I slept from midnight to almost 7 a.m. last night. It was a struggle, though. I didn’t check the clock but I’m pretty sure the last three or four hours I had to keep convincing myself it wasn’t yet time. The night before I’d kept an hour-long vigil in the bathroom with a night light on because I couldn’t sleep. Not a comfy place to sit and not something worth repeating.

My aunt V reminded my mom that I haven’t said anything about the CT scan results. Sorry!! The MRI news kind of eclipsed that. I spoke to Dr P on the phone the night before surgery, and she proclaimed my CT scans “beautiful.” So there’s that, at least.

In other news, until now I have been taking my combo therapy of dabrafenib and trametinib every other day. No longer. Now I need to toe the line and be a good cancer patient who takes her meds every day. This is an inconvenience, since it requires careful timing of when I eat and don’t – basically, a three-hour window of not eating (or drinking anything but water) twice a day. That sounds easy in theory, but it actually isn’t. You know what sounds even harder than that, though? Being dead. So, onwards to new meds regimen, and I will try to keep my complaints to a minimum, because There But For the Grace of Big Pharma Go I.

And now to complain about Decadron (steroid) and Keppra (anti-seizure med), which I have done at such length here before. I’m back on both. Hopefully short-term. But this time I’m having none of the fun I had on Decadron last time. It’s not making me gregarious. It’s making me cranky and mean. I instantly have next to no tolerance for my kids, so it’s a really good thing Mom has been here this week. Young A came in this morning to show me a Lego car he’d built, and I hijacked it and held him close and told him I’d have to be back on the medicine for a while that makes me cranky, but that he should know that I love him so much. He seemed to understand. How that will express itself remains to be seen. Maybe he’ll get even more hyper than he was before leaving for school today. Hard to say. I know they know I love them. But this medication makes it truly hard to control my rage when it so much as pokes its head out of the hole.

So I’m back in my bedroom/cave, pissed off at my situation, annoyed that in what seems like minutes since I’ve been back on steroids I have gained back four pounds already, horrified by what continues happening in the world – especially the non-picture-postcard parts of it – and trying to cope with being simultaneously sleepy and wired and aggressive and apathetic. It’s quite a cocktail. Did I mention they seem to have used extra lidocaine on my head when they were affixing the frame to it the other day? My head feels like a huge balloon on a string, tender to the touch, swollen, unsightly, addled.

All of this should contribute to my being very questionable company when J and I go out for dinner tomorrow to celebrate eleven years of married bliss. J, I will try to keep my mouth shut, and to smile. In case I screw everything up and start a fight or start crying or something, know that I love you. You are my steadfast life force and I can’t imagine dealing with any of this without your constant strength by me.

And now to face the day. I have to visit my ophthalmologist, Dr D. It’s been a while, and my eye concerns seem to be something I have always had. They were better for a while, now things are worse. And he doesn’t know about the surgery. The extremely long wait in his office means my eating and drinking moratorium should pass quickly, but I fear he will want to dilate my pupils, adding hours on to the affair. Nothing to do but roll with it. I hope I can.

Up like a bolt at 4:30 today when my alarm rang. Despite going to sleep at 11:30 (because I was waiting to see Mom when she arrived), I felt pretty rested. Good thing, since I took 2 mg of Decadron last night. I’m experimenting this time around with taking it earlier in the evening, around 7 pm, to see if that helps with the sleeplessness. I’m experienced now.

Waiting for the car we called, I looked out and saw things I would not have noticed if I were not up at that hour. A thin rib of golden leaves still clinging to the nearly-nude ginkgo tree out front. Our neighbor waved as he passed, walking his fluffy, adorable Samoyed, Onslow, way before sunrise (mental note: another reason not to get a dog).

This early time of day plus hospital still calls to mind more Labor & Delivery than cancer surgery. Though I’ve been up this early for surgery once before, of course – just this past June. I enjoyed my ride in the gamma knife machine that time perhaps too much, so now I’m going again. Maybe I grasped some titanium ring and no one told me that that meant another ride.

Even though I was going into this knowing the entire process, I still didn’t quite attain the degree of performative spectacle that came naturally to one of my sisters in melanoma, Kate Boone, who has cheekily bedecked her titanium frame with garlands, sparkly things, and lights. I didn’t really have much time to plan, this time around. I did, however, make the same tired joke the neurosurgeon and the nurses probably hear all the time as they are affixing frames to people’s skulls, tightly: “So… is that a Phillips head or a flat head?” (One of the nurses snorted. It was enough for me.) After that, it was no joke. It really actually hurts when you are jabbed with two needles in the forehead and two on the back of your head, and then screws get tightened and tightened beyond belief and you can feel some blood squirting out as they affix your titanium crown. Here’s me today (no blood!):

There were a couple of innovations today. The thing under my nose – I definitely didn’t remember that from last time, and neither did J. The green cloth around me – apparently to give me some privacy. Totally not effective, and who cares if anyone stares? We are in a hospital and I have a titanium frame bolted to my skull. What of it, good sir?

Things went much more quickly when I stated my intention to not have any sedation today. I did take the Ativan that melted under my tongue, but I didn’t get anything through the IV except contrast during the MRI before surgery. My refusal of sedation helped me jump the queue to first (there were three in line for gamma knife today). I almost leapt from the gurney when I heard I was first.

This reminded me of showing up to labor & delivery when Young J was about to be born. I had quietly and painlessly dilated to 8 cm and was told by my OB to tell the nurse on duty I’d been having “cramps.” I had not been having cramps. But being that far along, with fake “cramps,” meant I got in before everyone there to be induced, and within about three and a half hours, I had a baby on the outside. I don’t know if living in New York City has made me extra attuned to opportunities to jump the queue, but it can’t be discounted…

Today, we arrived at the hospital at 5:30 a.m., I registered with the lovely British-accented trans person who works registering people at 5 a.m. (I remembered them from last time). And by 9 a.m. we were on the outside of the hospital, me with a gauze-wrapped head like I’d been in a bar fight, stepping into a cab. No baby to show for it, but hopefully, we killed something bad on the inside.

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more…

I missed the call from Dr K this morning because I was at a class at the gym. I went to the gym this morning because I had had a good night of sleep, untroubled sleep, and because if I’d stayed home I might have fallen prey to more sleep, bad TV, and/or bad eating. I made a good choice, which when I saw I’d missed the call became a bad choice. I don’t have a direct number for Dr K. Also my phone lately plays this game where it periodically erases all of my most frequently called numbers. It stops recognizing J, or my parents. So I found the number for Dr K’s scheduler and left a message with her.

Dr K called me back when I was in the produce section of the food coop, which has spotty phone signal, and I was catching up with a friend I hadn’t seen in a while. So she wound up hearing this news before anyone else. And I wound up getting the news while staying in one spot, by the produce case, so I wouldn’t lose the call. I was plucking mushrooms from the bin and they felt very sticky. The produce sprayers cycled on and off a few times, misting me.

Dr K consulted with several people (including Dr P) and the consensus is to avoid invasive surgery, because it’s pretty far inside the brain. So I’m having gamma knife surgery again. Tomorrow!

This means I have to go back on the evil twins, Keppra and Decadron. (I don’t know if this means I can’t drive… but that’s really beside the point right now.) I know I’ll be exhausted (Keppra) and sleepless and manic (Decadron) for a while. I had the leftovers from last time all ready to go, in my closet of meds. This time I am determined not to let that send me into a downward spiral. Good luck to me.

I am a little excited to get gamma knife again. I know it sounds weird, but you should be used to that from me by now. This time I’m feeling much better overall, don’t have my period, and most importantly – I already know what gamma knife is like. I’m going to make a better playlist this time. Something more uptempo than Satie. Ska, maybe.

I wanted a ringing endorsement of the state of my brain. I don’t have it, yet.

Back in September, Dr K saw that while all of the tumors had continued to shrink, one of them had some bleeding surrounding it. He said that sometimes tumors do that as they are dying.

Today, that same spot, there was a lot more bleeding and swelling. The limitations of imaging mean that when blood is present, it obfuscates what is behind it. Dr K said that this presents two options, either a second round of gamma knife aimed at the spot, or else actual, invasive surgery on the brain to remove what is there. The risks for the latter include possibility of infection, as well as the possibility that a nearby blood vessel, which controls the movement of the foot, could be affected.

He’s going to talk to Dr P about this and call me tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m not crying – maybe that will come later after some beer. I’m mostly kind of pissed off! But, I’m sitting in Bryant Park for a few minutes, a place I love and often come to at times like this. It is the park of my uncertainty. And it has great trees.

I’m sitting in the hospital’s living room, or as close to it as you can get. I am typing with one swiping left thumb, because my right arm has an IV that is gift-wrapped for its next use, in an hour’s time. Every scan day is the same in that nothing and everything is the same. Today I had my MRI at the hospital instead of at the outpatient facility up the avenue. Today I waited for the crosstown bus and today again it left me a whole avenue away and as I approached the hospital’s main entrance I found myself in a passive aggressive race walk with a smartphoning doctor who was still determined to enter before me. In the end I let him win.

Today everything is later, meaning I could eat breakfast, lots of it, but am now fasting at lunchtime. The kids are going to aftercare today, which they haven’t yet done this school year, and I think that this concerns them more than the fact that Mom had/has/may no longer have cancer. They like their routines.

Directly from my CT scan, I’ll see Dr K, the neurosurgeon, who doesn’t like to wait until the ink dries on MRIs – he wants to give you results right away. I appreciate instant gratification – always have. But Dr K seems like a Highly Efficient Human, and as such I find him highly intimidating, for all of his Canadian affability. But it will be good to go home knowing my brain is – hopefully – well.

I’ll have to wait until Wednesday to find out from Dr P about the rest of me. 

I feel I should write this quickly, before the good memories recede in a more permanent way. As it is, I don’t have any of my own photos to share – my first trip to Paris, a solo one, is entombed in a photo album somewhere in the apartment that I can’t divine. (My second trip, my 30th birthday present from J, was recorded digitally and enshrined in a place we thought would be accessible long-term. Nope.)

The first trip: Crêpes bought expressly to warm my hands, a toy toaster purchased at Galéries Lafayette for my then two year old nephew (who is now 20), being told “Mademoiselle est très gourmande!” by my table companion, a stranger, at Chartier, because it was lunchtime and I didn’t skip a course, the youth hostel I was too old to stay in and the ridiculous union suit I used as pj’s which made using the coed bathroom infinitely more difficult. The hot chocolate and baguettes for breakfast at the hostel. The need to lock everything up when I left for the day, and the dread on my last night when my bunkmate discovered bedbugs in her sleeping bag. My outing to Théâtre de la Ville to see a modern dance performance, and my starving belly when I came out and realized Paris was not a place for late-night dining (or at least it wasn’t then), and my subsequent discovery of Pizzeria Karaoke in the Bastille, which, by the hour I got there was mostly bad neighborhood disco, but they decided to serve me a pizza anyways, which I consumed as drunk patrons staggered out of the disco in the back, groping each other, barely registering anyone in the dining room (I was the only one). My pilgrimage to Pause Café, which I knew from the movie Chacun cherche son chat, and where I sat with a beer and a soup to write my postcards. The bistro nearby where I stopped for a proper dinner another night, eating a plate of salmon so exquisite I asked the waiter how it was prepared, not expecting he would drop everything and stand by my table for a full ten minutes giving the play-by-play, which exceeded by far my French comprehension (and I studied it for twelve years). My night at Théâtre de la Huchette, known for its long run of an absurdist play by Ionesco, The Bald Soprano, which I had read for a book report in the fourth grade, but never seen live. The evening I showed up for a modern dance class at Centre de danse du Marais, a large building with studios named for composers surrounding the courtyard, and the teacher did not find out until the end that I was a tourist, and I walked out chatting with another woman who had been in the class, who worked for the power company. The intense longing to share the experience intricately tied to a need to have the experience be uniquely my own. The savoring the experience of a world capital while I was still living in a small town, but yearning to move to another world capital. The not knowing that in the space of less than five years, I’d return to Paris with my future husband J (then my boyfriend of one year) and stay in a proper hotel with a proper view of Parisian rooftops and visit museums and again buy crêpes to warm our hands because it was February again and we’d borrowed some magical book from the library which led us to not have one bad meal the whole trip, and the Louvre, and the Métro, and the Luxembourg Gardens and the Musée Picasso and the falafel and the lychees we bought on the street near Notre Dame that cause me to think of Paris whenever I buy lychees and the bag of croissants bought on our way to the airport which fell down in the street, spilling its precious cargo, mocking us for leaving so soon.

At no point did I ascend the Eiffel Tower. I figured I would be back and I’d do it then. I don’t know, I don’t know. Antiquities in Syria are now rubble, as are the Buddhas in Bamiyan, which had lasted thousands of years. It is hard to count on the Tour Eiffel. It is hard to count on anything.

Paris, my heart sobs. I’d say more in French, but I don’t really speak it anymore. It hurts too much. I’ll let Robert Desnos speak for me:

Le dernier poème

J’ai rêvé tellement fort de toi,
J’ai tellement marché, tellement parlé,
Tellement aimé ton ombre,
Qu’il ne me reste plus rien de toi,
Il me reste d’être l’ombre parmi les ombres
D’être cent fois plus ombre que l’ombre
D’être l’ombre qui viendra et reviendra
dans ta vie ensoleillée

Maybe you didn’t realize it when I named this blog a year ago. Maybe I didn’t realize it. “I’ll Live,” after all, was meant to be a wry comment on my health situation. A dismissal of it, with a shrug and a half-smile. But it turns out it was also a prediction – and, thus far, one that seems to be holding up pretty well. I have my doctors and nurses to thank. Well, I could thank my immune system and various enzymes in my body for cooperating (for the most part) with my treatment, but the body doesn’t speak human language. It takes its thank yous in, like, kale and exercise. More of those things coming soon! Promise!

When you seek to cast a thank-you net you find it expands infinitely, it widens, and eventually encircles more and more AND MORE people, until before you know it, it catches nearly everyone you’ve ever met, and they’re all looking at each other in a bewildered way. Such has been the nature of communicating cancer via blog. People who would never talk to each other in an elevator are drawn together by what I write here – equal parts tales of woe and tales of whoaaaa. This means I have become the elevator. Or the net.

I’m trying to have some fun here. On anniversaries there is a strong impulse to be maudlin. I’m not feeling very maudlin. If anything, I’m kind of pissed off right now. Two weeks ago, I set a personal record for vigorous exercise, vigorous healthy cooking (including my holy grail, making enough to freeze for later), and I recorded a resultant weight loss. It was The Best Week. Naturally, it ended in illness. A headcold descended and I am still, ten days later, not completely out from under it. All of last week was lost to marathon honking into Kleenex, downing gallons of tea, inhaling cough-inducing eucalyptus oil steam, pressing hard on pressure points in my face, attempting to nap while mouth-breathing, defrosting the meals I’d been hoping to save for later, and chanting incantations. Okay, maybe I wasn’t very regular with the incantations. But once again, as every time I get sick, whether a Major or a minor illness, it is astonishing to note how quickly things can go downhill. How quickly I want to retreat to the cave, assume a protective posture, disengage from polite society. I’m emerging again, I’m trying to get back to 100%, but to be realistic, I’ll need to take a nap right now if I want to hit 80%.

When I think back over the past year of posts – over two hundred of them now, and still very few of them usefully tagged (at this point I won’t even try to apologize) – I think they fall into a few major categories. Tributes – to family, to artists or specific artworks, to caregivers. Updates – from the sublime to the ridiculous, with perhaps only 24 hours or so separating the two extremes. Reportage – giving the “and you are there” feel to my treatment, with no detail spared (to the chagrin of some). Rants – because what is a blog without a good rant or two? Hmmm, already up to four categories. I think I should stop there.

If you’ve been a habitual reader and commenter over the past year, I would love to hear what your favorite post was (if you can remember it) and even what the worst post was. If you’ve been reading in the background – yes, you there! – thanks for reading. If you’re just finding this blog now, as a result to a web search, because you’re feeling kind of alone and because you may be the only person in your entire country to be receiving the same drug therapy I am – well, I wish I could hug you. It can be hard to be a citizen of this fledgling country, New Cancer, and it can be hard to get citizens of Cancer to recognize our documents. We don’t have an anthem yet, or a flag, but perhaps we can agree that our national food is the almighty doughnut. And, of course, that we want all cancer, new or old, to just get fucking dead.

Since it is November, a month during which many people stave off the boredom between Halloween and Christmas by trying to write a novel, I am repeating a similar exercise I did in 2013, and writing a poem each day (I’ve never been much of a fiction writer). Some friends have joined me. So posting here may be lighter than usual this month, while I try to set some poem ideas alight. I do have a scan coming up next week, so you can count on an update then, and if you’re lucky, maybe yet another photo of that horrid bottle of berry-flavored barium sulfate. So gross, yeah, but… I’ll live.

(“Making Me Understand” is a series of occasional posts where I talk about a particular work of art or artist and discuss its relevance to me, both historically and in my present situation. Here are the others in the series.)

Long ago and far away, in college, I bought an album by the Dutch band Bettie Serveert, Palomine, because I had enjoyed their radio hit, “Kid’s Allright.”

But the album also contained a cover version of a song I hadn’t heard before. The liner notes credited it to a band called Sebadoh, which I had heard mentioned but hadn’t actually heard, since I had not yet become an avid campus radio listener. I don’t know why the cover of the song struck me back then. Listening to it again today, I hear a lot of feedback and a waltz-ish rhythm, but… not much else to distinguish it. (I’m sorry, Bettie Serveert.)

But what that cover version did do for me was propel me into Sebadoh fandom. I didn’t listen to too many bands from the US at that point, aside from X. But 1992 was the year I fell for Sebadoh (and their musical cousins, Pavement.)

Sebadoh’s lineup has changed a lot over the years, with their most well-known incarnation featuring Lou Barlow’s sweet, melodic love songs that have more than a touch of saudade, and Jason Loewenstein’s heavy metal-infused indie rock noise walls. The band with two distinct personalities. Their music eventually formed much of the soundscape of my brief time living in the Midwest after grad school.

I started collecting Sebadoh albums. But it was early days for the Web, so I didn’t know much except for what Bettie Serveert had put in their liner notes. The song was “Healthy Sick” and it was from Sebadoh’s album, The Freed Man. The days of sending a SASE to a PO box for a mimeographed discography were over, but it was still difficult to find specific albums except by having a mental list you would run through every time you visited the right kind of record store. You know, the kind of record store you only find vestiges of today online, in blogs or alt-weekly archives, with maybe a scratchy photo of the storefront and “RIP” somewhere in the headline. Only the strong have survived.

While I was living in Ann Arbor (which, being a college town, had like three or four of these record stores), I would often make weekend escapes to Chicago. I needed frequent doses of Big City, and my friend T lived there. We often went to shows together, which was good because when the same bands came through Detroit, I invariably had no one to go with. Chicago also had plenty of good record stores, and it was in one of these, sometime in 1997, I believe, that I found The Freed Man. It was an LP.

Once I got back to Ann Arbor, I unwrapped it and settled in to listen. And it was… weird. It was a prequel to everything I’d heard. Like hearing the band in utero, through an ultrasound machine. It was just Lou Barlow and Eric Gaffney, Sebadoh’s co-founder, doing a couple dozen starts to songs. Just when one gets going, it’s over. Some tracks are just noise. Some, like “Punch in the Nose,” are hilarious. Some, like “Ladybugs,” offer Cliffs’ Notes fairy tales.

And after years, I finally got to hear “Healthy Sick” at last, in its original version. (If you’ve wandered here in search of actual rock criticism, I can happily point you to this professional appreciation of the song. What I do here, as usual, is tell you why this song is relevant to me.)

If you’re reading this post via email, it won’t work, but if you’ve clicked through to the Web, you can click play on the YouTube link below, and follow along with the lyrics.

“Healthy Sick,” by Sebadoh

No one can stop it all from crashing down to shit
Pushed to feel something more than just the sound of it
Time, time is the magic truth of stories
Sometimes magic is so very very boring

It’s a healthy kind of sick
A slow sort of quick
Very sad; I don’t feel bad at all
It’s a different sort of sane
A crazy kind of sane
A feeling without a name that they call “love”

Because I have my doubts, I know it must be true
Watch the dream die every day; I don’t know what to do
I know it’s only fear that makes me wonder
But I wonder why I’m so afraid
I wonder why I’m so afraid

Now, one can ascribe all sorts of motives to the songwriter – and it has to be Lou Barlow here, it has his moody, lovelorn fingerprints all over it. Is it a song about failure? Love? Illness? It’s all kind of hard to pin down, isn’t it? If you were to try to make an outline of the lyric situation of this song, things would keep falling out of it.

And this is why I love it so much. It’s a meditation. You can fixate on one line or one emotional state, or you can let them all blur together. And in either case you won’t be wrong. Not like those confounded “Magic Eye” pictures popular a decade or so ago, where you had to know how to train your eyes to generalize the image in just such a way so you could see the actual point, which was a different image. Some of us never got the hang of the stupid “Magic Eye.” We were left out. And it’s not offering any perky positive affirmations, either. It’s meditative, but extremely realistic.

This song isn’t leaving anyone out (except maybe my dear parents, who are perpetually flummoxed when trying to understand my posts about popular music). But, unlike a Hallmark poem, which strives to be uncomplicated enough to let everyone in, and leaves on your tongue the distinct taste of marshmallow sweetness while offering no substance at all, “Healthy Sick” can give you the impression that it gets where you’re coming from. It UNDERSTANDS, because it has BEEN THERE. And it’s not trying to fix anything or solve your problems, because it can’t even solve its own!

Is there any greater feeling in the world than the feeling of being well and truly understood? On the rare occasions I feel understood, an entirely different sun comes to shine on me – one with rays that don’t cause cancer. J understands me (mostly – and for the other parts he’s extremely tolerant), so I’m lucky we’re married. When I don’t feel understood, like, say, when I talk to medical insurance people for an hour with no progress, I want to cry. I do cry. The incommunicability is just… incommunicable. Painful. You know?

I feel like the deeper I get into trying to explain the significance of this song to me, the more sidetracked I get. As though the heavy clouds of pot smoke present at the creation of The Freed Man were secondarily affecting me, too. And boy, am I hungry.

Anyhow, it’s true. No one can stop it all from crashing down to shit. And the “magic truth of stories,” to me, suggests God. God has been pretty marginal for me in the past year. I wouldn’t say God is boring, per se, but is definitely beside the point for me these days.

And then there is the literal fact that I’m a “healthy kind of sick.” Week after week I meet people who are either visibly relieved I don’t look like death, or insist on asking how I’m feeling (I always turn it around and ask them how they are), usually with my kids around and when we’re headed somewhere and I really just feel like giving them the address of this blog. I feel good, people, okay? Well, at this very moment I feel sick, but it’s a common cold. (There will be no blog post about the cold.) It would be much less annoying if you asked me about my job search, or when the hell am I going to send out the essays I’ve been working on for a century.

I hope, if I’ve brought this song to your attention for the first time, that you like it. I don’t expect you to sing it in the shower or while driving (I do). Maybe you hate it! In the universe of “Healthy Sick” I would hasten to say that is totally fine too.

Yours, as ever, from the universe of grave illnesses that don’t make you seem very sick,

D.

All is good here. Better than good. Gnarly, you might say, if you were the type of surfer who said things like that. (Are there other types of surfers? Does anyone say gnarly anymore?)

Last week was the week of doctor appointments. This week has been all about cooking and eating and vigilance surrounding eating. I’m doing well on my diet and this week ratcheted up the exercise by a power of ten. Which means come evening I’m exhausted, but the good kind of exhausted.

Suddenly, the kids’ homework has shifted into high gear (mostly Young J’s – Young A is still young enough to find his homework amusing and unchallenging). There were some rough patches this week surrounding that. I guess it will be my job to smooth those over, come up with a system or a structure or a schedule. I’ve never wanted to be a manager, yet catch myself increasingly in postures that can only be described as managerial. Maybe I’ll name myself Acting Director of the household. I like the impermanence of that title. That it is a finite thing. Finite not because I think I’m going to die in office, but rather because my guidance won’t be needed forever. I hope.

I think I’m getting much better at inhabiting two worlds. One where there is nothing wrong with me at all (and truly, it feels like there is not), and one where things can go from bad to worse to… over.

This sounds pretty horrible to anyone who hasn’t been in a similar situation, I know. But given I don’t really have a choice? Why not just proceed as though it will be fine? Find new recipes, get through that huge stack of books, pay those bills. Even my shrink today told me I seem to be doing well. I needed that independent confirmation.

In just over two weeks’ time I’ll have my next MRI and CT scan. I’m not overly focused on them. They happen, and I get the results, and based on what I hear, I get to keep on keeping on, or else prepare for some new chapter. It doesn’t really bother me except in small and ridiculous ways, like, “Do I get the monthly membership at the gym, to save more money? Or do I just keep buying the ten-class cards?” Yes, I really think that way now. As a matter of course.

I hate the phrase “the New Normal,” which I think made its appearance after 9/11 and has been overused ever since, but… I don’t have anything better. (The New Banality? The New Mortality?) I have or don’t have cancer. Either way, as Voltaire wrote in 1759, in Candide, “il faut cultiver notre jardin” – we must cultivate our garden. We must renew our gym membership. We must plan meals for the week. We must make plans.

And in the words of Close Lobsters from 1987, “Let’s make some plans, let’s make some plans, let’s make some plans let’s make some plans, Ah, wa-oh, wa-oh, wa-oh…”

I visited the eye doctor yesterday, capping off a week which had me at a different doctor each day – Monday, Dr P; Tuesday, shrink; Wednesday, GP; Thursday, dermatologist; Friday, ophthalmologist. It takes a village. A village with a good scheduler.

My eye doctor, Dr. D, said he’d spoken at length with my retina specialist (they work at a clinic together once a week) about me. Nice to know I’m being talked about. Though I’d prefer it be in more entertaining circles. I continue to be an interesting case.

Dr. D tested my vision, covering my glasses with tape on one side, instead of the eye shade his assistant usually uses. My left eye, the one with the swollen retina, with which I’ve been unable to read for weeks, showed a lot of improvement. I was able to get within two lines of 20/20, and actually able to guess pretty well the last two lines. Exciting! I thought I’d noticed some improvement, but it takes a professional to prove it to you. I suppose I’ve found my ways of compensating in the meantime.

It was a good way to end the week, because the afternoon before I had spent over an hour on the phone with our medical insurance, trying to unravel why a refill of the steroid eye drops I’ve been using for weeks and which I’ve refilled a couple of times already, were suddenly costing $120 instead of $10.

First, I spoke with a woman who was unpleasant and gave me wrong information. She then transferred me to someone who seemed more promising in terms of getting me an answer, but before she transferred me, she demanded to know whether she had helped me. I gave her an earful, and she actually argued with me about my assessment.

I was transferred to a much sunnier and more capable of empathy operator whose oft-repeated phrase was “I’m sorry, I know this is frustrating” – which was better than her predecessor’s, “Bear with me” (followed by another five minutes of blaring music on hold). But Ms Empathy did no better at solving my problem, and I eventually hung up because I started sobbing and couldn’t stop. Reduced to tears by incompetence – now that was an unwelcome first for me. And the fact that it sat a lead weight on me for the rest of the day was also not great.

Yesterday, while in the waiting room at Dr. D’s, I defied the No Cell Phones sign and decided to have a rematch with the insurance people (it also drowned out the awful pop radio). I was armed with a printout from my pharmacy, and was not going to back down until they fixed things. Again it took almost an hour (good thing that’s how long you wait to see Dr. D), but I emerged victorious. But was I actually victorious, if I had to spend more than two hours of my life getting the insurance company to admit their mistake, and the process made me miserable?

When I finally went to pick up my correctly-priced eye drops, I commented on my ordeal to the pharmacy clerk (who now seems to know my name). She said I’d be surprised at the number of people who would have just paid $120 for a 15 ml bottle of eye drops. This makes me crazy. But also perhaps a little grateful that right now, fighting this sort of fight is my full time job. I wouldn’t say there’s a ton of job satisfaction, but it will have to do for now.