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Posts tagged “chemotherapy”

Day 198: Down the Lane

Posted on June 4, 2014

I take the Firecracker and Hannah to a Greek restaurant up the street the day I learn my grandfather’s dying.  Really dying.  He’d been joking about dying for a long time, joking about never buying green bananas, that sort of thing.  My mom tells me that if I want to call to say goodbye, the nurse at the veteran’s home will hold the phone to grandpa’s ear.

“He can’t respond,” mom explains, “but they say he’ll hear you.  The mind is the last thing to shut down.”

I sit in my kitchen after this, phone in my hands.  The Firecracker fills in the pages of a blank book made of stapled construction paper.  “Pinky 9985 is Moving,” she titles this one.  Pinky 9985 is an imaginary penguin.  Sometimes Pinky 9985 is ice fishing in front of the Taj Mahal.  Sometimes Pinky 9985 is hidden inside a storm of ink spirals or juggling pink igloos or moving to New York on a plane with wings like tucked arms, bent elbows, a sleek dolphin fin of a tail in a blue scribble sky.  Pinky 9985 peers out the airplane window with oversized penguin eyes and a “what the hell is going on” kind of crumple to her beak.  Hannah sits on a kitchen bar stool, her own phone in her own hands, thumbs tapping.  I look at the hanging pots, the sun catching the rims.

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Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, chemotherapy, hair, radiation, Rosie the Riveter

Day 132: The Copy

Posted on April 1, 2014

If it weren’t for a running tally on my calendar, I’d lose track of the days since diagnosis. That’s where I am now – ready to be done marking time. And this morning I got the girls on their buses, walked two miles, drank a green smoothie, did some yoga, checked emails, and logged on to see the NaPoWriMo prompt. That’s National Poetry Writing Month, for those who are unfamiliar. I’ve never done it before, and I usually make fun of National Novel Writing Month every November (because, seriously, one month!? The novel I’m re-revising now has taken me something like three years). But the new, energetic post-chemo dynamo that is my current self wanted to tackle NaPoWriMo, despite the fact that I typically write prose. So I cheated a little and wrote a prose-poem, and cheated even more by using NaPoWriMo’s “get ready” prompt from yesterday. Yesterday, the prompt was to write an ekphrastic poem, or a poem about a work of art. If wall art in home decorating catalogues isn’t really art, then I cheated all around. Nevertheless, here’s the result:

Minding the IV I shift in my seat to see the home decorating catalogue my sister unfolds. She’s driven roughly 300 miles to sit beside me, chemo snaking through the loose plastic loop pinched between my fingers. It’s like talking to a drunk, I’ve warned her, and the mass-produced paintings on canvases in the catalogue drift one into the other like liquid beads. Blues and grays. I can do that, I tell her. I’d been an art student just long enough to learn to copy.

And after my last treatment, the toxins having done their work, sixteen weeks of squeezing the tumor down so small fingertips can no longer find it, I stand in my studio, a bead-board room in the back of the detached garage, stand by the drafting table that takes up half the space and holds three crates of vinyl records on its crossbar underneath, stand and paint the same squares of color from the catalogue. Blues and grays. I add only a touch of sunrise orange, a nod to George, it’s been a long cold lonely winter. Brush to canvas, bristles dragging, long strokes like drawn breath.

Some nights I’d curl around my little girl and teach her how to breathe deep. In, out. Ocean sounds. Can you feel the waves chasing after your toes in the sand? Can you hear them wiping the bad dreams away?

I paint the squares. I paint over the squares. I wipe color on and off again with a rag dipped into the mud-colored water of a plastic tumbler that reads in scratched, black print: Eskimo Joe’s – Stillwater, Oklahoma. I let the canvas dry. I remember why I’d changed my major. My copy is like a slurred version of the original, like me trying to tell a story while the chemo slips along the IV. But it’s the end, too. It’s the first morning I spend post chemo listening to the raking of the brush bristles while I hum “Here Comes the Sun.”

And here’s the copy of a copy itself (see what I did there? I just copied Trent Reznor):

photo 4
Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: April 1, art, breast cancer, chemo's over!, chemotherapy, Cynthia Hawkins, Here Comes the Sun, NaPoWriMo, National Poetry Month, painting, the Beatles

Day 113 Monster

Posted on March 15, 2014

This blog began with a monster, a Day One Monster that was cancer, the Firecracker, and me at different turns.  My breast cancer journey has been that way all along, monsters morphing into other monsters, some benevolent, some bad, if I may borrow the language of Frankenstein.  On Day One, my New York friend Carlos started making papercraft monsters, one per day, to photograph and post to cheer me up.  And they did, like the many gifts I’ve been given by everyone from my dear friends and family to supporters I’ve yet to have the pleasure of meeting in person.  A handmade table, a hand-sewn hat, a Star Trek blanket, a hand-knit night cap, poems and photographs, tea, candy, potted herbs, lotions, yoga DVDs, magazines, rodeo tickets, gift cards, dried fruits, a bonsai tree. A bonsai tree!

bonsai karate kid

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Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, chemo, chemotherapy, Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse Challenge, Frankenstein, gift ideas, monsters, vampires

Day 89: Here Comes the Sun

Posted on February 18, 2014

Three a.m. on Day 89 and I’m sitting on the side of the Firecracker’s bed while she howls over my many reasons why we can’t turn the clock radio on high in the middle of the night.  INXS is playing.  “What You Need.”  I turn it off.  She balls her fists over her eyes, begs to go to my bed, squirms under the new Minnie Mouse sheet set and blanket we’d bought to lure her to her room to sleep in the first place.  The clock radio had been part of that package.  Along with one plush penguin with a flashlight tummy and a zebra-striped beanbag chair she’d pushed into her inflatable igloo in the middle of the room.

igloo
On Day 17, after my first round of adriamycin and cytoxan, I’d stuffed myself full of anti-nausea meds, curled up under my blue blanket, and found the Firecracker beside me.  “I want to sleep in mama’s bed,” she said, and we held fingertips and whisper-sang her usual bedtime songs and somewhere in the middle of “When the Red, Red, Robin Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along” I drifted off.  That’s okay, I thought.  Her mom has cancer.  She needs comforting. And hadn’t it been a comfort to me too, to roll over and find her softly snoring away on her dad’s pillow.  She’s pretty much been there ever since because it would seem the corners of her room at night yawn wide with terrible monsters, like the one she met in the Whole Foods fish case earlier on Day 89, the red wide-eyed dead fish which sent her into a blood-curdling scream-run toward the bulk bins.

fish

The problem is, she’s a restless sleeper unless she’s in her own bed.  She’s been staggering off the school bus in the afternoons, wild-haired and half-awake, having slumped to sleep on the ten-minute ride to our front door.  She’s been in a bad mood.  She’s told her best friend she’s not her best friend anymore forever and ever, sparking a meltdown worthy of a call from her teacher.  The problem is, an overtired Firecracker is even more fervently firecracker-like.  So I turn INXS off, though the song keeps playing in my head.  All night.

radio clock

When I was first diagnosed with breast cancer and given the treatment plan back in November, the first thing I did was research.  I learned what to expect on chemo, what to do to curb side-effects, what to eat, and so on, but nothing explained that while I was on chemo the kids would take over like kudzu vine through window gaps.  One reason is ease.  It’s so much easier from under the throw blanket on the sofa to wave a hand and let them play video games for hours on end and eat all the snack packs meant for their lunch boxes and gather every cushion and pillow in the house to make a fort and scatter uncapped markers across the wood floors and accumulate laundry.  It’s so much easier to shrug off a sibling shoving match with something like, “Just ignore each other for awhile, please,” than to actually bring down the hammer of discipline.

laundry

The even bigger thing is the cancer guilt that functions in at least two ways.  For one, I never want to be the reason why they can’t do something – have friends over, go to a movie, stay after school, play outside – whatever it is they often ask to do that requires a little more effort, a little more planning than playing video games and inhaling Oreos at home does.  I don’t want to be the reason, or, more to the point, I don’t want cancer to be the reason.  And when they want something – a shopping spree, skinny pants, a second Instagram account, another dozen stuffed penguins, a spot in mommy’s bed forever and ever – my default reaction is to think, That’s okay.  Their mom has cancer.

valentine candy

Maybe few have written about managing the family on chemo because there aren’t any easy answers, no right or wrong under the circumstances.  Maybe there’s only pushing through to the other side of treatment and reorganizing in the aftermath.  And we’re almost there.  Two more chemo sessions to go.  Four more weeks.

I assure the Firecracker that daddy told the people at Whole Foods to take the red fish to the polar bears at the zoo. “They ate them up, and they’re gone,” I say. “The red fish aren’t coming to our house tonight.” Then I try to convince her again that she doesn’t need her radio to go back to sleep. She’s only quiet under her Minnie sheets when I tell her I’ll sing the song that was my favorite when I was her age:

Previous “Box of Monsters” blog posts:

Day 1

Day 3

Day 5

Day 7

Day 11

Day 14

Day 18

Day 21

Day 28

Day 35

Day 43

Day 51

Day 58

Day 72

Day 74

Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

Tagged: breast cancer, chemotherapy, children, Cynthia Hawkins, INXS, parenting, the Beatles

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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Categories: Box of Monsters Blog

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

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

  

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