It was a vivid November morning nearly eight years ago today. Wearing suffrage white pants and a sharp Democratic blue blazer, I proudly stood in line outside a local church hall waiting to give me name…
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Ah-HEM. Tap. Tap. Tap. HELLO! OH—There’s no one here. Wait a minute. There’s one guy in the back who keeps yelling, “THE RONA’S FAKE!” Sorry, guy. Wrong blog. Let’s try this again. Some thoughts from the…
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Because why wouldn’t it be? At 4:20pm, for good measure. I called up the radiologist last week, after a summer of radio silence from my doctor and the lab technicians. I sent a few barely-concerned emails…
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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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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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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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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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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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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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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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