beloved books

Liz posted this on her blog (as did Liz, Kristine and Carrie), and I'm jumping on board.

Apparently, the Big Read (a program of the National Endowment for the Arts) guesses that the average adult has only read six of the top 100 books on this list. I went on the Web site and tried to find this list (and the NEA's thing about the average adult only having read six), but I couldn't find it. Nonetheless, it's a fun list! I've read 45 of them.

1) Look at the list and bold those you have read.
2) Italicize those you intend to read. (I'm including any books I've started but haven't finished. Has anyone I know ever finished Ulysses? Please speak up so I can bow at your feet ...)
3) Underline (or mark in a different color) the books you LOVE.
4) Reprint this list in your blog so we can try and track down these people who've read 6 and force books upon them ;-)"

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman Have read the first of the trilogy, but not the rest.
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D'Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller6
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller's Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli's Mandolin - Louis De Bernieres
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meany - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid's Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones's Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight's Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett (And I LOVED "A Little Princess.")
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte's Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo (Does it count that I read the abridged version?)

a few random pictures

Daniel must miss winter. He still insists on going out in his hat and gloves from time to time.


How do you like my handsome boy? How do you like my careful framing?


Because people asked ... of course, some makeup and a cuter top would help make it an outfit!


A little update, also for those who asked. I'm feeling OK (OK = a little run down but otherwise fine) since finishing my chemo session Tuesday, but I'm trying to stay away from big groups and people with colds and other potential sources of infection. Every two days, I change the dressing of my Hickman catheter and flush out the lines with heparin to protect against clotting. But really, I'm trying not to think about cancer very much. My sister left Friday after a very nice (but short) stay. Now I'm spending a lot of time with my family and a few friends — and in the garden. For the past two weeks, we've brought the paper and coffee out to the patio and enjoyed a quiet Sunday morning there.

Or maybe not always quiet. Stressful, sometimes. Work has begun on the fence (photos forthcoming). It's pretty exciting! But at the moment we have no fence at all — just tall cedar posts, eight feet apart — which means it's really hard to keep Daniel from running into the alleyway. Someone always has to chase him. Or keep him busy with a shovel.

ben at three months

And Daniel at 22 months and a day ...

the kiddos

Aunt Susanne (my sister) is here from Hood River, Oregon. (She told me today that her landlords were the founders of the Full Sail Brewing Co., which makes Full Sail Ale. Yum!) We've been taking quite a few pictures.


Ben is laughing here. Susanne is doing "Patty Cake" with him.


Daniel decided the best way to enjoy the sprinkler is to drink from it.


"Ahhh!" He actually turned to me and said that.


Daniel's trying to spread his love of cell phones. (That's not really a cell phone. It's the remote control for his nanny's car. But as long as he thinks he's got a phone, that's OK with me.) Lately, I've heard him talking to Ben. I'm not sure what he's saying most of the time, but it's nice.

oasis

For all the years we've lived in this house, we've never quite gotten around to dealing with all the weeds that sprang through the cracks in our patio. It was a chronic problem. When we didn't have children, we had plenty of time to spend pulling the weeds out, meticulously. One year I sprayed it down with toxic weed spray, but that wasn't something we wanted to do permanently. The past two summers, with children on board, we've been lucky if we can pull away the really tall ones before we have guests over.

Lately, though, we've decided we want the backyard to be more restful. On our honeymoon, we spent a few nights at a wonderful bed-and-breakfast in Monterey, California. Our room had a small, private garden, filled with plants and a small table and pair of chairs where we brought dinner one night. It felt magical, having a gorgeous space of our own outside, surrounded by beautiful flowers and wood trellises. It was an eye-opening experience, and after that, we kept wondering if we could make our garden more of an oasis like our garden in California. A place that makes us feel like we're on vacation, but without having to pack anything. With our climate, we certainly can't duplicate the California foliage, but we've been working, modestly, over the years, to turn more lawn areas into flowerbeds, create a row of patio pots and add to our mix of perennials. Last year, we added hydrangeas, which are everywhere in Minnesota. I can't wait to see the first puffy blossom.

Now we're on a roll. This weekend, we finally got rid of the patio weeds. Three of Steve's brothers (ably assisted by rake-wielding Daniel) came over and spent the morning lifting the patio tiles, raking the dirt underneath, trying to level out the areas lifted by roots from the old tree. They spread a pourous landscaping plastic over the dirt and replaced the tiles, and now we have a relatively flat — and weed-free — patio. And a patio table and chairs, too! Those, along with the canopy, were our summer treat to ourselves. (It's the Woodbridge collection at Lowe's, if anyone cares.) Sunday morning we spent the entire morning out there reading the paper and making sure Daniel didn't pull up all the flowers.

And this week, if everything goes according to schedule, the meager chain-link fence that separates our yard from the somewhat loud and public alleyway behind our house will be torn down and replaced by a six-foot cedar fence that will run along the back and up the side of our yard. That pickup truck you see in the background? Gone. We're going to have solid, gap-free gates that the boys can't slip through to escape. I cannot wait. I think that's when our yard is really going to feel like an oasis.

midway through chemo cycle

Groggy. Foggy. Just want to lie in bed all the time. A little nauseous until I pop an extra pill that helps quell the tummy rushes. Finished a thick Nora Roberts book in one day. Any ambitious plans, errands, phonecalls, etc., on the back burner. Kind of like having the flu, maybe. I'll post again when I pull out of this. Am just in no mood to write.

the quickest-movin' breast pump in the land

I've been trying to declutter a little, so Saturday afternoon, I packed up the Medela Pump-in-Style (which I don't need anymore) and put a "free breast pump" ad on Craig's List. (Steve wondered why I didn't try to sell it, since we did pay $250 for it, but I said I just wanted to give it away. So many people have been giving things to us, so why not just pay it forward?)

I posted the ad just before dinner. Right after we were finished eating, the phone rang for the first time. It was a mother of two in Columbia Heights (which is on the other side of the Twin Cities, for those who don't know) asking if anyone had taken the pump yet. Nope, I told her. It's yours. She sent her husband over to pick it up that very night. They were so grateful — it was as if that pump had dropped from heaven right into their laps. Meanwhile, two other people called about it, and I had to break the bad news before pulling the ad off Craig's List. Now that's some fast action.

round two

The strange, chemically taste is in my mouth again, my mind is fuzzy, and I'm kind of groggy. I'm heading into another week attached to the chemo pumps. But this time around it's a little better. For one, I have a Hickman catheter — sort of an elaborate IV hanging out of my chest with two attachment points, one for each chemo drug. Yeah, it gives me the heebie-jeebies thinking about the details of having a catheter burrowed under my skin and stuck into a major neck vein. And I'm not looking forward to having to flush it out with heparin (an anti-clotting agent) every day for as long as I have it in me, which could be a year or more. But at least I can change my shirt without having to string my entire backpack through it. At least the tubing is under my shirt so Daniel is less likely to grab at it. At least it's in a place where I can wear the backpack on both shoulders, which distributes the heavy weight and allows me to open the refrigerator door and reach down for a bowl of strawberries without it sliding halfway down my arm. At least now I can take a bath (even though I am not allowed to get the Hickman wet, ever, so no swimming and I'll have to figure out a way to cover it up when I shower).

My CT scan yesterday showed that the tumors have neither grown nor shrunk. Which we, and the oncologist, took as a "good enough" sign to continue with the same chemo drugs this cycle. In the three weeks before I started chemo, the tumors did grow, so if the chemo was able to keep them from growing more, then that is better than nothing. And as Dr. S. pointed out, it's only been one cycle, still a short period of time. Steve and I left this morning's appointment feeling pretty relieved. It may not seem like much — my tumors are no better than they were a month ago, but they aren't worse. And that, to me, feels like we've bought some time.

on due dates (and our doula)

I've always thought of Daniel as the one who "waited" 12 days past his due date to come out, as if he were a "stubborn" little bun in the oven, or maybe just so attached to his mama that he was in no hurry to come out — and Ben as the one who came a week early, as if he were eager to see the world or be the "easy" baby, wanting to make his mama happy. Or something. Somehow, I've managed to attach (or project) personality traits to their "lateness" or "earliness."

But in truth, I know each of them was right on schedule. Neither of my sons was born early or late, but within the normal range of when babies are born. I learned that from our doula, Rebecca, who sometimes comments on this blog and writes about her own lovely family on her own blog. (Up until now, I've kept our wise and wonderful doula's identity a secret here, so now I'm introducing her!) One of Rebecca's recent posts is about one of her pet peeves — those pregnancy counters that people put at the top of their blogs that count down to that magical date when their baby is due to arrive. Of course, it's not such a magical date. As Rebecca points out: "Babies are considered full term if born between 37 and 42 weeks. That's a five week window. You can have your baby three weeks 'early' and be on time. You can have your baby two weeks 'late' and be on time. It's more like a due month."

I knew this, of course, as Rebecca gently reminded me of it during those waiting days with Daniel. Yet I find it interesting how we fixate on the day anyway and assign all sorts of meaning to when the baby decides to come. That's a lot of pressure around one day. I know some women who play it vague when telling people their due dates. "Oh, sometime in early June." I think that's a good idea. They might have it circled on the calendar in their mind, but at least the rest of the world doesn't have to jump into the fray.

When I was pregnant with Ben, though, and there were two possible dates when he could have been conceived, the midwives did want to pin down a due date, as most OB care providers probably do. They wanted to be sure that if he did head into the 42-week area, they'd have a pretty good idea of when they'd need to start taking action, especially since he was a VBAC (vaginal birth after caesarean) baby. The pregnancy calculators ranged from March 31 to April 2, so we took the happy medium, April 1. I imagine some women prefer to take the latest date they can so they can let their baby gestate as long as possible without having to talk about inducing. (Any thoughts on that, Rebecca?)

a sort of ordinary week

So it's my last week before another round of chemo, and I'm on the tail end of the recovery from my last round, which means ... feeling not too bad. Just tired sometimes, but the mouth sores are gone, and my appetite is back. And I'm getting used to having no hair. (Got it all shaved off last Saturday so I could really get started on the wigs, scarves, hats, etc.)

I did a lot of ordinary things this week. Went to the mall with the boys and our nanny to buy some summer clothes and pajamas for Daniel. I hadn't been to a mall since January. It was almost like old times, except it was a double stroller this time. And I was walking with a cane and wearing a wig and didn't feel quite like the other mall moms. (Did I ever?) But still. It was fun to buy a coffee at Caribou and walk around looking at baby clothes.

Got a bikini wax for the first time since before Ben was born. Because, no, not all the hair is falling out. I broke down crying when I told Anne Marie about my cancer, though. I've been going to her for years — longer than I've known Steve, I think. She's seen me through quite a few life changes.

Spent a lot of time sitting outside on the front steps watching Daniel play. It's been so sunny — I'd be crazy not to take advantage of the nice weather. Some friends came over today, and we sat out there for a little while and watched our boys play with scooters and toy dump trucks and rocks and dirt and other boy things. Thanks to some babysitting help Sunday, Steve and I got to go to the garden store and buy some annuals to fill spaces in our perennial gardens. So now I go for little walks around the yard to see how everything is growing. My hip has been hurting a lot more this week, though. I don't know if I overdid the mall walking or if the fracture is getting worse or if the cancer is coming back in. I just don't know.

Made some leek and potato soup and added bacon this time. Not too bad.

Ben laughed for the first time this week. It's like an enhanced coo with a big wide smile. He just takes an extra breath in, and there it is — the sweetest giggle in the world!

Daniel does not like bugs. A large fly got into the house the other day, and Daniel freaked out when it got too close to his head. Freaked out big time — Steve said his face reminded him of the picture of the little Cuban boy, Elián González, when the troops stormed his relatives' house in Miami and pulled him out of the closet. The same thing happened the next day when he saw a big ant. Our nanny said he screamed and ran to her and would not let go. Later, when I was putting Daniel down for his nap, he was lying there looking at the ceiling, and he turned to me and said, "Ant." (He pronounced it with a British accent — "ont." Just like he says "Amelie" when he says my name. So cute!) Then, when I asked him what happened with the ant, "Finger. Window." The most I can gather was that he saw an ant on his finger, freaked out and shook his hand and knocked the ant onto the window, which is where it was when the nanny found it (and disposed of it). Poor little boy. He's so sensitive. I don't blame him, though; I hate ants.

score

Driving through south Minneapolis today on my way to Vanessa's for play group, I spotted a "Free" sign taped to a play kitchen. I drove a few more blocks making mental calculations regarding the size of my Honda's trunk and wondering if I should turn around and go look. I did — and as soon as I got out of my car and looked at it, I knew I (er ... Daniel) had to have it! A man walking by with a cup of coffee in his hand offered to help me load it into the car, and I drove the rest of the way to play group with my trunk hood halfway up. When I got there, Vanessa managed to shove the kitchen all the way into the trunk, and we were set.

Totally worth it. Daniel had the best time with it this afternoon. (That's his actual lunch he's taking out of the refrigerator.)


Now we just need to decide where to put it. It can't stay in the front yard all summer, though I'm sure Daniel wouldn't mind.

hair, part two

So I hacked it off over the bathroom sink just before dinner. Steve helped hold the Ziploc bag until Benjamin started crying for his bottle, and then I flew solo. I wondered, didn't Sharon Stone wear her hair this short once? But then I looked at the back of my head through a hand mirror and saw where a big patch of hair is already mostly out, and I'm pretty much bald.


After it was all over, the photos for posterity and everything, I sank onto the sofa and cried about how ugly I suddenly felt. How, for the first time, I look like someone with cancer. (Yesterday, I heard a Neil Young song in the car that brought me back to my college days, and I cried because whoever thought back then that when I was 40, I'd be fighting for my life, much less pulling my hair out by the handful?) I cried because from now on, whenever I leave the house, I am going to have to make sure I have something on my head. I cried because when I look at the big pillow of hair inside the plastic bag, I see that it is beautiful — glossy, shiny brown. I never appreciated that like I should have. I always complained about my hair, about how I could never get it styled right, or about its tendency toward frizziness. I should have just loved it because it was, after all, my very own beautiful hair.

But I must move on. And if divine intervention plays some role in this whole game, it certainly did today. This afternoon, while my friend Shannon and I were at Creative Kidstuff checking out toys, I saw a woman with the most gorgeous headscarf tied around her head. She wore cool glasses and had her face neatly made up. She looked chic and beautiful. I myself felt hot and sweaty, and my hair was sliding off my scalp whenever I moved my head. It was all over the shoulders of my fleece jacket. I approached the woman while we were standing in the checkout line and asked her where she got her scarf. She told me about how she goes to a local fabric store and buys 34-inch-square pieces of fabric to go with every outfit. She has, like, one wig at home, she said, and she never wears it. Scarves are so much more comfortable.

We started chatting about chemo. (I'm learning that no one on this journey is a stranger.) Suddenly, she said, "Is your name Emilie? Do you have a blog?" It turns out she is a friend of my friend L., who had mentioned my blog to her. (I'm keeping names out of this to protect privacy — but please let me know if you want me to remove this.) What a small world. Like me, she was diagnosed with cancer shortly after she'd had her second baby. In her case, she was nursing and had noticed what felt like a plugged milk duct. But it was breast cancer. Before she knew it, she was having a mastectomy. I can't imagine what that must have been like. Having to wean Ben so I could start chemo was one thing. Having to have my breasts cut off feels like quite another.

Anyway, she got me thinking about scarves, so tonight I tried some on, just to get the hang of it. My hair is still falling out right now, so I'm holding off on wearing the wigs until I get it all shaved off tomorrow. I wonder what I'll ending up preferring — wigs or scarves. Geez. I feel like there are a ton of hair puns in here somewhere, but I can't summon one up for the life of me.

I don't think Daniel is the least freaked out about me losing my hair. Not yet, anyway. Yesterday, as we were lying next to each other on his bed at naptime, he reached over and grabbed a handful of it. A little clump came out in his hand and tickled his face, and he laughed. No ... I think he's handling this part just fine.

our benefit fund

Many people have asked how they can help us financially, and to that end, a benefit fund has been established on our behalf. Contributions may be made to:

"Emilie's Fund" (fund #123)
Care of TCF Bank
2163 Ford Parkway
St. Paul, MN 55116
(612) 460-4674
or any TCF Bank branch

We regret that we are unable to thank you personally for donations because the bank does not tell us who contributes to the fund. Please know, however, that we are extraordinarily grateful for your generosity.

If you would like to help raise money for sarcoma research, we suggest the Liddy Shriver Sarcoma Initiative.

my guest blogger stint

I forgot to mention the other day that I was a guest blogger on the Star Tribune's Cribsheet, a parenting blog. I'm a regular reader and occasional commenter; apparently, one of the moderators, Kay, had seen my blog when I left a comment. A couple of weeks ago (just before I started chemo), Kay e-mailed to say she'd been lurking for a while and asked if I'd write something about what I've been going through. So ... I did. (I don't know how a person could say no to Kay. She's so nice!)

'let it fly in the breeze and get caught in the trees'

I woke up this morning and noticed a few strands of hair on my nightgown. I looked at my pillow, and it was covered with a fine, thin layer of brown hair. So it's beginning.

I'd felt a telltale sign yesterday when my scalp began tingling. I've heard that happens right before your hair starts to fall out. Still, today feels wierd. When I run my fingers through my hair, a couple dozen strands come out with them. Brushing pulls out a good clump, too.

"You're not losing your spirit — just your hair," Steve said this morning.

I haven't decided whether to cut it all off today or tomorrow or to let it keep falling out and see how long it takes to lose all of it. This is a once-in-a-lifetime event, after all. (Hopefully.) Part of me is curious about what the process is like. The other part just wants to get it over with and start wearing my wigs. (Two more arrived in the mail last week from a friend in New Orleans — platinum white and seafoam green! He bought them at a shop where, apparently, all the best drag queens in the Big Easy get their wigs. Or something like that.)

I'm saving my hair in a gallon-sized Ziploc bag. I'd like to do something special and meaningful with it. Maybe give it a new home under some rocks on the North Shore. Or burn it and sprinkle the ashes somewhere. I don't know. (Any ideas?) In the meantime, though, I'm sure our new nanny thinks it looks awfully strange for me to be wandering around the house with a bag of hair in my hand!

should carrie have married big?

**Spoiler alert**

I must be a big softie. That, or I don't feel comfortable in the black-and-white world of final answers. I like the mushy grey areas, where a woman can fathom the possibility of second chances at love. I thought, for example, that Miranda was pretty harsh to leave Steve with no discussion of his one-time infidelity, no attempt to figure out what went wrong (which was obvious) or to reconcile. But this post isn't about Miranda and Steve. It's about Carrie and Big. And I, for one, was happy with how things turned out between the two of them at the end of Sex and the City.

One of my friends said she thought Carrie's decision to marry Big at the end was a Big Mistake. "He'll hurt her again," she said. Yes, Big's momentary lapse of courage was painful to watch and even more painful for Carrie to absorb. (What a wrenching, tragic scene, when Carrie ran toward him on street, as wild as the blue bird attached to the side of her head, and began hitting him with her bouquet, over and over.) And yes, he's hurt her before with those commitment-phobic, cold feet. But in the end, I think she knew Big was only human, and she understood that Miranda's comment to him ("You're crazy to get married") freaked him out. And I think she knew Big was uncomfortable with the big "circus" wedding more than he was with committing to Carrie. He was committed to Carrie. I don't think that was ever in question.

In the end, Carrie followed her heart. Maybe she will be hurt again. Maybe the life they have won't be perfect. But it's the life she chose, and I think that's OK. Maybe she felt being with Big would ultimately fulfill her in a way being without him would not. Big was always the one for her, and I think she decided to let her heart make the decision, even if her head was refusing to read his e-mails or call him. That was the same advice she gave Miranda when Miranda was trying to decide whether to go back to Steve: This a decision you have to make with your heart, not your pro-con lists.

Thoughts on this or the rest of the movie?

crash?

I'm at the low point of my white blood cell count in my chemo cycle, and I think I might have an infection. My temperature for the past hour (since I started taking it) has ranged up to 101, and I have chills, and I've had intense back pains since this afternoon. It took a half hour for the oncologist on call to call me back, which seemed like eternity. She told me to come in and get checked out at the emergency room, so I'm waiting for my sister-in-law to get here so I can get a ride. I hope I don't have to get admitted. I hope it's nothing serious, but this is all new to me. I'm scared.

Updated to add: I'm home. I'm fine. No infection, anyway. My blood tests, urine test and chest x-ray checked out fine (my white blood cell count was even surprisingly high "for someone on chemo"); so three and a half hours and a bit of saline IV drip later, they sent me home with no further treatment — just instructions to call my clinic in the morning for follow-up.

five years

What do you say to each other when you're celebrating your five-year anniversary under this ... ugh ... this awful cloud of cancer? In our case, a lot of I love yous ... I hope for many more wonderful years with you, but if we don't have them, well, I'm so happy for the ones we've had. I wouldn't trade them for anything. I love you so much. I love you so much, too. Want to go drive up Summit Avenue and see our church? Oh, let's!


I wouldn't trade my friends for anything, either. Along with Megan, Susan and Charles have been here for a long weekend. The three of them babysat Saturday night so Steve and I could go out to eat for our anniversary. Susan and Charles have the same wedding anniversary we do — May 31. They were married six years earlier, and we happened to get the date the next time it fell on a Saturday. We were so moved that they chose to spend their night watching our kids.


We debated between two restaurants — the new, high-end New York-Paris outfit downtown or Carmelo's, the old Italian place where we end up celebrating many of our milestones. We chose Carmelo's, and we sat next to each other in the same booth. My appetite may have been low and my mouth full of sores from chemo, but it was one of the most romantic nights we've had in a long time. (Never mind that I am sporting one of the worst haircuts I've ever had and won't mind too much when my hair falls out in a week or two!)

And the next day, my best high school pals and I went to see Sex and the City — the movie! More on that in a different post, if I have time.