Cancer Notes - 8/22/04

Cancer isn't all it's cracked up to be. The pain is a low-level throbbing — but it's quite bearable. What isn't so bearable is the instant attention everyone gives you when they think you're sinking — and the faint air of disappointment when they find you'll pull through, after all.

I call it the "widow's syndrome": everybody's there for the funeral; but six months later she can't get a dinner invitation to save her life.

The pain is oddly like an ill-fitting garment that wraps around the wounds and the bruises. No matter how I move, I can't shake it. Sometimes it feels like it's on too tight. Sometimes the inescapability of it becomes claustrophobic: the ultimate trap is to tense up and want to escape, which makes it wrap around me all the tighter. Drugs make it seem to hang beside me: they give me a little breathing room, but it's still there in the next chair, an univited guest.

So I sit down in my favorite café (today it's Sette). I put on my glasses so everything on the table is sensually vibrant and alive. The incredible blackness of the olives, wrinkled and slightly bitter to the taste, gleam like patent leather in their cream-colored dish. The crusty bread slices take on the dimensions of geology, all ridges and caves and striated golden-brown mountains rising in cross-section from their plate. The large, bright flowers — orange, red, yellow — are like a child's drawing of a flower, like the first flowers I've ever seen.