My year of cancer, contd.
Nov. 12th, 2017 01:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
gwynSometime during the summer, I got this spot on my forehead, right at the hairline and sort of above my right eye, that I shrugged off as something I did that I didn't remember, because I'm always injuring myself and don't remember how I got that cut or scrape or bruise. But it wouldn't go away, no matter how gently I treated it, and I thought for sure it'd go away while I was in the hospital--because I couldn't do anything like wash my hair or squish my face into a pillow or whatever. I thought surely six days would fix it, but nope, it was all red and scabby still. I thought by week before last that I was finally, finally getting it to go away and it came right back, bleeding again, so I thought, oh great, now I have melanoma, that'd be just my luck to have cancer surgery for something else and then get skin cancer.
I'm this walking poster child for skin cancer, I've had tons of basal cell and squamos cell ones taken off, and apparently if you have lots of basal cell cancers, which are pretty benign and not usually harmful, you're more predisposed to get ovarian cancer and melanoma. That's always hanging over my head. Usually you can't get an appointment earlier than a month out, but they pushed me in early and sure enough, she looked at it with her spiffy little gizmo thing and said, yes, that's a basal cell cancer, but she was a little more concerned than usual about it because of the colon cancer and everything.
So they did a type of surgery on it that cuts less skin, since it was at the hairline, and sent it off for biopsy. I'm hoping it won't be anything more major, but…I'm also so tired of this. I think I've had something like 40-50 pieces cut off me, and I'm a bleeder, I bleed like a stuck pig and they never believe me, so they put these tiny little spot bandages on and then by the time I get home blood is soaking my clothing or whatever.
And it hurts, I have freakishly sensitive skin and half the time they won't believe me that it fucking hurts--I had one dermatologist tell me when I asked for something more effective than Tylenol (the most useless substance known to man) because it was the corner of my freaking eye, tell me that no one had ever said it hurts. And I just stared at him and finally said, really pissed off, "Did you ever freaking ASK them? You just sliced a section of skin at my EYE with a SCALPEL and you think it doesn't HURT?" He was completely bewildered and annoyed. Once he took the stitches out, I never went back, what a prick.
Aaanyway, so that's what I've been doing, along with working on a ridiculous book. It's a cozy mystery set in the South (for some reason, I assumed cozy mysteries were always in England, but I guess not), and it was a heavy edit, which I'd never done for this publisher before. Usually I'm warned that it's a light edit and the authors are "sensitive to change," which is code for "will have a hyssy fit and/or cry and rend their garments if you do more than correct errors." Fiction authors are so special. The thing is, I know what it's like to be edited and how depressing or frustrating it can be, and I'm pretty good at working with difficult authors, but sometimes these people need a lot of help that they won't get, and they don't ever really improve because they're unwilling to listen. And bad reviews hurt sales, good reviews help them.
The production editor said that this author was eager to hear things, though, and I hope that's true after she gets this covered in tracked changes thing back. But the logic of it was astoundingly ill-informed, everything hinges on apalling police work that has only the faintest relationship to reality, and no one does anything like toxicology tests or any basic forensic science--and I'd even be willing to take the terrible, ridiculous "forensic science" of a show like CSI or NCIS or whatever, anything at all, but that didn't exist in this book and I kept wondering if the author had ever even researched what a murder investigation is like.
Still, I am good at couching my corrections inside compliments, so I hope that she'll be okay, and maybe learn a few things along the way about structuring a story. Mysteries are incredibly hard to write, and new writers tend to flounder with them, and she was very clearly a new writer--though I got the definite whiff of fanfic writer from much of it. I sometimes work on books where the writer mentions fanfic in their bios, but a lot of times I can just tell: all the usual pitfalls of fic, or the tropey things, just that way of structuring narrative that forgets to include things necessary to world-building because in fanfic we can elide it or just skip over it.
As fiction publishing is changing so much due to the self-pubbing boom, they're casting their nets wider and I hope they're grooming her, but I fear they probably aren't--editors don't do much editing these days, and the copyediting stage isn't really great for major overhauls of a book. Much of what I read could really use a guiding hand in a developmental stage, but the new writers won't get that, and it's too bad. The production editor seemed to like the sample first two chapters of my edit, so hopefully she'll help the author along in the process.
But wow, did it kick my ass in terms of work. It was almost like rewriting an entire book, and that took almost all my time. I have the next chapter of Celluloid Hero tominim_calibre for beta, and I was amazed I could squeeze that in plus a couple of really heavy edits on articles for the music magazine I do. Everything else has had to fall by the wayside except the aforementioned dermatologist. I want to finish Celluloid Hero for my birthday at end of month--it may mean I post a few chapters one right after another. So three more chapters, I think, and then I can move on to the follow-on stories with the other characters dealing with Steve's movie stardom.
I'm really battling with just feeling overwhelmed and weird and bad, I keep getting stuck on "cancer diagnosis" all the time, and my birthday's coming up so now I'm closer to qualifying for fucking senior citizen status in some places, which just freaks me out. Everything that's happening in this country, from the racism to the GOP's attempt to take everything away from us, is overwhelming me, making me wish I could have just gone under anesthesia and never woken up.
And then I got a letter from my beloved doctor that she's retiring--I've often had conversations, in the more than 30 years I've been seeing her, with patients in the waiting room that we don't know what we're going to do when she retires, because she's amazing and we all felt like we'd hit the jackpot when we found her. Almost everyone I've spoken to had a similar experience--seeing a bunch of assholes and then finding her and having our problems taken seriously. She's been incredibly kind and supportive of me since losing my sister, one of the few people who seemed to grok what losing a twin must be like.
I still haven't seen Thor, because no time, but I might go tomorrow or Tuesday if I can, though I'm still really worried I will hate it, since I have hated those little movies of him in Australia or whatever, and the trailers all make him look like a buffoon. People keep assuring me he isn't, but I'm still worried about seeing it.
I'm this walking poster child for skin cancer, I've had tons of basal cell and squamos cell ones taken off, and apparently if you have lots of basal cell cancers, which are pretty benign and not usually harmful, you're more predisposed to get ovarian cancer and melanoma. That's always hanging over my head. Usually you can't get an appointment earlier than a month out, but they pushed me in early and sure enough, she looked at it with her spiffy little gizmo thing and said, yes, that's a basal cell cancer, but she was a little more concerned than usual about it because of the colon cancer and everything.
So they did a type of surgery on it that cuts less skin, since it was at the hairline, and sent it off for biopsy. I'm hoping it won't be anything more major, but…I'm also so tired of this. I think I've had something like 40-50 pieces cut off me, and I'm a bleeder, I bleed like a stuck pig and they never believe me, so they put these tiny little spot bandages on and then by the time I get home blood is soaking my clothing or whatever.
And it hurts, I have freakishly sensitive skin and half the time they won't believe me that it fucking hurts--I had one dermatologist tell me when I asked for something more effective than Tylenol (the most useless substance known to man) because it was the corner of my freaking eye, tell me that no one had ever said it hurts. And I just stared at him and finally said, really pissed off, "Did you ever freaking ASK them? You just sliced a section of skin at my EYE with a SCALPEL and you think it doesn't HURT?" He was completely bewildered and annoyed. Once he took the stitches out, I never went back, what a prick.
Aaanyway, so that's what I've been doing, along with working on a ridiculous book. It's a cozy mystery set in the South (for some reason, I assumed cozy mysteries were always in England, but I guess not), and it was a heavy edit, which I'd never done for this publisher before. Usually I'm warned that it's a light edit and the authors are "sensitive to change," which is code for "will have a hyssy fit and/or cry and rend their garments if you do more than correct errors." Fiction authors are so special. The thing is, I know what it's like to be edited and how depressing or frustrating it can be, and I'm pretty good at working with difficult authors, but sometimes these people need a lot of help that they won't get, and they don't ever really improve because they're unwilling to listen. And bad reviews hurt sales, good reviews help them.
The production editor said that this author was eager to hear things, though, and I hope that's true after she gets this covered in tracked changes thing back. But the logic of it was astoundingly ill-informed, everything hinges on apalling police work that has only the faintest relationship to reality, and no one does anything like toxicology tests or any basic forensic science--and I'd even be willing to take the terrible, ridiculous "forensic science" of a show like CSI or NCIS or whatever, anything at all, but that didn't exist in this book and I kept wondering if the author had ever even researched what a murder investigation is like.
Still, I am good at couching my corrections inside compliments, so I hope that she'll be okay, and maybe learn a few things along the way about structuring a story. Mysteries are incredibly hard to write, and new writers tend to flounder with them, and she was very clearly a new writer--though I got the definite whiff of fanfic writer from much of it. I sometimes work on books where the writer mentions fanfic in their bios, but a lot of times I can just tell: all the usual pitfalls of fic, or the tropey things, just that way of structuring narrative that forgets to include things necessary to world-building because in fanfic we can elide it or just skip over it.
As fiction publishing is changing so much due to the self-pubbing boom, they're casting their nets wider and I hope they're grooming her, but I fear they probably aren't--editors don't do much editing these days, and the copyediting stage isn't really great for major overhauls of a book. Much of what I read could really use a guiding hand in a developmental stage, but the new writers won't get that, and it's too bad. The production editor seemed to like the sample first two chapters of my edit, so hopefully she'll help the author along in the process.
But wow, did it kick my ass in terms of work. It was almost like rewriting an entire book, and that took almost all my time. I have the next chapter of Celluloid Hero to
minim_calibre for beta, and I was amazed I could squeeze that in plus a couple of really heavy edits on articles for the music magazine I do. Everything else has had to fall by the wayside except the aforementioned dermatologist. I want to finish Celluloid Hero for my birthday at end of month--it may mean I post a few chapters one right after another. So three more chapters, I think, and then I can move on to the follow-on stories with the other characters dealing with Steve's movie stardom.I'm really battling with just feeling overwhelmed and weird and bad, I keep getting stuck on "cancer diagnosis" all the time, and my birthday's coming up so now I'm closer to qualifying for fucking senior citizen status in some places, which just freaks me out. Everything that's happening in this country, from the racism to the GOP's attempt to take everything away from us, is overwhelming me, making me wish I could have just gone under anesthesia and never woken up.
And then I got a letter from my beloved doctor that she's retiring--I've often had conversations, in the more than 30 years I've been seeing her, with patients in the waiting room that we don't know what we're going to do when she retires, because she's amazing and we all felt like we'd hit the jackpot when we found her. Almost everyone I've spoken to had a similar experience--seeing a bunch of assholes and then finding her and having our problems taken seriously. She's been incredibly kind and supportive of me since losing my sister, one of the few people who seemed to grok what losing a twin must be like.
I still haven't seen Thor, because no time, but I might go tomorrow or Tuesday if I can, though I'm still really worried I will hate it, since I have hated those little movies of him in Australia or whatever, and the trailers all make him look like a buffoon. People keep assuring me he isn't, but I'm still worried about seeing it.
no subject
Date: 2017-11-12 10:35 pm (UTC)But it happens all the time. The only thing I find more obnoxious is when they claim it won't hurt at all, then it does, and then they admit something like "yeah that can happen, sometimes there is a nerve." That means it is not a painless procedure unless you are lucky!
no subject
Date: 2017-11-18 09:35 pm (UTC)