastrophizing a bit if she has cancer-related trauma.

It's weird that we call all cancers "cancer", like it's the same disease. Ovarian cancer and colon cancer are very different entities and present with different complexities. There's no really effective way to screen for ovarian cancer, which means it tends not to be discovered until it is symptomatic at a fairly advanced stage. It doesn't sound like your dad was symptomatic at all, which is a great sign that they found it early. Colon cancer grows a little faster in Lynch patients than in most folks, but not so fast that it would turbo-metastasize.

It's really not unusual for Lynch patients to get multiple primary (non-relapse) cancers. My aunt had three breast cancers, in different spots, in both breasts. Between my three affected Lynch relatives (dad, aunt, and grandpa), they survived thirteen cancers. To them, it's just a part of life.

My dad's so matter-of-fact about it when he gets another cancer that it's very reassuring to me. To him, it's just a problem that has a solution, and he does whatever he needs to do to solve it. I couldn't ask for a better example. He keeps up on his screenings and pays attention to changes in his body, so they keep getting it early and nipping it in the bud. When cancer comes for me, if I can meet it with that sort of practical grace, I feel like I'll be okay.

It sounds like the screening did what it was meant to do, and that your dad is probably in good shape to survive this. The fact that he keeps up with his screenings is great. It's really unlikely that this colon cancer was a metastasis from somewhere else in the body. The reason they give us annual colonoscopies is that identifying and removing the polyps early has excellent results.

I hope your mom has someone to talk to that can help her process this anxiety. At the very least, I hope she's not venting it at your dad. Maybe the consultation with the specialist will help to reassure her. Both my dad and stepmom say it's easier to go through cancer yourself than to watch your spouse go through cancer, so I can understand why she's upset. I know it's hard to find positivity in that situation but clinging on to a positive attitude (like driftwood after a shipwreck) has carried my loved ones through more cancers than you can shake a stick at. I hope this was caught early and doesn't need too much in the way of treatment. If it does turn out to be a bigger deal, he'll need your mom's support.

Exactly. It was a real lightbulb moment when she was off on one of her tirades, and it occurred to me that I could sneak away and leave a full-length mirror in my place and she'd never notice.

I've only had trans/GNC therapists for the last four years and it's great. You don't have to nerf your stresses about being trans. They get it. Also they're trained to handle the sort of emotions that might come up in that scenario. All my therapists would insist that they're safe to talk to about these things, and that you shouldn't ever have to prioritize their feelings above your own.

"You just want me to be your slave so you never have to do anything for yourself!"

She had me trained to serve her coffee and the paper every morning while I made my own breakfast and lunch and took myself to school, and she had me convinced I was useless and lazy.

I was responsible for getting myself to/from school since I was 10. But I would wait after choir practice to make sure all the other kids got their rides home before I started the mile and a half walk back to my own home.

Canes aren't a zero-sum game. There are enough to go around for those who need them. You wouldn't be taking anything away from anyone.

Mobility devices are there to help you get around. That's all. You don't need a prescription or even permission to use one. If it would help you, get one!

Megacorps are closing stores and blaming it on loss from theft when they really just made some stupid and greedy decisions about where to build new stores and then have to close them. But they can just blame the poor for their folly and then we get the blame for destroying their business when they didn't need any help from us.

Not saying stealing shit from groceries is a smart idea or anything, but the stories we've been told about multi-billion-dollar corporate stores closing due to loss from poor-people theft are false.

I'm moving in a month and I'm already 85% packed. I've been going through it slowly so I don't burn out, but I'm way ahead of schedule now. That's a victory worth bragging about I guess.

Can you ask for a second opinion on the MRI/CT results?

Happy to see the baby bats.

Having my therapist cry when I told her about what I went through as a child sort of solidified the severity of my mistreatment and made me realize how much I'd been downplaying the damage. I'll take an emotional therapist over a brick wall any day.

The fact that your dad is desperate to be left alone with your baby rings some alarm bells. Not that I think he intends to do her harm, but it's very strange that he feels entitled to unsupervised access to your child. The more he stomps and pouts about it, the less likely you are to give him any access at all, and you'd be right to deny him. This is clearly more about his ego than it is about having a true relationship with your daughter.

I wonder if any amount of appeasement will be enough for him. In my experience, once an entitled person gets something he wants, he'll immediately come up with a new unreasonable thing to want, and he'll kick up a fuss til he gets it.

Hang in there. This is a tough position to be in, but you know what's good for your baby, and that gets to be your choice. Instead of demonstrating that he knows how to properly care for a child, he's decided to act like one. That is his choice.

This is absurd. There's no reason they should put her at risk of withdrawal when she's been taking her medication exactly as instructed. If they're really worried that she's selling them, why don't they just count the medication doses she has left? It just seems like they're making a problem for her when they're the source of the problem. I'm sorry she's having this experience, and I hope they get their act together and don't punish her for their own error.

It sounds like she had a brain fart to me. I might have asked if it was decaf for clarification, not that it makes a difference now. It may have been a gesture of kindness that went a bit sideways despite good intentions.

Personally, I'd file this away in the back of my head and forget about it, unless she does something else that raises your hackles.

I had two weeks of just protein shakes and two days of liquid only before the surgery. The doctor told me they do that two week diet to shrink the liver, so that there's less chance of damaging it during the surgery. I had NAFLD at the time, so it made sense to me. It probably varies a lot from practice to practice, and from patient to patient. If I need a revision (which I probably do), I'm not likely to need that two week prep, since I don't have NAFLD anymore.

I use bay leaves more for the smell than anything. There's something about the smell of a pot of beans with a couple bay leaves in that's a lot more appealing than if there's no bay leaves at all.