Crap month

Been a long time. When I started this blog, my intention was to write as honestly as I could, every day or two, about my experience with cancer, writing, mothering, wife-ing, etc. I especially thought that writing about cancer would help... someone... maybe me, maybe someone else. I was inspired by that friend of Ted Koppel's whose name I cannot recall*, who was sick and blogged and then died, just a day or two before I started this journal. Anyway, I figured if he could write something every day up until the end, maybe I could, too. 

Obviously, I can't. Things got so dicey this month that I went head-down. At one point, when I asked Dr. J if we could get more aggressive in treatment, he asked, "What do you want me to do?" To which I responded, in my head, "I want you to save my fucking life again, idiot."

I had my first treatment in a month yesterday. For various, hideous reasons, we had to postpone, and postpone. Today I feel better than I have in a good while, surely because I've psyched myself into thinking that the medicine will be a blockade if not a backhoe. 

Curiously, I got a lot of work done on the novel. And I got a lit paper written and turned in.

My friend Bloglily inspired the next post. Thanks, BL.

*Leroy Sievers is his name. Blogged on NPR.org.

Worse than cancer

     Cancer is nothing but sucky, let's establish that off the top. When I was first diagnosed twelve years ago, I had surgery and started chemo almost immediately after, and for a while there, I went into that "survivor's euphoria" -- experiencing an outsize joy of everyday things, all that shit. It was nice while it lasted, maybe about three months. In due time, as I started to recover, the glow wore off and I went back to being myself; that is, my "worldview" (my Bush Doctrine, as it were) snapped back into place and I became appropriately grumpy over little irritations, argued with M, made humor from cynicism, etc. When the shitstorm started again four years ago, I was quite bereft of the smell-the-roses impulse, and it was all fear and sadness. The poorer my health, the lower I feel, the darker my moods, but even during the in-between upsides, I stabilize at my normal true self: optimistic, but looking over my shoulder. 

     None of this has to do with how much I love or appreciate my family. I am keenly aware of time passing, as any parent is when a tiny six year old starts spitting out teeth like she's George Foreman. My heart races when I think about my daughter, and it's literally tough to keep my hands off her when she's with me. I know we have maybe three or four more months of this utter innocence, this enchantment with fairies before -- poof! -- it gives way to something a little more grounded, mature, and "real," and I know this not because I have some enhanced sense of time brought about by illness, but because I'm a mother.

      I don't need euphoria, because normal is so good. I adore my husband and daughter, love my family and friends, love school, love where we live. We are the luckiest people in captivity. 

     It's easy to imagine people not so lucky. I don't even have to imagine them; some of my friends are not so lucky. I think of the heartbreak, the complete despair, of friends whose marriages are in flux and I hurt for them. To me, probably because of my rock-solid base with M and A, it would feel as though I'd been catapulted into another universe if my family life came undone. I cannot fathom anything worse. 

     Then there are the people I see in the infusion center every week who're in worse shape than I am, or appear to be. Some of them have cancer, some diabetes or kidney disease or immune suppressions that require perhaps daily professional care. Some of them have no family or friends to lean on. There is the hunched man who goes around our neighborhood with a mostly-empty shopping cart. There are people who hate their jobs, their circumstances, their lives. People who're stretched too thin, barely getting by on a few hours of sleep and taking care of small children and aging parents. People who are losing their homes. People who are unemployed and have no health insurance. (Jesus God, protect M's job and preserve our health insurance.) People who're losing or have lost loved ones. People whose child is desperately sick; who've lost a child. (The worst of the worst. I'd lose my fucking mind.) People who are dispirited for whatever reasons, and find the world too much, just too much. I don't have to look beyond the confines of my own little orbit to find these people -- they're right here, in the neighborhood, in the local newspaper, at school, friends, friends of friends... never mind political upheaval and wars and famine and disease and unrest around the globe.

     All these situations are, to me, worse, much worse, than cancer.

     

     Rough week, physically; fentanyl has already lost its magic -- the infusion nurse says my previous use of it probably has something to do with the speedy resistance -- and it's getting harder to eat. Pain is pretty constant, a matter of degrees. 

     Christmas was nice, although we never did finish decorating that damn tree. Hopie and Andy were with us. Santa brought a microphone for A. Lots of books all around. 

     I'm waking up at night, twirling. Worried about everything, but specifically:

• Getting sicker, and options narrowing
• Finances -- if I'm unable to continue with school in a few weeks, I'll lose my stipend, and then what?
• How my increasing reliance on bed is affecting A
• The mounting pressure on M

     A is tucked in, and I'm going to try to watch a movie with M. The treatment I had on Friday has put me under the clouds the last couple of days, so this will be a test of attention. I hope it's a good flick.

Conundrum

     Ooph. No chemo yesterday due to a fever I didn't realize I had. Also, I had a pretty intense meltdown and called an audible just as Elaine-the-best-infusion-nurse-ever leaned down to access my port (for the uninitiated, which I hope you are, that means just as she was about to stick the IV needle into the catheter in my chest to draw blood for lab work). "Do we have to do this today," I asked. The answer was no, absolutely not, good call, way to take control, take a week off and feel better, we'll re-do the schedule, going to call your doctor, be right back.

     Well, here's the thing: because of escalating symptoms, I am scared the chemo is not working. Yet the nurses and my doctor tell me I haven't been on it long enough for it to do its thing; I have yet to complete a three-week cycle. So, while I'm afraid it isn't working and we're wasting valuable time, I'm also afraid to skip it, and frustrated that my body finds ways to confound our best efforts. First my blood counts crashed, now a sudden fever. And I keep getting sicker.

     Cancer Blows, Reason #973: BORING. The world folds in on itself. All I talk about, think about, write about, is me. My body, my illness, my pain, my blood, my cells. Cancer snares me in a self-perpetuating web of self-involvement, and bores the everliving shit out of me. 

My body not my body

     Sometimes it's hard to determine if I'm following my body's signals or creating them. It's become a struggle, in the last two to three weeks, to keep a normal schedule. Each day I am a bit more exhausted and uncomfortable than the day before, so I limit my outings, do less, lose stamina, and can handle even less the next day. It's not sleep I crave, it's oxygen, nutrients -- fortification. Something substantial to give me weight, to anchor me to the ground. The sensation I have is that my body is a shell, hard-edged but hollow, and drifting.

     M skipped his own class tonight, left A at home with her sitter, and took me to school. He hung out for three hours while I was in novel workshop, then drove me home. By the time we walked in the door, I felt completely spent: lightheaded, empty, aching. I did nothing all day, literally, in an attempt to store up energy. Marking up manuscripts and writing workshop letters was just ridiculously difficult, draining. I took a shower and had to rest for fifteen minutes before getting dressed -- then had to rest again.

     I catch my image in the bathroom mirror these days and see a woman receding: drawn face, whispy hair, pale eyes. I look sick. I look old and hunkered. I am not old. I wonder if this is how elderly people feel -- is cancer as withering as aging, or more, or less?

     Everyone knows how depleting chemotherapy is. I'd argue, though, that illness itself is the most challenging, the most damaging. It's impossible to feel like the medicine is working when the medicine is making you feel like shit. Or is it the cancer that's beating you up? Is the persistent pain a sign the chemo is not checking the tumor at all, or that the disease is progressing, or possibly both? Fuck all, you see the dilemma.

     Still, fighting through penetrating exhaustion -- there should be a word for this kind of tired -- to do normal things, like going to class, ultimately helps me feel stronger by giving me the illusion of control. Which is all any of us has to begin with.

     Thank God for M.

Funnel

     Several things give me the sensation lately that the world is shrinking -- my world is shrinking. The election first. The closer we get, the narrower my reading becomes; in the last couple of weeks, I've found myself sticking close by and constantly refreshing WashPo, NYT, HuffPo, Politico, Wonkette. My fingers type the URLs almost automatically. I have no use for other news, never mind other outlets. I have fallen off my habitual grazing of writing sites in favor of all politics, all the time. I'm a junkie who can stand ever less time between hits. 

     Second is writing. The novel is stalled. Anxieties burst forth in short poems. Nothing is lyrical anymore -- everything I write is pistol fire. Time seems short.

     Third is this fucking illness. Less time between hydrocodone; whereas a few weeks ago I could count on several hours at least of feeling OK, these days I'm hurting within an hour of getting out of bed. When I eat, it no longer surprises me that I feel like shit immediately after. One of the chemo nurses told me to blame the medicine, not the disease, but it's hard when I feel progressively worse. 

     Socially I'm caving in on myself. One of the hardest parts of being sick (and being treated with poisons) is that it becomes increasingly difficult to plan ahead. I've been invited to a birthday tea for a close friend this Sunday, but I know I'll be feeling like hell by 3:00. Should I accept the invitation and hope for the best? My inclination is to let everyone off the hook and send regrets. 

     A's birthday party was a low point last Sunday. I'd had chemo two days earlier, and was in full-throttle freakout (steroids? anti-nausea meds?) by the time the guests arrived, a blathering snotty mess. The prospect of functioning -- i.e. acting like a real grownup person -- in the thick of a dozen kids and their parents was just overwhelming. I was so afraid of pulling attention away from A and having the highbeams on me, I didn't make it downstairs until the tail end, hence disappointing the most important person in my life on the most important day in hers. Fucking awful. 

     I was very, very sick in 2007. Gather-the-family kind of sick. And I recall the perverse urge to pull away from A. I don't remember much about that spring, but I do remember thinking that she was going to have to get used to me not being there, that she and M were going to have to learn to do things without me. It must seem crazy -- it has seemed nuts to me, until recently. Now, though, I'm getting to the point where the logic doesn't seem quite so twisted. I understand the impulse, even as I reject it. That scares me.

     So. Shrinking, funneling, retreating. Illness is isolating. Cancer is a whirlpool.

Random anxieties, worries

     UPDATE: Barack Obama is suspending his campaign for a real, legitimate, heartbreaking reason. This trumps the tally of pitiful distractions below. Prayers to the Obama family tonight.

     As my mother used to warn when I was five and whining: tone. Tone.

1. Limbaugh and other conservative mouthpieces stirring the uglypot
2. Ricky Dicky Davis, Part A: spicing up said uglypot with stale Rev. Wright dogshit
3. McPalin attributing more credibility to some random fake plumber's assessment of their opponent as "socialist" than they do to anyone with an actual brain
4. Nancy Poopinfucker making her own crappy contribution to the uglypot with her assertion that fully one-third of Virginia isn't real
5. Ricky Dicky Davis, Part B: implying there's something sinister about millions of people just like me and M donating an average of $86 to Obama/Biden
6. Bachmann Bachmann Bachmann

     God, there's too much to fully catalog. On top of it, I don't feel well. My energy is waning and the I'm eating more hydrocodone than ever. A asked tonight when I am going to feel better, because she wants to go places with me. My time with her lately has been limited to snuggling on the big blue sofa, or in bed. 

     Anxious and worried. 

Welcome to the Not So Great Depression

     Oh, I was all set to write funny, but then I turned on the TV and watched the whole goddamn economy crumble in, like, an hour, and now I'm in no mood.

     Brothers and sisters all over the world are in a blind spastic panic, unloading their investments and driving down the markets. Cashing out their bank accounts. Stuffing bills under mattresses. Opening wide to tweezer gold fillings into little cups. Pilfering their own copper pipes. Jesus.

     Rumor at school is that SaPa is coming to our little hamlet for a Hate-a-Thon sometime in the next week. I'm still waiting for her to explain (or be asked -- psssst, Couric: HINT) how Obama will "diminish the prestige of the presidency," while the close association of her own snowbilly lapdog Tard (Todd?) with the AIP will somehow elevate the reputation that W has methodically shredded in the last eight years. Grumpy Old McCain is back at it with the Ayers crap in a shameless effort to salvage a Straight Talk Express whose wheels came off weeks ago and whose smoldering carcass is still stinking up the bottom of the canyon. 

     None of this is enough to really do me in today -- I'm feeling like a shiny new nickel after the bloodsucking a couple days ago. But the cumulative effect, combined with the attempt to demonize, otherize, that one-ize, didja know he's black, wink? the honorable, patriotic, classy Obamas is so far beyond despicable I can't really get my head around it. I've been politically aware since about 1968, and I've never, never been so saddened by overt ugliness such as the McCain camp is launching, and its rabid supporters lapping up like blood-starved hounds. It's gone beyond insinuation to straight-up racism and fear-mongering. [This links to an elegant articulation by Seth Abramson of the real danger and potential legal implications of Palin's inflammatory rhetoric. An informative -- and chilling -- read.]

     Please, Mrs. Palin, explain how this elevates the prestige of the presidency. 

     Sickening.

     Chemo is on for tomorrow; we're going to try alternating weeks and begging the insurance gods to pay for Procrit. 

In the tank

     Well, I have nothing much to say about the VP debate that hasn't been said better by smart people all over the Interwebs. The dum-dums weren't listening last night, they were cooing; I have no use for them. Call me in the tank for Obama, if you must -- the genesis of that suddenly ubiquitous phrase is a mystery to me --  but at least I'm swimming with funny, bright people. 

     M offered to forward to me a Time snippet about why "women dislike Sarah" -- including fallacies such as "she's too pretty," "they're afraid she'll make them look bad," etc. Infuckingfuriating. I can't stand Sarah Palin for the same reason I turned against Susan Allen, long-suffering wife of Republican legislative delegate turned governor turned congressman turned senator turned "rising star" on the national stage who shot himself out of a canon and landed in Macacaland just a couple of years ago. Anyway, as a journalist twenty years ago, I covered his hijinx and caught on but quick that not only is he inauthentic in presenting himself as an "aw, shucks" tobacco-spitting, cowboy hat-wearing Southerner (???), but his wife is equally inauthentic in presenting herself as a button-nosed cutesy nitwit who defers to dumb men. (Not even smart men; dumb men.) It turns my stomach, the winking, the gee-whizzing, the flirting. It turns my stomach because, as a baby reporter with zero experience and blonde hair, I used those same tactics to try to get dumb men -- in my case, the peabrains in the police and sheriff's offices in Chattanooga, TN in 1984 -- to give me the information I needed to file stories. I wasn't asking for scoops; I just wanted the same access the boy reporters got. And every time I ran up against a brick wall, which was daily, sometimes hourly, I resorted to the only thing I knew how to do: I smiled, I flirted, I ingratiated myself. Sometimes it worked, mostly it didn't. I got pulled off "general assignment reporting" and promoted to anchoring (this was at a piss-poor CBS-affiliate TV station; I was 22; it did not escape my understanding that they'd have pulled a monkey off the street to anchor those newscasts, so low were the pay and the expectations). I hated myself for playing the game. I had slimed myself; had betrayed my gender and my mother's example and feminism and was caving to the most insidious kind of sexism. I may as well have slept with the fuckers in return for basic facts of a crime or court case. And now, I feel a twisting deep in my gut -- that old familiar, visceral stomach-turning -- every time I see The Two Faces of Sarah. Tough and confident? You betcha. Fine. Pandering and flirtatious? Wink! "Gee willikers, can ya help me out here? I just don't understand you big strong men from Warshin'ton, DeeCee!" Wink!

     Puke.

     An apt segue to what happened at the infusion center today, or didn't happen. No chemotherapy for me, so in the tank are my red blood cells and platelets. Fuck. First time I've ever been turned away. I have to have a blood transfusion. They scheduled it for Tuesday. I feel like poo.

     And I'm scared I'm not going to be able to tolerate Topo Gigio, and then what?

     Maybe I can summon that witch doctor dude from up there in Alaska to come pray over me.

Upbeat or else

     The New York Times runs an article today about Vitamin C and cancer. It's so confoundingly paradoxical -- and obvious -- that it infuriates me: some new study finds that taking large doses of C to boost the immune system, both to ward against infection while on chemo and to engage the body in attacking cancer cells, makes cancer cells stronger. 

     No shit. The reason this disease is so obscene is that it is literally the body turning against itself. What's bad for the cancer cells, chemo, is also bad for the healthy cells -- so of course it follows that what boosts healthy cells also strengthens and lengthens the life of the fucking cancer cells. How many hundreds of thousands of dollars went into the research that concluded that water is wet? Jesus.

     My oncologist once said to me and M, "Oh, we can cure cancer. What we haven't figured out is how to keep the patient alive while we do it."

     Anyway, reading that article brought me to another NYT article/public discussion about the expected emotional response to cancer, and how damaging those expectations are. I knew when I posted the other night that I am not alone in feeling pinched by this myth that a good attitude is paramount, and reading this article, and especially the back-and-forth of the public comments, shows it's on a lot of other minds, too.

Well, shit.

     Took a shower this morning, and after drying my hair, noticed it all over the bathroom. I'd like to report that I had the blower set 0n PowerBlast(tm), but that's not the problem.

     Why is this so upsetting? I've lost my hair too many times to count; each time I fall apart. I mean, of all the things to worry about...

     There are some things that distinguish this occurrence. First, I guess I was under the impression from my doctor and the infusion nurses that hair loss is not a sure thing with topotecan, that some people don't lose any hair at all. And because I always assume I am the exception to the rule (for whatever reason), it took me by great surprise to see it blown all over the floor. Second, I haven't told anyone at school about chemotherapy; I don't know how many people even know about the cancer (I was a skinny pixie with a close crop when I started last fall, but my hair had grown in to the point where it looked, I thought, like a fashion decision). Now I'm going to have to explain no hair. Without coming off totally self-absorbed. Fuck.

     Third and by far most important: A has been waiting for my hair to "grow long" for as long as she can remember. (She was only a year and a half old when I got sick again in 2004.) Her hair is down to her bottom, and wild. Naturally, she wants my hair to look like hers, wants to be able to braid and bow my hair, to use the same "products," as she calls conditioner (where do they pick up the jazzy lingo?). Now, at age 5, she will need me to explain to her why I am taking medicine so powerful it leaves my head quite bereft. And so we usher in the conversation about Mama being sick, again. Doublefuck.

     At the moment, my hair is chin-length. Crossing my fingers that I won't lose all of it -- that it will thin, but only to a point, and that I may be able to get away with a super-short boy-cut. And not have to explain anything to people at school. And when A asks why I cut my hair, I will tell her, gently, gently, that some new medicine is making my hair misbehave, so it's better that I keep it short for a while.

     I've never worn a wig, and won't. Baseball caps in summer, scarves in winter are my speed. Still, regardless of what I do, I look like the Kancer Kid. People treat me differently, look at me differently. Know more about me (or think they do) than anyone has a right to know. It's not the loss of hair, it's the loss of privacy that is so upsetting, no matter how many times it happens.

Boondoggle!

     This will be a rant about a thing that bugs the everlivin' crap outta me. Maybe I'm wrong, but it seems to me a giant waste of funds. No, it's not the 700 billion dollar bailout. Trillion. Whatever. No, it's not the millions in earmarks Palin requested so she can build a widow's walk atop the manse in Wasilla, the better to see the Kremlin from. No, it's not even the relentless lies the McCain/Palin campaign is paying tens of millions of dollars for, under the guise of political advertising, to pollute our public airwaves.

     This is insidious. This is personal.

     This is the big fat check M stroked this morning for kindergarten field trips and "special programs." There are ten -- ten -- planned this year, two of which are free. The hit parade includes:

• $5.00 for a pumpkin-picking junket to a farm in October 
• $4.00 for a day at one of the stuffiest history museums in the South
• $13.00 for three plays about Pocahontas, Rumplestiltskin, and Rikki-tikki-tavi 
• $15.00 for a "young scientists" program; there are no details about this one
• $1.00 for another farm visit in May
• $7.00 for -- are you ready? -- a trip to the local botanical gardens. Because as every parent knows, five year olds loves them some botanical gardens.

     This is a public, inner-city school with a significant population of free-lunch kids. And they want parents to fork over $45.00 for what? For kindergartners to gaze at nineteenth-century sculpture and plants? 

     Full disclosure: A was in the pre-K program at this school last year; same deal. I emailed the principal to offer alternatives to these cost-prohibitive excursions: poll the parents, I suggested, and take the children to see what people do all day at work. I'm in graduate school, let me show them what that looks like. Annie's mother is an artist -- let's visit her studio. Plus, this is a burden on our household budget, and I am certain we're not the only ones. There is no opt-out feature; no Plan B for children whose parents can't pay up, or think it best not to. I never got a response from the principal. 

     Fucking hell, what is wrong with taking kindergartners on a nature walk around the block to collect leaves and squeal at bugs? They gotta herd them onto a bus and schlepp them to places only people with blue hair and powdered faces get off on? For money?

     Nothing against old people, but my child is five. I suspect her interests are a bit different.

     Can you imagine having more than one child in this school? "Pony up $135 you didn't count on spending this month or your children will be left out, identified as the losers they are, teased mercilessly and ostracized for life." Man, I feel for the families who didn't budget for it and just cannot afford it.

     M (wisely?) wrote the check and got it into A's bookbag before I ever saw the extortion note. So much for feeling all smug about paying bills and having a little pad through the end of the month. 

     So, yeah. Kindergarten can suck it, again.

House of Pain

     Something else I had put out of my mind is a rhythm my family falls into when the stress of chemotherapy gets at us: A gets a cold, M catches it and it turns into something big and feverish. This happens almost like clockwork, usually when I'm just starting a new therapy, and it happened this weekend. 

     So far for me, the direct effects of Topo Gigio are minor compared to, say, Gemzar or Carboplatin. I had the crazies, as I reported earlier, and have been sleepy all weekend, but the most curious consequence is hunger. I'm ravenous, mostly for comfort food like M's homemade bread and split pea soup. As with other drugs, certain foods are so unappetizing I can't mention them, but bland things like crackers with butter, potatoes, rice... make way. I've been remarkably clear-headed since the mini-breakdown Friday night, which is unusual and, of course, welcome. Yes, I sleep a lot, but in between, at least I'm not fuzzy or dotty. That I know of.

     All that to say: of the three of us, I'm probably feeling perkiest. A is overcoming like children do, but still not her usual self, and M is stoic and miserable. 

     And so the ill effects of my illness spiral outward, knocking down the people closest to me. For me, this domino effect causes the most distress: the most worry, the most fear, the most sadness. Goddamn it all.

Kindergarten sucks

     Back to School Night tonight. Me and M. Forty minutes in a sweltering 100 year old auditorium on foldy chairs suffering senseless PTA announcements/antics ("If you can guess what's NOT true about the principal, you win this shitty t-shirt. Ready? True or false: Mrs. J-- likes the beach!") and musing between us whether we were, in fact, witnessing the political debut of the Republican party's Vice Presidential nominee for 2012, followed by another clusterfuck, this one with giant parents perched on wee chairs in Classroom 117, and featuring a shitstorm of paper, instructions, admonitions and procedural doodads. No shit, the most pressing piece of information we got was that we should "make sure our kindergartner gets a good night's sleep" because they're phasing out naptime in October.

     Getting the hang of the homework journal/daily agenda/pocket folder/backpack tango is as tricky as the tango itself, and as frivolous. (We're supposed to staple A's homework into one of those black and white composition notebooks. Why she can't do the homework in the composition book, that already has pages with lines, is an enduring mystery.)

     In other news, Sarah Palin is still stupid as fuck.

     The mood... the mood. Can you blame me? I'm drinking wine from a box.

     Kindergarten can suck it.

From small minds come breathtaking lies

     M and I were destined to despise everything about Palin -- including her bizarre, grating accent -- and so we pat ourselves on the backs this morning for fulfilling our destiny. The condescension oozing from this self-righteous, small-minded fundamentalist was outdone only by her unearned swagger. The Mayor of Munchkin City actually asserted she possessed more "executive experience" and "actual responsibilities" than the Obamas (yes, both of them) when they worked as community organizers in Chicago lifting up poor, disenfranchised people whom the U.S. government had left for dead. 

     How fucking dare she.

     Do they think that saying a lie makes it true? No. They think that saying it makes us believe it.     

     Did we know, for instance, that she has "lots" of foreign policy experience because Russia and Canada are just, you know, right over there? 

     Did we know that candidates' children are off limits, except when it's politically expedient to flaunt them and promise policy around them, as she did with her youngest son? Or hold up their service to America as a personal qualification, as she did with her oldest son? 

     Did she know we could hear her when she disparaged Obama's and Biden's legitimate, honorable service to the country, but held up McCain's equally honorable military service as an ultimate qualification? 

     Did she realize she had an audience of people, apart from the frenzied masses before her, capable of discerning bullshit when she claimed that Obama will raise taxes, forfeit Iraq, negotiate with terrorists and leave us more vulnerable than George Bush?

     Did Rudith Giuliani, as an exhausted Andrea Mitchell called him, know the microphones were on and the cameras rolling when he claimed, in a laugh-out-loud moment, that the 20-month governor/Queen for a Day has more executive experience than Barack Obama and Joe Biden combined? Because she got a road paved?

     Do the McCain mouthpieces realize they are talking to live human adults when they claim that Sarah Palin is a friend to the environment and champion of alternative energy?

     Do the rightwing airbags know we can see their lips moving when they tell us this anti-choice, gun-toting mommie dearest is a feminist?

     How can they square all this? They can't. So they lie, and hope we bite. They are despicable. 

     As is her taste in eyewear.

     Even Peggy Noonan is losing her shit.

Memory for shit

     One of the most insidious side effects of cancer therapy is "chemo brain." It may mean different things to different people. To me, it means:

• Scattered attention
  
• Inability to recall short- or long-term experiences, including (mercifully, perhaps) details of past therapies, names of drugs, treatment regimens, surgeries
• Inability to remember (unmercifully) whether I liked what I ate for breakfast yesterday enough to order it again, where I read that really interesting article about caregiver fatigue, who was on John Stewart last night, and what I've done with my car keys
• Failure to recall what I'm writing

     That last is a real pickle. Just try drafting a novel when, each morning, you have to reintroduce your characters to yourself. Fucking hell.

     I blame it on chemo, but maybe my brain is atrophying early. Maybe I have early onset dementia. I'm only 46; maybe I just don't pay attention.

     Or maybe it's my psyche's clumsy effort at sifting too many mindbending stimuli. Like the idea that I'm mortal. That I can't vanquish the disease by force of will. That there are things beyond my control. That the therapies, for all their apparent sophistication, are really just barbarous shots in the dark. Let's cut it out. No? Let's put some poison on it. Oops. Looks like that was maybe a little too much.

     Feh.

     I have class tonight. I'll have to bring every thought I've ever had about this novel, in writing, so I can explain what I'm doing with this book. So I can remember. So I can live.

     

Poems and cider

     Sometimes I write poems. Often they're poems about -- sing along -- cancer. Other times not. I'm working on a new collection in poetry workshop this semester. One of them has to do with apples. Perhaps I'll polish the collection to the point that I feel confident entering it in a contest. 

     One contest I won't be entering is Cider Press Review, whose recent suckage came to my attention via the hilarious Literary Rejections on Display blog, by way of poet Stacey Lynn Brown's Ten Fingers Typing. To pick the tiniest nit, the publisher's abuse of the word abuse is just... abusive.

     Karma dictates that Stacey's big fat ship will come in soon and roll right on past that dinky dinghy CPR. Go, Stacey.