Don't You Need That? @dontyouneedthat - Tumblr Blog

Hannibal, my best friend is battling stomach cancer right now. How can I help her?

Hey Anon,

I'm really sorry your friend is having to deal with this crap and I hope she's doing alright. The best advice I can give you is just to tell you some of the things I have found helpful over the course of my treatment, recovery and ongoing well... life.

1. Be there. Now I get you can't be right there holding her hand all day every day. Also some people don't do hospitals. That's cool. The point is to be present in her life as you would for any other struggle big or small. Call, text, and do all the little things you normally do to remind her "you're my friend and I think you're awesome." Cancer scares some people because it makes them have to face their mortality. Some people can't handle being close to someone who is in a situation where they have to do that. So they tend to disappear during the hard part. Don't do that. I'm not saying go hang out at the hospital if you have a phobia of hospitals, but remember she's having to be brave because she has no other choice. So you can choose to be brave enough to make sure she knows you're there.

2. Understand that this is part of her but it is not her. My journey and experience with cancer is a big part of who I am. It's changed me in a lot of ways and impacts a lot of my daily life. BUT it is not the whole of my identity. I'm not a poster child for recovery or some inspirational character. I'm a lot more than that and so is your friend. There will be days when she wants to talk about it or be angry about it or sad about it but there will be just as many days when she wants to talk about/be angry about/be sad about say Sleepy Hollow or who won Face Off or her conflicted feelings about the cat clawing her chair while looking adorable. The point is to find balance between her need to talk about whats going on and her need to not make it the center of her life.

3. There are times when you're going to want to tell her to buck up, or stop feeling sorry for herself or it's not that bad. ALWAYS take a moment when you feel this need and asses the situation as a whole. You know her better than me so you'll be able to tell when she just needs a nudge to get her on her feet for two minutes then we can sit down again. Keep in mind though that you also need to see those moments where she really just can't and that is a hard thing for her to admit. She's not a superhero. She's going to have some really crap days. Make sure she knows on those days that she's not letting anyone down, she's not a failure and she's not some Spartan. If in doubt trust her to know what she needs.

Those are the three biggest things I can think of, but feel free to ask follow up questions. Also there are great forums and support resources on http://www.nostomachforcancer.org/ Maybe do some reading together there. Maybe join in the conversation with your friend, reach out to others who have gone through this and see what they have to say as well.

I hope that helps and I hope your friend does well.

My new nutritionist! Lovely woman. Dr. Mansfield ran off before I could get a photo with us and Hannibal. Ah well. I get to check in with him I'm 6 weeks.

#hannibal #hannibalthestomach #mdanderson

Yearly appointment at MD Anderson. I'm anemic ... Who's surprised? I'm not...

#Hannibal #stomachcancer #stomachcancerawareness #hannibalthestomach

Hannibal and I had a rough week at work. But hey the show opened.

#hannibal #hannibalthestomach

Heading out fir another round of wedding dress shopping.

Hannibal and I helped my friend look at wedding dresses.

#hannibalthestomach

gameraboy

Donuts!

punkrockbetty-deactivated201508

FINALLY!!!

dontyouneedthat

So going back to the whole sugar thing, donuts and sweets in general are a dangerous business for me. But this is me and

LOVE.

SWEETS.

My dedication to them is well documented... at least anecdotally. I've discovered through trial and error exactly what kinds of donuts will be least likely to hurt me. It's the small victories. Of course there are some days I know I'm going to be at home with nowhere to be and take a big risk and have two *gasp!*

#youcantstopourlove

Quit Playing Games with My... Innards?

So my body likes to play games with me. It's not abnormal for me to feel anywhere from mildly blurky to full blown nauseated after I eat or if I eat too fast (or if I think of food on a day ending in "y" and my insides don't like the cut of my jib).

Fun Fact About the Human Body: Certain nerves in your digestive tract are actually related to your sneeze reflex.

So this results in occasionally feeling like I need to sneeze and possibly barf at the same time. Awkward... and the first several (million) times it happens really stressful.

#medicalnonsense #gastrectomy

think-progress

Our food labels desperately need an update.

alexandra-erin

While I can agree with parts of this (holy carp, would I love for all foods and beverages to disclose exact caffeine content)… um, no. No. No. No.

"Only added sugars (high-fructose corn syrup, table sugar, etc.), not naturally occurring sugars in milk and fruit, are the problem."

NO.

Are you trying to kill people, Think Progress? Is that the goal here?

I think part of the problem (so to speak) is approaching this from the standpoint of the nutrition label as a litany of problems to be avoided rather than a listing of information to be taken into account.

And the amount of sugar in food is information that some people need to take into account. It’s a medical necessity. And their bodies don’t care whether the sugar was born inside the orange you’re eating or was injected by the proboscis of a genetically engineered sugar-injecting mosquito.

Yes, let’s present the information in more cogent and less deliberately obfuscating ways. But let’s not go making judgments about what information other people don’t need.

dontyouneedthat

Reblog for the bolded text.

PS- Label the goddamned artifical sweeteners and how much of that is in there too. Cause my body gives NO FUCKS about whether it's glucose, sucrose, suCRAlose, dextrose what-the-fuck-ever-lose. If my body gets too much of it it gets upset. Like fucks up my life for anywhere between an hour to the rest of the day levels of upset. Sometimes I'm even screwed up the next day.And I have to play this game not just every day. But every. Single. Time. I. Eat.

#life with no stomach #body quirks #just tell me whats in my food #ffs

miriameleanorart

Skinny

dontyouneedthat

All. Of. This. I've been working on a post about my weight loss due to the surgery and it's hard to try and cover all my feelings about the way people reacted to my weight los, the way I react to it etc. This sums up a lot of it.

In October, a few years after moving from Boston to San Francisco to become a professional dancer, Lisa Bufano took her own life. She was 40.

That horrifying, heart-shattering moment when you go to link people to someone to essentially say "Piss off with your closed-minded, able-ist, sizist, that-person-can't-x-because-they're-y-ist bullshit" and you find this.

There was a conversation at work today about plus sized ballerinas that for me boiled down to "fat chicks can't ballet." I wasn't actually part of the conversation and it was not in an environment where it would have been appropriate for me to say "it's not about give them the part because they're fat it's about don't write them off before you know what they can do; It's about don't look at the size of their ass or the fact they have a belly and assume they can't do something. How about you base your ideas of whether they can or can't something on merit rather than just looking at them and saying 'we don't want you, fatty, you're not good enough'?" So I said nothing. Not unusual for me in a lot of cases. I often choose not to get confrontational. And no it's not about diminishing what professional dancers do in fact it has nothing to do with them. No one's saying "don't give the obviously skilled and talented dancer the job because she's just one more skinny chick." It's about "give the chick who happens to not be skinny the chance to surprise you before you write her off." Yes dance takes huge amounts of training. Definitely go with the person with the most talent and best skill, but how the hell are you supposed to know if that person has that skill or talent if you shut the door in their face before they even audition?

So I was going to spam everything I could with lots of Lisa Bufano's work. Call it passive aggressive; I call it turning a negative into a positive. Google brought me the above link. And it broke me apart for the evening.

I deal with a lot of "Can't." I have always dealt with a lot of "Can't."

"You Can't because you're fat."

"You Can't because you're not pretty."

"you Can't because you read too much."

"You can't because you're different."

"You Can't because you're broken."

"You Can't because you're weird."

You can't because you're not what we think you ought to be.

Lisa and her work were, for me, very much about kicking all that Can't bullshit straight in the teeth. She was/is someone I could hold up and say "you're wrong." I know you're wrong. She knows you're wrong. In fact there's a whole world full of people out there who not only know you're wrong, but prove you wrong on a regular basis. In my passive aggressive sort of way, that is.

I know, technically she's not a fat ballerina, but my point stands. People looked at her and probably said many times "you Can't.'

I don't want those voices to be what killed her. I don't want her to be gone because she got tired of hearing Can't every five minutes. She seemed very much like the kind of person who did things on her own terms for her own reasons. I hope that's the reason she chose to make her exit when she did.

#heartbroken #LisaBufano #so unfair