The first thing I wanted to do today was to blog.

I'm not sure why the cursor on this laptop likes to jump around while I'm typing. All of a sudden, in the middle of a sentence, I find the last several words have leaped into the middle of a previous sentence. I woke today, and reached for this computer, beside my bed. I wanted to blog. I wanted to start the day blogging and blog every day for the next 365 days.

My friend Donnie Harbeck had urged me to do so, last night, during our hours-long conversation. He's been blogging every day, and it's changing his life. Or... he's been changing his life and blogging about it. Anyway, he's DOING something, which is more than can be said of me. I've become incredibly unproductive, and while I'd like to blame it on my health issues, and probably nobody would argue... I have to think that I could be doing a lot more than I've been accomplishing. Maybe blogging about it will shame me into taking action... spur me on to achieving goals...

I have a lot of things I need to do immediately, and I don't want to bore you by listing them, but they're things critical to my family's financial survival... and I keep putting them off and watching movies.

The movie-viewing, I tell myself, is research. I'm learning the craft of screenwriting by watching others' results. One of my goals is to support myself and my family members who need support, with my screenplays. I hope they'll sell and get made into movies and this will become a lucrative career... and sometimes, or maybe all the time, I want to act in the movies I'm writing... and in others that I didn't write..

Sometimes I attend local free movie screenings hosted by Creative Screenwriting Magazine. They have a Q&A with the author(s) after most of these, and that's very informative. I just wish I wasn't so fatigued by the end of these movies that I can barely stay awake for the Q&A's.

Still, I like to go to as many as I can, and I do have several screenplays in various stages of completeness... or incompletion... on my computer. Not this one. They're on my i-Mac. I had them here, too, but this thing crashed a number of times and I had to reformat it. Every time I install Movie Magic Screenwriter, it crashes again.

I might use Celtx, if I decided to write on this computer. And I might do that, because sitting on my butt still hurts too much, and the i-Mac is a desktop.

Today I'm lying on my left side, sinking into the nice memory foam pad beneath my red, knit sheets. The sheets feel soft against my thighs. Last night I was feeling very menopausal-- sweaty and hot, so I slept in nothing but my bra, a tank top, my panties, and my bags. Yes, my bags...ostomy and other... and my hose-- not footwear. An actual hose protrudes from my left buttock and connects, several feet later, to a catheter bag that is conveniently equipped with a belt, in case I should need to conceal it under my clothing and go out in public, which I'll need to do, sometime today.

Meanwhile, the bag lies on the floor next to my bed, slowly filling with clear orange fluid and a few, tiny, red clots. It's not at all disturbing to watch this fluid collect in the bag. It's a relief, after seeing what the doctor collected in syringes at the hospital.

With the help of the CT scanner, the radiologist located a large collection of pus that used to drain out of my body through a hole in the top of my vagina. The hole had been t-- I interrupted the writing of this blog to shower and wash my hair. Correction... I took a sponge bath and washed my hair. I smell all minty now, from Dr. Bronner's peppermint soap, and my hair is all slimy with leave-in conditioner that will make it soft and not frizzy when it dries. I was born with naturally curly hair, but since the cancer diagnosis, and possibly as a side effect of the chemo, my hair has been insanely curly, and I've decided I like it that way. I will no longer use my flat iron to straighten it... unless an acting role demands it.

So anyway, now I'm dressed in a skirt, tank top and sweater. Yes,it's the same tank top I slept in. In fact, I'm also wearing the same panties and bra. The panties are pretty fresh because I'm still wearing and changing the gigantic, extra long,overnight maxi pads that used to collect the pus that was draining through the hole in my vagina, which brings me back to where I was taking you before the bath...

The surgeon tore the hole in the top of my vagina while he was performing the permanent colostomy surgery. It wasn't his fault. Radiation had fused the vagina to my rectum and my rectum to my spine. It was a hellishly long surgery, and a gynecologist came in near the end and repaired the hole and took out my ovaries, to prevent cancer from taking up residence there. The hole must have blown itself wide open, right away, because before I ever left the hospital, liquids began draining from my vagina.

First, it was clear fluid tinged with blood... just like what's in my catheter drain bag, right now. After a couple of months, I hemorrhaged... and giant clots of blood were followed by what looked like a really heavy period for a couple of weeks. But soon, the bleeding gave way to pus. Thick, gray-green, gooey pus. It stank. I went back to the gynecologist, who sent me right over to the hospital ER. They cultured the pus. It was e-coli. I stayed in the hospital a couple of days, receiving intravenous antibiotics and pain meds. I became constipated, vomited, and went home. Oh, they also did a CT scan then, and elected not to insert a drain at that time, since my vagina seemed to be acting as a natural drain. But the pus drained on and on for weeks, a couple of months, maybe, and every time I ran out of Bactrim, a potent antibiotic, I would start to run a fever and feel really sick.

So, finally, Dr. Pourshahmir, the surgeon, decided I should have another CT scan and when he saw the collection of fluid in that scan, he arranged for me to have the abscess drained in the hospital. So that's what happened, and it's why I now have a hole in my butt with a pigtail drain hanging out of it, and why I'm going to be wearing baggy skirts and dresses until the thing comes out, in a couple of weeks. At home, I'll wear whatever I want, because I'll put the bag on the floor. Right now, it's belted around my hips because I'm going out to argue with the Unemployment Insurance office... who totally denied that I earned any income at all, over the past year. Morons.

But that's another story.