Susan Hasler's Blog

On July 10, I'm releasing a new novel, KRILL. It is speculative fiction with a dash of black humor. I wrote it in 2019. In January of 2020, doctors discovered a large tumor on my ovary. It turned out to be cancer--two types of cancer! The chemo brought me lower than I have ever been, but I survived.

Survival and the climate crisis are the subject of KRILL. I think it's an important book and the best story I have ever written. Here is the summary:

What would you be willing to do to humanity to save humanity? Seas are rising, ice caps melting, and the world’s population growing increasingly desperate and violent. A back-up U.S. government has taken to sea on a handful of refurbished aircraft carriers. Mary Campbell, a CIA expert on the refugee crisis, and Sam Bostock, a Navy pilot, struggle with love, End-Times ethics, and a batshit crazy billionaire selling solutions to the world’s climate crisis.

Surgery went extremely well, and I am back at home in a room with a view of the garden. Hospitals do an amazing job of managing pain these days, so most of the time all I feel is the discomfort of dressings, drains, tubes, and various other appurtenances of surgery that now hang from my body like particularly unattractive Christmas ornaments. I’ve learned to avoid the type of movements that cause pain. If I hook my foot under the bedrail, I can use my leg muscles to raise myself to a seated position. I can call on Steve to pick up anything bigger than a small paperback. He is also on call to open any screw caps. Oddly, opening a screw cap is the most painful thing I’ve tried to do thus far. Those muscles are simply not available for use at the moment. My mug-lifting muscles are apparently also impaired. I keep spilling things.

I feel incredibly lucky. The tumor was benign and well encapsulated. They found nothing in the lymph nodes. I have good health insurance and access to wonderful, caring nurses and doctors. The medical facilities were clean, modern, and conveniently located. So I end my breast blog with a moment of silence for all of those who are not so lucky.

I haven’t written in this blog for a while, because it forces me to think about things, when I would rather nap. My bilateral mastectomy is next Wednesday, just a few days away. Right now I feel like I’m standing at the lip of a waterfall, waiting for the current to pull me over the edge.

I’ve emerged from the long list of pre-op medical appointments sore and overwhelmed. I went to the plastic surgeon’s office, where jellyfish-like implants sat on Lucite shelves interspersed with strings of sparkling white lights. It made me wonder how they decorate their Christmas tree. Three people were in the room as my breasts were measured and marked up with a Sharpie. Who needs dignity? The plastic surgeon sat down next to me and drew a sad profile of my breast on a clipboard. “See,” he said, “now your breasts are droopy like this. After the surgery, they will be perky, like this.” He drew a happy breast. Then he went on to talk about repositioning my nipples. Moving…my…freaking…nipples. Finally he had me stand against the wall as the nurse photographed my breasts. She took shots in front, three-quarter, and profile views, as if my boobs were dangerous criminals, which I suppose they are.

I’ve also been to see the breast surgeon again, my family doctor, my sleep doctor, and assorted nurses and nurse practitioners. I feel like half the county has groped my poor, sore right breast. Everyone says pretty much the same thing: that’s a big lump. Right.

I’ve come away from these appointments with all sorts of goodies: anti-bacterial soap for showering the day of surgery, a mastectomy jacket with special pockets for holding drains, brochures galore, and a tube of nipple numbing cream. I have to put this on at 5 a.m. on day of the surgery and then cover my breasts with plastic wrap. Can’t wait to see how well I can manipulate cream and Saran wrap at an hour when I am almost never awake.

I continue to work on my novel, although progress is slower than planned. I’m reading like a fiend. Like napping, it’s another way to avoid thinking about things like itinerant nipples. I load books onto my Kindle for the post-surgery down time, then I end up reading them and loading more books.

Wish me luck, folks.

It’s been a few days since I’ve talked about my breasts, so here is the latest. I went to see the genetic counselor last Thursday and was impressed by her knowledge, the research she had done on my case, and her ability to lay the facts out plain and simple. The upshot is that it’s not so much genetics, but personal factors that are the culprit in raising my cancer risk. By the end of the hour, I had made my decision to go with the breast surgeon’s recommendation for a double mastectomy. One deciding factor was that my doctors still don’t know exactly what kind of tumor I have, even after sending tissue samples to UVa and elsewhere. They’re pretty sure it’s not malignant, but they won’t say for certain yet. Malignant or benign, I don’t want cells dividing with abandon and partying hearty in my body. I want them out.

Having made the decision, I feel calm. The surgery will be sometime in July, although it hasn’t been scheduled yet. I’m focusing on eating right and exercising. I downloaded the latest installment in Gabaldon’s Outlander series onto my Kindle. I’ve been waiting for that book to come out for ages, but I’m saving it for hospital reading. After the surgery, I’m headed straight for eighteenth-century Scotland and America to spend some time with Claire and Jamie.

Meanwhile, my writing is perking along. My protagonist, Shelby, is still having a much worse summer than I, and I have even more ghastly things in store for him.

I wrote one thousand words on my novel this morning. That’s not a stellar word count, but it’s enough to reassure me that the looming mastectomy hasn’t knocked me off track yet. If I can produce a thousand words, I’m still a writer and not a patient. It’s a small victory, but one that I need to repeat on as many days as possible over the next few weeks.

I got good news on the MRI. Other than the honking big tumor at two o’clock on my right breast, they didn’t find anything abnormal. Thus far it looks like I won’t need chemotherapy or radiation after the surgery. I’ve sat with family members during chemotherapy and I fear it more than surgery. I can deal with the knife, but spare the poison, please.

Tomorrow I meet with the genetic counselor. I haven’t made the final decision on lumpectomy vs. mastectomy. The surgeon said that with the lumpectomy, my lifetime cancer risk still approaches 50 percent. If the genetic counselor concurs with that, then my decision is made. Twice in the past two years I’ve been through the mammogram-ultrasound-biopsy routine. Thank you, but I have better places to park my anxieties. I’d rather go back to worrying that no one reads my novels.

No results yet from the breast MRI, but I’m getting lots of conflicting advice on the merits/dangers of mastectomy. I’ll either end up completely fine and delightfully perky, or the surgery will leave an opening for aliens to invade my body and begin to snack on hitherto healthy organs. Where was that zen calm I was feeling yesterday?

I’m starting to accumulate items in that ironic, I-enjoy-being-a-girl! pink that has come to be associated with breast cancer. The nurse handed me a pink paper bag after my biopsy which included a tiny—half the size of my bruise—ice pack to slip into my bra and a handout entitled “Post Breast Biopsy/Aspiration Discharge Instructions.” It tells me that if my breast swells, gets hot, and begins to ooze smelly discharge, I should call the doctor. You betcha. I’ll call the doctor an incompetent so-and-so who ought to clean his instruments better. The handout also advises that I eat pineapple to reduce swelling and bruising. I like pineapple, but it’s giving me a life-threatening ear worm: Jimmy Buffet singing “If You Like Pina Coladas.” Oh, the horror. Included with the handout is a bunch of dried lavender tied up in a pretty organza bag. This is supposed help me relax, but sniffing it doesn’t work. Do I smoke it? I notice they didn’t include any rolling papers. How thoughtless.

I did manage to rewrite a chapter this morning, but I didn’t quite reach the zone where the writing makes everything else disappear. I’ll aim for that tomorrow.

I had an ambitious plan for my writing career in 2014. I had regained the rights to my first novel, Intelligence, and made the decision to go indie. I was going to put Intelligence out myself in Ebook and paperback, finish up my second novel, Project HALFSHEEP, and get that out as well. I would market those books while finishing my third novel, The Flat Bureaucrat.

By May, I congratulated myself on having accomplished a good portion of what I had set out to do—Intelligence and Project HALFSHEEP were out. Writing on the third novel was steaming along.

Then I went in for a mammogram, followed by an ultrasound, a biopsy, an MRI, and a consultation with the breast surgeon. The words “bilateral mastectomy” are the only ones that really stand out from that conversation. The surgery will take place as soon as the hematoma left by the biopsy shrinks. I am remarkably calm about it at the moment. My years as a counterterrorism analyst completely destroyed any tendency toward panic—panic is pretty useless in any context.

The question at the top of my mind right now is “Can I keep my writing on track?” I want to keep this summer all about Shelby, my protagonist, and not about me. This seems healthy to me. Focusing on myself and my sore, lumpy, and at the moment eggplant-colored breast could hardly be helpful. Meanwhile, I can put any morbid thoughts I have into Shelby’s head. Fortunately, he’s the morbid type. He’s also a whiner and complainer, which could come in handy. He is not a curser (not to be confused with cursor), but I may turn him into one before this summer is over.

I don’t know yet if I can keep a double mastectomy from throwing me off track. Maybe I’m being entirely too naive and optimistic. I’ll try to blog about it as I go along. When I was growing up, words like mastectomy were only spoken in coy whispers, and I effing hate coy whispers.

I’ve done it. My blog has 0 views thus far. It isn’t exactly what I was hoping for, but I can’t say that I’m entirely displeased. Sure, I could go figure out how to promote this thing, but I’ve had it up to my eyeballs with self promotion. I’m also weary of nasty comments from people who dislike my political views. No, this is a perfect solution for an introvert. I’m “putting myself out there,” as I’ve been advised to do, but no one is looking. I like blogging more than I thought I would.

Like me. It takes me straight back to that insecure high school girl who always felt awkward and ugly. Like me, please. The words sound so needy and pitiful. Yet I’m told that likes on a Facebook page are important for a writer, although no one has clearly explained why. It’s so hard to navigate that thin line between putting yourself out there and completely obnoxious self promotion. I’m not sure there is a line. Whatever. So, if you feel like it, please like my page—or ask me to dance at the next high school prom.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Susan-...

It takes a shovel to format a novel. The shovel is what keeps me sane through cryptic error messages, corrupted documents, and instructions that were never designed for Word for Mac. Through things that worked yesterday that no longer work today. Through margins that refused to justify properly and page numbers that appeared where page numbers should not. Through endless proofreading. Through tasks that require a patience and precision that does not come naturally to me.

When Word goes squirrelly, there’s nothing like a shovel. Go out and dig and get your blood circulating. If you put a foot down wrong, all of the dirt will not pop back to where it was when you started. The simple instructions for Shovel 2007 are the same as they were for Shovel 2004—and shovel 1504 for that matter. No need to google “troubleshoot shovel dig.”

Before you lose your mind, go get a shovel. But please don’t hit anyone with it.