The Adventures of Cancer Bitch

JULY 13. THE DANCER’S POSE

100 Suffering was going to the drug store and finding out that the very new dolt of a clerk didn’t have my new drug ready. It would take 10 minutes, he said. I was weeping and hovering at the counter like a desperate addict in my rain-dropped-on bald head, T-shirt, and torn shorts, and I went back to him and said, Could you give me just a pill or two for now, and finally, Could you make it a little faster because I’m in a lot of pain, and feeling a little guilty because I wasn’t in pain-pain, not about-to-die-and-double-over pain, but in weepiness pain, the pain of not wanting to be there, standing around and weeping and feeling a hole in my heart of desperation and sadness and rage. A dark wound in my heart. And suffering meant walking home with my three drugs finally , my umbrella above my head, knowing I would be home soon, where I would be able to collapse and even work on the stupid idiotic fucking book review, because I was suffering and not depressed. Suffering meant I knew that crying would make me feel better, once I could stop, and that I knew that underneath the suffering I had a core of appreciation for the thunderstorm that had broken the hot spell this afternoon, even though it had drenched my poor bike and helmet that I’d left moored to a parking meter on the street. Underneath the suffering was psychic pain, which is an entity, but I can deal with an entity, it is better than the erosion created by depression, which is more absent than absence, depression is the oxygen-gulping aridness of the void, and it fills every part of you with the knowledge that nothing matters, the universe is as meaningless as it is infinite. So that there is no part of you left that can slither its way around and get its interest quickened by an idea or person or mind or glazed blue Moroccan tile. There is no room for beauty or Marx or charity or alternatives to war. There is only the ash that’s left after a fire, after a long, long rain. JULY 13. THE DANCER’S POSE At yoga we often do partner work. One day last week we paired up to help one another do dancer’s pose. My partner was one of The Twins in the Back. The Twins are girls who look about 20 and have dark, 101 wavy hair. Usually they partner with one another. You can’t blame them; they’re perfectly matched by height and weight. Lately they’ve come with a third girl who’s shorter. I’d said hello to them but never talked to them before. They always stay on the back row, in a corner. This time only one of them was in class. She asked me about my head tattoo and I told her I was going through chemo. She said that she went through chemo “in my country.” She’s from Peru, it turns out, and she was diagnosed with lymphoma at 14. She had chemo and radiation for two years. It was in Lima, and she lived about a mile from the hospital. She said her family was really close, that there are four girls. She also said it was very hard to lose her hair at 14. It makes you stronger, she said. Today in class all three were there, and all in the back. I did partner work with Garnett. I wanted to at least catch the eye of the twin I talked to last week. But I couldn’t tell which one she was. JULY 16. CHEMO DAY Garnett picked me up and took me to Fancy for my noon chemo appointment . She had to leave at 3:30 and passed the baton to Linc. At one point I asked him to get me a blanket because I was cold, but by the time he found one, I’d had a hot flash and was sweating. As I told Lora, the hot flashes are the least of my problems. Feeling the void in the world is the worst, followed closely by bone pain and then weeping mixed with irritability. Yesterday my friend Jennifer was in town from Ohio, and we had brunch with her hosted by Rabbi Roy, who married us at the Bourgeois...