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Yoga for Cancer Patients: No Mat Required

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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 r
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2018 November 6: Tricks and Treats

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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
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2018 October 2: Ghosts

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Yesterday morning, I awoke and considered the day ahead: an Oxaliplatin infusion this afternoon, the first one in almost five years. I wondered briefly if I would see my friend Madeline at the cancer center - a mental image of her, smiling her little Mona Lisa smile at me (she had a whole wardrobe full of smiles, just as she had a closet chock full of fun clothes) from her infusion chair as we sat together, wafted up and forced me to do a mental double take, because I won't see Mad at infusion. Or anywhere else. She died on August 22 from complications of colon cancer. She was 41.  I tucked Madeline into my heart and head as I prepared for my day, knowing that her many years (she lived with CRC for over five years) of pushing back against this horrific disease with every medical option available to her would help me keep my perspective when I felt like whining. This woman exhausted all of the FDA approved treatments and then moved on to clinical trials, which are no small unde
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2018 September 20: Six of one and...you know the rest

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It's been a while. To be honest, the rest of the summer brought me some tough stuff to work through. I lost several people I care about, and people I care about lost people they care about, and that, sometimes, is just as hard. I was going to write about all of these losses but every time I try, I stop and close up my computer, so clearly I am not ready to do that. Instead, I'll tell you my latest health news. Because that's fun.  Do we want the good news first or the not so good news? Good news? Great! That's the way I prefer it, too. The good news is that my poor skin and toes and hair and (fill in the blanks with all of the parts and pieces that I have which have suffered due to irinotecan and Vectibix here) will now be getting a break. It's true! I'll be able to walk around without makeup on and not scare the locals! I will be able to skip moisturizing routines here and there and not wind up with toe infections (oh, the toe infection - I probably should
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2018 July 17: Crying in the MRI and My Friend Jen

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Honestly, I've been trying to write a post for what feels like forever about my friend Jen, who died of complications from metastatic colorectal cancer on 2 July. But every time I start, I can't seem to get it all together, so that one is going to have to wait a while, I guess. My grief and survivor guilt and sadness and anger and passion and hate for a disease I know so intimately - it all needs to percolate a little. But I'm not worried. Jen wouldn't have minded waiting to hear all of what I need to say.* As a matter of fact, I was thinking of her - and of this blog post - last night, while I was inside the MRI machine. If you've never had the pleasure of being inside such a machine, it looks like this:  Well, that's a fancy one that I found on the Interwebs. But you get the picture. They put you on the little stretcher there and zip you inside the little roundybout area. They give you earplugs and headphones (sometimes, they pump in mu
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2018 June 29: It's Just a Phase

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Surprise! I'm posting again, twice in one week!  Q: OMG! How can this be? A: I had an check-up and chemo yesterday, and some thoughts about that. So I thought I would go ahead and share. Chemo brain teaches you not to wait and write it all down later, because later arrives and your brain is blank in the spot that was holding your thoughts. It's nice. I hope you never have to try it, and I also hope that you have a lot of patience with your friends who DO have chemo brain (because they do!) and forget words, comments, previous discussions, plans, addresses, directions, phone numbers, what they were going to say - you name it. They are much more frustrated/annoyed about it than you are, and there's nothing to be done but make lists and calendar appointments and then make lists to remember that you did all that - and then keep the master list of lists somewhere you won't forget. I know aging leads most down this road eventually, but I'm 43 and had a photograp
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2018 06 26: Where Have You Gone, Dr. Jaaaaaaaay-ay-ay?*

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*to the tune of Don Maclean's "American Pie" Well, well, well! It's been a while, hasn't it? I got sidetracked as the second half of May engulfed me in a wave of "school's (almost) out, camps are starting and you should have registered in January" insanity, and after a couple of weeks, I realized that no one was asking me where the next blog update was and it was both a disappointment (for obvious reasons) and a relief (because I'd been starting to obsess a bit over the idea that I had to post consistently). So then I just started navel gazing rather than thinking and writing. I took a mental vacation, I suppose. It was sort of nice! But I discovered that the reason why I don't take mental vacations very often is because I get a little too cozy with my life-long nemesis, anxiety, and her BFF, depression. So the mental vacation is over and you'll all just have to pretend you're really eager for regular installments if I fall of
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