A Revised Hurricane Readiness Checklist for My Northern Sisters

Ladies,

Bless your hearts! By which I mean a)you seem to be reacting with rather disproportionate panic to the oncoming hurricane forecasted to grace your shores and I feel empathy for you and b) y'all are so dumb. Really, really pretty, but so dumb. 

So I feel like I have to tell you that you're overreacting. We're hearing that Connecticut Junior Leaguers have actually cancelled this weekend's tennis matches and Bostonites are letting people merge into traffic.  It's like The Day After Tomorrow up there!

(Dude. I'm SO inviting him to my hurricane party.) 

So in the spirit of sisterhood, even though y'all have been mean to me and mocked my accent every freaking time I've ever traveled north of Virginia, I have some advice for you on how to survive the approaching Hurricun (yes that's how we say it):

• Get a blowout and a leg wax like, NOW. When the power and hot water go out for three days you'll still look fabulous. 
• Consider disregarding the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Scale for this one we came up with at UNC (GO HEELS!):

• Buy gallons and loaves (respectively) of milk and bread, even if you have veganism or celiac disease. I can't tell you why--it's a secret known only to us SEC girls. 
• Just for giggles: while you're at the grocery store, buy inordinate amounts of something completely random--say, pickles and prunes. Then shake your head, tisk, and bless the hearts of all the other people in the grocery check out line like they have no clue.  
• Resist the urge to buy gallons and gallons of bottled water. Instead, fill up your bathtub and have a bucket at the ready (for flushing!--bless your hearts!). I mean, it's not like you'll go thirsty. It's going to flood!  
• Do bring a portable stereo with you to the grocery store. Once it gets really crowded, blast "Singin' in the Rain" at top volume to the throngs of emergency shoppers. Then teach them all a sassy dance number and cross "start a flash mob" off of your bucket list.
• As a side note, y'all should really consider putting the sugar in the tea before you serve it.  
• Do NOT pass the liquor store. Buy all the booze you can afford. After enough hours without electricity you will be bored senseless and need respite. Also, you will learn that during a hurricane, alcohol is more vital than water. Even if you don't drink you can barter your booze for canned goods once the power goes out and everyone's food turns into...okay I'm not even going to tell you how gross that shit will be!  
• Know that your boyfriend/husband/lady partner WILL insist on driving somewhere during the storm. Don't try to stop them as they have no control over their instinct to rescue people/pull trees off of roads/get electrocuted/buy more beer.
• Grits are delicious. Shut up.

• You'll also need this: Traditional Hurricane Recipe:
• 2 oz light rum
• 2 oz dark rum
• 2 oz passion fruit juice
• 1 oz orange juice
• ½ oz fresh lime juice
• 1 Tablespoon simple syrup
• 1 Tablespoon grenadine.

Shake all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with ice and strain into a Hurricane glass filled with ice. Garnish with a cherry and an orange slice. Spoon feed to Jake Gyllenhaal while softly whispering to him how pretty he is.  

• Should you become really, really drunk, be sure to find a nice air mattress or floatable couch upon which to pass out.  When your house floods you will rise with the water. This saved my second cousin's life during Katrina--true story.
• When the storm picks up right good, prepare to fight to the death until only one of you remains. Watch for tracker jackers. You might need protection and/or a hunting partner so find a Peeta or a Gale. 
• Re: previous advice. To pass the time once the power goes, read The Hunger Games (by flashlight!) and then pretend your house is a Panem arena. Should your husband give you any lip about borrowing his hunting bow remind him that you are The Mockingjay.  
•  If you're worried about how to entertain your kids indoors, under duress, with no electricity, do not worry. Follow the lead of a generation of Gulf Coast Moms and:
• Put all of the children in the master bedroom. Tell them to keep trying when they complain that the TV and the lights don't work. A copy of the Little House on the Prairie series will keep them sufficiently entertained so long as at least one of the children can read aloud. If they screech too much give them a copy of The Hunger Games and tell them they're to be the next tributes.
• Be sure to crack the windows in said master bedroom so that the gale forces do not shatter the window glass and decapitate/jugular-artery-sever any of them.
• Lock the door on them. They will be FINE, unless they are not strong swimmers, in which case you might want to at least put the young ones in swimmies. 
• See above re: Hurricane recipe. 

OK I just HAVE to tell you, bless your hearts. The eggs and milk are just for the french toast you'll make for the surviving children once the power comes back on.

Finally: good luck! May the odds be ever in your favor...

Everybody Out of the Pool!

OK yeah, there are some rather ominous looking clouds overhead and your iPhone radar says there might be lightning but I see that as rather shabby evidence for your screeching at all of our children to leave the pool forthwith or suffer the thousand natural shocks of likely electrocution. Seriously, CHILL, other hockey mom at our end-of-season team pool party.

Despite your having told me that my daughter's swimming today--you obviously DID NOT NOTE the Hindenberg-esque mass of plastic, duct tape, foil and air with which I swaddled her casted, broken arm--will surely result in maggots (MAGGOTS!) emerging tempest-tossed from the dark, close confines of her pediatric short arm cast when it is finally removed, and your assurances that once you attended medical school--I hesitate to defer to your meteorological judgments. While I forbid my children to enter the pool within 30 minutes of a snack (for reasons conferred me by a generation of Texas Pool Moms, namely that should we reenter the pool within 30 minutes of eating our bologna sandwiches we would suffer cramps so debilitating as to cause drowning and death despite our mothers being right there, poolside), I typically refrain from this kind of unilateral pool evacuation until I've experienced thunder, lightning, and also either deja-vu, shadenfreude, or acid reflux. With all due respect, lady, you are no Jim Cantore and unless I see Willard Scott himself carried off, Mary-Poppins-like and in possession of no less than 17 jars of Strawberry Smuckers via a Cat 5 hurricane o'er the Louisiana delta, I shall not panic.

So chill, woman. Seriously. Have a sip of this rum punch I have so cunningly disguised as a Venti Starbucks© Latte. (I save those cups for a reason!) It is strong as well as tasty. Have it all, in fact--I have a cooler of it in the back of the minivan, between the boy's hockey bag and yesterday's groceries which sadly never made it to the pantry.

And what do you know! Just like that the storm has passed! All children accounted for, none electrified or otherwise. Someone's pug nearly just drowned but that had less to do with the weather and more to do with our goalie's insistence that all dogs can swim right before he threw said dog from the diving board.
So cheers, Panicky Hockey Mom With a Heightened Sense of Drama. Could it be that the mole on your arm is indeed, Melanoma? No? A tick? Lyme disease is rampant down here, you know.
Anyway, the water's nice.You should get in.

Yo Mamma Grama! Live Blog from the Duke Cancer Center, July 2010

Author's note: the prequels to this episode can be found here, here, and here.  The author acknowledges that the original trilogy is far superior, that Jar Jar is an asshole, Hayden can't act, and Ewan McGregor looks hot with a beard, and asks that you direct any and all criticism directly to George Lucas. 

1:29  Leaving for Duke Hospital.  I have my ebook, a sweatshirt, a vuvuzela, and a cowbell.  (OK I really don't have those last two but I DID download vuvuzela and cowbell ring tones to my cell phone before I left the house this morning.)

1:34  Johnny's driving makes me carsick.  But I'm glad he's coming with me.

1:35  OK maybe I'm not.

2:02  Johnny just did a doughnut in the minivan in front of Duke.  REALLY wishing we had the General Lee horn right about now.  THE WORLD SHALL KNOW OUR REDNECKERY!

2:14  Johnny is not allowed inside the mammography clinic. I panic. (The last time we were separated in a hospital Waverly was born and you know how THAT turned out so you can imagine my trepidation.)  I promise the nurse that he will not stare or make inappropriate remarks or otherwise compromise the other patients' privacy but Mean Nurse must know Johnny and says no. Mean Nurse instructs me to go to the Special Room, undress from the waist up, and don the Mammogram Gown.

2:15  The mammo-gown has three armholes. Three. Armholes. I check my math then accept that there are people in this hospital with greater problems than mine.

2:16.  OK so I require written instructions, with illustrations, for putting on the mammo-gown.  I AM TELLING YOU THE TRUTH. And still I can't. Figure. It. Out. I am stressed out and sweating and starting to suspect that this is some kind of practical joke. Fucking Origami is easier than this. I give up and tie the gown in a vaguely toga-like fashion across my upper body. What with the sweat, my now-frizzy hair, and improvised outfit I'm sure I look positively crazyhomeless.

2:20  In the waiting room now. I am like, twenty years too young to be in here. The other women in the room eye me curiously. I suspect that they run a black market estrogen harvesting ring and that I may be in danger. I check the location of the exit signs in case of an ambush. Thinking they'll slow me down, I remove my fuzzy hospital socks for good measure.

2:26  Bored.  There are still three women ahead of me. I shall call them Bertha and Ethyl and Maude. Maude appears to be asleep but I think it's a trick. Just to be sure, I try out my new vuvuzela ringtone. AT MAXIMUM VOLUME.  ZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz!!

2:27   OK I'm not so good at subterfuge. Mean Nurse just told me to turn my phone off.

2:30  Nervous.  When I get nervous I tend to tuck my hair behind my ears repeatedly.  This causes me no small amount of pain as I have a 2nd degree burn on my ear from a recent scuffle with my Chi. (The Chi won--THAT TIME--however I have seen enough Coen Brothers movies to know how to exact my revenge.)

2:35  It's my turn.  I follow a technician into a room cold enough to freeze magma and there it is. The Boobie Squishing Machine. It is really big.  I am not.  I ask if there is a child-size version as I regularly require the child-sized blood pressure cuff and child-sized IV needles.  (There is not. Also: mammogram technicians have NO sense of humor.)

2:36  The tech, Aretha (Not Franklin) (who is very kind but lacks the fanstastic headgear of her namesake), sticks tiny pink stickers over where I tell her I can feel the lump.  My lump, my lovely lady lump.

2:37   I am now wearing my first, and the world's tiniest, pastie. 

2:38  OWW.  The tech has pushed my entire boob as well as a fair amount of skin from my neck and armpit inside the squeezie thing of The Machine.  The pressure is not that bad, but it pinches.  Also, there is nowhere to put my head so my neck is completely jacked to a statistically improbable angle.

2:39  This is not nearly as exciting as last year's knee MRI which made me feel slightly Six Million Dollar Woman, slightly Jake Sully in his Avatar pod.

2:40  Aretha has not seen Avatar.  I tell her that this is unfortunate, as Netiri is played by an African American actress and Aretha is also African American.  Aretha gives me The Look That Black People Are Always Giving Me.

2:41  OMG I haven't fed my boob to anything this frightening, intimidating, and menacing since I nursed Waverly.  "I guess you could call this a Booby Trap," I say. (Yeah I said that.) The technician is thorough, if humorless, and has now pulled enough of my body into the mammogram machine that I think I'll know soon if my appendix is okay or I have any cavities.

2:42   And then it's over. Aretha leaves the room and I get tangled up trying to put the 3 arm gown back on and wind up straightjacketing myself. I require assistance. Maybe someday I will be old enough to dress myself and get a big girl mammogram.

2:50   Back in the Waiting Room with Ethel and Maude now, waiting for an ultrasound, which I did not know I'd be getting.  I assume this means I failed the test. I am more distraught by failing a test than I am at the thought of breast cancer.  When I was a child I'd have panic attacks at the ophthalmologist. (Vision Test Anxiety. It's REAL, people.)

2:55   My red sharpie just exploded all over the 3 arm gown.  I now look like a crime scene.

2:57   Just found out I will get my results today.  TODAY.   Freaking out as I am not prepared either way. I have not thought this through.  I need my mom, my husband, my sister. I cannot find this out alone.

2:59   Ryan. Our shining star. He just died. That really happened. So this really can't. I am not strong.

3:00   What this place needs is more cowbell!


3:02   Have made it to the ultrasound room. Discover that the worst part of this entire experience is removing these motherfucking stickers from my nipple. The doctor, an intern, is kind and tells me she sees nothing in the ultrasound.  SHE SEES NOTHING.  But I can feel it, I tell her. It's something. I am ready to cry. I am not making this up. So for the first time in my life I tell a woman to feel my boob.  FEEL MY BOOB, WOMAN! She does. She can feel the lump too. She leaves to go get the resident.

3:10   Still waiting.  I decide to ultrasound my forehead. The picture comes out way blurry. I think about using the ultrasound jelly to get a better image but it is very cold jelly.

3:21   The resident shows up. Alas, he is more McDreary than McDreamy. (*rimshot*) (*OK that was awful*) I stash my forehead sonogram pics in one of the armholes of the 3 armhole gown that is around my waist and smile like I'm not actually sitting there topless.

3:23   Dr. Strangeglasses repeats the ultrasound.

3:24   I do not get a diagnosis. I do not have a diagnosis. I do not have cancer. The lump is a ridge of dense, harmless tissue. I will be fine. I AM fine.

3:36  Before leaving the clinic I ask the nurse if I can keep the 3 armhole mammo-gown. I need it to restrain my children. She says no.  I say you do not know my children.

3:44  I show Johnny my forehead ultrasound. He says it's too soon to tell the sex but we should totally frame it anyway.

**Author's note: Since penning this blog entry I learned that while I did not have breast cancer, my God-sister did.  Does. 

*

I hope that recounting my experience here neither mocks nor minimizes her ordeal or that of any survivor.