Laid bare

A lot has happened since we last spoke.

As it tends to do.

I went for a walk with my friend Fee and gave her the high/lowlights on Saturday and she said: “All that happened this week???”

Yup.

Here’s a selected slice of it:

I found a lump in my right boob early in the week and couldn’t sleep that night worrying about it.

The good thing that came out of it is that it motivated me to do my 50-year-old health check … two years late.

And so I found myself on Friday, hooked up to an ECG machine and having my feet examined by my GP. I’d been thinking it would be my vagina that would be so intimately examined, but it turns out I’m not due for a pap smear for a few years. Hallelujah! So instead I had to put my feet on his leg while he felt around looking for my arteries.

Apparently my ECG was textbook fabulous. So was my blood pressure.

My right boob was less so and appears to contain two lumps. So I’m off for a $500 mammogram this week.

It’s probably just a menopausal hormonal thing. I found lumps a few years back and had my first-ever mammogram, but it’s always best to check these things out.

That first mammogram was quite the freak out, as while I was sitting in the waiting room for my results, a parade of staff stuck their heads around the corner and stared at me with furrowed brows, then one of them hustled over to say the senior radiographer would be out to see me shortly …

What the?

It turned out they’d mistaken me for someone else. Oooops.

I’m also having a whole heap of blood tests this morning.

I told the doctor I would also book a skin cancer check and do the bowel cancer poo test, but he says the free one I got in the mail two years ago is out of date so I’ll have to beg for another one.

Most of these conversations took place with my boobs out, which I always find a little off-putting. I’m also never quite sure of the social etiquette. If you’re paying someone in a professional capacity to examine you, are you required to make polite small talk about what’s been going on in their life or can you just talk about yourself the whole time?

Since I constantly worry about appearing self-absorbed, I decided to make small talk about his life, which led to him discussing a laughing yoga class he did in India recently as he lifted my left boob up to put an ECG sticker under it.

Ah well, at least he wasn’t examining my cervix.

On Friday night I twisted myself in knots trying to decided whether to book our airfares to the World Skipping Championships.

It is impossible to fly to North America cheaply for the competition because it falls during both the Australian school holidays and the US 4th of July celebrations. So everything is about double the usual price.

I figured things weren’t going to get cheaper in midst of that, just more expensive. So I went a bit left field. We’re flying with Hawaiian Airlines to New York, with a stopover in Waikiki on the way back.

I almost vomited with panic when it was time to press the “Book” button and sign away a freaking fortune.

But I think it’s a bit of a travel hack if you fancy going to both New York AND Hawaii. It also means it’s just two 10-hour flights to get back and forth between New York and Sydney.

Now I just have to work out how to get from New York to Ottawa. Plane, train, automobile?

We will have a cheapish few days in New York staying with a friend who lives about 45 minutes north of Manhattan.

And then we have six nights in Waikiki on the way back – that won’t be cheapish at all.

That’s about all the good and bad and stressful stuff I can tell you right now.

Other than giving you another movie recommendation: Easy A is great, though slightly off-putting subject matter, with a high school girl becoming infamous for pretending she’s lost her virginity. Emma Stone was excellent – and stunningly gorgeous, though a little too skinny for my liking – in it. And I loved the fact the male lead gave her an ’80s movie ending, mixing John Cusack in Say Anything with the soundtrack from The Breakfast Club.

And so another week begins.

Was it a good weekend round your way?

Song of the day: Simple Minds “Don’t you forget about me”