Lump (9)

She has more or less decided to go with the mastectomy.

That’s an estimated $90,000-$100,000.

We don’t have it.  If we sold everything including our clothes we wouldn’t have it.

Medi-Cal probably won’t cover it because she made more than 200% of poverty last year*.

ACA won’t cover us because it’s the wrong time of year to enroll.  The cancer clearly must be Republican.

Running back to Canada won’t cover her until June 1, and that’s a long time to wait when you have aggressive, invasive breast cancer.  In order to qualify for June 1 she has to leave by the end of the month, otherwise it rolls over to July.

Monkey brain is screaming again.

I’m sitting in my office.  She’s sitting in her office.  From here I imagine that I can zoom in like a camera, closer, and closer, until I am staring at the lump there in her breast.  It’s laughing at me.  Its laughing at her.  It’s just a mass of malfunctioning tissue, without heart, soul, intelligence, or intentionality, and yet it is more powerful than we are.  It controls us.  It doesn’t worry about money.  It has no thought or care for financing.  Delays actually work in it’s favor.  Confusion, stress, and anxiety make it stronger as they make its host weaker and less able to fight.  Day by day, as we learn just how fucked we are and our ability to take action or gain resolution steadfastly recedes further and further into the future, along with our hopes and dreams and optimism, it only gets bigger.  It only spreads.  It only works to take over more and more of her body.

Lump is very much in the driver’s seat.  Lump is in charge.

Lump is leading the race, and so far Lump is unopposed.

_____

*Lets hear it for Medi-Cal’s Breast and Cervical Cancer Treatment program incidentally.  For anything else it would have been 138% of poverty.  Who comes up with numbers like “138% of poverty” anyway?  “No, no – 139% of poverty is far, FAR too much!”