Tag: Cancer
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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…
Whatever Held 