Groovymarlin.com

Dear Ricky and Katie,

Did your mom ever finally tell you about me? Do you wonder where I live, what I look like, what my personality is like? Do you even know I exist? I know that you exist, of course, but I don’t know much else about you. Just your names, your ages, and where you grew up.

When I first found out about you, I was 27 and you were 14 and 12. Your mom, my birth mother, sent me pictures of you and talked about you lovingly in her occasional letters to me. She admitted that neither of you knew that she and your father had a child when they were very young (me) and gave it up for adoption. She even told me that they had let your grandparents think I was stillborn, though she always suspected her mother knew the truth. She told me all these things after I found her, and of course I was very interested. How I longed to someday meet you, and her, and my father! You see, I had a wonderful adopted family, but I was always curious about my birth parents. When I finally found them, learning that I had a brother and sister I’d never known about was a wonderful bonus! I made lots of plans for when we’d finally meet.

But then your mom’s letters slowly dropped off, and stopped arriving at all. The many letters and cards I sent her went unanswered. When I tried to call her, whoever answered the phone would tell me she was busy, both at work and at home. For some reason, she decided she didn’t want to get to know me after all.

I guess the worst part of this was the lack of an explanation. To this day, I don’t know if I said something that offended her, or she had a conversation with your dad that changed her mind, or she suddenly got nervous about having to explain me to you or your grandparents.

A long time has passed since then. You’re in your late 20s and early 30s now, and I have a child of my own. Perhaps one or both of you do, too. I don’t know if you live in the same place anymore, or honestly if you’re even alive. I hope that you are. I hope we can still meet someday. I hope I can introduce you to my daughter, who looks so much like me, and so much like you.

Maybe I could find you quickly, by posting your full names here, and asking for help reaching you. Maybe one of you would find yourself mentioned here in a Google search of your own name. But I respect your privacy, so I won’t do that. I’ve thought about hiring a private investigator, or trying to find you on my own, and making contact, but I don’t want to be the “weird stalker lady.” For this same reason, I have never driven to your mom and dad’s house and rung the bell, even though they live just hours away. I’m just not assertive enough to do something like that. Maybe I’m a little bit too afraid of rejection.

So Ricky and Katie, I sit here, knowing that you most likely still don’t know about me, and feeling mostly helpless to do anything about it. I’ve never met you, but I love you both. Would it be wrong to track you down now, to introduce myself via letter or email, now that you’re both adults? Would you think I was just some crazy person?

What will it take to make me find out?

Love,

Your Sister

The Daily Outfit is working out really well. Polyvore is fun to use – my biggest problem is that a lot of stuff I wear isn’t necessarily in stores anymore, or can’t be found online. So I have to improvise and use things that are close. Otherwise it’s pretty kickass. I don’t actually blog my outfit EVERY day, but I do publish it in a set on Polyvore most days. I’ve added a box to the bottom of the far-right column which has a link to my RSS feed of Polyvore sets. Most of them are the daily outfit, but some are contest entries and other miscellaneous stuff.

The Daily Song I’ve been slacking off on, to the point where it’s by no means “daily.” But I’m still doing it at least once or twice a week, and I can live with that.

I’m still loving my new layout, and especially happy that my comments now support Gravatars. What’s a Gravatar? It’s an icon that you can use to represent yourself across a variety of websites, and it’s keyed from your email address. Go here to sign up for one!

Have a great weekend, everybody!

Via The Daily Beast:

Fresh on the feeling of being sooo proud of myself for finally having my mammogram, and then being thrilled that it really wasn’t a big deal at all, I got a call from Kaiser. The nurse wanted to schedule me for a follow-up, diagnostic mammogram and a possible ultrasound. And she wouldn’t tell me why.

Awesome.

It was pure coincidence that I had an appointment today with my OB/GYN for a routine follow-up to last summer’s ickiness. So when I went in, she looked up the results for me and we discussed what was going on. The radiologist’s diagnosis noted what appeared to be a 7mm nodule in my left breast. However, what this “nodule” really is, or if it is really even there, requires the second mammogram (which apparently requires pressing harder – again, awesome) and ultrasound if that’s inconclusive.

Oh, really? 7mm sounds pretty small but it’s not microscopic. It’s about the width of my pinky fingernail, for instance, and it’s certainly something large enough that a person, like me, who does careful self-exams every month, would probably notice! I felt nothing. My doctor, who I’d expect to be even better at examining boobs than me, after reading these notes from the radiologist, couldn’t feel anything either. And she knew exactly where to look!

So what does all of this mean? I’ll be going back for the diagnostic mammogram (which at least they only have to do to the one, affected boob) later this month. I’ll have an ultrasound at that time, if necessary. But most likely it all amounts to nothing at all. In women my age, who need to have mammograms as part of the standard protocol, but haven’t yet entered menopause, mammography is tricky. Because we’re still pulsing with hormonal goodness, images are usually unclear, and there is a high percentage (up to 10% of every 1000 women who have a mammogram) of false positives. Reading about this on Wikipedia this morning made me feel better, and so did WebMD:

According to the American Cancer Society, only 1 or 2 mammograms out of every 1,000 lead to a diagnosis of cancer. Approximately 10% of women will require additional mammography. Don’t be alarmed if this happens to you. Only 8% – 10% of those women will need a biopsy, and 80% of those biopsies will not be cancer.

I figure this is just the latest in a long line of weird and/or false positive results to routine tests that I’ve had over the years. I’ve had numerous abnormal PAP tests, which led to everything from repeat testing to colposcopy to the awful endometrial biopsy that I had last summer. In every case, it turned out to be nothing. Compared to a biopsy, having a repeat mammogram is really, in my opinion, no big deal.

Tonight I upgraded to the latest version of WordPress. This post is just a test to make sure everything looks OK. How boring and parochial of me!