Waiting to Exhale: the First Scan Results are Here
I guess I wasn’t paying attention. Or I guess I had buried it, because I couldn’t bare the thought of bad news. But all of a sudden, it was the week I’d be having my first…
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Do It Yourself (DiY) Palliative Care
I swear this is a post about DIY palliative care. But just hang in here with me for a minute while I tell a story that seems completely unrelated on the surface, but that my weird…
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The Devil Wears Palliative Care
Palliative care. Before this week’s appointment, I had all kinds of preconceived notions about it. My knee-jerk assumption was that palliative care was for people who were in the active process of dying, i.e. in hospice…
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Cannabis Oil: For Pain Relief or For Killing Cancer?
I squeeze a tiny blob from the plastic syringe onto my finger. It’s as thick and oily as tree sap mixed with ear wax. I touch the tip of my tongue to the blob and—YURCHHH—it’s bitter.…
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A Hail Mary to Targeted Therapy
You don’t just wake up with cancer one day. It takes a long time to get from “uh oh, what’s that mass?” to “it’s Stage IV incurable lung cancer.” During that agonizing wait time, I slowly started…
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Welcome to Cancer
It’s 2:00pm on a Thursday in early May. I step one foot in front of the other in the crowded oncology waiting room, eyes downcast. I think about all the people in the room and if…
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10 Years in California
When I was a little girl in Massachusetts, I often played in the woods with my neighborhood friends, climbing over moss-covered stones in the cool, damp understory to collect earthy trinkets and play adventure games. The…
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How To Shake Convention Brain
How many of you have ever gone to a convention and taken a picture like this? And how many of you have come back after the convention and gone, “Yeah, I have no idea what this is…
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The Battle of the Craft Project
My son is two weeks into kindergarten and we’ve gotten his first assignment. Naturally, it’s a fun craft project that mom, dad, and child can all enjoy. So naturally, it was a fucking nightmare. Backtracking for a second:…
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Are You There, Blog? It’s Me, Wendy
Funny thing happened this summer. I died. It didn’t happen suddenly. It was a slow death I should have seen coming. A series of events, one after the other, that combined to take me away,…
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