"Benign!"

That was the first word I heard from Jason when I woke up.

This is what happens when robots attack (48 hours post surgery):

My abdomen is still swollen, but there's hardly any blood down there. Minor spotting yesterday, nothing today. I have to inject a blood thinner into my belly for seven days. Apparently, I'm more prone to blood clots because of the cancer in my body. 

My abdomen is far more sore than anything in my lower region. It almost feels like aliens came down and swiped my precious organ while I was asleep in bed. Although those first few hours post-surgery were significant. My entire body shook and my teeth chattered violently, just like when I had given birth to Nigel.

One person told me that during my surgery, I would be hanged upside-down. She had had a face-lift down there (not elective; it had caved-in) and that's what they had done to her. And it's true! I asked my medical team and they giggled and said, yes, I would be slanted downward at a very steep angle. Lord knows what they did with my legs. And just before I went under but right after they gave me the Versed (the Alice in Wonderland drug), my breast surgeon suddenly appeared through an invisible curtain, grabbed my hand and belted out, Somewhere Over the Rainbow. The gyn onc seemed a bit peturbed and reached for my hand, too. I heard apologies whispered from my breast surgeon to my gyn onc, and then I went to sleep. 

When I woke up and told Jason the story he said, "Are you sure it wasn't the drugs?" I have to wonder. 

The surgery only lasted one hour. I guess my uterus was well behaved which would be the only time it ever has been. Personally, I could grind it into the ground and kick it in gutter. It never did me any favors: painful cramps that kept me crying in bed away from school, ejecting Nigel at 29 weeks. It was considered "irritable."

But my ovaries... I had a hard time accepting that I was going to lose my ovaries and fallopian tubes. They were my friends, a woman's Tree of Life. But now I'm being slammed into menopause. I always imagined my ovaries and fallopian tubes quietly undulating like seaweed attached to the ocean floor, reaching up toward the sunlight, but I know the reality is that they are more like the arms of an air traffic controller. My left ovary happened to be hiding behind my uterus, weighted down by the questionable mass. And who knows where my right one was. Now they are both gone.

But it's time to pull myself up by my bootstraps and move forward. I've got some cancer ass-kicking to do!