Tuesday November 11, 2008 7:27 PM

I had told my mother about the gyno and my fascinating "grey patch" and I can tell she's worried about me having cancer. She doesn't come out and say that, but you can just tell. Jim says he's not worried, but for the first time in nine years he wanted to try a vodka and ruby red grapefruit juice last night after I said, "Hell....I need a drink!". Jim hates alcohol. He fixed himself another one tonight. Maybe he really just wanted to try a vodka and ruby red grapefruit. I don't know...but you never know exactly what's going on in Jim's head. If I can't guess he'll fill me in a year from now. I'm so off my rocker, though....want to know the first thing that popped into MY head when I found out I needed a biopsy? "Shit...I just got my hair looking good! Sonofabitch!" But my gut feeling is that it's nothing serious, and they were probably just looking at a patch of scar tissue. After I had all those surgeries when I nearly died having Jimmy I was told by my doctors that my uterus had been reduced to nothing but a big hunk of scar tissue, which is why we never had any more kids. It doesn't happen to me much anymore because I'm an old broad now, but when I was younger it was amazing how many people made remarks about "When are you having another kid?" and I'd say, "We're not" and they'll say "Oh, you'll change your mind...." and then I'm forced into having to tell them, "I can't" which makes them feel bad. I know that people just assume that you're able to pop out kids like english muffins but it bothered me that Jim and I no longer had any say in that decision. Would we have had more? Probably not, but it would have been nice if the decision could have been ours and not pre-ordained by the condition of my body. To everyone out there....don't ever make remarks about people having more kids. You don't know the story, and you may hear more than you bargained for.

As for the theory of the patch just being scar tissue or some damage left over from my fabulous birthing experience, I found the following in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Diseases of Women and Children: "When there has been trauma inflicted upon the cervix, with resulting exfoliation of the epithelium, the abraded surface is covered with a dirty yellowish-grey patch of pseudo membrane. This is usual in streptoccic infection." And what is "streptoccic infection?" What I was loaded with after I had Jimmy. On the National Institutes of Health website, I found this: Group A streptococcus (GAS) causes a variety of human infections. It is also an uncommon but serious cause of postpartum infections...It is possible that women who had GAS as a cause of vaginal infection may have a tendency to be carriers of this organism, but this has never been proven. We believe it is of importance to determine if women who have had one infection may be long-term carriers" Anyway, that's just my theory. We'll see if I'm right. I go for the biopsy the day after Thanksgiving.

But enough of the female anatomy lesson. Now on the Jim's teeth: I had mentioned before that Vanni was not on the website as a participating dentist in our new dental plan that just started on the 1st of November. There's a guy that we work with who has dentures, and they look great. I honestly would never have guessed that the guy wore dentures until he told me, that's how convincing they look. This guy got his teeth done at a place called "Affordable Dentures", and they have several offices in New Jersey, one of which is about a half an hour from our house. Jim had gotten the website, and I called there. Affordable dentures has a lab right on the premises, and if you need work done you can come in in the morning and your dentures are ready by the afternoon. No appointment necessary...you can just walk right in. In the meantime, Jim asked Vanni if he participated in the new dental plan, and Vanni does...not in the HMO but in the PPO, which is what we have. Well, Jim was supposed to go to Vanni on the 10th but rescheduled it for later in the month so he'd have time to go check out Affordable Dentures and see if they could finish the work. We figured it's better to go to a place with a lab onsite that to have to go to Vanni and say "Hi", he reschedules for a month out, takes impressions, reschedules for ANOTHER month out, tries on the teeth, decides to make adjustments, reschedules for ANOTHER month out, and pretty soon you're looking at a year going by and you're still not done, which is where we are right now. Ridiculous. So Jim went over to Affordable today. Good news and bad news. Jim's uppers were not fitting right....he'd been having to load them with glue goop just to keep them in place. Affordable relined them today from soup to nuts and Jim got them back at 2 pm. Now he doesn't need any glue at all for them to stay in. But Affordable can't help him with the bar on the lowers to meet the implants because they don't work with Jim's model of Frankenstein bolts. So it's back to Vanni. The good news is, once the Frankenstein bolts are all done, Affordable can handle Jim's maintenance work.

We're off to White Plains again tomorrow to talk to Dr. Melville about my test results. I'm keeping my fingers crossed I get more than a condescending look and "You know...you ARE getting older...."