A day in the life

Ask anyone who knows me: I am one of the world’s least girly of girls. Nonetheless a good chunk of my time and money is devoted to body-improvement tasks of various sorts.

I floss, brush and irrigate my teeth and swish with plaque-preventing mouthwash twice a day. At night, I poke the interstices of my teeth with a wooden toothpick stuck into a special plastic doohicky from my periodontist.

I shower in the morning, then smear my entire body with moisturizer to replace all the oils washed away by the shower, and spritz my underarms with a mineral-based spray, which is probably not necessary because I haven't sweated since my lymph nodes were removed five years ago—but who wants to take a chance?

I neti my nose to prevent recurrence of the sinus infections that plagued me for two decades. Then I smear ointment on my nostrils to prevent irritation from the neti salts.

I take a multivitamin capsule, a calcium/vitamin D tablet and a biotin tablet every day. Once a week I take a bisphosphonate tablet, which will either maintain my bones or destroy my jaw or both. Time will tell. It’s a crap shoot.

Every other day, I shampoo my hair, then condition it to replace the oils I washed out.

I brush my hair, these days using a wig brush to prevent removing any loose hairs from my sparsely covered scalp.

Once a week, I grate the calluses from my feet with a Ped Egg rasp—satisfying but easy to go too far. Sometimes I slice off larger chunks with a superdangerous mini-mandolin-type thing.

In the morning, apply eyeliner and mascara, often twice since I usually get it wrong the first time. At night, I remove the stuff with a special makeup remover.

I exercise: a yoga class or 30 minutes on the elliptical and the armbike.

At night I squeeze a rubbery device over my toes to pry them apart and counteract the pressure from my bunions. I leave it on for 20 minutes.

I dab debriding gel on each of my toenails. When they grew back after falling out from chemo, they have been fungus-flaky, and my liver is too quirky for me to take the antifungal medication that might cure the condition.

I fill the humidifier I use to counteract the drying effect of the radiator heat.

I’m sure I’ve left stuff out. And this list doesn’t take into account the endless hours I spend muddling over my clothes and breast prostheses and looking in the mirror to make sure I don’t look like a transvestite and that my shoes don’t look too dorky with the rest of my outfit and that I haven’t once again put on my shirt inside out. And there’s the daily earring decision. And let’s not even get into outerwear selection.

I am a bimbo manque

Most of my life I have expressed disdain for the kind of woman who rides on her looks. Bimbos! But to be honest, I have cheated. Although I may not have worn the trappings of a bimbo, I was a bimbo at heart. I gloated at admiring glances and flirtatious overtures. I savored the advantages my prettiness gave me over homelier women.

Despite my best efforts, I never would have been able to relinquish my bimbo benefits. So in a way, cancer did me a favor by depriving me of my pretty hair and graceful figure. I can now live with an undivided heart. I can now say with full sincerity that it’s what’s inside that counts. No one believes me, of course. Not really. Especially pretty girls. But it’s true. Really.

I feel bad about my hair

Nora Ephron's neck problem is a damn luxury. I'm going bald. And I've been told there's nothing I can do about it. Mostly I deal with it through denial. In the mirror, I look at the front of my head, where my hair is thin but more or less covers my scalp. In Copenhagen, however, Other and I stayed on the fourth-floor of our hotel, and the only way to get to and from our room was to take the fully mirrored elevator. Every morning I woke up cheerful. Half an hour later, when I stepped into the "fun" house mirrors of the 'vator, I descended emotionally as well as physically. There was no denying that I look just plain depressing from the rear.

If I'd had to choose between my boobs and my hair, I would have kept the hair and lost the boobs. Sadly, I didn't have that choice. I lost the hair AND the boobs. Maybe I would have lost my hair anyway—my family runs to unmanageably thick tresses early on and unmanageably thin wisps beginning in middle age—but chemo certainly played a role. Taxotere (a.k.a. taxo-tears)  is known to cause permanent hair loss in a small percentage of women, a fact that has come to light mainly because women who get Taxotere are surviving their cancer long enough for the rarer long-term side effects to reveal themselves.

I'm one of the beneficiaries of Taxotere-promoted survival. I've lived so long—more than five years since diagnosis—that I'd like to put it all behind me and stop feeling like a cancer victim and start feeling like an ordinary person. But it's hard. I look 10 years older than my age and 20 years older than the preternaturally young-looking Other. When I walk down the street with him, I can practically hear people thinking how nice he is to be so affectionate with his mother.

At any rate, being boobless and nearly hairless is a cosmetic challenge. I try to wear at least one signifier of my gender every day: earrings, a necklace, a skirt, whatever. I've been trying to wear falsies lately in my effort to put the past firmly behind me and get on with my life. And I've found a pair that are tolerable, though not actually comfortable. Trouble is, the flat chest kind of explains the bald thing: people guess that I've had cancer. When I wear the falsies, people just think I'm an aging crone with a revolting hair problem.

So when I hear people like Nora Ephron whining about their necks or their thighs or their big butts, I have sympathy, but not that much.

You're a ... dick-butt

I know this automatically turns me into a bad (and trivial) person, but I cannot deny it any longer: I’ve woken up every morning this week eager to find out what Charlie Sheen has done now.  I know he’s mentally ill and the public gawking at his spritzing spree is exacerbating his illness. Nonetheless there’s something exhilarating about someone being so bad. It’s like watching a 2-year-old having a tantrum or an 10-year-old calling his teacher a dick-butt. You want to join right in. Or at least I do. Watch out!

Passing

Whenever you travel, you, perhaps unconsciously, ask yourself, Could I live here and be one of them? In most countries I’ve visited, I’ve been quite obviously NOT a native. I’m too tall, too fair, too American (or, to some eyes, too German) looking. One novelty of our trip to Denmark was that I “passed.” I was often mistaken for a Dane, and even when I wasn’t, everyone spoke English. Relocating to Denmark would be an easy transition on one level. But for that very reason perhaps not worth the effort.

My little problem

I have a “little problem.” No, it’s not drinking or shoplifting or incontinence. It’s the inability to watch violent or sexually overexplicit or deeply sad movies without experiencing intense anxiety that keeps me awake. So when Other or one of my kids raptures on about some wonderful movie, there’s a flick at my disability: “You wouldn’t like it, though. It would upset you.” This handicap has created a subgenre in our household viewing archives: Movies Mom Can Watch. This is a seriously pitiable category, consisting almost entirely of failed romcoms. Even I find them nearly unwatchable. They include the irritating and offensive “It’s Complicated,” the dispiriting “The Good Guy” and last night’s oppressive “Morning Glory.” I have high hopes, however, for tonight’s showing: “Another Year.” And there was, of course, the joy that was “Downton Abbey.”

Why bother?

The thing about foreign travel is that once you reach your destination, you wonder why you’re there and what you’re supposed to do. If you’re like me, you’re used to spending your daily life working and doing household chores. Suddenly abroad, how do you spend your day?

In our case, the reason for our trip was to see our daughter C, who is studying in Copenhagen for a semester.  But she was busy much of the time, so we set about exploring the city on our own. Some days we saw three museums.

But why? Other said it was to get to know a different culture. But can you really get to know the Danish culture by staying in a hotel, looking at castles and canals, going to museums and eating in restaurants (which we’re told Danes rarely do)? In some ways, it seems like a hopeless undertaking. A mitigating factor in our case was that our daughter’s host family invited us for dinner and took us on a drive in the countryside, so we had a chance to see how they lived and ask frank questions.  C’s “new mother,” as we call her, is a rather unusual Dane, however. While I go to an office and sit in front of a computer all day, her job, which she has held for the past 18 years, is singing in the chorus of the Royal Danish Opera. “It’s just a job,” she said when I asked her what it was like.

(A digression: When the little girls who live downstairs from us in New York came to visit a couple weeks ago, they asked what happened to our hamster. It died, I told them. What happened to our turtle? We gave it away to someone who wanted a companion for her turtle, I said. Where was our daughter? She’s gone to live with a “new mother and father” in Denmark, I told them. They were horrified.)

Don’t get me wrong. I loved our trip to Copenhagen, but I’m not sure I know it much better now than I did after reading the Rough Guide before our departure. In fact, watching the “60 Minutes” segment on how Danes are the happiest people in the world was probably more informative than observing the Danes firsthand. I never would have guessed their secret inner happiness, since though they were helpful and kind, they rarely smile at strangers and do not exactly exude joie de vivre. 

Perhaps travel makes more sense for the young, who can hang out in bars and meet their ilk. Other and I don’t really do that anymore.

In a way, I feel as if I learned more about New York than I did about Copenhagen. In the days since we returned home, I am seeing the city anew: the garbage and the cracked sidewalks and the ragged homeless—but also the cheap eats and the diversity and the spontaneity.