Category: It IS all about me

When my doctor and I reviewed the results from my annual physical, I was feeling pretty smug. Because I turned 40 this month, we did the big baseline reading thing: TSH, cholesterol, iron, etc. Turns out my risk score is zero… bad cholesterol is good, good cholesterol is not bad but could be better, thyroid is dancing in the low end for normal but within the healthy range, and while my haemoglobin is fine my iron stores are on the low side. All excellent results, so much so that we joked I had a little bit of room for misbehaving.

I wasn’t laughing too loud this morning, though, when I read this front-page anxiety-stoking article that trumpets those highest at risk for severe complications from the H1N1/Swine Flu epidemic are: healthy 40 year olds. Gah!!

(I’m also a little twitchy because she found a swollen “nodule” in my left breast that was of enough concern to book me for a mammogram and ultrasound. I’ve been carefully not thinking about it for three weeks, and my mammogram is booked for tomorrow. Stay tuned for yet another post in the continuing stoooooory of my vexatious breast…)

How bad can 40 be, when it starts out with a blissful day at the beach with some of my favourite people?

(How bad can 40 be when I’m willing to post a full-body shot of me in a bathing suit on my 40th birthday?)

(Consider yourself lucky you got this version of my birthday suit!)

(I think I have to keep typing “40” to convince myself it’s me we’re talking about. How can I be 40 when I’m still 23?)

(More beach pix and a great new family fun recommendation to follow!)

Why yes, as a matter of fact it IS another post in the ongoing saga of my vexatious breasts!

Yesterday, my mom and I went bra shopping. I’m three days shy of forty, so I don’t *need* my mother to come shopping with me, but retail therapy has long been equated with quality bonding time with us, and we just don’t get enough time to do it together any more.

I’ve been wearing my nursing bras even though Lucas has been weaned for a couple of months now out of sheer laziness because I’ve lost enough weight that my old bras don’t fit anymore. You might remember, too, that I toyed about this time last year with breast reduction surgery. While I haven’t completely written off that idea, I have put it on hold for now. Losing 30 lbs overall (and perhaps weaning the baby) has reduced both my band and my cup size by enough that I’m no longer as uncomfortable as I was at this time last year.

I’ve been looking forward to getting a grown-up bra for a long time now. Back in early 2007, not too long after my last miscarriage, Kerry and I wandered in to the fancy high-end bra shop near our office building one lunch hour on a whim and I had my first encounter with a bra that cost more than a hundred dollars. I scoffed. A hundred bucks? Why the hell would I pay more than $100 for a bra? And then I tried one on and instantly lost 15 lbs. Ohhhhhh, that’s why! And so I promised myself that as soon as I’d finished losing the extra bit of pregnancy and grief weight, I’d buy myself a fancy bra. A girl deserves at least one grown-up bra, don’t you think? But before I could buy that bra, I was pregnant with Lucas.

More than two years later, Bra Chic has moved from Sussex Drive to Westboro, and my mother and I walk into its friendly brightness one late weekday morning. The owner, Marianne, greets us even as our eyes are adjusting from the glare outside, before I have even had a chance to take in the rows of lacy finery hanging on the walls. “What can I do for you?” she asks, and I blurt out something about weight loss and weaned babies, and the first thing she says is “Congratulations!” which disarms me even more. She asks me my name and hustles me in to a change room in the back, and I realize that this is not going to be like my usual experience of locking myself into a change room at The Bay with sixteen styles in five sizes, aiming for and yet often unable to achieve the lofty goal of merely functional and acceptable.

She asks me what I want out of my bra, and the question completely perplexes me, enough so that there is a long pause before I start to stutter out my band and cup size, and she says no, she wants to know what I expect out of my bra. Oh, now I understand. “I want it to do its job and stay out of my way.” A faintly knowing smile plays across her lips.

As a big-breasted girl, I learned at an early age that bras were functional, not fun. Not for me the flowery little A-cup bits of flounce from La Senza, buy four get three free. Bras are about function and form, about keeping the girls under lock and key and as far out of the way as possible. Bras have bones, or latches to let the nursing baby in. Bras are a necessity, and shopping for bras is an exercise in demoralizing misery, to be endured only when absolutely necessary.

My tank top is soon discarded, and she measures my band size, asking me to exhale fully and inhale deeply. I expect her to measure my cup size next, but she’s obviously been at this a while and doesn’t even bother. She steps away and comes back with a beautiful silky cherry red bra and I have to bite back a snicker. I can see she has registered the look of commingled amusement and trepidation on my face, and she says “It’s a lovely colour, isn’t it?” I tell her that my existing bra collection covers the full spectrum from white to cream to beige, but once I had a black one to which I was quite partial. She laughs, all the while fitting hooks into eyes and tugging straps and jiggling things into place. I can only stand with my arms akimbo and wait for her to finish her ministrations. I have never been fussed over in quite this manner, but it is not in the least bit unpleasant.

She steps back, and I look in the mirror. Whoa! Lookit them all way up there! I’m surprised my breasts aren’t getting vertigo at that elevation! My nipples, usually hanging around somewhere near the bend in my elbow, have climbed up to a perch near the top of my bicep. I pull on a t-shirt, and parade outside for my mother’s inspection. She admires my lofty silhouette, and raises an approving eyebrow when I flash the cherry red strap at her. I promenade around the shop a bit, and my jiggly bits are jiggle-free. I even feel taller. I am in love with this bra.

I try a few others, one a nice chocolate brown with pink trim and an extra detachable bit that I don’t entirely understand, intended as a bit of arabesque that ties behind my neck when I’m wearing something with a plunging neckline. Since I fancy neither plunging necklines nor bras with bits I can’t account for, I pass on that one. I learn the difference between a full cup and a balcony bra as various styles come and go. They don’t all fit, but the shop owner is a whirlwind of fastening and unfastening, clothing me in different styles and sizes while I stand rather like a dressmakers’ dummy, completely submissive to her expertise.

I am more than happy, almost giddy with relief, to hand over what for nearly 30 years has been a consistently onerous and unpleasant experience to her capable hands. I begin to wonder — to wish — about other unpleasant tasks in my life that might be farmed out to more obviously capable hands. To simply have the responsibility of bra shopping taken out of my hands is more than worth the (as yet undisclosed) price of the bra.

I finally remember to ask about the cost, and manage to swallow the cringe of dismay when she tells me the cherry red beauty will set me back a little more than $150. I look in the mirror and know that I am more than worth it. To see my girls — my only girls, as it turns out in this lifetime — sitting so jauntily high on my chest makes me want to weep with gratitude. If only I’d known ten years ago!

I fuss briefly over whether such a “playful” bra is appropriate for every day use, and the shop owner clucks knowingly. “This isn’t a particularly playful bra. Shall I show you a playful bra?” I nod rather timidly, fearful of what she might bring out. Playful, it turns out, is less silky cherry red and more black and white patterned lace with metal bits whose purpose I can’t quite fathom but am too embarrassed to ask about. Suddenly, subtle cherry red seems entirely appropriate for my largely plain cotton knit wardrobe.

In the end, I buy two bras. Well, I buy one and my mother insists on buying one as a birthday present. I take home the cherry red beauty with the full cup, a bra I knew in my heart I had to own the minute I saw it on me, and a demure beige balcony cup half in soft, supple lace. (No wonder my old bras never fit properly. I’d been wearing 36 DD to 38D when I should have been in a 32F.) I learn how to lean forward into the bra as I put it on, how to slide two fingers inside the cup to lift and separate my breasts, how to tug and shake the bit of bra just above my sternum until my breasts settle magically into the perfect spot. I am delighted with my perky new silhouette. My mother opines that I look like I’m 18 again, and I reply that I don’t think they were this perky at 18, either.

$150 for a bra? You betcha, baby. I figure 50 cents a day for a year of looking like I paid thousands for a breast lift is a more than worthwhile investment. And I’m worth it!

Those of you who have been around a while know I have, um, issues with iPods. Or, perhaps more specifically, iPods seem to have issues with me. Let’s take a moment to review my rather checkered iPod past, shall we?

I joined the clan of the Apple faithful in August of 2006. Beloved bought me a 1G iPod nano, and I loved the heck out of the little dickens. Perhaps I loved it a little too much, though, because it died an untimely death a mere two and a half weeks later.

The replacement iPod lasted a whole five months before it seized up and died in the midst of transfering a play list from my computer one day. Less than a year old, though, it was replaced under Apple’s one-year warranty protection plan.

The new iPod, shipped straight from Apple, died before I even opened the box. It arrived in a pre-deceased condition. Seriously!

So, if you’re keeping score, that’s four iPods in six months. The next one lived a good life. A whole eight months went by before I, um, laundered it to death in the fall of 2007.

And because the universe was running out of new and innovative ways to kill my iPod(s), the latest replacement was simply stolen out of my unlocked van one night almost exactly a year ago.

I replaced it, though, and I’ve come to be rather fond of this latest lucky seventh iPod, the one that has been with me the longest. Perhaps that’s why of all the trauma and hassle resulting from the accident on Thursday, the loss of this last iPod was the bitterest pill to swallow.

I don’t usually leave my iPod in the van. I’d had it at the gym, as usual, on Wednesday, was distracted leaving the van and left it lying on the seat. Later in the day, I stuffed it into the glove box, but the cord from the earphones was dangling out. Thursday before work, I stopped to get something out of the van on my way to the bus, and noticed the dangling cord. “I should put that in the house,” I thought, but knew I was running late for the bus. “Okay, I’ll just stuff the cord into the glove box and get it later. It’ll be fine.”

Famous last words.

About 10 hours later, the front corner of the van closest to the glove compartment crumpled into a heap shortly before being engulfed in flames, and then throughly soaked by the firefighters’ hose. If my iPods can’t survive a data transfer, there was no way it could have possibly survived this:

(I couldn’t resist this last picture when we went to the impound lot to retrieve any personal belongings from the van yesterday. You know, it’s amazing what minutaie collects in your car. Umbrellas, sippy cups, CDs, kids’ toys and books, a soother (I left that behind), a case of club soda… it was both traumatic and cathartic to pick through the charred ruins of my former van, collecting these little bits of normalcy. It was a very surreal moment, especially because the van was in the exact condition it was in at the moment of impact — the key still in the ignition, the windows were still open, because it was a warm and glorious summer afternoon. That more than anything brought me immediately back to the crash…)

When I first looked through the open window, after I took in the still-inflated air bags, I noticed the glove compartment was open. “For chrissake,” I thought. “Bad enough I’ve got to deal with everything else, but someone’s been rifling through the van looking for anything worth stealing.” It’s a secure yard, though, and it turns out the glove box just popped open from the impact.

We’d had the van for nearly a year when we realized that it actually has two glove compartments, one above the other. The second one, the less obvious one, is where I had stashed my iPod. After looking at the sodden remains of my owner’s manual in the lower glove compartment (I left it behind, but the magpie in me kept a little Dodge Ram emblem that had popped off of something), I had little hope that there would be anything left of the iPod. I wasn’t even sure if I’d be able to open the glove compartment, looking at the state of the rest of that corner of the van.

It opened easily, though, and I was surprised to see very little evidence of the fire inside the glove compartment. I reached in and pulled out the iPod, still in it’s Roots neoprene case and still attached to the headphones. When the headphones actually dripped as I pulled them out, so saturated was the foam padding on the ear pieces, my heart sank. I’d been holding out against hope, I think, without even realizing it. I threw the whole thing into the box with the umbrellas and the sippy cups, and threw them into the back of the car.

A few minutes later, I pulled it out to show Beloved. I reached into the neoprene case, and could feel the dampness through the neoprene. I peered at the LED display in the bright sunlight, and to my shock, the display was working. I must have hit the clickwheel with my thumb as I was pulling it out. I was so surprised, I actually turned it off again, and then back on. I clicked a few times, and cranked the click wheel to turn up the volume, and damn if Headley wasn’t suddenly blasting out of the sodden headphones.

Talk about lucky number seven. My iPod survived!