Emmaruth's secret agents

Dear diary,

Today I moved to another country. I couldn’t sleep on the plane ride over so Ethan and I synced up our tvs so we could watch “eternal sunshine of the spotless mind” together as it’s been a tradition of ours to watch that annually, something that started after we watched it in the theater the last time we lived in a different country together. Ethan fell asleep pretty quickly, but we tried and that’s the important part, it counts. I listened to In ár gCroíthe go deo on the descent. It was a bright and sunny morning and I want to remember that, it felt like Ireland was welcoming us.

Our apartment is very over the top but I love it. There’s a gorgeous but very lux grocery store on the first floor, special occasions mainly. I’d love our apartment it more if it had furnishings but it doesn’t yet so I’m gonna stay in a hotel and work on that while Ethan goes back to America to clean the remnants of us from our house and picks up our dogs along with some certified dog transporter. We couldn’t manage all my meds (basically two suitcases - it takes a lot to keep me running) and the dogs on one trip and I am an admittedly not great flier so I’m sitting this round out (plus me flying back and forth means needing to transport more meds so it’s not necessarily useful) this will be my first time absolutely alone in a country but I think I’ll be ok.

Tomorrow we’re going to fit in as many chores as we can before Ethan leaves. The I’m just gonna have to take over Dublin and get stuff for the apartment. I still have a bunch of banking and phone number stuff to figure out. I will give myself one day for touristy shit and then buckle down. I was so scared of this leading to it, but now we are here and I feel really free. I miss my giant tub from the house though. That was remarkable. On the flip side tonight I had the best takeaway pizza I’ve had in years.

I need to preface this with everything is okay.

In 2021 while Ethan and my mom were dealing with Covid, I found a tiny bump in my right breast. I was wilding out with fear about what was going on with my very sick mom and husband and also wilding out with health anxiety, which I have in abundance on a good day. Cooler heads did not prevail and I got into the breast center at mgh super quick and failed my mammogram. From there I had a stereotactic biopsy, and from there I had a lumpectomy where they removed a bunch of atypical ductal hyperplasia. The whole ordeal ate up most of February and March. It was scary although I was more concerned about my rapidly deconditioning mother so I was kind of on autopilot in regards to myself. The worst part was our puppy Myrtle Snow arrived during all of it and I could not pick her up for ages.

This February I failed another mammogram on the same breast, had to go back for tons more imaging and then more biopsies. Since I had ADH that raises my cancer risk as does my Ashkenazi ancestry - which is so wild to have had relatives with this rich history but to be absolutely and utterly divorced from it beyond conceptually. That however doesn’t matter when it comes to genetics. Thankfully that turned out ok but took months to get sorted which was difficult.

My breast surgeon decided she wanted me to get a mammogram in October before leaving since it would take a while to get me into the Irish systems and they are more lax about mammograms anyway, preferring a 2 year cycle, so it could be a bad combination. So I was all “yeah get this shit done and then focus on moving and packing” totally cavalier about it and of course they found a Birads 4 area in imagining in the other goddamn breast. At this point I just wanted to rip my skin off, I couldn’t relax, but I think since they knew that a big life thing kinda hung in the balance, all the additional imaging and biopsies were scheduled at breakneck speed. Which is great, but it still meant I had to take a ridiculous dose of prednisone, which is always brutal, but I just did that whole rigamarole less than a month ago for my kidney, my system hadn’t even righted itself before dousing more prednisone into the equation which was hellish. It also sucked because I said nothing to no one about this, so I was having all these conversations pretending to be all happy about our imminent move when I wasn’t even sure it was happening.

So it’s good and all that but 3 times in 4 years is exhausting. My main goal when we get to Ireland is restart thr glp1 stuff (in light of having so many surgical procedures the last couple months I haven’t been able to take that since they don’t play well with anesthesia, and my body already doesn’t play well with anesthetics so no need to make it worse) But losing weight could potentially help, and after that I’m gonna have to talk to a dr about what I can do to lower my risk profile more, because I can’t take this anymore. I lost a good chunk of this week since my cortisol just predictably crashed putting more stress on Ethan PLUS I wasn’t allowed to lift heavy stuff again.

Sometimes I kind of want to be a robot.