The Adventures of Cancer Bitch

MARCH 12. THE CANCER CARD

48 teach your class, which isn’t as lively and fun as at its best, but still has content and is hysteria-free. At the break your students have a basket at your place at the table with chocolates and soaps and colored pens and books, and you are able to be enthusiastic and grateful. Truly. Afterwards, as planned, you come back to your mother’s hotel room to sleep (because your husband is sick and can’t sleep with you because you can’t afford to get his cold now) and watch the montage of tv you always watch in hotels: some Friends, some movie, cnn, Fox, actors vaguely familiar and young, mostly double entendres that aren’t funny though the laugh track thinks everything is funny. Then in the morning your mother has to leave for the airport , and you leave her hotel and sit at the Starbucks down the street and read through the big pink binder on breast cancer treatment and follow-up, and wait until you’re not too exhausted to walk the block to the subway to go home and go to sleep. At home you sleep and watch tv and call the chemo nurse back to schedule your first round of it and you pause to weep while you’re still on the phone, and she says, Are you OK? and you say you are. Your husband says that someone at work asked how you were and he said you had a meltdown. MARCH 12. THE CANCER CARD This afternoon I was walking from the subway to Fancy Hospital to get my heart scanned to see if it could withstand chemo. On Michigan Avenue a young woman approached me. She had on a cross, so I immediately assumed she was an evangelist. But her first question was, Do you live here? Usually I pass up street hawkers, but I was curious. Yes, I told her. Then she said, Can I talk to you about your hair? I said, I’m going to have chemo and lose all my hair. Oh, she said, falling back. I felt so guilty I called Linc immediately on my cell to confess. He said that no one has a right to accost me on the street, that whatever she got in return was fair. Later tonight he said, People don’t have an inalienable right to sell things. ...