The results from Minnesota came back. I got the call on Friday, which was much sooner than I expected. Normally I would have had to go and get the results in person but they are making exceptions for me because I live farther outside of Vegas than most of the other patients. This small detail alone has taken so much stress off of the situation.

The news was not good. The preliminary results show definite signs of spreading. I have to start all over again and have another surgery....

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The biopsy from the surgery came back cancer positive. Follicular carcinoma, minimally invasive. I was pretty much prepared for this after speaking to the surgeon on Wednesday. Unfortunately, the lab was unable to determine whether or not the cancer has spread outside of the bits of me that the surgeon has already removed. They know for sure that it hasn't spread to the lymph nodes but they don't know if it has affected the other half of the thryoid so they want to get a second opinion. What that...

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I've been home from the hospital for two days and most of that time has been spent sleeping. This is really the first time I've felt well enough to sit up in bed and type but not for long. They released me late Tuesday night, which was a longer stay than I had expected. I spoke to the surgeon yesterday. During the surgery he removed half of my thyroid and what he believes was a cancerous mass. The final biopsy results will be available Monday evening, which is also when I will have the three inches...

beegee

Ask me how I am doing on any given day and you will either get a shrug or a lecture, it just depends. There are exactly seven days left until the surgery. The hardest part has been keeping my spirits up. Six months ago, as I waited for the weather to change, I planned a four day weekend at the end of this month to go hiking across the salt flats of Badwater Basin in Death Valley. Instead, I will be spending that time recovering. I haven't spent a day off outside of a doctor's office in over a month....

beegee

First my doctor did an ultrasound. He said it looked good, as good as can be expected in this situation, but he wanted to be sure and so he sent me home with an appointment for a biopsy the following week. It really does look good, he assured me, maybe a five percent chance of cancer, and five percent is very low. So I went home and pondered the concept of five percent for seven days. If there was a five percent chance of rain I wouldn't pack an umbrella, I told myself. But then again, if there...

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It was my first trip out there in all the years I've lived in this area. The weather was beautiful. It was warm, but much cooler than in the city.

A few pictures:

Red Rock Canyon

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Six Sentences has published my submission:

Six Sentences

The feeling is awesome.

beegee

First, ask someone who lives in the city what the weather is like. When they say, "freezing," pack sweaters - only sweaters. Big, thick sweaters, and a couple of scarves just to be sure. Then, ask a local, any local, how far it is to get somewhere. Finally, go ahead and walk the "few blocks" they will tell you it takes to get apparently everywhere. Be sure to do it in the sweater, and the scarf, uphill, all day, sweating like a glass of lemonade left in the sun. But I cannot...

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When I was growing up I wasn't allowed to read Judy Blume. My parents belonged to a church that believed certain books were dangerous, that the ideas they contained within their pages could lead me astray, and so they were forbidden. Blume's books were the biggest offenders. She wrote about breasts and menstrual cycles through the eyes of a prepubescent girl who talked to God. A curious young woman who dared to question her religion. A heathen-child brazen enough to ask God to help her begin to...

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Niland is a small town in Southern California nestled alongside the Salton Sea; a town so desolate that I thought I might have made a mistake in my plans to visit it as I drove past the green highway sign announcing that I had arrived. In the distance I could see the encampment known as Slab City. Flat, arid, and nearly deserted, Slab City is home to a handful of hippies, snowbirds, and fringe-dwellers who live among...

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I stopped by the Harmony Motel yesterday on my way to Niland, Ca.

The sign has changed since U2 posed in front of it but the giant Ocotillo is still there, the bright red flowers blooming like fireworks.

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I was a fan of U2 years before there was an album called The Joshua Tree. In December of 1984 I received a copy of The Unforgettable Fire as a Christmas gift. I can still remember hearing it for the very first time. It has remained my favorite album after all these years both because it is so beautifully written and because it reminds me of a time when my love for this band was still so passionate and new. Twenty years later, the band is still with me, but that passion has faded considerably. Today,...

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Even after seven unsuccessful years of marriage and nine subsequent years of singlehood I still love to look at bridal magazines, especially the ones with cakes on their covers. I love the towers of soft, fruit-filled sponge, the impossibly smooth fondant, and the flowers made of frosting. I even love the miniature bride and groom that stand proudly on top, smiling like idiots. In a closet somewhere, deep in a box, I have my own set of little plastic people with their arms entwined, ready to face...

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I had never visited the blog called Ear Farm until one of the guys who runs it read my Ruined Music essay and contacted me about my blog. As it turns out in this very small world of ours, Ear Farm had also written reviews on my brother's band. At the time he wrote to me we had no idea that he had interacted with us both, on either end of the country. It was funny in a six degrees kind of way. Anyway, I have been asked to pen a guest post for their ongoing Eight Plus series which is a series of pieces...

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I arrived at the address to discover that it was nothing more than a vacant lot between two trailers. It was over two blocks from where I'd originally thought it was located. Evidence suggested that there had once been a trailer on the empty lot, as the house numbers were out of sequence by one. On the left the address ended in the number nine, on the right, thirteen. The empty lot would be eleven. There was a concrete block where back steps would have been and a large, black mailbox balancing precariously...

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