life, the universe, and donna

So here’s the State of the Union as far as that whole cancer thing goes.

The background: In February of 2010, my mother found a lump and went to her doctor about it. Since approximately 95% of lumps are nothing, they weren’t very concerned. Well, crap – it’s cancer. Well, okay. 95% of breast cancers have a 10 year survival rate. Nope, instead Mom has Triple Negative breast cancer, meaning that unlike most breast cancers, it has no hormone receptors and the usual treatment doesn’t work. Triple negative breast cancer has a 55% 10 year survival rate, or 75% with chemo & radiation. Only ~20% of breast cancers are triple negative, and mostly affect younger Hispanic & Black women. Mom, being 50+ and white, managed to really hit the probability jackpot. Woo-freaking-hoo.

So, after being diagnosed in May 2010, Mom had a mastectomy within a month, and then started on chemo in the summer. Her last round of chemo was in October of 2010, just before Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving, she found herself very ill and unable to eat, and later took a trip to the ER. Unfortunately, they wrote off her symptoms as a side effect of the chemo, and sent her home despite her soaring blood pressure. A trip to her regular doctor the next day was also useless. Finally, a full four days after her original symptoms, she was finally admitted to the ER and it was discovered she had a serious intestinal blockage. While we’re still not sure exactly what caused it, it only makes sense that it would be a side effect of the chemo.

Mom spent almost a month in the hospital in October, most of those unable to eat anything. (Incidentally, be careful what you wish for: Mom had mused that it would be nice to lose some weight. Being stuck in the hospital with a tube up your nose is not a recommended weight loss method.) After over a week of attempting to remove the blockage manually, they decided to do some exploratory surgery and ended up having to remove roughly six feet of necrotic bowel. While the human body comes out of the box with about 25 feet, one does not prefer to lose these things. Turns out your body is SUPPOSED to have all that extra bowel. Try to hang onto yours, hey?

Then, to add to all of this, Mom still had 6 weeks of radiation to look forward to. It seems that the margins weren’t QUITE large enough from the mastectomy she’d had in June, and so they wanted to blast her with some radiation just to make sure it was all gone. So, for those playing at home, this has so far meant:

Surgery -> Chemo -> Hospital -> More Surgery -> Radiation -> Long Recovery.

Fuck cancer? Fuck cancer doesn’t even BEGIN to explain how I feel.

But yes, fuck cancer regardless.

Anyway. Mom’s doing pretty well. Her digestive system is starting to get back to normal. She’s starting to get her energy back, but still tires out pretty easily. But she’s getting better.

Here’s why research is vitally important: Ten years ago, this type of cancer was virtually unknown. Mom would have been treated in the usual manner that does absolutely nothing for her type of cancer, and her survival chances would have been tenuous at best. Thanks to ongoing research, she’s doing great. As you can imagine, this is so very, very important to me – and to all women. And to anyone who has ever met a woman.

Fundraising: I’ve been slacking a bit, with this whole new job (which isn’t all that new anymore) and new home (which is only slightly less new) and new boyfriend (okay, he’s still pretty new) but even then, I’m up to $1200, plus another $100 in cash donations I haven’t submitted yet. Hooray! But, time to get off my ass and get this show on the road. I’m going to be doing some crafty fundraiser type things, so stay tuned for that. At the moment, I still have Breast Cancer soaps (pink soaps with pink ribbons embossed in them) available for $5/bar, 100% of the proceeds going toward my fundraising. Currently, I have one type – enriched with Moroccan clay and scented with Oatmeal, Milk & Honey fragrance, and smells super yummy. I have a new batch of Breast Cancer soaps in mind, but haven’t settled on a scent yet… possibly Earl Grey (bergamot & vanilla). I like tea. So does Mom. It seems appropriate.

I’m also planning on making up some bath salt mixes. These will be a collection of salts & herbs & essential oils that will make your bath oh so yummy. Let me know if you have any requests. They also make nice gifts. Stay tuned.

Note that any purchase over $10 will come with a tax writeoff receipt. Score.

Haven’t donated? Donated already, and want a tax receipt for 2011 too? You can do so here.

Want to buy some Breast Cancer soap? If you’re local, leave a comment and we can arrange a meetup. Not local? You can send a Paypal payment to paypal@arwen.org in $5 increments, plus $5 for shipping. (For more than 4 bars, contact me ahead of time, the shipping costs go up a bit.) As mentioned, right now I just have the Oatmeal, Milk & Honey scented soaps, but will soon have a few more varieties available. All soaps will be pink! (Colored naturally with mica or oxides or clays.)

So, now? Thanks to surgery, chemo, & radiation, Mom currently has no evidence of this dreaded disease but is still recovering from the harsh treatments required to conquer this virulent type of breast cancer. While the odds of this type of cancer returning are greater than other types of breast cancer, with the right money, research can perhaps offer more hope to my mom and other women diagnosed with breast cancer in whatever form it takes. My mother considers herself very lucky to be living in the lower mainland where the BC Cancer Agency is consistently making great strides breast cancer treatment.

It’s good stuff. Before fundraisers like The Weekend came about, breast cancer research in BC got a measly $200,000. Since The Weekend started in 2004, they’ve raised over $16 million from this one event alone. That? That’s amazing. Please help out.

So, no surprise, I’m a transit junkie. I was raised by transit employees – today, April 20th, is my mothers 30th anniversary. Given that I am 31 and a half years old, it would seem that I was about 19 months old when Mom was hired on as a driver. So, despite the motto that “Friends don’t let friends take transit”, this whole transit thing has been a part of my life as long as I can remember. I remember Mom leaving for work just as I was going to bed, working night shifts, then coming home in the morning to see me off to school. I remember spending a couple of days when I wasn’t in school riding the bus around with her, and a nice older gentleman asking me if I was lost (since I was parked in the front seat with a pile of books & toys.) Mom let him know that I was with her. Heh.

Because my mother worked odd hours, I stayed with my grandmother a lot. Since she quit driving the year I was born, transit was her main mode of transportation as well. We’d catch the bus in downtown Cloverdale, near where Nana lived before she moved in with us, and take it all the way out to Guildford Mall. I remember learning a fair amount of transit etiquette from her, like the fact that if the bus was full, I wasn’t allowed my own seat and had to sit on her lap. I remember being quite bitter about that, damnit. I wanted a seat! She also would refuse to use the courtesy seats, even when she was well into her late 70s, because “those were for people who really needed them.” To this day, I’m uncomfortable sitting in the courtesy seats, even if there’s nobody else who needs them.

When I was 10, we moved halfway through the schoolyear, but just a couple of km away from our old house. Instead of switching schools, I was put on the 320 heading to my old school in Cloverdale, which conveniently picked up half a block from my house and dropped me off right in front of my school. I was a rather nerdy child, but I got a little bit of street cred for being the kid who took public transit to school.

(Picture is unrelated.)

Like most other Cloverdale kids, I went for my drivers license when I hit 16 (although lost interest over an ugly winter, and didn’t actually get my license until I was 17. My interest was renewed when my grandmother bought me a car so I could chauffeur her around.) Transit service in Cloverdale was worse then than it is now, and we didn’t live particularly close to any route. A car was necessary. (Heck, it still is. Although with the opening of the new pedestrian bridge over the ravine by my parents house, the 502 is at a lot more accessible.) So, I had cars throughout my late teens & early 20s, including when I lived in Victoria, although commuted by transit most of the time (or at least halfway, driving to park & rides.) But… I moved to Yaletown when I was 22, and realized I didn’t need a car. (Although I did have a motorcycle, but that was for fun.) So I got rid of my truck, and was pretty happy living car-free by choice. And did so until I was 28, when I moved back in with my parents for a few months and discovered again the horrors of living in Cloverdale without a car. (That pedestrian bridge just opened up a few months ago, so getting to transit required at least a 15-20 minute walk… when I already had an hour and a half commute once I got to a bus. Bah. Do-able, but not if I could avoid it.)

Nick & I always had a car. I still had my crappy little Cavalier when I moved in with him, and it became extremely convenient for SCA activities – when you are lugging 60+lbs of armor, having a vehicle is super convenient. We eventually upgraded to a minivan, which made SCA traveling infinitely more convenient. Still, I hated using a vehicle when I didn’t have to. It rarely occurred to me to drive to work even if it would have been convenient for after-work activities, and Nick & I would usually disagree over how we wanted to get downtown for Adventure – he wanted to drive (and pay through the nose for parking) I always preferred just hopping on the bus and not worrying about parking and the whole omg wtf I have a VEHICLE nonsense. And we’d invariably end up standing in the cold for half an hour, but still. Nick & I had different ideas of “convenience”.

Having left the van to Nick (well, because he bought it) I was quite pleased to go car free again. I like taking transit. Case in point: On Monday, I had a day of Adventure. I had one time sensitive errand to run – I had to pick up my replacement Kindle from the UPS by the airport, and the only bus (the C90 Sea Island North!) that gets me to the UPS parking lot runs twice a day, an hour apart. Missing it meant about a 3km walk from Templeton Station on the Canada Line. Which I did on the way back, since my 10 minute stop in at UPS meant that waiting I’d be waiting 50 minutes for the bus to take me back. Naaaah. I walked and I took some nice pictures on the way back.

I started off by having brunch with Dan, and then hopping on the #7 into Vancouver. Dropped Dan off at work, then had some time to kill before I had to hop on the Canada Line to get to Bridgeport Station for that C90. So since Dan works near Waterfront Station, I decided to hop on the Seabus and zip over to Lonsdale Quay, take some pictures and kick around for half an hour, then head back and whip out to Richmond.

Honestly, sometimes Transit impresses the hell out of me. My day was East Vancouver -> Downtown -> North Vancouver -> Downtown -> Richmond -> Downtown -> East Van. And if I’d been paying more attention to the time and not dicking around on the drive, I’d have then gone out to Surrey by Skytrain to go to fight practice, but I wasn’t paying attention and ended up grabbing a co-op car. Oops. (But that wasn’t a transit fail, that was my own “Err… what do you mean I have to be somewhere in half an hour, and I’m still half an hour away from home?”)

And the cool thing? Assuming I didn’t already have a free three zone pass through work, I could have done that entire days travel for $9 for a daypass. Seriously, how awesome is that? NINE DOLLARS. It would have cost me more than that in gas to do that trip, nevermind all of the parking fees, etc. Sure it’d be faster, but I’d be stuck in a car and not taking Awesome Pictures. (Although I’d miss that 3km walk from the UPS back to Templeton Station, too. But hey, I got to see a new skytrain station. And take more pictures.)

I dunno. I love transit. I think it’s effing cool that I can do all of this travel without really thinking about it. I wish I could explain why I like it so much more than driving. It just feels so much easier than driving. I’d rather read, play games on my iPhone, or look out the window any day of the week than drive and stare at Other Drivers. It really hit home later that night when I had to grab the co-op car and head out to Surrey, while I was skipping through radio stations desperately wishing I was on a bus where I could just read my book.

Anyway. I find buses lend themselves a lot more to Adventure, and I love Adventure. I like the car co-op because I admit, sometimes it’s supremely inconvenient not to have a car. I have a dog who is too big (and neurotic) for transit. Sometimes, I buy large things that I don’t want to take on the bus. Sometimes I travel to places that are not serviced by transit.

But most of the time? Bus, please. It’s inconvenient, the weather is hell, and I’ve spent more times cursing buses for not showing up than I can think of, but … I still don’t have any interest in owning a car for as long as I live in Vancouver.

Things that are awesome? Dan’s a transit junkie, too. This pleases me.

This is so worth being dead on my feet.

Weeks ago, I heard about the Bootlegger’s Ball, put on by one of my favorite local attractions, the Vancouver Police Museum. This is a pretty awesome place in general, putting on a fantastic Sins of the City walking tour around the Downtown Eastside, super awesome looking “Forensics for Adults” classes (which I haven’t taken yet and SO WANT TO), and operating the museum itself out of the old City Morgue. Seriously, if you have the slightest interest in Vancouver history, this place is an absolute must see. Even if you don’t, screw it, go anyway.

So when I heard that they were putting on a prohibition/20s themed party… well, hell YES I was planning on going. Assuming I wasn’t working.

I couldn’t buy my tickets until this week, as I had to make sure I had the night off. Once I got my schedule, it seemed that I did! Hooray for me! Dan has been crazy sick all week and wasn’t sure if he was going to go or not. So rather than fly solo, I asked the wonderful kdot if she’d come with me – being the awesomest, I believe her response was high pitched squeals I could hear all the way from Mt Pleasant.

I was a wee bit lazy with my outfit. 20s themed? Well, whatever. I had a brand new peach corset with white antique looking lace I’d picked up on Ebay. It was originally intended for steampunk, but I decided to put it into service for my “flapper” outfit. Combined with a long black skirt, a white feather boa, and a fancy headdress I made from some elastic trim, a peach colored appliqué, and a long white ostrich feather. Oooh, and stockings with a seam up the back. Ah, stockings with seams, so cute. Pinned my hair up, stuck it all together, put on some crazy heavy eyeliner, and voila. One pseudo, totally inauthentic flapper outfit. Whatever, I looked cute, and if I was adjusted properly, I had nice cleavage too.

Dan decided that plague or not, he was going to come too, so after medicating him rather heavily, we headed off to pick up the lovely kdot (who did her hair up to look AMAZING – so jealous of her mad skill) and then … to the ball! Because I am the queen of last minute, I may have been sewing my headdress on the bus to kdot’s place. Oy.

The ball was fantastic. Right from when we hopped out of the cab at the Biltmore, it felt “period”, with an antique police car parked in front, and plenty of suited gangsters wandering around. Not everybody was in costume, but there was a heavy presence of feathers and fringe. Inside was even better, with fantastic live entertainment… from vaudevillian singers, performers, and can can dancers… to a raid by the morality police (it turns out, they can be bought off by pretty girls in sequins, booze, and a fiver)… to an excellent performance by The Creaking Planks, complete with an accordion player/lead singer. I may have even danced. To a song made popular by The Count from Sesame Street. What? I like memes.

Not only did I get to spend the evening with my absolutely fantastic (albeit high as a kite, yay cold meds!) boyfriend and my effing sexy date kdot, I also spent much time socializing with the delightfully hilarious Kimli and her bukkake necklace (bukkake > cherries), and finally got to meet the lovely StacieBee with whom I have been chatting on Twitter for ages. Both ladies have lovely cleavage, thank you very much. And an evening wouldn’t be complete without some time spent in a bathtub with some gin.

The gin was flowing (Hendricks was a sponsor, and holy crap that’s some good gin. I love me my Bombay Sapphire, but Hendricks? Hendricks is just niiice.) and I may have had a few. I am a huge fan of gin & tonics. So tasty. Even in a tub.

Many pictures were taken, both by all of us with our iPhones (nerrrrds!) and some pros they had wandering around. With my corset & my hair up, the tattoo on my upper back was on display (very pleased!) and I had it shot by one of the roving photographers who called it “a photographers dream”. Well, that’s why I got it of course. (Er, well, no, but hey, bonus.)

They also had a silent auction. I bid on a couple of items – a gift basket of Police Museum swag, which I was quickly outbid on. I also bid on two tickets to Grouse Mountain, because I’ve been wanting to head up for ages, and if I can get them a little cheaper than face value… well, score, right? I actually have no idea if I won that one or not, as the last time I checked it I was the high bidder, but I hadn’t checked for the last hour of the night.

There were lots of other awesome prizes, but the two that were stunningly amazing were:
- A ride for two people on the VPD police boat around the harbor. C’mon, are you kidding me? That’s awesome.
- A tour for four of the VPD Tactical Training Centre, including a chance to shoot off some rounds. Tactical. Training. Centre. Translation: The effing SWAT team. How cool is that? Well, I’ll tell you in a while how cool that is after I’ve done it… because Dan won the auction. I won’t say how much it went for, but let’s just say that Dan spent most of the evening babysitting his bid. SO crazy excited about this. I’ve been shooting once before, at the indoor range in Port Coquitlam, and I loved it. I GET TO SHOOT WITH THE SWAT TEAM. Yay!

Excited? Me? Yes. Very.

Only downside to the evening was my 7:30 work shift the next morning. I went to sleep around 1:30am. To get to work on time, I had to be up at 5am to have enough time to walk the dog, finish trying to scrub the rest of the eyeliner off my face (only semi successful, sadly), come up with some sort of lunch, and then walk 8 blocks to the effing bus stop. All I can say is: Thank god for the 24 hour McDonalds at Grandview & Renfrew, where I could kill 40 minutes waiting for the first train to come by. McDonalds coffee? Not so bad. Skytrain naps? Totally awesome.

SLEEPY DONNA IS SLEEPY.

So, during downtime at work, we’re pretty restricted on what we’re allowed to do. One of the things we CAN do is read the local papers. Which sort of suck, but they’re better than nothing, and I’m getting pretty good at the crossword puzzles.

Anyway, so because of this, I’m much more up to date on (the usually boring) current events, like the current issues with polygamy in Bountiful, and currently the concept of whether or not polygamy is constitutional is being debated. The latest addition is evidence that young girls were smuggled across the border to marry polygamists in the US.

I admit, I haven’t read a TON about it, but I simply can’t understand why this is an issue for polygamy, and not an issue for say, child abuse, human trafficking, slavery, and sexual abuse.

The articles usually say something like this:

Parties in favour of scrapping the polygamy law argued at trial that those laws were sufficient to deal with the problem.

“This evidence and the picture it paints demonstrates really eloquently why that just isn’t so,” said Jones.

…no, it means that what we have in place to prevent child abuse, human trafficking, slavery & sexual abuse are NOT sufficient. Not that we need to prosecute for polygamy too.

Confession: I’m not a fan of polygamy, personally. I know full well it doesn’t work for me, but if other people want to have consensual, adult polygamous relationships, who am I to judge? Yes, clearly I have a HUGE issue with elderly men marrying multiple 13 yr old girls. I also have a problem with elderly men marrying ONE 13 yr old girl. This isn’t about polygamy, it’s about pedophilia.

What am I missing? Because I honestly don’t get the debate about polygamy in this case. Shouldn’t they be working on, say, stopping child abuse and giving the women of Bountiful options & education so they can choose to leave, not just banning polygamy in general? I’m so confused.

I have a rant about snow. I started this rant in an email, I’m expanding it JUST FOR YOU!

So, Vancouver doesn’t deal with snow well. Several reasons:

One, we’re a hilly, hilly place. I don’t know if you noticed those big mountainy things over there, but it turns out that even being at the bottom of the mountains means that we’re still up & down all over the place. I don’t envy cyclists in this city in the best of weather, there are hills like gangbusters. But hey, water over there, mountains over here, strangely enough there’s going to be some elevation changes in the stuff in between. When you make hills slippery, it becomes harder to get up and down them in a controlled manner. swoosh!

Two: We get snow once or twice a year. Now, people who bitch and moan every time it snows because OMG it never snows in Vancouver! are also very, very annoying. Yes, it snows in Vancouver. Virtually every year. For a few days, then it stops. Shut up already. But regardless, we only get a few days of snow in a year, do ou really want to city cut funding to awesome things like arts and social housing so that we have an amazing response to snow for TWO OR THREE DAYS A YEAR?

Yes, Toronto has a much better response to snow than we do. Absolutely true. Georgia’s is worse, by the way. Although Vancouver has way more Toronto transplants than Atlantians…

Quite frankly, I’d rather have a few shitty days a year than cut funding elsewhere. Even if it makes my job harder. Now shut up and if possible, stay home for one or two days a year when the weather sucks ass.