Sometimes it takes a little bit before I remember how incredibly lucky I am.

Today’s case in point actually came to my attention immediately after I posted my last blog, and I almost posted just links again so you could all giggle along with me, but having given it a day, I’m more Zen, and think I see a bigger picture.  (Sorry if this is a little discombobulated, I took my meds to go to sleep, and still can’t, so I thought I’d get all of these swirling words out of my head and see if that brings slumber.)

SO, I keep referring to my “gummi bears” and thinking that it’s just a slang term for new breast implants, since that’s what my plastic surgeon called them the first time I met her way back in August. Since I’ve tripped naïvely along this journey forgetting that not everyone goes to a world class cancer center and research hospital as the hospital their doctor just sends them to, I thought this was standard.

Evidently no.

So there are two pieces to the power of the Gummi Bear. The first is this realization that I obviously did something right in a past life for this to be going so smoothly and to have such amazing medical care like I do at SCCA and UWMC, but the second is a little bit of a giggle that brought me to this realization.

It’s easier to explain this as it happened in my head, so here goes.

Other day, hit send on blog, put note about blog on FB, start surfing to see what others are up to.  A former colleague, we’ll call him Manhole so that if he reads this he gets the reference shout out but is not personally and publically associated with my insanity, posted a link to Alicia Keys singing on Jimmy Fallon. Which is whatevs, until you realize what she is singing… a soulful rendition of the theme song to the late 80’s Disney cartoon, “The Adventures of the Gummi Bears.”

I know I’ve mentioned him, but I have a baby brother. I was 13 when he was born. And as a proper teenaged sister, I spent hours in front of a television with him, watching what I believed was appropriate programming for a toddler… including “The Disney Afternoon” pretty much every day when I came home from school from like 1988 until I left for college in 1992.  That included a lot of hearing the ACTUAL version of the theme song how it immediately started running through my head.

So if you clicked on that link you’re likely starting to get it… my readers are nothing if not link clickers who are bright, right? For those who missed the words that I’ve had stuck in my head:

• Gummi Bears!!
• Bouncing here and there and everywhere.
• High adventure that’s beyond compare.
• They are the Gummi Bears.

There are many other lyrical gems there if you think of them as boobs… but I kept thinking, how has the video for this song not gone viral with a bunch of bouncing silicone boobs.  I mean, once I have my gummi bears, I believe they WILL fight for what’s right in what ever they do!

So I went to see if I could find someone who has made my clever giggle connection when I got hit by the lucky part.

Evidently no one has made this connection because “gummi bear” boobs are relatively new in the US.  They are named for the popular gummy candy (which I am now craving BTW) because unlike the old school silicone which could be punctured and would then leak, these are made of high-density silicone, so like a gummi bear, if you cut into it or puncture it, it doesn’t leak. You can learn more here from people who advertise that they are one of the only clinics that does them in So Cal…

So maybe it’s just good marketing on that one page that makes them seem exclusive, but that ABC story calling them “new” is from May of this year, and I remember when I told my Pink Pal, Tina, that I was getting gummi bears, she was jealous because her plastics guy “couldn’t do them.”

And it hits me again.

All I did was go to my normal doctor who I’ve seen for like 15 years, and she sent me to SCCA for my mammogram. And they saw that something was wrong right away, on that first day at the mammogram appointment. Because they’re that good.

Other people have to shop around to get the right care, and there are people who fly here from all over the country to get treatment from my docs.  Hell, there are people who don’t have insurance and don’t necessarily have access to breast care at all.

I get cranky if there’s traffic, so then the drive takes me 45 min to get to this facility where my doc is reading the latest journals before they are published so that he always knows the latest findings in his field, and can take them into account for my care.

Lucky, lucky, lucky!