The Adventures of Cancer Bitch

APRIL 1. TWO MILES

63 sleep, Ambien. I’m afraid I’ll become addicted to Ambien. I’ve taken it about five nights straight. I didn’t know this morning if I should get up and walk three miles or sit around in my robe and read. Do you listen to your body at this time when it’s reeling from the chemo, do you rest, or do you push on because you’ve promised yourself to walk every day, and walking will make you feel better? Which part of yourself do you listen to? Which is the legitimate part? Which is the whiney, weepy, wimpy part that needs a push? The thing is you don’t know. No one can tell me if even after the 20 weeks of chemo, I’ll be cancer-free forever. That is true. And it seems stupid to be hopeful because you could be wrong. But it seems self-defeating not to be. Isn’t it better to hope and believe that I’m already cancer-free, that the chemo is just to make sure, that all this will be a bump in the road when I look back on a long, healthy life? The opposite is to be the sadder but wiser girl, the I-told-you-so girl. But what is the value of being able to say I told you so on your death bed? APRIL 1. TWO MILES I walked two miles to the Bourgeois Pig Café. I didn’t feel better or worse when I got there. I got a small decaf latte and read a reprint of A Contract with God, an early graphic novel, which my student Tim had sent me, along with the sappiest card he could find bearing the message: Hang in there. The novel is so dark! Will Eisner wrote and illustrated it based on the death of his daughter from leukemia. Later tonight I gave it to Barry and Sharon to read. Sharon wanted to say something sad about Jesse and chemo and I said, No, don’t say it, and Barry said, No, don’t say it, and Linc said, No, don’t say it. And she didn’t. When I talk about my port and she talks about Jesse’s port, all seems doomed. Cancer means Jesse, and Jesse means death from cancer. I saw him after he died. He was lying in his bed upstairs. He’d been dead a few hours. They didn’t know what to do. He’d been alive the night before, talking to his doctor and a patient advocate from the hospital, who’d come to visit. A few of us sat around the table, the same table where we had chicken soup tonight. They hadn’t known what to do. I mean, Sharon had just been trying to find clinical trials 64 Jesse could be part of, and investigating a healer in Brazil. They called the synagogue and the hospital, which sent an ambulance, I think. Another friend carried Jesse downstairs. When Seth came home from school, early, there were his parents’ friends sitting there looking at him. I think I hugged him. He said something like, It’s OK. Meaning , the death of his brother was OK. Because what else could he say? He had to shrug. Because there were the adults there. And then two years later a friend of the family died, another young man, and the adults were sitting around the table and one of them went up to Seth and said, I’m sorry that you’ve lost your friend. There is so much loss. And on the other hand, Sharon’s mother had breast cancer 20 or so years ago and is alive in south Florida or Cleveland, depending on the season. Alive and with husband. MORE APRIL 1. EL REPLIEGUE Today I felt better as soon as I woke up, though I’d only slept about nine hours, and the night before I must have slept 13. And I can’t define or delineate what is better. I still had and have the jittery, rundown -feeling headache. But it didn’t bother me as much. How difficult it would be for a doctor to treat me. I’d say, I feel the same, except it was bad yesterday but not today, and I can’t tell you how it’s different . With this sort of headache, I feel the pain as dispersed pieces of glitter floating in my...