On Sept. 28th, 7:30 pm

a chunk of my hair fell out as I was styling it for photobooth pictures.

I don't think you'll ever forget the first time your hair falls out. It is like an anvil to the head. It's the realization that yes, I really DO have cancer. This hasn't just been a dream. I am a sick person.
bummer.

putt putt

Perception changes when life is threatened. I liken it to getting your first pair of glasses- your moments are a blur and then, all of a sudden, clarity. At least, this has been my experience. I have no choice but to abandon past and future and simply accept the sharp, clear edges of what has been placed in front of me. The present.

My past is another person, another life. My future is so uncertain I can't even fathom it. Now "going through the motions" attains a whole new meaning: every sense, every small minute function of the body and mind is acknowledged and felt- savored, even- rather than abandoned.

just little things

the miniature matters.

gonna work it on out

The great thing about cancer is that the pharmacists know it's tough-times u.s.a for you, and subsequently send you home with enough painkillers and anti-anxiety/depressants that even wall street would be jealous. Suffice to say it keeps one adequately hammered.

The thing is, 95% of the time I'm sad and self-medicating these days isn't the fact that I have cancer... it's the same shit that's always made me a sad pathetic mess.

People who disappoint you before Cancer will still disappoint you after you have Cancer.
The things that hurt you before Cancer will still hurt you after Cancer.

The friends that listen to you bitch about your boy troubles will stick around to listen to you bitch about chemo farts, but you'd be kidding yourself if you think relationships will change and people will magically love you once you get some weird fatal disease. I know you've fantasized about it. Don't lie.

cancer girl still has the same achilles' heel as regular girl...

except now she has better drugs.

FYI

Never youtube search your specific cancer at 2 in the morning. You will get memorials and it will scare the bejeesus out of you. And why are they all dubbed over with Celine Dion?

I would really, really like for the cancer not to kill me too soon. It can kill me 40 years from now. I'd be totally cool with that. Is that too much to ask?

Adventures of Cancer Girl

The MRI last night was hell. Imagine being stuck in a tube with aliens bombing it from the outside and robots screaming in your ear for an hour. At least, that's what I imagined with my eyes closed.

A friend recently called me "cancer girl" and suggested we hang out soon, "assuming you don't die of cancer". I know he was joking, but I was offended (please do not call me this). Cancer girl. Cancer girl... sounds like a superhero name, no?

I began thinking of my favorite comic book characters from childhood; mostly boys I thought were attractive (gambit, tuxedo mask, mmm) and then BAM! Nostalgia hit me like the proverbial H-bomb. I was obsessed with Tank Girl comics in my pre-pubescence and early teens. I would draw her incessantly, substituting the characters for my friends. In fact, my fashion illustration croquis today are totally reflective of this.


I saw in Tank Girl what I wanted to be as a grown-up: an untouchably tough nonsensical kick ass punk rocker ready to annihilate anything that stood in her way who still remained undeniably cute (remember camp koala?).


I wouldn't quite call myself this girl now. I went through my "I hate the world" phase back in high school and left it there. However, when it comes to this tumor, I feel some of this old idealism bubbling back up. The fighting spirit, if you will.

I completely see it when I look in the mirror: buzzed head, body scared, bruised, bloodied and bandaged from all of the blood draws, tank top stained from my inability to eat otter pops with the necessary au fait.

Enter Cancer Girl.

into the fire

You know that Tom Waits song Yesterday is Here? The foreboding lyric "all our dreams come true" has been stuck in my thoughts. The idea that our conscious or subconscious dreams and nightmares will manifest, absolutely. The more we think about them, the more real dreams become.

I've always been terrified of cancer, the idea of something eating you from the inside. In high school, when my lymph node swelled up to golf ball-proportions, I was sure it was some kind of lymphoma. The nightmare was that cancer would strike me early, for some inexplicable reason. Cancer was up there with my "top fears", only preceding being eaten by a large predatory animal or getting stuck in an Egyptian sarcophagus as it crumbles down on me (major claustrophobia). Come to think of it, watching the Discovery Channel at the tender age of four was not such a baby genius idea.

be careful what you dream of?
or live like you dream?

"He was weary of himself, of cold thoughts and intellectual dreams. Life a poem! Not when you perpetually went around inventing your life instead of living it. How meaningless it was, empty, empty, empty. This hunting for yourself, slyly observing your own tracks- in a circle, of course; this pretending to throw yourself into the stream of life and then at the same time sitting and angling for yourself and fishing yourself up in some peculiar disguise! If only it would seize him: life, love, passion-- so that he wouldn't be able to invent it, but so that it would invent him."
-Niels Lhyne

What will my dreams and nightmares invent in me? I'm living them both. It is undeniably better to live through what you fear most, in your darkest imagination, because it becomes human experience.

Experience is the catalyst that takes us from smoke to fire.

And I will only accept fire.

self-portrait today:



Check out ma weeeave... ok it's not really a weave but I like calling it one. Long hair is difficult. Shit gets stuck in it. I went to a movie today and kept dropping popcorn in it. ugh.

Tomorrow I'll be at the hospital most of the day for bone scans. Let's cross our fingers that it hasn't spread. I wonder if bone scans are as inherently joyous as CT's? I do know that I have to get a shot beforehand that will make my skeleton glow, which is pretty rad.

I apologize if I am late with calls/texts these past couple of days- my phone has not been proper and won't show my missed calls. Sucks being away from you all <3