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...

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...

I've been neglecting you, my dedicated blog readers. I'm so sorry. Don't worry, I haven't been languishing in the hospital or crawling from bed to rocking chair and back. I haven't even been in hiding. Nope! I've been out and about, and I've been busy! I've been...SPRING CLEANING.  This is a momentous event. Long, long ago, in a world before I was diagnosed with cancer, I was a tidy person. An organized person. A person who would work all day, come home, parent and perform various household tasks, and then end the day with some reading or hanging out with my husband. And then I would get up and do it all again the next day. I had energy! I'm sort of amazed, looking back now, on all that I was able to get done. Spring cleaning was one of those things. On a somewhat regular basis, I would tear apart the closets, purge the dresser drawers, weed out the bookshelves, and all the rest. But that was a long time ago. In my post-diagnosis life, some days...

Spoiler Alert: I guess it's possible: I finally complained too much. But I had no choice, with the complaining and the wailing and the gnashing of teeth and so on! I've spent about $9 kajillion on skincare solutions but my skin would not play nicely. I can't even believe I'm saying this, but it's not even the acne all over my face that has been bothering me the most. It's the fact that I feel like a cicada nymph about to become a glorious locust, but without the glorious locust payoff. Don't know what I'm talking about? Feast your eyes on this: If that's not interactive enough for you, it appears that you can buy empty cicada shells in a fancy jar on Etsy . And then you, too, can feel what it's like to have my skin, at least a little...by putting one of the shells on your thumb? (Seriously, though, what is going on with this, Etsy? I feel like I just stumbled into the dark underbelly of the craft world.)  Anyhoo, I'm gonna wh...

When it comes to my cancer treatments, the hardest periods for me are the "in-between" ones. One treatment has ended due to toxicity or tolerance but a new one hasn't yet begun - or even worse, a new course of action has yet to be decided. These are the minutes, hours, days, and weeks that really send me into deep distress. Each day is interminably long. I feel paralyzed by the lack of action, fearful of what's coming down the pipeline, and anxiety ridden over whether the new approach will work. I start to shut down and disconnect. "I just need a breather, time to process," I tell myself as I snuggle back into my bed instead of getting up to start my day. "I need to give myself a break," I say as I climb into a bubble bath and watch three episodes of "Friends" in a row. It's no big deal. I'll be back at it tomorrow.  Life carries on - kids get to school, husband gets to work, our dogs skid around corners and bark at the deliv...

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...