Here is the blend I did for the challenge over at LJ. I don't know whether or not I could post it over there, so I'm just doing it here. I guess I'm not suckalicious after all. It's decent, I guess. I really love the way the main pic turned out though.

I didn't do much today. Went to the store. Watched Gilmore Girls and Charmed, as per usual. Charmed made me cry. Getting involved is bad.

Tomorrow is the fifth anniversary of my lovely abdominal surgery. It's amazing really. It doesn't feel like five years ago. That's a pretty significant amount of time. I guess it flew by in all the rest of the utter tragedies of my life that followed. The day after that, the 10th, will be the two year anniversary of Teresa's death. Then 9/11 of course. September is an altogether bad month, along with August and October. At least for me.

But hey, it's been five years and I'm still here, cancer free as far as I know. And since being alive is about the only good thing I can say about where I am, I guess I should be grateful. And I am, trust me, I wouldn't have wanted to die in that surgery (which was a very real possibility - that or I was coming out of it with a hysterectomy - neither happened), and I had to have the surgery or the tumor would've killed me one way or another. It wasn't aggressively cancerous or anything, they just said there were possible malignant cells, but it was actively crushing my organs. Intestines and all that loveliness.

I hope I'm never that dumb again, because I'm very thin, and I had a football sized tumor in my lower abdomen and never saw it coming. Maybe that was because it got big pretty suddenly, apparently. I noticed I looked three/four months pregnant pretty quickly, not over a period of time.

You know, what's funny is a lot of people have told me I should be over all that by now. But maybe they just don't realize what it's like to know you had a foreign object actively growing inside you, or that you had to spend the worst week of your life in a hospital struggling with the pain and to stay awake, and now you live with a seven and a half inch scar up and down your abdomen. If you're human, that changes you. If you had what I had, your hormones help change you.

I lost almost twenty pounds between the day of the surgery and the day I left the hospital. My hormones went crazy as I went from the painfully serious mini-adult the bad hormones made me, into a giggling, dorky 16 year old like I was supposed to be. (That part, admittedly, hasn't changed much in five years.)

It may not be something I think about all day every day, but every time I see my scar, every time I'm late for a period, every time I'm forced to visit a hospital, or hear the word 'tumor', anything like that, I'm reminded. And an experience like that affects you. I didn't think I could survive everything that happened to me, but somehow I did. It hurt like hell, but I did it.

That should all be reflection for tomorrow, but there it is now.

Now, today. Today would be the five year anniversary of the Scully cut. ;)

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