In the plastic surgeon’s office, something like a barber’s chair sat squared against a full-length mirror in an otherwise empty room.  White.  Sci-fi white.  After motioning for me to stand, the surgeon attempted to gather a few inches of flesh at my stomach as a nurse stood behind him, looking unimpressed with a pen to a clipboard.

“You’re just so … bloody thin,” he said as he squinted in inspection.

Believe me, I know how annoying this sounds.  When I logged onto Twitter later that day and asked if anyone had any ideas for “high calorie, nutrient-dense shakes for healthy weight gain,” six people immediately unfollowed me.  Just keep in mind I’d spent sixteen weeks on chemo and turned vegan somewhere along the way.

Modern mastectomy with reconstruction is a very sci-fi thing in itself.  All breast tissue is removed and then replaced with stomach tissue, and two surgeons work to “reconnect” all the little veins like splicing your cable TV to a rogue TV set.  Voila!  If you have stomach tissue to work with, that is.

One of my surgery concerns is that I’ll wake up and the surgeon will say, “Sorry!  You only had enough fat for one boob!”  This is in addition to my fear of waking up in a vacated hospital in the middle of a zombie apocalypse.

So I made my own granola.

And bought some full-fat coconut milk as per Seth Pollins’ suggestion.  Seth is a TNB contributor and recipe developer for Whole Foods, and he also wisely suggested avocados and organic nuts.

When Plan A wasn’t quite working, though, I moved from consuming good fats and loaded calories for every meal to consuming good fats and loaded calories every second of the day.  With donuts and shakes thrown in for good measure.  Mostly, the overachiever in me wants to prove I can do it.  I want the surgeon to look down at my glorious, generous paunch on the day of the surgery and declare, “By golly, I didn’t think it could be done, but nobody tells this woman she can only have one boob!”

It’s like training for a marathon in reverse.  And it feels pretty awful, actually.  You know that feeling you got at your sixth birthday party when you ate an entire Swensen’s Hurricane all by yourself and vomited mint chocolate chip for three days straight and found Jesus?  That’s how I feel right now.  Like I’m gestating a chest-burster alien made out of pie dough.

As we sat watching The Walking Dead on Sunday, Joe reached over to poke my stomach and check progress.

“Stop fondling my boobs,” I said.

The weird thing is I haven’t sobbed about the prospect of having a mastectomy and reconstruction.  I haven’t sobbed about the cancer recurrence.  Plenty of other people have.  Friends, family, students, colleagues.  And I just look at them, thinking, Why are you crying?  Don’t cry!  I’m a magic badass unicorn.  It’s going to be okay.

But yesterday as I sat in my office in my ongoing food coma reading the plastic surgeon’s booklet, I cracked just a little.  The booklet suggested getting one’s hair cut right before surgery because the recovery period is so long.  So I called my salon to schedule.

“Ohhhhhh,” she said.  “I’m showing that you haven’t had your hair cut here in over a year.”

“Yeah.  That’s probably right,” I said.  Because, you know, I had no hair from about December to June.

“You’ll have to come in for a consultation first.  Then we can make you an appointment.”

I was thinking I only had two weeks before surgery, and those two weeks were full of doctor visits and preop tests and course preparations to make before I left.  I barely had time for one salon appointment.  And I thought of saying as much, “I’m trying to fit this in before surgery,” but it wouldn’t come out of my mouth.  At first, I wasn’t sure why.  Instead, I said, “Well, I’ve talked about it with her before, and she knows what to do.”

“No.  No.  See, we don’t know how much new growth you have.”

It’s all new growth! I wanted to blurt out.  And this was the point I started to cry in my office at work.  Right there at work.  Then I knew why.  It was the realization that I’d had roughly four blissful months of being cancer-free, of being a healthy, normal person who exercised and ate well and went to movies and met Andrea in Austin for the day and played Cards Against Humanity with good friends late into the night and worked on a screenwriting team and swam with my girls and carried my attaché up the Rocky steps to my office building and grew a Mia Farrow pixie and didn’t have to ask for special accommodations or explain my history.  It was the realization that four months hadn’t been long enough.

Remember how I told you I’d been reduced to two emotions and a need to express myself in gifs?  That’s still a thing.

Which is to say, yesterday I was crying in my office and today I sat at the oncologist’s all smiles and cracking jokes just before my oncologist came in with the PET scan pathology report in her hands.

“I thought you’d like to hear good news for a change,” she said.

Like last time, there is no spread.  Just the slightly less than a centimeter spot to the left of the cavity where the old tumor was.

“We’re going to be rid of this soon,” she assured me.

Which should buy me four cancer-free months and then some.

+Read more

Well, here we are again, friends, talking about tumors and doctors’ appointments not five months after I’d declared the end of the sad cancer blog. I’d wanted to blog instead about walking that half-marathon in December, but it would seem I really know how to get out of strenuous activities.  Alas, I will walk another half marathon at a later date, and crossing that finish line will be all the sweeter.  But for now, I’ll tell you a little story about boobs.

Yesterday, I cancer-punched nurse Margaret.  (Cancer punch: verb — to blindside innocent party with unprompted news of one’s cancer, often, but not necessarily, at the least appropriate moment.)  It seemed clear when Joe and I showed up at the oncologist’s office for our first meeting since the biopsy that everyone was very gingerly preparing us for the bad news of the biopsy results.  My oncologist has a strict “no test results over the phone” policy, so, as far as they knew, we were in the dark. As far as they knew. I’ll tell you a secret. I always ask that test results be sent to my surgeon as well because he calls me as soon as he gets them. I’m like the Danny Ocean of oncology patients. Always a step ahead.

And Nurse Margaret looked pained as she settled into her swivel seat at the computer in the examining room.

“Margaret,” I said, “It’s okay.  Dr. Fischer already told us about the biopsy results being negative.”

Margaret’s posture crumpled.

“I thought something was up!” she said.  “I never look at test results because I’m no good at hiding it when patients walk in.  Damn it.”  After a long sigh, with her fingers arched over the computer keys, she continued, “Well, let me ask you my questions,” sounding thoroughly deflated, “Are you still taking your Tamoxifen?”

Tamoxifen is the hormone regulating drug some patients are given as a breast cancer preventative.

“Nope.  I stopped taking it two days ago,” I told her.

“And why’s that?”

“Because I’m mad at Tamoxifen. It’s like, ‘You had one job, Tamoxifen!”

“No shit,” she said.

If I haven’t told you about Nurse Margaret before, she ‘s great. She once gunned down a ten foot rattlesnake on her ranch and posed with it dangling from her grip for pictures. She claims vegetarian food makes her tongue swell.  When she first gave me the after hours nurse phone number and I called it the same day, she answered, “Oh, you think you can just call me whenever you want?”  And after she input all of my updated information, she stood and said, “I’m telling on you,” as she let the door fall shut behind her.

“About the Tamoxifen?” I called after her.

“About you talking to Dr. Fischer!” she answered from the other side of the door.

But the oncologist didn’t come in with a scolding.  She came in with the contorted head tilt of the completely perplexed.  “You shouldn’t be sitting here right now,” she said.  Surprisingly not on her list of explanations:

• That I brought my students cupcakes and sang, “Guess who’s cancer free!?”
• That I watched ethereal sad cancer mom flatline at the beginning of Guardians of the Galaxy not once but twice.
• That I ate feta in my lentil soup that one time.
• That I registered for a half marathon.

Her best guess?  A few stubborn cells somehow got left behind during the lumpectomy and were then resistant to radiation.  I’m imagining these cells hanging out silently chain-smoking in white.

This was echoed by the plastic surgeon I met two hours later, the one who compared the DIEP flap reconstruction process to Big Mac layers and told me to start inhaling donuts to gain weight before the surgery, AKA My Favorite Plastic Surgeon.  “You should have met with me back then,” he lamented.  “I would have made you do the mastectomy.”

Ugly truths time.  And I want to be clear about how moronic my reasons had been that first time so if you are in the same predicament you won’t repeat my mistakes. The fact that I thought Guardians of the Galaxy gave me cancer again is proof in itself that I should not be trusted with major decisions.  More evidence:  I decided a mastectomy would have taken me away from work too long. The surgeries required for someone just off chemo sounded numerous and extensive … based on what I found on the internet. The terms “DIEP flap” and “nipple reconstruction” sounded like something from Saw.  I liked my boobs (emphasis on past tense — I’m over them).  To paraphrase Shakira, they might be small and humble and not to be confused with mountains, but they’re mine.  The worst reason?  I decided, without talking to Joe about it at all, that Joe would see me as deformed and our marriage would be kaput.  Chemo had already made me feel monstrous enough.  I know.  I told you they were ugly truths.

There’s a scene in Dallas Buyer’s Club in which Matthew McConaughey’s character takes his doctor, played by Jennifer Garner, to dinner.  He wears his best cowboy hat, brings her a framed painting of flowers, clearly has romantic aspirations the viewer knows aren’t likely to materialize.  He’s an emaciated, terminal HIV patient with possibly only months to live. As he sits across from her, settles in, he says something like, “Nice dinner. Pretty lady. I almost feel human again.”

That line crushed me.  That’s the secret fear of the toll of hard fights, of the toll of serious illness — that we’ll be rendered inhuman, unlovable, desexualized.

But, to quote Dr. Malcolm, “Life finds a way.”  And in my case, life found a way to make me do what I should have done the first time around. Full mastectomy with reconstruction.

“Like, yesterday,” the oncologist said.

She tells me I’m such a strange case that a board of breast cancer specialists will be convening to go over my records.  After the surgery, the removed tissues will be “genome profiled” to try to isolate and define the mutation in my DNA. They will grow the tumor in the lab for research purposes, to study the behavior of these cells, to test the types of cancer treatments they respond best to.  “They’ll transplant little pieces of the tumor into mice,” the oncologist explained.  (My sister Michelle called this “The Cindy Project” when I told her.) And when the oncologist left the room, I turned to Joe and said, “Aw!  I want one of my little mice when they’re done with it!”

Then Joe pulled the same wide-eyed, ironed-flat expression he gets when our kids ask if he’s Santa.

My posture crumpled.

“Oh.  Oh!”

“It’ll be like the monkey in Project X,” he said.

We were both sitting there morosely doing the “Virgil, apple” sign when Nurse Margaret came back in with my flu shot.  Now I’m feeling a little conflicted about “The Cindy Project” …..

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.

“Let’s go out to eat,” I finally say.

The Firecracker brings her book-in-progress and a sandwich bag of colored pencils angling to poke a hole in the corner.  Hannah forces her phone down into the back pocket of her denim shorts.

I’m wearing a scarf tied around my head because the girls are still embarrassed by the baby-bird feathers of my post-chemo stubble.  In the Greek restaurant, two women in maxi dresses and sandals stand in line, ordering gyros and Coronas, their matching expressions of sympathy sliding away from me as they wait for their total.

“But I’m not sick anymore!” I want to explain to them.

It’s true that the post-lumpectomy pathology report indicated total annihilation. Just like my daily meditations since last November have painstakingly envisioned. So now I think I can levitate the dog bowl and pull rainbows out of my ears and conquer all of Westeros.

Or at least walk two miles in under thirty minutes.  The other thing I used to envision in those daily meditations was me in the summertime looking like Jean Seberg.  I’m not quite there yet, though.  I lunge for the Firecracker, who is making two hanging panels of the restaurant’s menu display clang.  I tuck the tail of the headwrap even tighter.

I’d never told my grandparents about my breast cancer.  My grandfather was starting to decline, and the family decided it would weigh on them both too much at the worst possible time.  So I never told them.  And when I missed a trip to see them for the holidays, I couldn’t explain that it was because of the chemotherapy treatments.  I keep thinking of that, the way grandpa might have thought that I’d simply forgotten.

The knot of the headwrap, just over my temple, the whole tangled scarf cocked and rebelling against looking like the full-on cancer turban it was months ago, the knot is giving me a headache.  I order carefully, no meat, no dairy, but as I slide into the booth beside the girls I see feta sprinkled on my lentil soup.  I try to spoon it out, but it melts across the broth.

After the diagnosis, after researching all the ways to keep cancer from coming back, I decided to be vegan.  And I’d been vigilant about it through chemotherapy along with drinking five cups of green tea every day and meditating and stretching into yoga poses recommended for breast cancer patients.  Now, post-chemo, post-cancer, now that I’m on my own, it matters even more because it’s all I have in defense.  I eat the soup anyway, feta and all, and I think, Someday if the cancer comes back I’ll know it was because I sat here eating feta on my lentil soup in the Greek restaurant while my grandfather was dying and I couldn’t even call to say goodbye. Grim as he ever was.

In the car, I set my Pandora station to Lawrence Welk while the girls balk.

“It’s my grandpa’s music,” I scold.

All those times I’d sat on his sofa with my legs folded aside as I held my socked toes and pleaded for him to change the channel.  Once he’d learned how to record Lawrence Welk reruns, there was no stopping him.  It was like being trapped in an elevator in the sixties, sitting in that living room while he fumbled with the remote to turn the volume up higher.

As “Swingin’ Down the Lane” plays, I imagine the television glow reflecting off grandpa’s glasses and his fingertips playing notes across the armrests of his recliner.

“Maybe we can watch this later,” I say.

“What?” his voice booms over the music.

Grandma always said that even though grandpa was almost deaf he could hear when he wanted to hear.

When I pack for grandpa’s funeral, I can’t decide whether to wear the wig sitting on its metal stand in my closet or one of the scarves I’ve collected or neither.  I wrap the wig in a scarf and pack both with a plan to decide later, and when my parents pick me up for the drive to Missouri, I ask, “What should I tell grandma when she sees me?”

“She won’t notice,” my dad says.  “She’ll be too upset.”

But I’m thinking upset or not, she doesn’t miss much.

Hannah insists on going too.  She sits between my mom and my little sister Alicia in the back seat, pops her earbuds in, slides her shoes off, stretches her legs between dad and me up front, stretches her legs out on the center console.

“Hey,” I turn to tell her, “your grandpa doesn’t want your stinky feet up here.”

“It’s alright,” my dad says.

“Oh really?” I say.  “You never let me do that when I was her age.”

“I’m nicer now,” he says with a shrug.  “And your feet smelled worse than hers.  In fact, I don’t smell hers at all.”

“She only packed one pair of socks,” I warn.  “Just give it a day.”

Hannah smiles at me without showing her teeth.

Though I offer a few times, dad won’t let me drive.  Maybe because I mention the afternoon sleepies.  That’s what my radiation oncologist calls it anyway, the sense of tiredness that takes over in the afternoons during treatment.

“Like when you’ve spent the morning in the sun on vacation and a little later you just feel drained,” she said.

When I first met the radiation oncologist, she showed me the pinpoint blue tattoo between her finger and thumb.

“I had this done so patients could see what it was like before they get their own,” she said.

The dots are used to center the patient on the machine.  Mine are on either side of my ribcage up high and another right in the middle of the chest.  Like blue freckles.

“I always wanted tattoos!” I said.

Really, I did.  I’d wanted one of an abstract black sun on my outer right ankle (you can probably guess this was in the ’90s).  I’d walked into the tattoo parlor in downtown Dallas, heard the buzz of needles, and walked out again.  Before breast cancer I was squeamish. Now there’s nothing I can’t do.  I have three tattoos.

We stay overnight in a hotel halfway there, my sister in a room with my parents, Hannah in mine.  I change into pajamas, and while I’m pulling my nightshirt on Hannah says, “Are those lines from your breast cancer?”

I pause with the shirt overhead so she can see.  “This one,” I say, pointing to the pink rim of skin under my collarbone, “is where the mediport was.  And this one was where the tumor was.  And this one,” I crane my arm up so she can see the other slash of a scar just below my arm pit, “is where they took out two lymph nodes.”

“Oh,” she says with a matter-of-fact tilt to her head.

Once, she burned her finger on a pan she’d grabbed without oven mitts from the oven.  She passed out cold when her dad wrapped it in ointment and gauze.  We took her to the hospital for the concussion she got when the back of her head met the tile in the fall.  The burn was fine.

Once, she passed out in health class when a visiting nurse who had diabetes showed the class her port.  Hannah slumped all the way out of her desk and onto the floor.  Her friends crowded around her and cried.  They thought she had died.  “It’s the best day of my life!” Hannah declared when I picked her up, everyone out front, teary-eyed and waving goodbye, Hannah waving back.

Once, she recoiled from my hug after she’d grazed the mediport.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

“I think I’m going to be sick,” she said.

Now, though, as she notes my scars with a studious nod, she’s just fine.  She slips into her own queen bed across the room and turns out the light.  In the dark, we talk about my grandpa, the way he laughed at his jokes, the way his laughter sprawled out big and swallowed your own, the way he’d smile so his eyes crinkled up smaller behind his glasses, the way he combed his hair aside with Brylcreem, the way he’d get up in the middle of the night to shave and then go buy raisin bread.

“I loved his stories,” she says.

“He always had a story,” I say.

Grandma notices.  When we finally arrive in Joplin, grandma sits across the room from me at a gathering with the preacher the afternoon before the funeral, sits with her hands in her lap, her shoulder’s slack.

“Cindy?  What have you done to your hair?” she asks me.

I’m wearing a red bandana tied at my forehead in Rosie the Riveter fashion.

“Oh,” I begin, “I did some treatment that thinned it out, so I’m waiting for it to grow back in.”  Then I ham it up with my palm behind my ear and ask, “Don’t you like my bandana?”

“Well yes,” she says, “I do.”

She doesn’t mention it again, not even when, at the end of the meeting, I hug her close enough she can surely feel the stubble through the cloth against her temple.  She squeezes back, her face plaintive and dry.  She’s a strong woman, I’m thinking, and I decide the next morning that since grandma isn’t phased I can go to grandpa’s funeral as myself.

*photo by Debbie Whitlock

I haven’t worn a wig or scarf since, and it’s a good thing too because when I get home from Missouri I accidentally melt the Tennille wig.  I reach into my overnight bag for all the clothes I’d packed, shove them in the wash, transfer them to the dryer, and pull a hot scarf out with a magician’s tug and find the ratty knot of the wig at the end of it.  The hair had shrunk to the cap and fused together at the ends.  I slip it on to see if maybe I can still make it work.  The answer is “no.”

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

Day 89

Day 113

Day 132

Day 198

+Read more

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):

Hello from the other side of chemo! It’s been a little over a week since my very last treatment, and I’ve been celebrating ever since. Of course, it’s just one phase that has ended. I still have a lumpectomy and radiation to look forward to (gah!), but in the meantime I’m happy to be almost all done with this cancer business.

One thing I had to stop doing when I started chemo, since I had to avoid crowds and germs while my immune system was more fragile, was venturing out to movie theaters. Roll up to the top of this blog, will you? You’ll note that it says: Cynthia Hawkins, Girl on Film. Mostly because I typed it in as a joke and now I can’t figure out how to undo it, but also because many people know me as a film connoisseur.

And few things along my journey have been quite as depressing as reaching the start of Oscar season without having seen any of the nominated films because this told me, unequivocally, that no matter how hard I’ve tried to keep things normal since diagnosis, things haven’t been normal at all. So, this past Saturday, Joe and I stood in our room having this conversation:

Me: “Ah man, I’d love to go see The Grand Budapest Hotel.”

Joe: “Then go. You can do what you want now.”

I can do what I want now! (Not exactly, but I’m sticking to it.) So off to the movies I went while Joe stayed home to babysit the girls. No worries. I usually go it alone. That’s how much I love movies. And then on Sunday, my friend George Gaytan, who is a wonderful classical guitarist, invited us to the Hotel Contessa on the Riverwalk where he played “Here Comes the Sun” and gave me a bag full of movie books.

As I contemplated my weekend return to the movies, in a sense, I remembered how several posts back I told you how I altered my guided meditations to be film-infused and that I should record one of my own. Well, I did. For you. And for movie lovers everywhere. You’re welcome.

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

Day 89

Day 113

+Read more

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!

These are just a few of the wonderful, thoughtful things I’ve received with endless gratitude. Did I say bonsai tree?! And in Carlos’ lot, there was one papercraft monster that seemed to say it all.  The F-You Cancer Vampire:

And while I’d thought there were only twenty of these little monsters, I learn on Day 113, on the eve of my very last chemo treatment, that there’s one more.  

After my little sister’s birthday celebration, Joe drives us home and announces he has to go back to work.  He has an email he still needs to send or something or other.  I shrug it off, go to bed.  Then sometime around midnight, he fast-tip-toes into our room like his sleeves were on fire and asks, “Are you awake?”

“I am now!”

“I wasn’t working,” he says.  “I was getting your ‘last chemo’ gift ready, and I think you should open it right now.”

As I’m following him down the hall, into the living room, toward the powder room where he says the gift is stashed because he “didn’t have time to wrap it,” he’s trying to convince me he made a papercraft monster of his own with some guidance from Carlos.  Let me tell you, Joe isn’t crafty.  About as close he gets to a crayon is when he finds them chewed up on the rug while the dog is outside pooping rainbows.  So I’m thinking it’s either a sloth or a room full of puppies.  One or the other. And, well, here.  Watch for yourself.  Fair warning:  I am wearing sexy flannel cancer pajamas and ye ol’ sleeping hat and it was filmed by a twelve-year-old on her phone.

“I’ll take a grass-fed vegan, thanks,” Carlos said.

“Maybe I can find one. I can definitely find a free-range vegan at Whole Foods.”

This is the kind of banter we’ve had in the chemo lounge on Day 114, and as I type, Joe, Carlos, and I are watching the very last of the Taxol drip down from the bag.

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

Day 89

+Read more

This is me. This is the me you’ll see shopping for dishwashing detergent or walking to the curb when the kindergarten school bus pulls up or standing at a lectern at the university. This is a woman with a bag of tricks, a bag on wheels, no less, a bag that thumps over the concrete seams of campus with purpose. A snack-sized baggie with Motrin tucked inside. A bottle of water. Peanuts. A makeup compact. A bottle of hand-sanitizer. Determination. This woman puts her hand on top of her head in a good Texas gust because she’s afraid it will all blow away. This is me when the girls want to trace hopscotch patterns on the sidewalks, when everyone’s smiling, when the sun breaks over the eaves and the bare tree limbs blur into the blue sky.

On Day 96 I ask Hannah, who’s been snapping photos of jars of Nutella and her foot on a skateboard and our dog curled into herself on a sofa pillow, if she might want to take some pictures of me.  “The real me,” I tell her, and she squints for a minute.

“With your bald head, you mean?” she wants to know.   “Sure.”

She’s come a long way.  The day I shaved my head we’d asked if she wanted to record the video, thinking it would appeal to her artsy ambitions, thinking it was her way in.  But before she even got started, she tossed the phone at me and ran out crying.

“Can we talk about why you’re upset?” I asked, my chin to my shoulder so my voice would travel down the hall after her.  I was sitting on a black folding chair in my bathroom.  Joe was untangling the cord to the hair clippers.

“I’m upset because I don’t know how to work your stupid phone!” she called back.

And while she helped me pick out the wig she preferred I wear, it seemed to be spun from the devils gold or something.  She would give it looks, the wig, the one-eye-squint you master the day you turn twelve.  And at a family Christmas party, right after my second treatment, we leaned together in my mother’s kitchen, my head tipped to touch hers, and she reared back.

“It’s going to fall on me!”  she said with the squint and the lip snarl.

“No it’s not,” I said.

“Go ahead,” she said.  “Take it off and show them how bald you are.  See if they like it.”

I cried all the way home.  And when I cried, she cried.  She cried like she might have when she was ten or six or four.  She cried like the little girl I knew her to be.  We decided that she was really mad at cancer.  Not me.  Not the wig.  But while she sits with the Nikon poised, we start with the wig.  Then, the hat.

I love my hats.  I have one my mom knitted for me.  The hat of many colors, she calls it.  Before she brought it over, she’d sent me a picture of herself modeling it.  Reds and blues and purples.  A lip of knit yarn rolling back from her thin eyebrows, arched exactly like mine.  I sat forward with my laptop on my knees, looking into the face of my own mom, living with Hepatitis C, months after a cancerous tumor was removed from her liver.  But I don’t see her struggling.  She is only the woman who wears the hat she made for cold nights, the woman who brings a pot of soup for us every chemo Friday, the woman who climbs the narrow steps of a tree house in her backyard to help Firecracker dust the corners.  All I see is mom.  I took a picture in the knit hat and sent one back to her.

This hat, though, is my Ralph Kramden hat, and I arrange the brim before Hannah snaps a series of pictures.

Hannah asks if I’m ready for a bald-head shot.  “Sure,” I say, dropping the hat to slouch beside the leg of the upholstered chair.  No filters, we agree.  Everyone should see what a bald woman looks like, straight-shouldered in the front room windows.  Otherwise, this woman can usually be found in the corners of the house, the bathroom with the door locked, the walk-in closet where the wig stand waits.

Joe slipped past a gap in our door once when I was changing from the wig to the Kramden hat.

“Stop!” I said.  “I don’t want you to see just how bald I am now.”

“I already know,” he said and kept walking.

I have another hat I wear on nights that aren’t that cold.  A sort of thin, slouchy cotton turban that rearranges itself across whatever snagging stubble I have left.  I wake from a Dickens book everyday in this hat.  But here I am, without the security of any hat at all.

Remember just a few weeks ago when I was worried Hannah would remember the “saddest moments” between us?  That surely everything through her perspective as a kid of a mom with cancer was gloomy?  When I say between camera clicks, “I look like a tough sci-fi chick,” she says, “Yeah you do.”

Whatever it was she’d had to accept about the way treating cancer was changing me, she’s made it through.

Then we decide people should see that woman, the woman on chemo.

No filters.

No makeup.

This is me.  This is the me who has lost half of her eyelashes, who’s brows have thinned.  I feel wonderful as I sit for this picture, but I know despite how I feel, despite the fact that I’ve walked a mile and a half today and made tabouli lettuce wraps and wrote this blog, I look sick.  Almost eight weeks of chemotherapy has made my skin tone change to a pallid gray, darkened circles under my eyes, dried out my lips, creased new wrinkles in my chin, turned my nail beds purple.  I spend a lot of time covering these chemo signs so I don’t look sick, so no one worries when they shouldn’t.

Last week when I met with my surgeon to plan a lumpectomy in April, he asked how I felt, that I looked like I felt great.  The woman in the wig and makeup went to this appointment.  “Oh, I can’t complain!” I said, which he thought was the funniest thing he’d ever heard a cancer patient say.  But I can’t.  I’m doing okay.  I promise you.

Hannah checks the pictures on the Nikon’s display screen.

“It’s alright if it looks bad,” I say.  “That’s the point.  To show how bad I look.”

“You could never look bad,” she says.

We’ve both come such a long way.

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

Day 89

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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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I told him that there was nothing cool in the seventies in Arkansas for 600 miles (unless you count that someone spray painted “Nugent” on the Dairy Queen wall) and that when I looked up the possible horror hosts out of curiosity I found this notice:  Sadly, the scariest thing that has come out of Arkansas is Roger Clinton’s music. To our knowledge there have been no horror hosts in Arkansas. So that’s where I lived once, carefully carrying a rubber worm into the kitchen on two palms so I could saw a mouth onto its small face with a butter knife, a mouth that I could pinch open by squeezing the sides so we could sing songs together.  We sang we are Siamese if you please, we are Siamese if you don’t please while I dangled my legs off the balcony at the back of the house, both of us staring off into the dogwoods that lined the barbed-wire farm fence of the pasture behind us.

I did have two human friends, one named Christy who lived down the street and, I suspected, was part of an arranged friendship forged by my mom with Christy’s mom.  I got stuck in Christy’s locked bathroom once, and, after what seemed like hours, the adults had to squeeze me out the bathroom window and into the boxwoods below.  The other was an only child on the other end of the street, older than me, and bigger, oafish, two large turned-in teeth always showing in a snarl.  She had a lace-covered double bed with twenty pillows in frilly cases, a white Victorian dollhouse precisely her height, and a blistering left hook.  If she would have seen my pet rubber worm, she would have smacked me in the shoulder so hard the worm flew out of my hand.  Once, she chucked a volcanic landscaping rock at my eye, and along the socket it turned the color of the rubber worm.  My whole family gathered around me as I stretched out on the sofa with my arms sloppily crossed over my striped tank top while mom patted at the bruise with an ice cube wrapped in the dishtowel.  After that, I drew black rings under my eyes with crayon so maybe this could happen again.  It never did.  But that’s the same sofa I sat on one October night, the rubber worm coiled in my fist, to watch Whale’s Frankenstein.

The monster walks into the room backwards and pivots into the light for a closeup.  He stands, shifting his weight, his arms lock-jointed straight by his sides.  He drags his boots when he steps to Henry Frankenstein.  He’s talked to like a child.  Sit down.  Sit down! He tries to hold a light beam.  Sit down.  Go and sit down. His hands, palms up, tremble, empty.

74 Days after diagnosis, two days after the oncologist switched my chemotherapy treatment to Taxol for the home stretch, my hands and feet swell up sunburn red, painful to the touch, and I’m shuffling around the kitchen, the “V” of my loose robe showing the mechanics of the mediport just under my skin, a thin cap slouched on my bald head, trying to figure out how to open a water bottle with Boris Karloff creature claws.  Like holding sunshine, it can’t be done.

So I sit on the sofa with the bottle and quiet cry until everyone else wakes up.

“Why didn’t you come get me to open it?” Joe wants to know.

Because it’s been awhile since I drew black around my eyes for pity and maybe even longer since I admitted there was something I absolutely couldn’t do on my own. It turns out I’m in the slim margin of people who experience what’s called hand and foot syndrome from chemo, and I start to think of all the other slim margins I belong to.  I’m in the slim margin of breast cancer patients diagnosed as “triple negative,” for example.  I’m in the slim margin who are under a certain age or weight when diagnosed.  I’m in the slim margin without a family history and on and on.  So after Joe sets the opened water bottle down on the side table my dad built for me and turns on the television to find that Philip Seymour Hoffman has died, I fumble to open my laptop with my thumbs and slip into the internet vortex of doom.  My fingers can bend just enough to tap at the keys in search of Hoffman news, then “hand and foot syndrome and chemo,” then “triple negative breast cancer,” then “statistics of breast cancer survival.”  Within a few clicks, I’ve bought a book with a chapter called “Preparing for the End.”

Later in the evening, as the Superbowl unfolds on the front-room television, I direct my melancholic shuffle toward Hannah in the hallway and ask if I can borrow one of her make-up removal wipes.  She brings it to me, her eyes almost level with mine, her hair swept up in a topknot to show her bare, thin neck stretching in earnestness.

“How should I wash my face now?” she asks, blinking.

“Like you usually do?”

“But this is the last one.”  Her eyes well up.  “But you can have it because you have cancer and I can’t take away a face wipe from someone with cancer and I’ll just cry if you don’t use it just because now you know it’s my last one.”  She blinks again, brown eyes the size of moon pies, fat curls of lashes glistening.  Really, those lashes.  She was born with them.

Luna moth-like in their velocity when they bat.  They used to attract strangers in grocery stores and restaurants.

“My god those lashes!”

“I know.”

“That one will always get her way.”

“I know.”

So I tell Hannah she can have the last wipe if she can help me wash my face with a warm rag.  She takes the wipe back and follows me to the bathroom where we stand toe to toe on the gray rug as the sink faucet runs.  “Is this warm enough?” she asks me, touching my chin with the edge of a wet, pink washrag.

“Yep.”

Eyes closed, I shimmy my hat back just enough to reveal my forehead but not the sparse stubble at the edge.  Hannah’s not fond of the bald head, unlike the Firecracker who’ll sometimes pop my hat off and call me Caillou or rub the top to see if it still feels like the shorn belly of our Shih-Tzu.

“This is like being at the salon,” I say as Hannah dabs the rag at my cheeks.

But it’s not like that at all, I’m thinking.  I’m thinking this is that essay she’s going to write one day in tenth grade about the saddest thing she’s ever had to do in life, the essay that begins with something like, “my mom with her eyes closed looking all dead and stuff while I wiped her face clean.”

But after she’s done and I say “thank you,” she replies in a sing-song voice “you’re welcome” before pivoting on her tiptoes to walk away and I realize that’s probably not what she was thinking at all.  Maybe she was thinking how grown-up it felt to be able to help.  Maybe she was thinking how glad she was I didn’t use her last make-up wipe.  Who knows, but I decide then that maybe I’m not Frankenstein’s creature to anyone else but me at my worst.  And I decide there are different sorts of slim margins I also fit – the slim margin whose cancer responds so quickly to treatment, for one.  Mine, after all, is one place, one small mass that’s at least halfway gone already.  Then the swollen hands and feet I thought were in the slim margins of those that stay this way forever begin to ease back to their usual proportions again.

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

+Read more

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.

I snap a picture, one blurry, the other clear, and then I push the glass door back and check in.  They move me to another waiting room, a separate waiting room with four chairs where women in crisscross hospital gowns watch HGTV beside the door marked “Caution: X-Rays in Progress.”  The mammogram room.  I know where to change clothes, and I know where to sit.  I know where to go when they call my name and all the other women wish me good luck, just like they did the last time.  Last time, Extreme’s “More Than Words” played over the speakers and I couldn’t stop laughing though the technician ordered me to stay perfectly still.  This time they played “And We Danced” by The Hooters, and I’m starting to suspect someone with a wicked sense of humor is programming the music around here.  This time, the mass that had registered as 1.8 cm now checks in at 1 cm.  The mammogram doesn’t show this, because the mammogram is worthless for someone with dense tissues (my surgeon’s words).  The sonogram they complete in the broom-closet room down the hall shows this – the black hole of the mass collapsing in on itself at last.

* * *

Day 69.  I have a comedian for a babysitter.  I mean that literally.  I mean that my babysitter is a comedian who wants to write a comedic television series.  Here she is babysitting the Firecracker:

Maybe an hour after she’s left my house, while I’m packing up at work and Joe has taken over at home, the babysitter texts me to say that she just discovered our television remote tucked away in her backpack where the Firecracker must have hidden it.  I ask her if she can bring it back the next day.

“This changes everything,” she answers.  “You now owe me 12,190 Rupiah if you ever want to watch TV comfortably again.”

Later I learn that’s roughly a dollar.  When I sternly ask the Firecracker why she put the remote control in the babysitter’s backpack, she says: “Uh … I … I’m getting kind of confused,” bats at the air like someone losing equilibrium, and then runs off to play Club Penguin on the computer.  We’re all comedians around here.

* * *

On Day 70, I sit in my Lebowski robe watching North by Northwest to make sure it’s fresh in my mind for tonight’s screenwriting workshop.  This is me in my Lebowski robe back when I had my own hair and thought it was funny to send friends pictures of me dressed like The Dude.

The big difference between teaching pre-chemo and during chemo is that now I have to keep careful notes of what I need to cover in class to keep me from rambling about things like that time in second grade when I sat in the big desk in the back of the classroom wearing a metal arm brace attached to a pencil, looking all Edward Scissorhands, because the teacher thought the way my spindly fingers curved inward and slanted my letters to the left instead of the right was an abomination.  I used to call them guitar fingers, piano fingers.  She called them abnormal fingers.  No one can beat me in thumb wrestling because my long-digit-stretch is incredible.  That’s all I’m going to say, because I’m looking down at the notes in my journal that read DON’T TELL THE LONG FINGER STORY IN THE BLOG FOR GOODNESS SAKES.

So I record careful notes, and I mostly keep to them in class now – just like I did the very first class I ever taught.  That class was one I taught by invitation of a friend who thought I was ready to give it a go.  1995.  I was wearing Joe’s combat boots, a burgundy button down dress sewn by my mom, and blue-black hair I’d cut myself to hang to my chin.  My hands shook so badly I dropped a few note cards when I tried to shuffle one behind the other and I gulped an audible gulp that ricocheted off the walls and radiated out across campus.  “Thanks everyone,” I said before walking out mid-lesson.  I caught a glimpse of my friend’s face on the way out, wide-eyed, lower lip tucked in, her fingertips touching her cheek.  There are only two times a friend will give you this look – when you gloriously bomb like a Costner film in her class and when you meet her mother and try really hard not to say something like “vagina” instead of your first name when you shake her mom’s hand and you say it anyway.  As long as I don’t revert all the way back to that en total, I think I’ll be okay.

The other difference is that now I re-read and re-watch whatever we’re set to discuss in class as close to class time as I can.  I don’t trust my chemo brain to remember.

Cary Grant slips through a window and into a stranger’s room.  “Stop!” the woman orders, leaning back against her pillow before she settles her black-rimmed on her nose for a better look.  And then, “Stop.”

* * *

I come home from work to find that the Firecracker has packed her bags (a few stuffed animals wrapped in an Angry Bird blanket) and tried to run away from the comedian babysitter whom the Firecracker has terrorized for the past two hours of Day 71.  The babysitter and I go over the offenses while the Firecracker kicks her legs in the upholstered chair in the front room and mock-cries.

“I don’t understand why she’d turn into Damien,” I say, hoping the comedian babysitter won’t quit on us because she’s the best comedian babysitter around.

The Firecracker’s cries cut off with the sudden quiet of someone who just found a tiny unicorn in her pocket.  “What?” she asks.  “What’s a darmian?”

“You,” I say with a little vehemence.

That kid’s going to sit in time out until her body conforms to the chair, I’m thinking.  That kid’s going to pack up her playhouse igloo she got for Christmas, walk all the way to the North Pole, and personally give it back to Santa.

“Maybe we could take her to the moon and leave her there,” the babysitter says.

So as soon as the babysitter leaves, I send this picture to lure her back next week:

But I know she’ll come back even though the Firecracker is eating this note.  Because the babysitter’s writing a comedic television show.  She needs fodder.

* * *

Day 72.  Here’s something I haven’t told you yet.  Remember how I’ve been trying meditations and sometimes they take Tolkien turns?  Well, I stopped listening to the guided meditations altogether because, as I told Joe, “I can do them all by myself now!”  Which means I imagine things like Travis Bickle taking out quivering, crumpled discs of cancer cells with his quick-draw slide gun or my red cells multiplying into a billion Hellboys.  Maybe I should record guided meditations for film fanatics.  But I also imagined, to shove myself through the day with my new rolling attaché case packed with detailed notes, that on Day 72 my oncologist would say, “Oh!  The mass shrunk by almost half!  No need for chemo anymore.  Goodbye!”

That’s not exactly what she says when I show up for chemo five.  She’s encouraged by the results and tells me we’re almost there.  I’m a triple-negative (as opposed to breast cancer patients who might be estrogen positive, etc.) and this means we need to be even more concerned with recurrence because hormones don’t explain my mass.  Nothing explains my mass.  So we need to decrease the odds, which is what the full treatment of chemo does.  Nonetheless, as of Day 73, I’m going back to imagining that when I see her again in two weeks we’re going to decide I’m all done.

Joe drives me home from chemo number five, and I’ve scrunched myself in the passenger seat, leaning against the window, drinking water and watching the scenery slide by.  Overhead, curlicues of highway ramps divide the sunlight.  Life is so beautiful, I muse to myself, admiring the curve of the elevated ramps.  Yes, they gave me just enough drugs today to find the undersides of highways beautiful.  They gave me just enough drugs – a whole IV bag of Benadryl and Taxol among them — to think, screw it, I’m eating whatever I want today, and order Joe to pick up enchiladas and chips at the diner by our house.  It should be said that I completely credit the whole-foods vegan diet I’ve been following to the letter along with the chemo for shrinking the tumor by nearly half in what the oncologist deemed exceptional time, but today, today the sun is shining in a starburst of a cracked divot in my windshield, the highway squiggles are phenomenal, next week the oncologist is going to say, “no need for chemo anymore, goodbye!,” and today I’m going to shape the take-out box into a funnel and pour a diner-variety enchilada dinner down my throat.

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

+Read more