Achy breaky body

When I told my yoga teacher E a while back that sometimes my back is so sore and weak in the mornings, I can hardly get out of bed, she looked perplexed, as if she was confused by my bringing up the obvious. “Everyone our age has aches and pains,” she said. “I can’t bend over the sink to brush my teeth in the morning.” 

Schadenfreude at works

There's a guy at work who says peculiarly comforting things. It's hard to explain exactly why I find them so helpful, but I do. For example, when I obsess about potential imperfections in a task that I have completed, he says, "That ship has sailed." Poof! Anxiety gone. And this week, when I worried about how I was ever going to get all my work done, he said, "Well, at least you don't live in Japan." Wow! I cheered right up!

Human Race

I hate rushing. In order to avoid it … I rush. I get up early, so I won’t have to race the clock. I jump in the shower before Other, so I won’t get a late start and have to make up for it. I run to the subway station, so I won’t have to run for a train. I get to work early, so I won’t have to play catchup when I get there. God, it’s exhausting!

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!