I'm still recovering with a capital R — feeling better than I figured I'd be so soon after surgery. Aside from two plastic tubes looping out my side and draining lymphatic fluid into a couple of plastic bulbs hanging from my shirt by safety pins, you'd probably never guess I'd had a mastectomy five days ago. More so than any discomfort from the surgery, it's the lack of sensation under my arm, on my side and across most of the left side of my chest that's taking some serious getting used to. Some sensation might come back in some spots weeks or months from now — or not. It's one of those is-what-it-is things. Wish as I might that I didn't have to put up with this much nerve damage, I sure am glad that my surgeon cut as much cancer out of me as he possibly could. I don't miss my ex-breast. I'm quite glad it's gone. It'll be a while before I get used to the look of the scarred remains, but I feel quite relieved knowing that I'm not carrying cancer around with me anymore — as far as we know. I was hoping that there wouldn't be anything amiss in any other lymph nodes besides the one they biopsied back in early June, but there is — no, therewas — cancer in six of the eight lymph nodes my surgeon scooped out last Thursday. Four of them had "macrodeposits" measuring 2mm or more and two had "microdeposits" measuring less than 2mm. This bumps me from stage 2 to stage 3 and means I'll have to get the big, bad "red devil" chemo drug adriamycin. Another is-what-it-is reality. As my brother put it when I broke the news, "I'm not feeling anything positive about this lymph node news." Nope. Me, neither. The only remotely "good" thing about it is that we now know more about how far my cancer has spread and that we have some more searching to do. A week from today, I'll get CT and bone scans to see if they can pick up any other signs of cancer elsewhere in my body. I'm so used to the testing-waiting-testing rigamarole at this point that I'm trying not to worry about what those scans might or might not find. We'll deal with the findings, whatever they are, and move forward with more knowledge about what the next step(s) will be. On a happier note, I'm smiling ear to ear this week as my dear friend Roxanne Martin is staying with me as I recover from surgery. Sean, the kids and I had planned had been to visit her and several other friends during a family road trip to Northern California. As soon as Roxanne found out about my cancer, she asked when she could come up to help. How nice for some of my vacation that couldn't be to come up to Seattle instead.

So here she is, cooking us tacos, doing our laundry, cleaning our kitchen, playing catch with the kids, taking me out to lunch (that photo of us is at Geraldine's Counter, where I enjoyed one helluva chicken pot pie today), helping me shop for easy-on easy-off button-up shirts at our neighborhood consignment shop ... Life is good. Even with a shitbird like cancer trying to drag me down. As I gear up for my "red devil" chemo, which will start in about a month once I'm all healed up, the song that keeps playing in my head is the one in the trailer of the new Mission Impossible movie: "Ready or not ... here I come ..."