Today is surgery for me; I’ll give you news and be back when I can

By David McElroy · January 30, 2012

By the time most of you read this, I should be in surgery or maybe even finished with it. I’m scheduled to be at the hospital by 6 a.m., so many people will still be asleep. I wish this were a day for me to be asleep in my own bed instead of “sleeping” from anesthesia.

Let me bring you up to date on where things stand. As you might know, I was diagnosed with breast cancer slightly more than two weeks ago. A week later, tests of additional samples led the doctor to back off a bit, saying that he could now only say that there were “atypical” cells. The lump in my chest might be cancer, but it might not be.

I won’t know until I wake up after the surgery what was done to me or what they found. Here’s the plan. They’re first going to remove the lump. While I’m still knocked out, it will be sent to the hospital lab for testing. If the people in the lab can determine that it’s definitely cancer, the surgery will resume and they’ll remove all of the breast tissue from the left side of my chest, possibly even lymph nodes, depending on what they find. If the lab can’t definitely say the cells in the lump are cancer — if the cells just appear “atypical” again — the surgeon won’t do anything else today. Obviously, the second is the one I’m hoping for.

If the cells are cancerous and they have to do the major surgery — a “modified radical mastectomy” — I’ll be in the hospital for at least one night. If they don’t have to do that, there’s a good chance I’ll be home Monday night. Either way, I’ve been told not to expect to do much this week.

Honestly, I’m expecting the less-serious outcome, so I’m expecting to be home Monday night. I got one piece of very hopeful news Friday when I went in for a CT scan. (That’s the scanner above.) The technician operating it told me that the lump didn’t appear to be connected to anything else. She said that’s a good sign that whatever is going on in it hasn’t spread elsewhere. She’s not a doctor, so she could be wrong, but it’s a hopeful sign.

Despite my absence, some things will continue as normal here, at least for a few days. I’ve given most of the monkeys a week of well-deserved vacation, so you won’t be seeing any news links this week, but I have new articles that will be published for the rest of the week. Please keep up the discussion of anything you find interesting even if I’m not around to join in. I’ll at least be reading your comments on my iPhone.

If you’ve never gone through anything such as this, count yourself lucky. It’s been an interesting learning experience, mostly because of the emotional roller coaster it creates. It’s scary, but it also has the odd side effect of forcing you to look carefully at what matters to you in life. It’s had that effect for me, and other people have since told me that it had the same effect for them.

I want to let you know that I’ve appreciated all the emails, Facebook messages and phone calls. You guys have been amazingly supportive, and I want you to know how much I appreciate you. I’ve also been amused to find that three different people mentioned that their pastors didn’t know how to pronounce my last name correctly when they read the name on their church prayer lists. I’m accustomed to that by now.

I’ll probably have a chance to post news to my Facebook page before I’ll be able to post something here about what’s going on later, so feel free to check that page if you’d like. It’s an open page, so anybody can read it or post there.

Thanks again for all the support. I do want all of you to know that I’ve appreciated everything you’ve said and done, each in his or her own way. I appreciate all of you.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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