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...

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...

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...