I used to think I understood truth. It was the simple, direct, honest representation of fact.

But, truth be told, truth and facts are slippery.

I'm not talking about Orwellian doublethink alt-facts that are outright lies, or truths all twisted up with bullshit. I'm talking about facts without context, without a full understanding of circumstances, intent, or perspective. Do we ever really know the whole story about anything?

Truth can be downright hard to fix in place. It changes right before your very eyes, shifting in the light of bias and history. Like a fawn hidden in the tall grasses by the doe, truth's origins, awkward connections, and political or moral inconveniences are folded and tucked away. The tender parts that complicate, but illuminate, understanding can be hard to find. And who has the time anyway? If it doesn’t fit in a headline, a 30-second news bite, or a tweet, it’s just too much.

In my college freshman philosophy course I learned that a table, which seems a fact we could all agree upon, is not the same table for all of us. The table you see is not the same table I see. Because you bring different ideas to the table than I do. You see it in a different light. It's Bertrand Russell's argument that reality is distinct from its appearance. It’s not even the same table for me each time I look at it.

And even though we might agree that the table looks smooth, it’s all rough hills and valleys under a magnifying glass. Under a powerful microscope it's xylem, phloem and ray vascular tissue.

All truth, but all different. Depending on perspective. The whole story never completely revealed.

This played out in my town, Bloomington, Indiana, in a lecture hall on the campus of Indiana University. Well, what used to be a lecture hall until it became too controversial. Toward the front of the hall are two, 12-foot-high Thomas Hart Benton paintings, striking in their undulating forms and bold color. One is titled Indiana Puts Her Trust in Thought. But no one ever talks about it. The other one, titled Parks, the Circus, the Klan, the Press, sets people on fire.

It’s one of 11 sections of a mural that details the complex, and oft dark yet also oft hopeful, cultural history of Indiana. There’s a lot going on in the painting (as in all Benton paintings): airplanes, a water hose putting out a fire in a skyscraper, a striker throwing a rock, a circus act, a tree being planted. And it specifically puts in brashly applied egg tempera paint the story of the 1928 Pulitzer Prize winning take-down coverage of the Klan by the now long-defunct Indianapolis Times.

That story is at the center of the painting. And it gets people’s attention, as Benton intended.

In the background there’s a clump of tiny nightmarish, white-sheeted, hooded KKK figures with an American flag rallying like madmen by a burning cross and a church steeple. They are eclipsed by a press photographer, a reporter pecking at a typewriter, and worker at a printing press in the foreground. To the side a White nurse cares for both a Black child and a White child, equality seemingly secured.

But that wasn't what some students thought as they sat dwarfed in the room by the eternally frightening KKK silently shrieking in supersize. They didn't know the story of painting, and if they did, they didn’t want to sit held captive next to the image of the ghastly Klan figures every day in class. From their perspective, all they could see and feel was racism and oppression, not the hope of Benton’s story that the worst of the worst could lose their grip on society. Especially since the Klan never did completely die out. Especially since racism and oppression are still alive and well everywhere today.

So, students circulated petitions to have the painting removed or covered. The painting survived, but now the room no longer hosts classes. It sits mostly empty, door locked, entry by appointment only. Benton had important facts that he wanted remembered, but the pressure of modern sensitivities shouted more loudly than an old, dated painting done by someone that’s only relevant to a few.

Sadly, I have Klan history in my family, most White, multi-generational Hoosiers do because the Klan once ruled the state. And I grew up in the Indianapolis neighborhood where the KKK Grand Dragon (ugh, what a title) once ruled from a big, white-pillared, plantation-like mansion. But today I live in Bloomington. It’s a blue oasis in the bright red state of Indiana that loves license-less open gun carry, abortion bans, marijuana bans, book bans, cigarette smoking (around 30%!), and deep-fried tenderloins, brownies, and cheese on a stick. Bloomington’s libtard acknowledgement of systematic racism is not popular out in the corn and soybean fields.

I miss visiting the painting and its power of that takedown, but I try to hold on to hope that this country can turn things around. Making things better is the theme of much of my life. Many moons ago I was a student in that classroom, and the painting filled me with pride that conservative Indiana had once stuck it to racism, bribery, corruption, and murder that went all the way to the mayor of Indianapolis and the governor of the state.

There's a direct, indirect, straight, wavy line that links the daring of today's civil unrest to the upheaval of the 1960's and early 1970s that lured me so many years ago. It was a time fraught with truths that could only be partially seen, and so much has been forgotten about what really went down. Good and bad. Still, it was a time that I thought would change everything for the better. Equality across the board. Voting rights, equal pay, women’s right to make her own decisions about abortion and birth control, to control her own life and money. Civil rights. Housing rights. The acknowledgement of the contributions people of color and women made in history. All of that is being chipped away today.

We think life changes, but does it really? The basic struggle for power versus equity rolls over again and again. So caught up in the arrogance of each era and generation, we hardly notice that the tune to which we dance to is on repeat. Maybe with a different rhythm, or some reverb, but it’s the same. And if we don’t understand how each moment is tied to the past, tied to our basic flaws as humans, we have no possible hope of moving ahead. No hope of unlocking doors that prevent us from walking around the table so we can see it from every angle.

“The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning that women suffered in the middle of the twentieth century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries, matched slipcover material, ate peanut butter sandwiches with her children, chauffeured Cub Scouts and Brownies, lay beside her husband at night—she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question—Is this all?’”

Today is the birthday of Betty Friedan, born in Peoria, Illinois (1921). Her thoughts, like the one above, put forth in 1963 book, The Feminine Mystique, roused women into action for equality, challenging the widely shared belief that fulfillment had only one definition for American women: housewife-mother. Friedan was right about the depth and breadth of women's dissatisfaction. The book sold three million copies in three years.

Women had been discouraged from working during the depression to give men jobs. But during WWII they flooded into jobs and college slots vacated by men gone to fight. They were independent. They made good money. They had future careers. They made airplanes, ships, munitions, and tanks. They held technical and scientific jobs for the first time. But all that was lost upon the return of soldiers when the fear of another depression forced women out. It was promoted as the patriotic thing to do, but it decimated women’s lives as they were systematically relegated to pink-collar jobs in law, medicine and business or no jobs at all.

Everybody knows how the brilliant Ruth Bader Ginsburg couldn’t get a job as a lawyer. But what I remember was my mother’s bitterness over being shunned by other women for working in our family flower shop. And the woman who married my stepfather after my mother died: she was forced out of medical school to make room for returning veterans and had to accept a career as a high school biology teacher when she wanted to be a doctor.

But by the 1960s, the nearly psychotic and bored white women of the suburbs (yes, the same women courted by today’s politicians) tossed aside Tupperware, frozen dinners, and tranquilizers to put their racist, Bardot-draped, shoulders into righting the listing ship of women’s equality. They wrote books, marched in the streets, launched legislation, started magazines, ran for office. And strategically excluded women of color, just like the old suffrage days.

That oft-scorned movement put women in congress, allowed us to have birth control pills and the right to terminate unwanted pregnancy, credit and houses in our own names, admission to top-drawer universities, and careers beyond menial labor. It was the second wave of feminism.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 stipulates that women receive the same pay as men for the same work. We're still working on that. And working on even allowing women to hold equal jobs.

Stifling attitudes toward women are woven into our culture, like racism. And for women of color, it’s a double whammy.

I have deeply pondered my own racism. From my late teens on, I did everything I could think of to reject racism. But recently, I was trashed on social media as a racist. At first, I protested. Not ME! But then I realized my trasher was right. I’m racist. I can’t help but be racist. And I have to own up to it because it helps me see my privilege, helps me understand the anger of those who look at me in disgust.

This has led me to believe I am also riddled with bias against women, even though I am one. Even though I experienced decades of sexist slap-downs, forged radical non-Hollywood relationships with men, clawed my way as a single mother to fairly respectable positions, and pride myself on my feminist views.
 
I can’t help it. It’s buried in me. Like racism, it’s part of my foundation.

I was taught. By my family, my teachers, my bosses, my friends. By the lack of female authors, artists, scholars, or innovators available from which to learn. I can fool myself—like I did in the 1980’s, thinking I was no longer a racist because I forgot a Black friend’s color—that I’m not sexist because I have tried hard to unlearn what I was taught.

It’s hard to excavate my biases. Almost impossible to see them. They lie hidden in my dark, irrepressible judgement of women who have chosen paths I deem inadequate—dissing Melania Trump’s plastic-surgery-modeling-rich-guy route when I should just try walking a mile in her ambitious, sky-high stilettos. They seep into my own language, that I must vigilantly correct—calling Joe Biden, Biden; but calling Kamala Harris, Kamala.

Beyond me, out in the larger world, the third wave of feminism is blossoming. I Googled “feminist activists 2020,” and first up came a link to an October 2020 post on Mashable, “6 feminist activists to follow on social media.” Right away, I’m heartened. The women are all colors, shapes, sizes, ages, and religions.

They are probably racist and sexist too, but I’m following them. Closely.​​

And hoping, as this young woman points the way for us all:

        "...And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us
        but what stands before us
        We close the divide because we know, to put our future first,
        we must first put our differences aside..."
                --Amanda Gorman

At the end of last winter, I started thinking about not getting my annual mammogram. I mean, my mammogram had been the same for 30 years. Three little round calcifications that never changed. Why would things change now?

Several of my friends never get mammograms, citing statistics about radiation exposure or over treatment of early abnormalities. Maybe I’d just skip that extra dose of radiation, give my increasingly old body a little break.

Breast cancer has popped up with some frequency in my family—my sister & a couple aunts, all at younger ages than me. This stuck me in a high-risk category over the years. But had I aged past the danger?

I mean, I have aged past the need for a pelvic exam. I’m unvaryingly healthy, if you don’t count the removal of my malfunctioning appendix and gall bladder, or that worrisome lump on my thyroid. I rarely even get a cold, recover handily from banged bones and abused ligaments, and have always thought of myself as stronger than the average bear.

When I got the reminder postcard in the mail one chilly March day, I hesitated. But before I throwing it in the recycling, I decided to Google around about the age to quit mammograms. Of course, I found that the risk of breast cancer rises with age—"rates are highest in women over age 70." Actually the risk of all cancers rises as we grow older because of the aging of our cellular system, but that's neither here or there.

Being 66 years old, I made the appointment.

This time things weren’t as routine. First there was the need to redo the scan. Then there was the announcement that I had some abnormal cells, and a biopsy was scheduled. Then the meeting with grim-faced doctors. I had DCIS. Ductal Carcinoma In Situ. A Stage 0 cancer that had not spread anywhere. A spot about the size of a thumb. A tiny, spot unable to be felt even by the most experienced medical fingers.

Stage 0? Not Stage 4. Not You-Aren’t-Dead-But-Let’s-Do-Surgery-Chemo-And-Radiation-On-The-Way-To-Your-Grave cancer. OK!

But then, they started talking about doing a double mastectomy and rebuilding my breasts with other body parts. “We treat this the same way we would a more advanced cancer,” they said with authority.

Fast forward a month or so, and the size-of-a-thumb spot (newly imaged with more fancy equipment and evaluated by big-city radiologists up the road) now is the size of a fist. Still, the news is good. I don’t have the dreaded BRCA genes that give about a 50-50 chance of developing breast cancer.

And no mastectomy. Just digging out the nasty cells in a lumpectomy followed by oncoplastic surgery to fix up my breast and a reduction get the other one to match. “How about perky little C-cups?” the oncology surgeon said merrily as she glanced at my generous breasts with some disgust.

Fast forward to the end of May. My new, perky little C-cups look like a gruesome, bloody patchwork quilt as I perched unsteadily on the edge of a whole universe of unmentioned agonies admist the cheerful reports than the area of abnormal cells was actually the size of a pinkie fingernail, but that it was an aggressive, more dangerous sort of DCIS.

Anyway, here, almost 8 months since my surgery, I am grumpily grateful for the removal of these potentially very nasty cells and hope I get to keep my perky little C-cups;  that they don't get sliced off at some point in the future. I could have gone happily my whole life with the inconveniences of big tits, but since it's done, why not enjoy the benefits? My clothes fit better, I look better, and all that jumping in my Zumba class is easier.

But mostly, I think about other inconveniences—the side effects, and discomforts of the treatment I received. The looming possibility of my cancer returning has always seemed nebulous and distant, nothing compared to the immediacies of opening incisions, painful scar tissue, or persistent itching.

My oncology doctors don't give a fig about these little things; their focus is on keeping me cancer-free. But I think about it every day and have since I woke up from surgery. I have given up countless hours of my life Googling and wasted an amazing amount of money trying to find solutions while wandering the DCIS lumpectomy oncoplastic radiation wilds. 

I know I am not alone in my search for an easier post-breast cancer surgery and radiation treatment life. Everywhere I went on the internet, women were out there alone trying to sort out what was going on and what to do. So I thought I'd put together some of the things I learned. I hope, if you are in a similar situation and you find your way to this page, these tips might help you. For some items I have provided Amazon links to buy, I do not make any money off these recommendations.

If you get to feeling alone, you can always sign up on the Real Self website where women share absolutely everything with photos about cosmetic surgery, including breast cancer surgery, and various physicians comment. There are many women out there who blogged throughout their treatment (not me!) Here are 3 good ones to start with, good pix: 1 The Banshee. 2 I have Breast Cancer --Say What? 3  My So-Called Breast Cancer.

Before surgery
Buy a notebook, bring a friend, organize everything, Then ask, hunt, ask. Write down your questions. Write down their answers, or better yet, bring a friend to do it so you can listen. Ask every doctor the same questions (I got different answers). Throw away the folders they give you and make your own. My file categories: contacts, patient ed, articles, onco surgery, plastic surgery, radiation onco, clinical trial, genetic testing, maps/directions, test reports, notes, diet. Consider writing up everything you heard when you get home from appointments. It will help cement the information in your brain and generate questions to Google and ask. One of the most important jobs you have as a patient is to ask, hunt for information, and ask again. Doctors have a low common denominator of standard information that they dole out. If you ask, and ask, and ask good questions, they respond with more and better information. The challenge is keeping track of everything and sorting through the garbage that's online.

Get advanced care: It is worth it to have an oncoplastic breast surgeon and an oncology breast surgeon working together versus a general surgeon. If you live in the boonies, go to the big city and get yourself a top-notch team. Surgeons who only work on breast cancer are boatloads better than those who do it part time. I had a less invasive, more cosmetically pleasing surgery than the one proposed locally and was able to come home without drainage tubes. However, I did my daily radiation locally and got a less invasive technique because I did. I was enrolled in a clinical trial that my local center was not participating in, but upon my asking, they were able to be included. So ask, hunt, ask. Remember you have choices! Don't let the system rush you.

Get your drugs before being released from the hospital. I made a big mistake here. The evening I was released from the hospital, they handed my daughter written prescriptions for pain. Unknown to me, the diazepam had to be pre-approved by the insurance company—so the cost wasn’t covered when we got to the drug store. The Percocet wasn’t in stock, and we had to drive around to get it from the only CVS in town that had it, barely making it there before the store closed while the pain meds I'd taken long ago at the hospital were wearing off. This is not how you want to spend your time immediately after being released from the hospital. I haven't tried it, but I have heard from others that you can get these prescriptions filled in advance.

Know that some pain medications can only be ordered with handwritten prescriptions. After surgery, I realized I had only gotten a couple days of pain meds, with no refill. The new prescription had to be picked up in person. My doctors were 60 miles away in another city. Don’t let this happen to you. Read the prescription! Through the quick thinking of a nurse, my local primary care doctor was able to write a prescription.

Sort out pain medication plans in advance. My oncology surgeon and my plastic surgeon had completely different ideas about what pain meds I needed. One thought I could get by on ibuprofen, the other thought I needed stronger medicine (and I DID). Don’t get in the middle. Have this discussion before surgery and get your meds before you leave the hospital! My discharge prescriptions were written by the doc preferring ibuprofen and HO BOY was I sorry. It was a mess.

Prep your house before you leave for surgery. Make it easy on yourself. You’ll be hungry and you won’t want to cook. Freeze or buy single servings of food that you like. Be sure to have plenty of fiber on hand to offset the constipation of pain meds–bean soup, dried fruits, bran cereal. You won’t want to lift anything heavy. So buy smaller sizes of milk etc. and put out small pots and pans. You’ll want to set up your bathroom and bedroom too. The American Society of Plastic Surgeons has a worthy guide with lots of good ideas. Download it.

Hire housekeepers. Unless you have someone else to clean your house, find someone to hire. You won't be lifting, pushing, or stretching for awhile.

Be healthy before surgery. My hospital assumes that everyone eats a poor diet and routinely recommends a few days of meal-replacement, immunonutrition IMPACT ADVANCED RECOVERY® beverages before surgery. I was able to avoid these god-awful drinks by reading to the pre-op staff from my food tracking app what my daily levels of protein and other nutrients were.

Have loose, front button clothes. PJs and big shirts!

Get ready to sleep on your back. I'm not a back sleeper, but I can do it. I decided to buy a fairly expensive foam wedge to help me. I hated it. For me, a collection of pillows, supplemented by my easy chair, worked the best. So if you buy a wedge, get it somewhere you can return it.

Get a boatload of camisoles. I came home in a surgical corset that was never comfortable. It bunched up under my breasts killing my incisions. I quit wearing it early, but needed support to keep the weight of the perky little C-cups from pulling on the incisions. Any bra-like garment hurt. Not wearing one hurt. I tried wearing a giant front-closing sports bra from Wal-Mart with a cami on top to keep things stable (see pic). But that hurt too much. So I turned the cami WRONG SIDE OUT so the seams didn’t rub the side incisions and wore it under the bra. Later, I abandoned the bra and put on two camis, fold the top one up to give bra-ish support without hurting tender incisions. If you decide to try sports bras, look for the bigger sizes—they are really tight! My needs changed over the months. When I was doing radiation, soft was essential. When I was trying to reduce my lymphedema, compression was important.

When you are ready for a bra, get this one!!!! It took me almost a year to find a comfortable bra that didn't irritate the heck out of the side incision of my radiated breast. There are many bras out there that say they are seamless, but they aren't. This one is. Not only that, it's cute. It molds to your body, 60% nylon, 40% spandex. Just enough compression to make my lingering lymphedema better. They rock! 8-in-1 Evolution Bra by Knixwear.

Your incisions might split. At the “T” where the incision from the nipple meets the incision running under your breast, and along the bottom incision. Mine did this at about 3 weeks after surgery just when I thought things were looking pretty good. It was nasty surprise that didn't surprise my surgeon who was never worried about it but who also didn't warn me it might happen. Slowly the seeping holes did close up on their own. I saw online that some women get huge holes that somehow manage to heal. Now I have weird, thick scars where this happened.

Keep the glue. I had a black line of glue on my incisions that was very uncomfortable as it aged. Don’t pull it off. Just be uncomfortable. It's supposed to come off naturally after 3 weeks, but mine wasn't. It drove me crazy and I picked at it. I suspect this may have caused the opening of my incisions. Don't be like me!

You may get a huge lump where your lumpectomy was. Mine feels like a hard handball. If you get one, insist on having it imaged to discover if it is a seroma (fluid) in the surgical cavity, lymphedema, or scar tissue. Mine is fat necrosis—scar tissue. Damaged, fat tissue that lost its blood supply and died, and then got fried by radiation, creating a hard cap. I massage mine hard. Have been told to use warm compresses for 30 minutes every 4 hours. But who can do that? Plus, after radiation, fibrosis can develop, a hardening of the breast that irreversible. It's important to keep that hardening tissue moving or it will harden even more. See below about massage.

Live a cruciferous life. There’s some convincing data that cruciferous vegetables (cabbage, kale, broccoli, arugula, brussel sprouts, radishes, cauliflower, etc.) help to metabolize estrogen and generally protect against cancer. Cruciferous veggies are high in glucosinolate that enhances the elimination of carcinogens before they can damage DNA, or by altering cell-signaling pathways in ways that help prevent normal cells from being transformed into cancerous cells If you had an estrogen-related tumor. It’s so easy to add a helping  every day. Read about it.

Bookend treatments with positive things. Radiation is just a sucky thing to do. Try to put it in somewhere in your life that’s not too bad.

I tried to stay as active as possible through the recovery from surgery and during radiation by walking, but it was a challenge because of the jiggle factor on the healing incisions. It was better when divided up the walk into smaller segments throughout the day. A soft indoor track is nice too. So I took a walk, listening to a book every day right before my treatments. 

After the treatment, I looked forward to settling into my easy chair when I got home with a Spicy V8 Power Smoothie of my own concoction. The walking upped my energy to fight fatigue and the smoothie made me feel as if I was supporting my blasted body.

I drank one of these after every radiation treatment, and plan on drinking one every day for the rest of my life. It's nice to pour all those vitamins into your body without the sugar of those fruity smoothies. Try it: Whir up a cup of Spicy V8 (or some other tomatoey juice) with a handful of baby greens. Sometimes I add sprouts, sauerkraut, nutritional yeast.

Unscented goat-milk soap. My doctor recommended an unscented, moisturizing bar soap like Dial to wash with during radiation, but I couldn’t find any in the stores. I COULD find bars of unscented goat-milk soap at the local BloomingFoods co-op and that worked great.

Calendula lotion. Before, during, and after radiation, I diligently followed my radiation oncologists orders to slather myself with various lotions, including calendula lotion (not ointment, cream or gel). I could find the lotion in local stores but it was super expensive. Much cheaper at Amazon.  The radiation center staff and doctor told me that my skin stayed in better condition than many because lots of women just don't put the lotions on.

Have thick scars? Get massage. My breast that had the abnormal cells, where “all the work was done” started out with a very thick incision scar. It got much thicker during radiation. And, I read online about deep tissue massage to lessen the thickness and loosen the skin and got confirmation from the massage therapist at the radiation center. After much whining and asking every one of my doctors, I was able to get a referral (instead of paying out of my pocket) from my plastic surgeon to physical therapy at the local lymphedema clinic for massage.  This is not regular massage, you need to get it from someone specially trained in post-radiation, post-surgical massage. It really made a difference, but I still have thick, uncomfortable regions that I continue to massage myself. Next I’m trying therapeutic ultrasound*; the oncology nurse practitioner recently gave me a referral, wondering why I hadn’t gotten one before. Again: ask, hunt, ask.

Be sure to watch out for fibrosis, the tissue scarring and thickening that can show up even ten years after radiation. What starts out as tenderness and redness turns into firm, hard, uncomfortable mass.

*UPDATE: It turns out that radiated breasts have compromised vascular systems. That means ultrasound massage cannot be done. This was discovered when the ultrasound massage referral was mistakenly sent to the physical therapist who did the manual massage on my scars. She contacted the oncology nurse practitioner who didn't know this! The NP confirmed with other PTs and cancelled the ultrasound referral. Geez! Thank heavens for that mistake that prevented a mistake.

Even if you don’t have a lymph node removed, you might get lymphedema. Both surgery and radiation can cause the formation of more (!) scar tissue that blocks the flow of fluid in lymph vessels and nodes. My radiated breast has a mild case of lymphedema that keeps things sore; I'm told it may never go away. If you see big pores in the skin of your breast, that’s the sign that you’ve got it. Ask your doctors about decongestive breast massage and Google it. Here’s a good video.

Lymphedema might show up days, weeks, or months after radiation. Get a referral if you can to a therapist at a lymphedema clinic.

See if you can get a foam form to help move fluids and prevent fibrosis. My physical therapist at the lymphedema clinic made me a form from open-cell, low density foam covered with a gauzy sleeve that I wear at night. Magically it helps move the fluids in my breast (both vascular and lymph) and works like massage to reduce the scars and fibrosis. The radiation may have permanently altered both the vascular and lymph pathways of my breast, and I may end up wearing this for the rest of my life. But it sure makes a difference. I thought I was well past needing it and quit wearing it and things went down hill with more swelling and shooting pains. She also made me a foam chip bag to wear that helps fight the fibrosis more aggressively.

If you can't get help, you can hunt down  Schneider pads and Schneider packs online.

Exercise instead of hormone treatment. My medical oncologist was okay with me not taking tamoxifen. What with my substantial round of radiation, huge margins, and stage 0 cancer, she felt I was adequately protected. When I mentioned that I had hired a personal trainer to design a set of routines to bring back my muscles from the ravages and weakness of surgery and recovery, she casually said that if I stuck with it, exercise provided as much protection as hormone therapy! Why don’t they promote this? Why did I only hear this when I brought it up? Anyway, several weeks into my new exercise routines (upper back, balance, core + 2 miles walking & Zumba), I can felt my old self returning. Or is it a new self?

Vitamins to give your poor zapped breast help revitalizing. I don't know if it makes a difference. but hey! Why not? A friend of mine advised me to do a round of B complex, beta carotene, vitamin E, and vitamin C just as soon as I finished radiation. I did. And then my breast grew more sore about four months later from lymphedema, so I'm taking B complex and vitamin E for at least another year. Along with rutin, which I hope will boost my breast's crippled vascular system.

Tuesday was Arbogast feast day. I was so busy, I forgot to celebrate. I almost always forget. You'd think I'd remember, because the 21st is also my father's birthday, a memory rich with vats of homemade ice cream and plates heavy with thick-sliced tomatoes. oh well.

Instead I will give a nod to my 5th great grandfather, Michael who, with his wife Elizabeth, started up the Arbogast clan that arose from Virginia. Michael immigrated from Cologne, Germany where he was born in 1734. He arrived on the Speedwell in Philadelphia at age 17, parents and siblings all dead, and threaded his way through the big mountains west of the Shenandoah Valley to Highland County in 1758. These days, Arbogast is known as a "good valley name" and the graveyards are full of Arbogast tombstones, unlike Indiana.

Immigrants from Germany, England and Ireland (plus a few folks wooed from Pennsylvania) were the ones who felled the trees in Virginia to made way for the farms, and to pay off their passage. He was naturalized in 1770, patented 130 acres there in 1773 and added more acreage over the years. He married a natural born Virginian and fathered two rarely noted daughters and seven oft-noted sons (several of whom served in the American Revolution).

He died at age 79. In his will, he left his wife "one-third possession of at the time of my decease for and during her natural life time and her to keep possession of the dwelling house where in I live during the said period of her life and the adjoining to said house and all the under of following articles: to-wit, her bed and furniture, one pot, one baskin, one dish, two plates, two spoons, one fleish fork, one laddle, one kettle, one coffee pot, two teacups and saucers, one set of knives and forks, lisc (?) tin cups, two chairs, one large chest, one spinning wheel, one wool wheel, one pair wool cards, one pair cotton cards, the table in the house, all her books, her saddle and bridle, one tin bucket, three coolers for milk, two head sheep, two of my best milk cows, one horse creature, of not less value than fifteen pounds currant money, all her clothes, and the mulatto girl named Nancy."

I hope things worked out okay for Nancy.

My 4th great grandfather, David Arbogast. and his brother Michael, and "their heirs from them" were excluded. Maybe they had already received their shares when emigrating on to the east, or maybe there just wasn't enough room in Virginia for all of those big Arbogast personalities. Michael moved over the mountain to establish Arbovale, now part of West Virginia. David moved to Indiana, leaving his twin brother behind.

David, who with his wife Elizabeth had five sons and four daughters, died at 109 years of age in Andersonville, in Posey Township - about two hours away in the northwest corner of Franklin County. Originally known as Ceylon, was laid out in 1837 by Fletcher Tevis, and renamed in 1849 after Thomas Anderson, a tavern owner. David was living in Virginia when he was 49, and it looks like all the kids moved with him, so the next 50 years surely were interesting.