Skip to main content

This is cancer!

Cancer is... 

  • Waking up to find hundreds of hairs on your pillow and being scared of the shower because the hair just won't stop falling out. 
  • Drinking water and electrolytes nonstop and still feeling dehydrated all. the. damn. time. 
  • Reading the same paragraph over and over and over and not absorbing any of it. 
  • Thinking your brain will never be clear enough to finish your dissertation. 
  • Wondering about what you would be doing in that moment if you didn't have cancer. 
  • Saying to yourself, "I have cancer." and it still being weird. 
  • Wanting to call your Mami but not wanting to have to answer the question about why you're not having babies yet. 
  • Sore throats and stuffy noses on the first day of summer. 
  • Feeling an added responsibility to imbue meaning into things because the precariousness of life has been revealed to you. 
  • Going from never napping a day in your life to not being able to keep your eyes open by 3 pm.
  • Being bored.
  • Doing the dishes and feeling like you just ran a few miles. 
  • Trying to reconfigure your priorities when you have long been defined by your work, but you no longer have the stamina to actually do it consistently. 

Cancer is also...
  • Going out for breakfast AND lunch on a Saturday.
 
  • Your husband gently stroking your head until you fall asleep when the headache feels like it won't ever go away. 
  • Buying pretty Moschino silk scarves at Century 21. 
  • Your mom's perfect couscous boulettes made on demand. 
  • Karen sending you her head covers from the other side. 

  • Your brother, who lives across the country, saying, "I've got the even treatment weeks, and Jeremy's got the odd ones!" 
  • Elana coming over for Shabbat, buying a Carvel cake that wishes you a happy birthday, and saying that you're starting a new chemo week tradition. 

  • Mrs. Farwell sending a care package with just the most spot on head scarf and CBD coffee in it. 

  • A long and lovely phone call with Therese. 
  • Goldy fitting you in for yet another haircut (a GI Jane buzz, likely). 
  • Waking up early on a beautiful Sunday morning and walking your compost up to the farmer's market. 

  • A ribeye steak when your iron counts are low. 
  • Kathrine Skyping with you from Copenhagen to digitally walk you through a meditation session. 
  • Joking about cutting your hair to look like your bald father's (/Bernie Sanders/Larry David). 
  • Cherishing the forthcoming off week. 


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I am here (I am alive)!

Hello! This will be a quick one as I am very still much in post-double mastectomy + axillary lymph node dissection land. I'll start by saying that the title of this blogpost is that of a Bonny Doon song, one of the artists we saw when were upstate this past weekend for the Woodsist Fest: It was awesome, and the weather was perfect. But you guys don't care about that, nor do you care about the great Rosh Hashanah dinner we had on Sunday night!* You want to know more about how I'm feeling and all that good stuff. Well, surgery is officially over 🙏, and it went mostly as planned! I want to give a hugeeee shoutout to our friends Austin and Allix, who stayed at the surgery center all day on Tuesday. Austie kept G company while Allix, who works at Sloan in the pathology lab, stayed on top of lymph node dissection like it was precious cargo! We love them and little doodis so damn much. After waking up pretty out of it (but still cracking some good jokes about how bedpan...
2 comments
Read more

Well, fuck this shit!

Hello! Lately, I haven't really felt like posting a blog, in part because I haven't really felt like having cancer. When I reached the halfway point last week, instead of feeling a sense of accomplishment, I actually felt really frustrated that I have to repeat the same amount of chemo sessions I already have under my belt.* And then I got to thinking about how I'm only halfway through the first step of my treatment. And how even when I am done with the next intensive steps– surgery, then radiation, and likely, more surgery– I will be taking medicine every day for the next 5-10 years that will basically put me into early menopause. And I will be monitored for the next several decades to make sure this piece of shit cancer doesn't recur somewhere else in my body. Greg initially described this whole cancer thing as a detour. But it actually feels like my car has been hijacked. And when the hijacker finally abandons it, it's keeping a few parts. There's just so...
2 comments
Read more

50% through AC, 25% (?) through chemo!

Yesterday was a chemo day, and boy, I can't sugarcoat it, are those days rough. It's a weird thing, because the treatment itself, besides being prodded with an IV for three hours, is perfectly fine. Even the first few hours after, you feel pretty okay. But then, it just slowly creeps up on you, like a fog cloud all over your body. And then the exhaustion and nausea set in. Man, so much of cancer is just a wicked waiting game. I will say that sleeping through the day did me some good, and in general, my response was MUCH better than the first treatment, especially in terms of the heartburn, for which I prophylactically took some meds. I had  a new nurse this treatment, who was a Soviet from Brooklyn like Grisha. She was nice, and good at her job, but I didn't like her as much as nurse #1, Asha.* With the chemo meds, they bring in a second nurse to double-check your identity as to make sure they're 100% giving the right doses to the right person, and Asha popped in fo...
5 comments
Read more