Laura knows that she said she was going to finish up the brant she started on December 22 on December 23, and here it is December 29 and she’s only now just getting to it. But Laura suspects it’s less laziness and more ambivalence about her brant-topic that kept her from keeping her word.

(Laura has inserted a pink ribbon — the universal symbol for fighting breast cancer — here in an attempt to lighten and brighten things up! She wishes she could figure out how to put smiley faces — particularly those adorable winking blinking smiley faces — on the pink ribbon but she’s just not that technologically savvy. She did manage to find this pink smiley face-emoticon which she thinks is a pretty good second choice — pink smiley face = symbolic pink color associated with fighting breast cancer–so she happily inserts it here:) <--oops! unintentional smiley!

Despite the fact that Laura is no privacy freak — in fact, she’s often been guilty of the Way Too Much Information thing — she’s still feeling a little funny about writing such a depressing buzz-killer-of-a-brant-entry right in the middle of the holiday season. And yet she just couldn’t figure out how to leave out the event that bracketed the publication of Piece of Work — after all, she found out about her condition a month before the book came out, and she had the surgery about two days after her final book event. And so, in a strange way, it felt like all of her bragging and ranting and self-promotion needed to be tempered by reality: that is, Laura didn’t want her fans (both of them) thinking that she had this amazingly fabulous ‘I write, therefore I’m happy’ kind of life. One of the purposes of her brant — from the very beginning, if you check back to the introductory entry — was to humanize herself for her fans; to show them that she, too, has problems like everyone else. Life isn’t perfect, that’s for sure, but Laura still feels lucky that after a fuckload of major surgery and six whole weeks of shuffling gingerly from her bedroom to the bathroom and back to her bedroom, she has a new set of fake boobs and a flat stomach to show for it.

And so, just to finish the story and move on: Laura had her surgery on Friday, November 17 and it took 12 hours. Yes, that’s right — 12 hours. It was so long that the nurses gave her a pass on getting out of bed the next day and let her “relax” with her patient-controlled morphine drip until Sunday. Which is when she suspended her disbelief and let two nurses talk her into the idea that they were going to pull her out of bed and help her walk to the bathroom four feet away.

The only thing worse than getting out of the hospital bed for the first time was the fact that the minute she’d gotten out of bed the doctors started trying to tell her it was time to go home. They’d tell her on their rounds in the morning; they’d tell her on their rounds in the afternoon; interns, residents, surgeons — doctors she’d never seen before and would never see again — all of them crawling out of the woodwork and stopping in to stare at and cop a feel of her new reconstructed boobs and then tell her that she really should think about going home already.

“So, how are you feeling today?”

“Well, you know, pretty bad.”

“Sure. You were on the table for a long time.”

“Twelve hours, they told me.”

“So, how do you feel now?”

“Now? You mean compared to a minute ago when you asked me? Pretty much the same. Like I got hit by a truck and then the truck sat on me.”

“That’s normal.”

“That’s reassuring.”

“You had pretty major surgery and it takes time to recover. But you really should start thinking about going home already.”

“Already? But it’s only been two days.”

“Right, but tomorrow will be three days. And the sooner you get up and walk around the easier your recovery is going to be.”

But Laura refused to budge. She couldn’t understand how she was supposed to get up and walk around so she could go home when she could barely make it to her handicapped-accessible bathroom! Were they crazy? What was this madness about going home two days after major surgery? Did someone mix up the charts and think she’d come in with a hangnail?

Whatever the reason, this ridiculous farcical dance continued — the doctors telling her to start thinking about going home, and Laura trying to explain that there really was no possible way for her to go home quite yet, which then led to the doctors’ concern that there was some sort of pathalogical reason for her resistance to leaving the hospital. Laura realized that the standoff had devolved to this particular point when a social worker was sent in to ask her why she didn’t want to go home.

“Are you afraid?” the social worker asked. “Do you not feel safe at home?”

Laura was going to say Yes! Yes of course I’m afraid to go home with all these surgical drains and gauze dressings and yes of course I don’t feel safe at home caring for myself three days after surgery since I’m not a fucking registered nurse and neither is my husband! — but before she said anything she realized that the social worker’s question was probing for something else. Was she afraid to go home because she didn’t feel safe because there was domestic abuse? That was the real question. And while Laura doesn’t make light of domestic/spousal abuse at all, for a split second she was tempted to lie and say yes so she could get a few more guilt-free days of hospital time without being shamed every two hours by the doctors on patrol.

And so, on Wednesday, after managing to extract five days of in-patient care, at about 7 p.m. (they will, Laura found out, discharge you at any time of day just to get you the hell out of there), she left the hospital with her husband (who was taking two weeks off to be her full-time caretaker) and went home. After he hoisted her out of the car and practically carried her from the car to the door, she looked up at the flight of stairs that separated her from her bedroom — where she was told she’d be spending the better part of 6-8 weeks — and felt like she was facing Everest. How the fuck was she supposed to get up the stairs and into bed when she had barely made it in from the car without a team of trained medical professionals??

Very slowly, she quickly figured out. Which is how the recovery has gone. Very very slowly. Lots of painkillers for the first two weeks, and lots of sleeping and napping and resting and taking it easy for the next four weeks. And yet now, at the six week point after surgery, Laura suddenly feels she’s made a quantum leap from what she felt like a week ago, and a week before that. (One of the most frustrating parts of the recuperation she felt was the fact that progress wasn’t made day to day, but rather week to week — which meant that everyday she woke up she felt like it was like the movie “Groundhog Day.” She would feel no better until an entire week had passed and even then the difference would hardly seem significant.) For the past few days she’s been walking on her treadmill very very slowly (one mile = 45 minutes) and she even started driving again. Going to CVS and getting to walk through all the aisles touching everything and taking a full hour the way she always does and which drives her husband crazy trying to decide what body lotion and body oil and wrinkle-fixing face cream and toothpaste and hair dye to buy was one of the best moments in recent memory. And she hopes she never forgets just how remarkably joyful the smallest most everyday things in life like going shopping for toiletteries can be.

For those of you (besides Laura) who are counting the days before “Piece of Work” is published, there are only ten more days between now, September 15, and the official publication date of September 25. Laura thinks she’s done the math right (25 minus 15 = 10), but just in case she hasn’t she’s showing her work (maybe if she hadn’t gotten an 11 on her math final in her junior year of high school she would have more faith in her ability to do math, if you can even call simple addition, or subtraction, math). If she’s made a mistake in her calculation, please bring the error to her attention by leaving a comment here on her brant (just make sure you sign it “Smarty-Pants”).

Not to get bogged down in more figures and numbers (this is the most math Laura has done in years), but in the 15 days since her first brant entries Laura got pretty busy. She meant to keep her brant current with interesting and entertaining entries to satisfy her rabid readers (although from what she can tell about them so far, she’s not sure satisfying her readers is possible because they are SO incredibly rabid), but she was kind of swamped (inundated, actually) with enthusiastic responses to her website. Yes, okay, so a lot of the praise was for the site designer’s (Jefferson Rabb’s) actual design of the site (”cool”, “hip”, and “modern” are three words Laura got really sick of hearing this week), but she, too, received her share of comments regarding the content. While most people (allegedly) enjoyed the faux-narcissistic voice of the third-person narrator (also known as “Laura The Branter”), one or two people (buzz-killers) doubted the fact that Laura is really as insecure as she makes herself out to be. In other words, they wonder if her self-deprecation is an act. This struck Laura as incredibly funny (in fact, she would have started laughing hysterically if she wasn’t already crying hysterically because of how wounded she felt having her credibility called into question like that). All Laura can say is that these doubters (buzz-killers) must not know her very well. In fact, Laura wants to reassure everyone that she is even more insecure in real life than she makes herself out to be on her website!

(OK, well obviously that’s a lie, but you know what she means.)

Laura also wants to call attention to the fact that her theories about celebrity narcissism (featured in “Piece of Work”) are actually based in sound scientific research. To prove that she does her homework before shooting her mouth off (even though, technically, she shot her mouth off long before this bit of supporting research was released), she’d like you to read this September 13th article from the Los Angeles Times — “Celebrities Are Their Own Biggest Fans.” (Again, she’s providing the link even though she doesn’t know how to get the link to light up and do it’s linking-thing.)

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/cl-et-narcissism12sep12,1,5835330.story?track=crosspromo&coll=la-headlines-entnews&ctrack=1&cset=true

For those of you who have just arrived at Laura’s Website, you might want to read her Homepage and her Bio to see what she’s all about these days (self-promotion).

Up until now, Laura considered such public displays of self-absorption — PDSAs — completely unseemly and she refused to engage in anything which could, even remotely, be considered self-promotional. Of course, when invited to do a reading, or attend a book group, or give a lecture, Laura would always gratefully accept. Why? Because she hadn’t generated the attention; the attention had come to her.

But when it would come time to generate attention to herself for herself by herself — the way all authors are supposed to — she refused. Which is why, at this late date, 2006, years and years after every single Tom Dick and Harry has their own website and blog and newsletter and podcast, she is finally joining the pack.

Yet even though she is indeed joining the pack, Laura refuses to follow the herd. This has always been both a positive and a negative in her life. Because instead of just blogging away on a blog, she felt the need to create her own specialized forum of communcation — one she has renamed BRANT. Brant, she feels, better sums up exactly what this sort of activity is really all about — bragging and ranting — and now that she has her own brant she will be branting away as much as possible.

And so, Laura welcomes you to the introductory post for her brand new brant. She hopes you like it! (But if you don’t, please don’t tell her. The last thing she needs right now 24 days away from publication is a whole bunch of “honesty” from people she doesn’t even know. That would be a huge buzz-killer.)