Friday, June 29, 2007

Just a Little Bit Menopausal

Years ago a friend of mine wrote an essay about her experience with in vitro fertilization, and said that indeed that it was possible to be just a little bit pregnant. I think I'm a little bit menopausal. Which is more menopausal than peri-menopausal....
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Tuesday, June 26, 2007

Cancer Bitch Meets the City Clerk

Warning: This post contains minutiae about red tape.Today I went downtown so that the endodontist could finish his part in the root canal. It was uneventful, except that I found out why he works only one day a week in the office. The rest of the time...
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Sunday, June 24, 2007

Taking Taxol/I feel petty, oh, so petty

What can I say about chemotherapy that hasn't already been said, in a million pop songs? That's a line from an essay by Marjorie Gross. I don't know what chemo-poison she was referring to. The chemotherapy agent of the hour, of my hour of discontent,...
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Wednesday, June 20, 2007

All in All, I'd Rather Have a Puppy

Back to Fancy Hospital today for an ultrasound to check on my uterine fibroids, and just in the next set of rooms, a blood test to determine my FSH level, or follicle-stimulating hormone, though, as I said earlier, the test is supposedly inaccurate....
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Tuesday, June 19, 2007

The tongue,

said the endodontist this morning, is a very curious animal.This is true. It has its own obsessions and compulsions. The tooth (number 13, third from the left, on top, next to the molars), had broken off after phase one of his root canal. Part of the...
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Saturday, June 16, 2007

Sacre Vert

The other night I was walking home from the L, toward Wrigley Field, just as the Chicago Cubs game was letting out. Therewere crowds on the street and sidewalk walking toward me. As I got near our place, I started to get vigilant. We've had problems...
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Wednesday, June 13, 2007

Guilt

The beginning of this guilt. First a feeling of difference, of feeling what I have isn't serious, not the real thing, starting from reading blogs by people with mets--meaning the breast cancer has metastasized. Reading reviews of books by these people--feeling...
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Tuesday, June 12, 2007

Bleed Me a River

Another day concerned with orifices. I went to the endodontist for part 1 of a root canal for tooth number 13. He was a modest guy without the Hail-fellow-well-met-ness of many dentists or others who often greet the public. He only said what needed to...
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Monday, June 11, 2007

Bloggers R Us

So I have this image. A family has eaten dinner together then each member rushes to his/her computer and begins blogging, each in a separate room, reporting in the blog what everyone else in the family said, and then the blogger's side of it.Does this...
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Sunday, June 10, 2007

Sunday/Paper/Critters

I think the high concentration of mold in the air is making both of us tired; we didn't go on the naked bike ride last night, alas. We walked slowly to a Mexican restaurant and then trudged to a used book store and then to a trifling Alain Resnais movie....
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Saturday with Doctors and Writers

If you don't like medical detail, just skip this post.There was a nice little coffee/tea place/restaurant on in Greenwich Village named Anglers and Writers. I was there when it was rainy outside and so when I think of it I think of cold and rain outside...
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Thursday, June 7, 2007

Bourgeois Pig (R)

Yesterday I was at the Bourgeois Pig(R) Cafe, where we were married, and I overheard two girls reading from Chicago guidebooks, on and on about Al Capone and other gangsters. The Pig is around the corner from the Biograph Theater, where John Dillinger...
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Marks

Our yoga class is on vacation this week because it's between terms. G came over Monday night to do yoga ad hoc, and to paint my head. She's been in the park district class for two years and I, about six--several times a week with the same instructor,...
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Tuesday, June 5, 2007

Hijo de Cronica

I went to the library tonight to look up the book on cronicas. I walked there and back--first time in a while I'd done my three miles. So now I know more about the Mexican cronica. It seems it's more a reportorial form, an urban sketch, a witness, than...
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Monday, June 4, 2007

Cronica

I have decided that these Cancer Bitch entries are cronicas. What is a cronica? "A literary genre peculiar to the Brazilian press," claims the back cover of Clarice Lispector's Selected Cronicas, which appeared originally in the Brazilian press. "In...
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Birds

Last week after chemo I saw a baby bird,almost naked, curled up, on the sidewalk. Land his friend R was with us. L said the kindest thingwould be to kill it, but none of us could bringourselves to stomp it to death. We hoped that themother would somehow...
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Saturday, June 2, 2007

LOUTS

I got off the L yesterday afternoon after the Cubs game let out and the neighborhood was littered, as usual, with drunken and drunken-seeming louts. I was walking behind some on the sidewalk and then in front of them. I could hear them talking about...
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