Tag Archives: chemotherapy
Overdue update, & encountering cancer
This is largely what I saw the first time I encountered cancer: I was wearing this absurdly cheerful polka-dot skirt the day I went for my biopsy results and was informed I had a Stage 2, Grade 2 breast cancer. I was … Continue reading
Filed under uncategorized
10 August 2009: Choice
Terrible foreboding and loneliness. The two of us in this house together and nothing but discomfort between us. I wish I could feel warmth, comfort, closeness. All outward signs are there: he takes me to the hospital, makes my meals, … Continue reading
Filed under treatment journal, uncategorized
2 August 2009: 31,000 feet
Taking off from Cleveland as the red sun dips in the sky. From the air the network of streets and trees, ponds and houses seems delicate and deliberate. So many blue swimming pools. My hair is falling out again. To … Continue reading
Filed under treatment journal
16 July 2009: the same sad, sick self
My brain’s still operating strangely, slowly, a sluggard of drugs. Three o’clock in the afternoon, having only just really begun the day. Tea and Scrabble with H. earlier, feeling strange and anxious all the time. Last night—the experience of seeing … Continue reading
Filed under treatment journal
15 July 2009: the Lord preserves the young ones
The sick cloud of the final chemo—I can hardly write or fathom the date. Barely able to function in this sick, spinning state. Unable to speak coherently to my mother—having caught me in the library, demanding a date to book … Continue reading
Filed under treatment journal
13 July 2009: Insomnia
2 AM—steroid insomnia Or insomnia of another sort of course Statistics & mastectomy pictures Reconstruction, Tamoxifen, Michigan Bankruptcy, relationship, religion, Jack the Ripper, gender/secondary sex characteristics, the Bodleian, Haworth, Wuthering Heights, Simone de Beauvoir, ‘writer’s block,’ the emptiness, Mastectomy, my … Continue reading
Filed under treatment journal
23 June 2009: a cry for connection
Awash again with chemo after Dr. S’s U-turn in treatment (a standoff in his office yesterday, his defensiveness and awkwardness and my ever-present frustration and anger)–decision to go ahead with the final two chemo treatments with a view to mastectomy … Continue reading
Filed under treatment journal
18 June 2009: the worst possible outcome
I had prepared myself for the worst possible news but still not quite expected it–mastectomy, or a waiting list for one at least. A terrible uncertainty, weeks or months of waiting for worse news. For the moment, waititing to see … Continue reading
Filed under treatment journal
30 May 2009: the Disease
Tired of The Disease’s distasteful interruption to my life. A coping mechanism, I suppose, to view it as a nuisance. Trying to quell the terror of the possibility of this new drug’s being just as ineffective as the last was. … Continue reading
Filed under treatment journal
