This post is late and short and sweet. Thank you all for your kind thoughts and support. The past couple weeks have been a roller coaster — figuring out a new doctor and a care plan. I reached out to the team at Duke, NC and they wanted me to fly there asap for a drill biopsy - after a five minute conversation. We flipped out. We stayed calm. I wrote a bunch of emails, made a bunch of calls, kept trying to save the worry.
Luckily, we were able to transfer records and see the doctor stepping in for most of Dr. Mammoser’s patients this morning, Dr. Trevino at Tulane. He is thorough and thoughtful and took a lot of time looking at my images from more angles than we’d seen before. He said the spot is tiny and he measured to see that it’s very likely in the 100% radiation zone. He will double check what with my wonderful radiation oncologist. There are a few other indicators that it’s likely necrosis - there’s no evidence of blood flow to the area and no evidence that a mass is pushing my brains around to make room. This was all without my full records. He also explained that the fancy Duke surgeon could very likely do a biopsy and miss the tissue, the spot is that small.
We are relieved on so many levels. I can yell at the boys again as needed. We can sleep. And eat. AND get excited to celebrate Mardi Gras! One of the first parades is this weekend.
I took several classes this week so I’ll just post some of that work here today. All of this work is, by design, fast and loose. The idea is to draw faster than your mind can think, to avoid doubting yourself.
I started a drawing for comics course. We were asked to make a morning diary comic, inspired by Ellen O’Grady:
Here’s mine, I experimented with making it on an iPad with Procreate:
I took a poetry comic zine class with this wonderful creator, Juniper Kim:
She had us make two zines. Her prompts felt prescient, just for me “think about your low point this week, your high point, a time yesterday that you experienced beauty, what if the you of a year ago met the you today what would that look like? does your childhood self have anything in common with yourself now? what do you enjoy about yourself, DRAW HOW THIS WEEK FELT…”
She made a beautiful point, that comic creators are working, not to be able to draw the world realistically, but to develop our own visual language.
This one is an expandable zine with images only, we didn’t have time to add text:
& the second zine we wrote first and then added the drawing:
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& a song to celebrate, “Booty” by Saucy Santana
Love allaya’ll
through time & space
XO
Cassie
Wonderful news!! Love you guys!
So thankful for the good news!