"Unplugged"

Last Wednesday evening I was upstairs making Olivia’s bed while she soaked in the bath. I was watching The Act on Hulu through my phone.

Alyssa was in her bathroom, ‘grooming’ before her shower. She was watching YouTube.

Tom was…doing something downstairs. Probably packing something to be shipped the next day.

The show on my phone started buffering and then stopped completely. I closed the Hulu app, thinking I was just too far from the living room, which is where our router is. It sometimes does make a difference where you are in house for the WIFI to reach your device.

A few minutes later, Alyssa came in, all fresh from the shower.

“Are you in the WIFI?” she asked, wanting to know if I was hogging all the bandwidth.

“No,” I informed her. “My Hulu was being weird so I turned off my WIFI.”

She flounced down the stairs to see if Tom was on the computer, which, by its very proximity to the router and modem, is the first served by our WIFI.

He wasn’t.

Huh. Weird.

Later, Tom mentioned he thought he’d heard the router sizzle earlier that evening.

Whatever the case, we had no internet.

It was 7:45pm on a Wednesday.

Whatever were we going to do with ourselves without precious weefee!?!

I mean, sure, we have more DVDs than I care to count. We have antenna TV, we have books and board games.

But you’d have thought we were in the middle of a blackout without access to candles.

We did end up watching a rerun of The Goldbergs and the last half of Chicago Med and then the first ten minutes of the newest season of The Amazing Race (fucking Rupert from Survivor is on there, back in his stupid ass tie-dyed shirt, OMG!) and then were all in bed by 9:30, with lights out and eyes closed.

It was actually kind of amazing.

Of course, we expected to come home on Thursday to find that Tom has gotten everything fixed.

We were disappointed by that expectation. Though it was softened by spending almost two hours at my mom’s after school and work, soaking up her lovely WIFI.

When we got home, Tom announced that the new modem he’d purchased that day for $150 did not fix the problem. Our internet provider would be out sometime the next day, Friday, with a new router.

So we spent another evening without WIFI. Both Alyssa’s and my phone have access to data but it costs us. I was able to check emails for Tom and get addresses for his shipments but there would be no Hulu or Netflix.

We ended up watching The Hunger Games on DVD.

And we were in bed again by 9:30.

There’s something to be said for being unplugged, even if just a little.

But yes, I was incredibly glad when the WIFI was back in full force. I mean, come on, now that I’ve experienced Hulu…I don’t want to give it up.

YouTube Black Hole

Speaking of YouTube, the other night, I kind of fell into a black hole of YouTube videos. I was watching the latest update from a family member who is the caregiver for her wife. This led to some suggestions from YouTube. Oh, don't follow those suggestions...

I did, though. I found one YouTuber in particular who'd been diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer. Hers was further along than mine. She ended up dying from it.

I know.

But her videos were still helpful. She's the one I'll be watching again to prepare my skin for radiation.

One video, though, gave me goose bumps. I felt like she was speaking directly to me. She'd just told her viewers that her cancer was back, that it was in her liver. She was, at that point, considered terminal. She was still fighting though. She was going to make that damned cancer work hard to take her life.

She was looking in the camera and explaining what it meant to be terminal. She said something like, "Look, if this cancer had been a single small tumor in my left breast, if I'd had surgery right away and followed up immediately with chemo and radiation, I might have beat it. But we caught it later than that."

She made the choice in the beginning to try and fight her cancer, which I believe was stage 2 (maybe 3?) when it was found, using natural methods such as herbs and supplements rather than chemo and radiation. This gave her cancer several months to grow before she had to start the traditional treatments.

But when she made that comment about the tumor being a single, small tumor in her left breast (hers was actually in her right breast) I felt like she was speaking directly to me. I felt like she was telling me (years before I even got diagnosed with triple negative breast cancer) that I was doing everything right. That I am going to be just fine.

I have to believe that. Why else are we doing all this?

My port comes out in six days.