Gimme a Break?

So at this point I'm all healed up and feeling much better. I religiously applied Mederma to my scar every day, and I started working out again. Ryan got me a certificate for a personal trainer at our gym, which was very thoughtful (no, seriously it was) because I wanted help in building the muscle back that I lost in the surgery. That turned out to be a slight disaster--I told the trainer about my surgery and what I wanted to work on, and she started giving me a hard time when I couldn't complete a whole set of ab exercises! Hello, I had muscle surgically removed from my stomach, give me a freaking break! And by the way, you're kind of fat to be a personal trainer as it is (I wish I said that!). So needless to say I started just working out on my own again.

In the summer, though, I was nowhere near ready to wear a bikini--I was still pretty embarrassed of my scar and the way my stomach looked, and I didn't want the world to see. My girlfriends frequently lectured me that now is the time to show off my body before it got too late, and throw all of those tankinis in the garbage. Actually, this summer of 2009 is the first time I've worn a bikini since the surgery, which is ironic because my new tumor is at the biggest it's been. But I realized life is too short to worry about what people think. Not that I'd ever go this far, but I started feeling more comfortable about my body:

At this point, the summer after my surgery, all of my dreams started to slowly come true. Ryan and I got engaged, and he proposed in front of my entire family! He wrote this really funny and sweet poem, then got down on one knee and proposed. We were both laughing and crying and it was wonderful (fine, I'll break the suspense--I said yes.).

That fall, I got the job that I had truly been hoping and waiting for at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner in NYC as a Forensic Biologist (OCME peeps, seriously I really wanted the job and I actually LIKE it. That may seem hard to believe by the way I complain at work, but it's true!). Our lab is the biggest in the country, and my friend who already worked there seemed to love it. The city was also building us a brand new building that would have all the room and equipment we needed (in theory--we seem to run out of printer paper a lot, oddly enough). Before we could move in to the new lab, we had to stay at our old working quarters, which consisted of the main Manhattan morgue and labs, as well as some lab space at Bellevue Hospital. Yes, that Bellevue Hospital, home of the crazies. Here's a pic of Shannon and I working very hard at the new building:

Everything was going really well. I had to get a check-up MRI every six months to make sure the tumor wasn't coming back. Like I said before, I didn't know how much time I'd be spending in an MRI tube when all this started, but I was getting used to the process of having to lay perfectly still for over an hour and doing breathing exercises. The first MRI after the surgery was super, but after the second the doctor called and said he saw a "spot." I was upset--even though the tumor was small this meant it still came back. Theoretically desmoid tumors could never come back or start growing then just stop, but I somehow knew I wouldn't have such luck. And there began the saga known as....Return of the Lumpus! More on that next time.

The Eagles lost today, so I will leave you with a photo from the Phillies World Series parade, because it makes me happy. This is a picture of me with three random people. The couple on the left caught the vodka bottle that Jayson Werth threw at the crowd during the parade, and at the time it seemed super important that I take a picture with these celebrities who now had his DNA. I don't know who the guy on the right is.





xoxoxo,
Sue