“And just what was so wrong about her?” my friend asked with some anger after my mother, whom he’d met twice, died.

            How can I explain that her smother love wasn’t for me? That what was wrong wi… Read full post »

For a week or more, I have been touchy and weepy and jittery and grumpy. In other words, I was facing another cancer check-up. The night before, I had medical nightmares; things went very wrong. I would like to think that cancer would leave me alone, but it does not,… Read full post »

 This week I talked to a lawyer  about the possibility of bringing a suit against my urologist for medical negligence. It’s a non-starter, partly because at least in my state, maybe nationally, there’s a one-year statute of limitations for malpractice. Unless I find out… Read full post »

Right now, Regency romance novels are getting me out of my own life. Any chick lit is good (and I do not mean by using that label to denigrate genre fiction), but the stories set in Regency England have the advantage of another time and place. Language differs too;… Read full post »

To call the bike pink would have been an insult. It was more the color Crayola called thistle, a purplish cast to the paint, not a boy’s bike, certainly, but not a sickly sweet girly bike, either. It came with training wheels, even at 24 inches. My parents would… Read full post »

“It’s best if you can just be still after the surgery,” an acquaintance counseled, when I asked for advice about how to deal with the impending removal of my left kidney.

This woman donated a kidney several years ago. To call us friends would be stretching it, but… Read full post »

I last went to Florida during late winter of 2008, after two cystoscopies that led to a diagnosis of Stage I, noninvasive bladder cancer. It was my second cancer, the less dangerous one to offset the scariness of Stage III ovarian cancer, for which I’d finished chemo… Read full post »

 In Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale, when the king unjustly accuses his wife, Hermione, of unfaithfulness and condemns her to prison, she asks,

Who is’t that goes with me? Beseech your Highness

My women may be with me, for you see

My plight requires it.… Read full post »

The month of October will be swathed in pink, as if for a national Christo installation. I am not opposed to fighting breast cancer, or any other kind of cancer. I just wonder if anyone knows that September is National Ovarian Cancer Month, or that our color is… Read full post »

“Sorry to crap in your Cheerios.”

No, this was not a glib apology I recall from a boy in junior high. This sentence fragment came from my urologist, an eternal boy who will be talking like this when he is seventy. He’s a sports nut, a gambler, a… Read full post »

“You do not feel well,” said one of the pharmacists as I slowly walked to the back of the drugstore clutching my scrip.

“You look like you’re walking the Green Mile,” another pharmacist offered.

If I’d felt better, I might have smiled for them, but walking was al… Read full post »

When a friend went through chemo several yars ago, I tried to be helpful. When I went through chemo myself, I apologized to her. I did not know, could not know, what it was like. So here’s a list for those of you who want to help, a… Read full post »

“I don’t need you to worry for me, ’cause I’m alright.

I don’t want you to tell me it’s time to come home.

I don’t care what you say anymore, this is my life.

Go ahead with your own life, leave me alone.”

Billy… Read full post »

Journal entry February 29, 2008

I think I’m depressed, possibly a phase of grieving, even though the biopsy says the bladder cancer is noninvasive. I’m facing (just a bit) the reality of what this second cancer means in terms of follow-up, circumscribing, the sense of a door closing on a… Read full post »

“And after the chemo ended, she lived happily ever—for six months.”

I determined that if I had less than five years to live, I was going to live them on my terms. I took a few vacation-celebrations with friends, ate a lot of celebratory meals, saw a dermatologist and got… Read full post »

I’m single because I am a church leftover, a cruel term tossed out by a thoughtless young man who probably was trying to be kind to me when he was explaining which Sunday School class I might want to attend as I visited his church. (Not the one for church leftovers.)/… Read full post »

On the first Saturday in June 2007, two weeks before my chemo port was to be removed, an intern from the hospital called. Compunet, the blood draw people, had called the hospital to report that my absolute neutrophil count was low, 1.4.

“But it’s my nadir count,” I… Read full post »

It was a lovely thing to wake up and know I was not facing chemo again—hopefully never, but at least not any time soon. The carboplatin was easier, but I was queasy the next morning.

My chemo nurse, Linda, and I considered crying when I left. I… Read full post »

During my week off between rounds five and six in May 2007, I meet with the audiologist as I’d agreed to do—anything to get rid of the high-pitched sirens. I sit in a sound booth, trying to concentrate, when all I really want to do is look around at… Read full post »

  On the first Thursday in May 2007, near the end of my chemo treatments, I considered giving up. After taking my Compazine, I threw up, for no good reason. I wondered if vomiting was a psychosomatic response to thinking about my chemo session the next day. On/… Read full post »

Five years ago today, I walked into the chemo room wearing a mortarboard and humming “Pomp and Circumstance.” I got my laugh and admitted that I’d stolen the idea from Suzie, who’d recently finished chemo in New Jersey.

Today I celebrate being alive, thrilling… Read full post »

I was taking all advice from anyone who’d been through chemo. One bit I had no trouble accepting: eating a carb load the night before a treatment. So on the evening before Round Five began, I drove to a nearby town with two friends to have dinner at a… Read full post »

On April 19, 2007, facing my fourth round of chemo I wrote that I went to sleep, wearing one of the three new hats sent to me by a woman I’ve only spoken to on the phone. She’s the receptionist at the company I’m freelancing for, and she has/… Read full post »

Round 4, 2007

            One of the hidden blessings of chemo is seeing old friends in new ways. Today Marie used part of a vacation day to take me to and from chemo. So far, she’s coordinated meals right after my surgery, come by… Read full post »

            When confronted with human suffering, on any scale, the impulse is to do something. I understand this—I have it myself. Right now, I’m feeling sick enough, however, that I don’t want helpful, doing folk aroun… Read full post »