Did You Ever Think Life Was Gonna Be This Way?

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...

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...

I spent most of the day today in bed. I guess the radiation treatments of last week sort of wore me out more than I had expected they would. But with all the laying around, it reminded me that this time last year, I was in the hospital. After I couldn't shake the 40 pounds (!!!) of water weight I'd gained during my liver resection in three weeks, my oncologist decided to do a CT scan to see if it would help them figure out what was going on. And what, exactly, did he find? A MASSIVE blood clot that extended from somewhere near my liver all the way down my left leg. Exciting, right? They admitted me to put me on an IV drip of blood thinner and to perform tests trying to understand where it came from. Unbeknownst to me and my medical team, I'd been a ticking time bomb for weeks. This is probably the closest I've come to death.  Blood clots, as you know, can kill you. The really big ones will almost certainly kill you, because they break off and the pieces can get stu...