Tag: Cancer
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In it with me
During treatment I slept on the couch downstairs a lot. I’d like to say it was for practical reasons, and some of it was, but the honest reason is that I was more comfortable alone during that time. So the couch became mine. There were a lot of nights where I felt sick and couldn’t…
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Chat Rooms and Candles
In 2004, there was one other person. I was young and sick and more alone in it than I have ever been able to fully describe. Nobody my age understood. Nobody my age was going through it. I’ve written about how apart I felt in those years, the young cancer patient among peers who were…
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Bowl Cuts
My girls hate the pictures. Every so often they’ll come across old photos of themselves from when they were little, and there it is, the haircut. The bowl cut that is round, slightly-too-even, unmistakably-a-kid’s-haircut look, sitting on their heads in photo after photo. They groan. They laugh. They ask, in the way kids do, why…
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Z for Zorro
I found out I had cancer almost by accident, and I told my mother about it almost as an afterthought, which is to say I told her after it was already over. I was twenty-five. There was a mole on my calf that had started to flake and darken, and I hadn’t thought much of…
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New Friends, Harsh Realities
Most of what a scan is, is waiting. The PET/CT unit at Stanford was a trailer, and it had three parts. A room with the machine. A monitoring hub where the techs and nurses sat watching their screens. And a small sitting area, dim, with two medical chairs and IV poles and a single bathroom,…
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Down the hall
There were two beds in my mother’s room. She was in one. That night, I was in the other. I had driven up from Madera after my own treatment, the shot still working its way through me, that particular sick heaviness settling in the way it always did a couple of hours after. I walked…
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The Doorway
The chair. The beeps. My whole body tense, every time, for a year.That’s what comes back first. Not the medicine, not the diagnosis, but the chair I sat in and the sound of the machines and the way my body braced itself the moment I walked in, before anything had even started.I went alone. Every…
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I’m sorry
My mother went looking for a window washer during the time of my treatments, which sounds like such a small, practical thing to need in the middle of everything else that was happening. She’d cometo stay with us mostly to hold the house together, three young kids under 5 who still needed feeding and driving…
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Normal Brain
I am driving again. Madera to San Jose, San Jose to Madera. Central Valley to the Bay and back, the same road, the same hours, until I stop seeing it.At one end is my own treatment. At the other is my mother, who is stage four now. The cancer is in her bones. I am…
