Did You Ever Think Life Was Gonna Be This Way?

Long ago and far away, before I was a cancer patient (or even married to my current husband, or mother to my children), I taught yoga - and of course, I practiced yoga, almost every day. My yoga of choice was power yoga - an almost aerobic form of yoga as fitness (think Baron Baptiste), practiced in a very warm (but not Bikram hot) room with high humidity. At my peak, I could do all kinds of fun  asanas (poses) and had terrific breath control and great flexibility. I even took some acroyoga workshops, and I loved those! After finishing grad school and starting my career and getting married and having two babies, yoga took a bit of a back seat and I stopped teaching. But I still practiced several times a week and kept yoga close to my heart, part of my central identity. It was the first time, really, that I had excelled at any physical endeavor - I never played on any team sports or anything like that. So it was really a shift in my own thinking about what my body could do, and how...

I loved Halloween as a kid. The dressing up for school parades, the running around for (what seemed like) hours, trailing the rumors of full size candy bars all through the neighborhood, our costumes covered by winter coats (I grew up in one of the suburbs of Chicago). The inherent subversive nature of it all was what really made Halloween such delirious fun: for one beautiful evening, the doors to a world outside after dark were flung wide open! The streets would darken, my brother and his friends invariably would tear off and leave me - but it didn't matter, because we knew almost every kid in the neighborhood and so I would find my pals and wander around with them, concocting plans about trying to return to a place that had the best offerings without being called out for repeats, eating candy all the while.  treats When our kids were born, then, you can imagine how excited I was for Halloween. Not only for the candy, but for the costumes! The pumpkin patches! The leaves cr...

I chunked a big, dark, heavy rock at you all... ...And this is what happened. Thank you for the beauty and support and love. I am blessed beyond measure.

I have the tendency to leave out the messy, sad, difficult parts of my everyday life with cancer. The reasons for that are legion, but they boil down to one: we all like to present our best selves. No one likes to feel vulnerable and naked to the world. I don't want people feeling sorry for me or pitying me. There are only a tiny handful of people that I really open up to about this terrible disease, and that's because it's a huge burden and frankly, I don't want to trust just anyone with sharing my load.  But I don't want everyone to think life is all rainbows and sunshine, either.  When one of my closest friends, who loves me very much (and the feeling is mutual), urged me to stop obsessing over certain things and gave me a well-intentioned pep talk about how the big crisis was over and it was time to find my "new normal"...well, I knew I had some 'splaining to do. If someone that close to me thinks that we're all done with cancer around her...

Since my last scan, I've been thinking a lot about the next phase of my life.  I've had life-saving medical intervention that has allowed me to banish almost all of my cancer. I've spent some serious time relaxing and pampering myself, and I have the energy and recovering fingernails (they kept splitting!) to prove it. And now I'm ready to move on, to open a new chapter in my life. I feel as though my future wellness is really in my own hands right now. Do I want to spend my life "managing my illness" - or do I want to commit myself to enhancing my wellness? Um, I'll take the latter, thankyouverymuch!! My new approach consists of four "buckets," if you will: nutrition, exercise, mindfulness, and intellectual engagement . I'm not becoming Buddha or anything (yet!), but I've read enough that I'm convinced that a vegan, low-sugar diet is going to serve me best. I'm walking every day and committed to enjoying yoga again 3-4 times ...

This time last year, I was starting a new round of chemo - Folfox, which we now know really REALLY wreaked havoc on my systems, especially my platelets and white blood cells - they even wound up testing me for leukemia this spring because my counts were so low. Andy platelets, once robust and normal as yours, still have not recovered. At this point, my oncologist says the damage is probably permanent and that my platelets have "reset" themselves at this new, much lower level. Just to give you an idea of what's normal in the world of platelets, 150k-400k is the normal range. During chemo, my oncologist required my platelet levels to be at 100k or higher. Today, my platelets are generally around 75k. Last time I had chemo, the medical team had to request (and thankfully, received) special permission ("compassionate use")for me to use a drug that would boost my platelets to an acceptable level for treatment. Fun stuff, right?  But I  digress. I started this post fu...

Early this week, not long after I wrote a tongue-in-cheek post about how I wasn't going to say things about how you should hold your sweeties tight and tell them you love them, I received word that my college friend, Rachel Perlmeter, had died of a heart attack on Sunday. She was 38 years old. An absolutely brilliant artist and human being. I met her when she was a freshman at Northwestern and I was a sophomore - a place really just chock full of geniuses - and even so, she stood apart. She was kind and brilliant and funny as hell and one of only a handful of people I've ever met my whole life long who loved books even more than I did (do). She went on to have this amazing career full of artistry and beauty, filling the spaces between theater and literature and art with her own special vision, and married a man that she told me she adored. We hadn't talked in a couple of years but she came to mind at unexpected times and places. Her death has really rocked me.  It migh...

After a long hiatus in which I could only watch "Friends" episodes, listen to the All Souls trilogy on audiobook, walk around feeling like I'd drunk a gallon of coffee, and sometimes - sometimes  - knit, I've finally read a book. Two books, in fact! I'm so proud. One seems to have a bit more synergy with my present situation, however, so I give you: Station Eleven: A Novel by Emily St. John Mandel Had Station Eleven been written in a chronologically organized way, it would have been a nice addition to the growing field of post-apocalyptic fiction. But Mandel instead takes readers through life before "the collapse," as well as during and after that seminal event, using a technique that reminded me of a disorganized but dazzling pile of photographs.  Readers follow the fates of a handful of people introduced in the first chapter of the book, which occurs in a theater just before the collapse. What really makes this book sparkle is the organi...

There's this crazy amazing thing that happens when you cry out for help. Within minutes of my last post, I discovered someone had sent me a card game in the mail; I received comforting (and in at least one case, perfectly bossy) texts from several dear friends, all of whom made me laugh even though I was also crying; and I got plenty of internet love, too. Plus my dad called to tell me to ditch the edema and keep the boots, and he threw in a bonus idea of what to make for dinner. So you know what I did? I discovered a Xanax on the floor, so obviously I took that.  Already feeling a bit better, I proceeded to watch the "The One with Ross's Sandwich" episode from  Friends  while taking a bubble bath, and then I got out of that bathtub and put on decent clothes - I even wrestled those damn boots on, too. Next, I started walkin'. Because that's what you do after you finish your middle of the day bubble bath pity party and put on kickass boots. (And also what you...

It took me a little longer than usual, but I've finally finished Chimamanda Ngoze Adichie's Americanah . A bit of a feast, really: This is a big book. A book of lives lived and those left to wither, a book about love and superficial - or maybe not - romance, a book that left me full of more questions than answers, a book about race in America and life in Nigeria, a book that made me feel nice and full. It took me four days to read it, which is forever for me, but I didn't mind, because there's plenty to think about and the writing is good. It's long, but it's tight - the story doesn't meander and it doesn't fade. Once I let go of my idea that the book was about the immigrant experience in America and life in the post-9/11 West, which it's not although the back cover marketed it as such (bastards) - Adichie made efficient use of my time. Since I'm neither black nor an immigrant, I can't really say for certain whether she truly "g...