So I have recently returned from a two and a half week trip in India I have a lot of photos, they are here.
Where do I start. There are some amazing contrasts in India, not just the well-off and poor divide, but the rapid pace of development and ancient monuments, pollution/litter and natural beauty, corruption and generosity, and traffic… that’s a whole category on it’s own.
Continue reading My trip in India
It’s been a while since I’ve posted here, I’ve recovered from radiotherapy (harder mentally than surgery because you’re completely exhausted), I’ve travelled to India (will blog more about that later), and it’s almost Christmas.
I’ve been collecting some articles about breast cancer, the cost of treatment, what we die from young (women = breast cancer), how trans people need to be careful of breast cancer, and really what you can do to ensure that you catch cancer early and get it treated quickly.
Continue reading Breasts and cancer
I don’t think that speech which harms minoritised groups should be protected. I don’t think that giving another platform to someone who has engaged in hate speech regarding a minoritised group is necessary or that it will add to any ongoing debate. I don’t think that providing a platform to someone who has engaged in hate speech will in any way help them realise that they are harming a group of people, nor will it educate those who are on the fence regarding an issue. In my opinion all it does is reaffirm their existing position, it does not give them an opportunity to learn about how they have harmed others, nor an opportunity for others who do not understand that harm, to understand it better. I am really not a fan of people (who usually have multiple other platforms) being given another platform to other or dehumanise groups of vulnerable people.
Before I go any further I want to state I am not a trans person, I am cis-gendered. I do my best to be a good ally to the trans community, but I will (and do) fuck up from time to time. I will do my best to learn from my mistakes.
Continue reading I believe in limitations on free speech
Come one, come all to the 89th Down Under Feminists’ Carnival. I know an apostrophe goes in there somewhere, and that is where it goes today. There are many wonderful things about the number 89, it’s 24th prime number, following 83 and preceding 97. 89 is a Chen prime and a Pythagorean prime. It is the smallest Sophie Germain prime to start a Cunningham chain of the first kind of six terms, {89, 179, 359, 719, 1439, 2879}. 89 is an Eisenstein prime with no imaginary part and real part of the form 
. M89 is the 10th Mersenne prime. (all from Wikipedia) I don’t know what most of that actually means, but I share it for your edumacation.
Anyway, September was yet another fantastic month to be a blogger in Australia and New Zealand, particularly a feminist blogger. There was the “knifing” of Tony Abbott, a new Minister for Women in Australia, a new Australian Prime Minister (more primes), Chris Brown effectively banned from Australia, lots of commentary on the scourge of domestic violence, spring started and Melbourne eventually started to warm up. I haven’t been paying attention to the weather in other parts of Australia and New Zealand, so I hope your weather was also more spring like, and less winter/summer like.
If you reside in Australia or New Zealand and you’d like to host a future Down Under Feminist Carnival please let Chally know here. It’s not very difficult, and I promise I will help by sharing relevant posts with you. And now on with the carnival.
Continue reading Welcome to the 89th Down Under Feminists’ Carnival
So I’ve had a few days of radiotherapy now, and thought I’d provide a general update as to how it is.
So I rock up at the hospital, sign in and be advised if my appointment for the following day/week has changed, go to the waiting area, and hang about and wait. The waiting usually isn’t for very long, and then I get changed into my hospital gown, go wait in the second waiting room for a few minutes, and then get into the radiation room.
So far I’ve only attended one of these appointments alone. I’m very lucky I have the support of friends and family to keep me company in the waiting room, even if it is for a short period.
So in the radiation room I tell them who I am, what they’re treating, and lie down on a table under a big machine.
As I’m getting treated for breast cancer, my arms are above my head and I’m holding onto some bars. The technicians mark on my skin where I got some tiny tattoos, and then line me up under laser beams (I am high tech) to make sure I’m in the right spot for the radiation to be delivered. Once they’re happy they leave the room and I get shot with high energy photons, twice, diagonally through my breast in order to avoid my heart. It takes maybe 5 minutes.
I don’t have a problem appearing nude in front of people, so constantly being topless in front of the technicians isn’t a problem for me, I can imagine it would be for some people, particularly as some of the technicians are men. All of the technicians are lovely, and highly professional.
My breast is beginning to redden from the radiotherapy, which is the expected side-effect. I am after all getting constantly burnt with radiation. It’s also a bit tender, which isn’t surprising as all the cells are constantly being damaged and then have to repair each day.
I have been warned that I might get extreme burns (blistering and/or skin cracking) as I progress through the treatment. I don’t know if the burns will hurt as much as they will be annoying. The hospital will keep an eye on any burns and side-effects to ensure that I am coping ok and provide assistance where possible. I have already been provided with sorbolene cream to put on the irradiated area twice a day in order to keep the skin moisturised and soothed.
I’ve also had a cold/bacterial infection while doing this, so it’s been more shit than it normally would be. I only have 14 more sessions left.
I tweeted the other day (ok several months) ago, that I had come to a realisation about why I just don’t like some stories. Everyone raved about Anita Heiss’s Tiddas, and was talking about how they related to the story about a close knit group of girlfriends. I love Anita and bought the book to read, but sadly I couldn’t finish it, and I thought over the course of a few weeks why that was.
It certainly wasn’t the writing, Anita is a fantastic author, her writing is superb and her senses of place and character are powerful, so it wasn’t that. Eventually I realised it was because of the key essence of the story – secrets.
It’s not that I don’t mind a book where the characters have to keep things from each other to keep each other safe, or because there are far more important things to do than discuss how a careless comment hurt their feelings at breakfast, but in a book where there appears to be no other reason to keep secrets from each other than to drive dramatic tension, I have a problem with that.
I’m not sure why this is a specific thing that bugs me about some stories. I’m sure part of it is being a person who is open and honest with those I care about, and that I don’t like keeping secrets from those I care about unless they’re fun secrets like surprise presents or parties. That said, I also hate surprises, so maybe that’s part of it too.
Stories are often told where an event happens and that drives the plot, or where conflict between people happen, and that’s the plot, or there is a journey or a game or things. Stories where someone is fretting about whether or not they should tell someone else this thing that is going on in their life, when for all the history as far as the reader knows of this character and this other person is that they would have told the other, irritates me. I believe it’s huge in romance books (another genre I don’t read).
It’s one thing that annoyed me most about [Rowena] Cory Daniell’s series The Last of the T’en (and now I discover she is also from Brisbane), sure initially the main character has absolutely no reason to trust the invader who demands she marry him, but they begin to understand each other, and there are all sorts of non-reasons for them to stop communicating. The romantic tension is driven by them failing to communicate and it annoyed me. The world, ideas, clash of cultures, rebel alliances, etc are all great, but why can’t they just talk to each other?
Really this is me having a whine because my I value openness in my relationships over many other things, and when I see fictional characters fail to communicate (this even happened in Glitch and that annoyed me too), I rage at them to just sit down and do the talking thing. Yes it is hard, it isn’t always fun, and can take time, but it is necessary and the plot will happen anyway because you have built interesting characters, in interesting places, with interesting things happening to them.
I love a great “us against the world” story. I love reading about people learning about themselves and other people. I love reading about defeating evil, or slightly evil, or “oops we thought that was the bad person”. I love reading about people who learn to communicate better with each other as they realise that one of them communicates in a different way to themselves. I love most stories. It turns out I am not a fan of stories about not communicating.
Today’s post prompted by this.
So this radiotherapy thing is becoming realer, and I’m getting more anxious about it. It’s very easy to be flippant about these things when they’re off in an undefined time period in the future, but the moment it becomes real, the flippancy disappears and the anxiety settles in.
I’m more anxious about this than I think I was about the surgery. I’ve had surgery before, I know what to expect (more or less). I haven’t had radiotherapy. Now that I know my radiotherapy date starting I will contact the people I know who have had breast cancer and talk to them about what to expect. I don’t know how alarmist the radiotherapy doctor is being about being a fat woman having radiotherapy versus a thin woman (apparently I have a greater risk of skin cracking due to the burns I will get), or whether that is because I have larger breasts and I’d have that risk regardless of my weight.
Both the doctors who saw me today, the radiology doctor in training and the consultant weren’t particularly personable. Their hands were FREEZING and I got quite cold as they poked and prodded my breasts before drawing on them in texta. I didn’t appreciate their talking about me as if I wasn’t really there, but I didn’t mind being part of a doctor’s specialisation education.
The nurses/radiotherapists on the other hand were absolutely delightful. Their hands were warm, they were reassuring, they talked to me about what they were doing and how long things were going to take. They apologised when they were about to touch me with something that was cold (mostly the ruler they were using) and ensured that I could get up and go to the toilet when I couldn’t wait any longer during the appointment.
So radiotherapy starts on the 22nd of September. A bit under 2 weeks away. I will be going to the hospital 5 days a week (business days) for 4 weeks (barring sickness). I may get very fatigued, I may burns that resemble severe sunburn, I may have none of those things and just have the inconvenience of my days interrupted with a hospital appointment.
I am a bit over the unknowns. My life generally has a lot more certainty in it, and I prefer it that way. But soon things will be back to normal (more or less). I’ll start on the tamoxifen, work through the side-effects, and just be myself.
Book: After the Fall, Before the Fall, During the Fall by Nancy Cress
Format consumed: Ebook, also available in hard copy (Fishpond, Booktopia)
Plot summary (Goodreads):
The year is 2035. After ecological disasters nearly destroyed the Earth, 26 survivors—the last of humanity—are trapped by an alien race in a sterile enclosure known as the Shell.
Fifteen-year-old Pete is one of the Six—children who were born deformed or sterile and raised in the Shell. As, one by one, the survivors grow sick and die, Pete and the Six struggle to put aside their anger at the alien Tesslies in order to find the means to rebuild the earth together. Their only hope lies within brief time-portals into the recent past, where they bring back children to replenish their disappearing gene pool.
Meanwhile, in 2013, brilliant mathematician Julie Kahn works with the FBI to solve a series of inexplicable kidnappings. Suddenly her predictive algorithms begin to reveal more than just criminal activity. As she begins to realize her role in the impending catastrophe, simultaneously affecting the Earth and the Shell, Julie closes in on the truth. She and Pete are converging in time upon the future of humanity—a future which might never unfold.
Weaving three consecutive time lines to unravel both the mystery of the Earth’s destruction and the key to its salvation, this taut post-apocalyptic thriller offers a topical plot with a satisfying twist.
I don’t think I agree with the plot summary in Goodreads. I’d rewrite it as follows (unless I read a completely different book).
The year is 2035. After ecological disasters nearly destroyed the Earth, 26 survivors—the last of humanity—are trapped by an alien race in a sterile enclosure known as the Shell.
Fifteen-year-old Pete is one of the Six—children who were born deformed and sterile and raised in the Shell. The original survivors are growing old and sick, and some have died. Pete and the Six blame the alien Tesslies for the end of the world and their only hope lies within brief time-portals into the recent past, where they bring back children to replenish their disappearing gene pool, and supplies to make their lives more comfortable.
Meanwhile, in 2013, brilliant mathematician Julie Kahn works with the FBI to solve a series of inexplicable kidnappings and thefts. With each new data point her predictive algorithms are more accurate and she can predict where Pete and the Six will appear next.
Weaving three consecutive time lines to unravel both the mystery of the Earth’s destruction and the key to its salvation, this taut post-apocalyptic thriller offers a topical plot with a satisfying twist.
This novella was nominated for several awards and won some too (Goodreads):
Hugo Award Nominee for Best Novella (2013), Nebula Award for Best Novella (2012), Locus Award for SF Best Novella (2013), Endeavour Award Nominee (2013)
Type of post apocalyptic story: This one is interesting. It’s written both immediately before the world as we know it is ending, has the moment the world is ending, and also in a now that is the future. The chapters swap between the past and present, working towards the moment the world as we knew it ended.
Review
This story is certainly ambitious, and the writing is of high quality. The characters were all equally unlikeable, and I think that’s why it rates so poorly. Pete is an obnoxious, aggressive, sex obsessed teenager with entitlement issues and Julie is a determined loner who wants to do it all on her own, bugger the consequences. I certainly didn’t feel any empathy for either of them, mostly I wanted to shake them and tell them to grow up.
I did like the story mechanic. I would have much preferred that the story followed one of the survivors versus Pete, but the gradual collapse of all the time lines to the main event was done really well, and the urgency was surrounding the events was well captured.
World Building: Basically the world is Gaia, a self regulating mechanism, and she/it gets pissed off with humanity and wipes us all out. The book is set in the Northern Americas which is convincingly wiped out. I’m still not sure Australia was affected. We’d be protected from Yellowstone exploding by trade winds, and any resulting tsunami from that event would wipe out the Pacific Islands and PNG, but Australia would be mostly ok. The tsunami from the Canary Islands collapsing in the Atlantic wouldn’t affect Australia. If a major earthquake happened off the coast of Chile, then Western Australia would still be ok. Australia is special that way. I’m not sure anything happened in the Indian Ocean either, so all the countries in that part of the world are probably ok too. However, there is another element to the plot which means that humanity would die off regardless of what continent they lived on.
I’m nit picking, and really when the end comes, it comes quickly enough that news about what is happening doesn’t have time to spread. So I’ll just say that everyone but the survivors died, and the story went from there.
Character Building: I didn’t like any of the characters. I didn’t like their motivations, I didn’t connect with them, I thought they were all insufferable. This is not a ringing endorsement.
Women: So Julie is really smart and capable. The women survivors are resourceful and have worked hard to build a new life for themselves with the male survivors in the Shell. The survivors are a bit 2 dimensional because they’re not main characters in this novella.
Non-white characters: So they’re there, but most are not central to the plot. The survivors in the Shell were all the the US at the end of the world, but are not all white. There is a Chinese man, someone with Latino/a heritage, and Julie’s surname suggests that she has South Asian heritage. It’s a good reflection of the diversity of the US.
Disabled characters: So the Six have various birth defects, for undisclosed reasons, which have meant that they all have a disability of some form. The story does not go into this in much depth, but Pete is described as having a head too big for his body and a weak shoulder (which is wrenched from time to time when he’s kidnapping children or fighting).
Queer characters: There is no mention of any queer characters in the book at all. LGBTI people do not exist in this world.
Final thoughts
Pete is such an obnoxious character. He really ruined the story for me as he was so self obsessed and entitled. I find it rather weird that he grew up that way given the survivors had the choice to change the ways they did things (including raising children). Pete wanders around with such a huge chip on his shoulder, and believes that he should get what he wants in relation to sex.
Oh and the angry sex he has with one of the Six makes him even less palatable. I don’t recommend this story at all.
So today I went and saw the radiotherapy doctors at the Peter Macallum Hospital, Victoria’s premier cancer hospital. Before I talk about me, I want to talk about that hospital because it was one of the most amazing patient orientated places I have ever been.
The Peter Mac (as it tends to be known to everyone) is a bit of a maze. That is a big downside when you’re stressed and confused and don’t know where to go. However, once you get where you need to be – in my case the Breast Cancer clinic, the waiting space is absolutely amazing. The various clinics are located alongside each other, with one big waiting room. And what a waiting room it is.
I wasn’t there for very long, but this is what I saw. There are jigsaw puzzles, with tables set up to do jigsaw puzzles on. There is a big box of wool, with knitting needles and I’m guessing crochet hooks, so people can knit/crochet while waiting. The supporting columns were all decorated with yarn bombing. There were colouring pencils and adult style colouring pages. There were board games and a chess board. There was a library of fiction and non-fiction books. There were magazines in many different languages. There were comfortable chairs. There were treadmills if you want to walk off anxiety or do your daily exercise. There is also free wifi so you can browse the internet/read RSS feeds/play games on devices.
I know the Peter Mac is moving next year to a new location on Grattan Street, across from the Royal Melbourne and Royal Women’s Hospitals, and I hope they keep this very patient friendly and supportive atmosphere in their new building. It was great to see so much creativity. A little more on what goes on is here.
Ok, so me… I saw a younger doctor who initially told me I’d need 6 weeks of radiotherapy, and then went through my cancer diagnosis history and overall health. I reported something* which I think might be related to the surgery I had, he wasn’t sure it was related, but I’ll speak to the breast care nurse at the Royal Women’s tomorrow anyway. He took me through the not very likely, but serious risks of having radiotherapy, and then went off to find his supervisor – who is the doctor I’d actually been referred to see.
The supervisor doctor said that I’d only need 4 weeks (which is what the RWH had said), and that overall that’d be better for me as it means that it’s over quicker and the immediate side effects don’t last as long. I will be called for a mapping appointment which will be in the next two weeks, and then radiotherapy will start two weeks later than that… probably. Apparently the planning of how to deliver the treatment without impacting on my heart and lungs can take up to a week, so the radiotherapy won’t start as soon as I expected. This is ok, I am not an urgent case. Given my cancer is at an early stage and appears to be completely removed from my body.
* I have some pain under my breast that seems to be as if some fluid (oedema) has formed as a result of surgery. It might resolve on it’s own, it might need to be drained. I’ll get a second opinion, because it’s sore and that means that I’m not doing all the things I’d like to do otherwise.
And the answer is no, which is good.
This morning we saw the oncologist and she was LOVELY, really really LOVELY, and laughed at our jokes and thought we were funny (which is always nice). I am still super impressed with how the hospital, the nurses and the specialists are dealing with my two partners. They pause briefly after I answer their question as to why I’m being accompanied into the room by two men, and then move on like it’s no big deal (which it isn’t).
She’ll refer me to the Peter Mac do to the radiotherapy as the Royal Women’s Hospital doesn’t have radiotherapy services, and I’ll need a month (4 weeks) of radiotheraphy at least. I should have my initial appointment with them in the next two weeks, then an appointment to line up the machine and tattoo me, and then radiotherapy, 5 days a week until it is done. I should be able to work while being treated, but will feel quite tired and a bit sore.