Butterfly Cancer

Papillary Carcinoma is butterfly cancer.  I think I caught it from the butterflies.  There will be no transformation, no metamorphosis.   I will not spread my wings and fly.  I was already doing that without butterfly cancer, thank you.  And who gets a tattoo of a thyroid gland? No one, that's who.

Recall that the thyroid processes iodine.  Three doctors have asked me if I've had radiation treatment of any kind, because that can cause butterfly cancer.  I have not.  There is a lot of iodine in some foods, like seaweed.  I love eating seaweed.  One evening, I was giving a talk about monarch butterflies at a Science Café in Hays, KS, and a man came up to me after the talk.  You know the sort.  The FBI had been following him and stuff like that.  He handed me a packet of his research and said, "you know why the monarch butterfly population crashed?  Fukushima."  Maybe Fukushima tainted my seaweed, and gave me butterfly cancer.  Thanks to some Japanese nuclear engineers with really bad oceanic geology skills, I ate radioactive seaweed that was processed by my thyroid.  Or I just have bad luck.  My luck is not as bad as the citizens who once lived near Fukushima.

I've discovered that the ENT doctor here in town has the same opinion about lymph nodes as the KU Med Center doctor:  Only remove them if they are enlarged and are showing obvious signs of cancer.  So, I've asked the doctor here in town to start the process of scheduling the surgery.  His nurse will call me on Wednesday the 29th of July, probably, after squaring things away with the insurance.  I kept finding myself complaining to the doctor about the insurance company, which has asked his office to substantiate a claim, and has failed to pay for the pathologist at KU Med Center.

"I didn't even need the pathologist at KU Med Center, because I didn't doubt the original pathology," I said, as I wondered why I was telling him this.

I think I was telling him because he seems like he cares, and he listens even when I'm babbling on about the "perspective of a hospital patient," or "bad timing, just really bad timing."  And he doesn't look over his glasses at me and purse his lips like the KU Med Center doctor.  He even gave me his cell phone number, just in case I have any questions.  Of course I lost that.

I've been losing things and forgetting stuff, you understand.  I have some trouble getting motivated in the morning normally, and this morning I just wanted to sleep for ages.  But I've managed to drag myself to work each day, maybe a little late, and plug away.  My patience for unreasonable people has become more limited.  I've had to tell several people who aren't satisfied with their milkweed plants that they aren't being reasonable, and they respond remarkably well.  One woman complained that her butterflies died after eating the milkweed we sent her.  I should have told her that the plants are giving the butterflies cancer because of Fukushima, but I really don't want the FBI to give me any trouble.  The timing for that is not so good.