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Young Frankenstein

Day 74: In the Margins

Posted on February 7, 2014

My dad had a box of fishing tackle he kept in the garage, a great silver box that accordioned into eight levels when you opened the lid.  That’s how I remember it anyway.  The glints on little hooks.  The feathers.  The spools of iridescent fishing line.  Later he’d carve his own out of bass wood and hang them on handmade racks to paint and epoxy them to a high shine, writing names on the tails he’d picked out of an English to Spanish dictionary: Pescado, Nadar, Niño Malo.  But these in the box were store bought, some still in their clear plastic containers that snapped shut.  Lying stretched straight in a tray — a rubber worm twice the length of my finger and the purple color of an old bruise.  I was six or seven, living in Arkansas.  One month before my breast cancer diagnosis, D. R. (Duke) Haney and I were working on a piece about Frankenstein and Duke told me that growing up in Virginia he was able to tune into a D. C. station to watch Detroit-based Sir Graves Ghastly present films like Whale’s Frankenstein in the middle of the night.

sir grave ghastly

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Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, Cynthia Hawkins, D. R. Haney, Frankenstein, James Whale, Philip Seymour Hoffman, TNBC

Day 72: Strong-Willed Children

Posted on February 1, 2014

On Day 68 the oncologist sends me back to the beginning, back to the radiologist’s office where I had the mammogram and sonogram that revealed the mass before we knew it was malignant.  This time I try to park close to the front doors because my red blood cell count is half of what it was last time I was here due to eight weeks of chemo, which means I’m walking very slowly in my wig I call “the Hitchcock blonde.”  The “Tennille” wig I wear to work, and somehow I’ve frayed it a little around the bangs.  I think from the time I leaned to pull a sheet of sweet potato fries out of the oven and felt the steam from the gap of the oven door sprawl across my cheeks.  Leave it to me to melt my best wig.  Or it could have frayed because Tennille filed for divorce from the Captain.  So I sweep the Hitchcock blonde bangs back and step into the building’s lobby, which looks like the Genesis cave in Star Trek: Wrath of Khan.  Stone walls and greenery.

photo

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Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, chemo, children, Cynthia Hawkins, Damien, Wrath of Khan

breaking bad

Day 58: Worry Dolls

Posted on January 18, 2014

Day 55 and I returned to the classroom for the first time since starting chemotherapy for breast cancer.  I marched across campus double-time, running a few minutes late, my notebook opened to the building and room number scrawled on the ledger pad, my attaché slipping off my shoulder.  As I squinted at the closed double doors of the lecture hall to see if its number matched what I’d written down and tried to assemble the chemo spiel I’d been rehearsing for three days, I heard someone say, “Let’s do this!”  It was my assistant, Andy, who I wasn’t expecting until the second class meeting.  Andy was among the students on whom I’d dropped the cancer bomb in Fiction class last semester.  He knew, and somehow this made it infinitely easier to throw the door back and say, “Hello!”  I did not say “Hello!  My name is Inigo Montoya!” like I’ve always wanted to do, but … some day.

inigo

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Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: Alien, Breaking Bad, breast cancer, chestburster, Cynthia Hawkins, Heisenberg, mediport, red matter, Ridiculousness, Star Trek, Travolta House

Day 51: Gaps

Posted on January 10, 2014

A belated welcome to 2014, everyone!  ‘Tis the season for fitspiration overload on Pinterest and gym promos and twenty ways to trim your waistline while eating chia seeds and lawn clippings and so on and so on.

It’s everywhere!  I turn on the television, open a magazine, click on my little safari icon and boom – everyone wants me to be Lea Michele in a thong or, rather, a tangle of toothpicks in a rubber band.  Just now, for example, as I was eating broccoli soup off a flaxseed cracker, which really does look exactly like shit on a shingle, one of these belly-buster magic pill commercials came on between news segments and my Janeane Garofalo-voiced inner monologue interrupted with, “You know what’s super for a quick slim down?  Chemo.”

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Tagged: 2014, bikini bridge, breast cancer, chemotherapy, Cynthia Hawkins, diet, health, New Year, thigh gap, wellness

Day 43: Electricity

Posted on January 3, 2014

When I spoke to Jody on the phone she encouraged my confidence in her acupuncture services because she used the word “evil” when I mentioned “cancer” and “chemo.”  Last week, I had … a vision?  I don’t want to say the word “vision” because it makes me think of Dirty Steve in Young Guns warbling out at half-speed, “Did you see the size of that chicken?”  I was dozing off at any rate, and I imagined without trying (okay, call it a vision if you want) that chemo was a lanky woman in a cheap feather boa leaning on an elbow, flicking the nails on one raised hand together, looking back at me with her brows aslant in mock pity.  I’ve worried that my animosity toward the chemo might manifest itself more deeply, might make my body resist the work of the chemo every two weeks.  So I’ve been trying not to see chemo as evil at all, but when Jody made the connection I thought, this is the acupuncturist for me.

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Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: acupuncture, Annie, breast cancer, Carol Burnett, chi, Dirty Steve, Frankenstein, James Whale, Miss Hannigan, monsters, qi, Sean Young, Young Guns

Photo on 12-24-13 at 2.40 PM #2 2

Day 35: Mommie Dearest

Posted on December 25, 2013

On Day 30, Joe escorted me to chemo treatment number two, and before the hook-up we visited with the oncologist who asked me about my behavior, sleep habits, and mood. “Fine,” I said.  “Pretty good.”

And to Joe, she asked, “Is that right or is she kicking butts and taking names?”

“Oh yeah,” Joe said.

I slapped him on the thigh. “She means am I being really mean to everybody at home,” I told him.

“No, you’re, like, feisty with a good attitude about getting through the cancer and all. That’s what it means.”

“No it doesn’t!”

“Yes it does. Taking names. Kicking butt.”

“No!”

“Maybe she’s just a little cranky at home,” the doctor said in a kind of whisper, writing something down.

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Tagged: acupuncture, breast cancer, cancer survivor, Cynthia Hawkins, Faye Dunaway, green tea, Joan Crawford, Life Over Cancer, meditation, Mommie Dearest, orcs, poached eggs, The Returned, toast, turbans, What does the fox say, yoga

Day 28: Outbreak

Posted on December 18, 2013

I once stood in front of a British Literature class of sixty and told them, after a long swig of water and a pop of a fresh cough drop on my tongue, that we call the Firecracker “Outbreak Monkey,” as in the monkey in the film Outbreak who unleashes a pandemic.  This was my way of explaining my waning voice and the magician tissue-rope poised to stream from my pocket for the rest of the lecture.  Three of the sixty offered an obligatory chuckle.  The rest – nothing.  Seats creaked as a few students shifted.  I coughed in the silence.  Then one front-row student, resting his pencil eraser on his temple, said, “Oh.  That’s cruel.  You call your little girl Outbreak Monkey?  That’s awful.”

“Well, not to her face,” I said, which didn’t sound any better.

But the gist of the joke remains true – the Firecracker must surely spend her time at school licking the bottoms of every child’s shoe, and the doorknobs for good measure, because she regularly comes down with raging colds she often passes on to the rest of us.  In the last three months alone, she’s had pink eye, mono, and pneumonia.  It’s the reason I find Ted McCagg’s Day Care Tasting comic so apropos. The problem is the Firecracker’s adorable.

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Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: Big Star, breast cancer, chemotherapy, Cynthia Hawkins, Doris Day, E. T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Ella Fitzgerald, Hibiclens, Outbreak, Outbreak monkey, The Cure

Straight Line

Posted on December 14, 2013

First mammogram.  The machine’s clear plates squeeze in on my right breast.  A sticker clings just above the nipple.  Extreme’s “More Than Words” plays in the radiologist’s office.  I laugh when I should be holding my breath.  We have to start over.  One, two, three, now don’t breathe, the technician says.  She’s not laughing, anyway.  And she didn’t laugh when I told her that the sticker she applied, at a glance, looked like a sound-effects splat in a comic book – kapow!  The sticker marks the place where my doctor, one week prior, found something under her rolling fingertips.

Right there?

Right there.

I only noticed it myself when I hugged my five-year-old Chloe.  A sore place.  Like pushing at a bruise.

***Read the rest here.

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Categories: Creative Non-Fiction

Tagged: breast cancer, breast cancer diagnosis, Cynthia Hawkins, The Nervous Breakdown

Day 21: The Captain

Posted on December 11, 2013

Forty degrees out, a quarter to nine a.m., and I’m standing at the door of a wig shop, in three layers of clothes and a newsboy cap, waiting to be buzzed in. That’s how it works. If Mary doesn’t like the looks of you, she’s not letting you in. It’s like a chemo speak-easy. She squints at me from behind the glass, wearing a kind of ruffled, knit ascot and a captain’s hat, maybe eighty-something years old. A little younger than my grandmother, anyway. I’ve shaved my head since the last time I was here, though that’s mostly disguised under the cap, and maybe Mary’s squinting because she’d wanted to be the one to shave it or maybe she’s squinting because she has no idea who I am. I smile wide, wave big, even though it’s four days after my first chemo treatment and I’d rather roll myself into a blanket cocoon in my living room and listen to tropical ocean surf on a loop. I haven’t had it that rough, actually. But today the aftermath of chemo has turned the cold into a hell-freeze kind of cold and my headache into Chernobyl. And any second now I might cry just because the weed in the sidewalk crack has two shoots instead of three. This is where I am when Mary unlatches the door and stumbles backward just a little with her face in a confused twist.

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Tagged: aliens, breast cancer, Captain and Tennille, Cynthia Hawkins, Ripley, wig, wig fitting

Day 18: Mine

Posted on December 7, 2013

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

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Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

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