Today marks the twenty-second anniversary of the day my radiologist called and told my parents, “We got it all.” I wasn’t home at the time, and this pre-dated cell phones, so the way my parents chose to tell me the news was by banging pots and pans as I drove up the driveway. I got […]
Cancer
On Grief and Over-Identifying with Childhood Loss
The announcement came at 11:30 on Friday morning: New York schools would be closed for the year. It wasn’t a surprise, of course. I didn’t think I had a shred of expectation that we might return in June— I even signed up for an online class on Thursday afternoons for the month of May, knowing […]
How Scars Become Beautiful
One doesn’t get to adulthood without acquiring a few scars, of both the emotional and physical kind. You could be emotionally scarred from a difficult childhood, from being bullied, rejected, dumped or passed over. You could be physically scarred by broken bones, surgeries, regretted tattoos, or self-mutilation. Everyone carries the scars of aging, which include wrinkles, gray hairs […]
A Change Of Perspective: Cancer Speaks To Me
The other night, I was chatting with my mother-in-law in my kitchen while Edwin spooned pureed vegetables into his mouth (or tried to, anyway). I was telling her how much I’d enjoyed interviewing Marie, Laura and Lauren for their cancer stories. One of the questions I’d asked all three of them was how they’d changed […]
Lauren’s Story: “My Tumor Went Away”
Today’s cancer story belongs to Lauren, who has cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, which falls under the umbrella of non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. “It’s one of the few cancers that you can never say you’re cancer free. So I’ll never technically be a survivor,” Lauren told me in our interview. In cutaneous T-cell lymphoma, Lauren explains, the T-cells within the […]
Laura’s Breast Cancer Story
This week, I’m publishing stories of other cancer fighters and survivors. Monday’s post featured Marie’s story. Today’s post features Laura, my partner in cancer, friendship and sisterhood. Laura has been my best friend since second grade (that’s 25 years) and we’ve had the mutual curse to have cancer at young ages, and the blessing to […]