In a message dated 7/19/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to debobr:
I have absolutely no idea how you and jean managed it and i understand as i did not really then how abandoned you felt by me so if i couldn't really apologize before i do now. the isolation is intense.

In a message dated 7/19/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to sharha:
Oi. My first cheese and (organic) tomato sandwich after a week, now being tamped down with ginger tea. It's slowly back to the land of the living, that is to say friends and TV and people who eat normal things and have normal lives. Speaking of TV, when are you coming here to watch cable?
The cup is half full, I suppose. People DO call, but I think they have a hard time realizing what this is actually like. Yesterday the lowest point: crying uncontrollably, thoughts of suicide, schemes to abandon treatment. Kim, otherwise known as Coach, came home to find me staring. THAT WON'T DO. Call Michael the oncologist, who clearly wants respect: title and last name: Dr. Van Scoy-Mosher. [End Page 286] Please. I ask for something for aches and nausea. He pushes Advil. Chemo is just something you have to live through, he says. Eventually I extract Atavan.
I am exhausted.

Thursday, 20 July 2000
Nath calls from Marseille. She is dismantling her mother's house. You are loved, remember that at your worst moments.
Couples shrink. Were you crying when you left the last time? I have a hard time accepting affection, I say, like one of those dogs that just shivers and shakes and then howls or even snarls when you move in to make friends. It is all about Catherine now, how Catherine feels, physically and emotionally, says Kim. There is no room for me.

Friday, 21 July 2000
In a message dated 7/21/00, debobr writes:
The strange thing about sojourning in the c-world is to discover who is there for you and who can't/doesn't deal. It's a deep irrational test of some sort and I never condemned anyone for not showing up.
In a message dated 7/21/00, dhijr writes:
Big hug.
In a message dated 7/21/00, genab writes:
When my housing things are resolved and census kaput (very soon) i can probably ride a train across the big land again and visit . . . ok?

In a message dated 7/21/00, cblord@uci.edu writes to undisclosed recipients:
SUBJECT: HER BALDNESS BECOMES AN ART COLLECTOR
Last Monday I received a gift of three garden sculptures from one of my graduate students. She has in the past fabricated covers for common objects ranging from guns to stacks of dishes to penises. More ambitiously and more recently, she has used thin plastic to construct full-scale models [End Page 287] of symbolic architectural spaces, which she takes to locations such as fields and parking lots and inflates. Displacement.
The sculptures in question, however, her one and only foray into the world of cement, were possibly something of an inconvenience. Two months ago, it seemed like the right thing to do. I was chair of Jennifer's thesis committee. I couldn't guarantee her fame, but I could give three small cement replicas of the internal space of her studio, each weighing four or five hundred pounds, a home as permanent as anyone can promise. I have a yard, of sorts. Why not accommodate the ghost of a teaching relationship? So what if it came to roost outside my bedroom window?
On Monday, Jennifer arrived, with Mario and Mark and Deirdre and a truck with an electrified ramp and dollies and ropes and carts. Nobody said a word about hair or its absence. Wobbly as I felt, sitting on the front porch propped against the wall, I realized that I was a spectacle and I made them afraid. I noticed that only one of them had thought to wear boots. I went inside to lie on the sofa, wonder what the liability limit is on my homeowner's insurance and skim one of the many lavender books I now own with the word BREAST in the title. Much crashing and sweating later, the sculptures were installed. Everyone went down to the backyard to pick plums except for responsible Deirdre, who stayed behind to fluff some of the plants that had been flattened by their encounter with concrete. I sat on the porch and watched her work in her purple T-shirt. THE ONLY WAY TO WIN THE REVOLUTION IS GARDENING, it said. For her final project, Deirdre turned a piece of nowhere above a drainage ditch in a Santa Ana barrio into a garden for neighborhood kids. It took them a year to find a patch of earth the city had [End Page 288] forgotten to pave and plant a packet of sunflower seeds. They threw a party. That was a week or so before I'd learned I had breast cancer.
Is chemo horrible? she asked.
Why, I wonder, is it unnerving to weep in front of a student? Even a graduated one? Even a slightly older one? Even a kindhearted and somewhat scared one? Even a dyke? What would be the matter with a fair exchange? Their work, my tears. Why is weeping in a classroom, though we have all felt like it, more of a threat to the mortar that holds together the bricks than stupidity or hatred or ignorance?
You feel like shit, I say, face wet. Of course Deirdre hugs me. This is not quite right—the shit part, that is, not the hug part. Kristeva aside, I don't actually feel like a turd. Turd is a leap I cannot make. Nor do I feel like I have the flu, though the comparison is often volunteered. Flu feels like something is borrowing your body for nourishment. You don't want to make the loan, but you can. Chemo is different. Something has broken into your body and it has murder on its mind.
Chemo is medieval, enough poison to make you crazy miserable but not enough to put you out of your misery. It's like a relic from the days when some people got to cover themselves in finely crafted metal skins while other people were crushed and pierced and slowly pulped. Lights are too bright, noises are too loud, your skin is not only too tight but much too thin, every pressure point in your body hurts, and so does your entire skull.
The soles of your feet burn, everything going into your mouth, even the water that you must drink because you are desperately thirsty and because if you don't the drugs will sit in your bladder and corrode it from the inside out, everything feels like a bad idea. Piss like a racehorse, the [End Page 289] nurses tell you, and when you do, it comes out red. Though food on the face of it does not appear to be your friend, you need something in your stomach besides water because when your stomach is empty you feel it beginning to consume itself. Nothing is funny, you can't read, you can't watch TV, you can't sleep, and you cannot get the poison out of you because you have swallowed a pill that overrides the better instinct to vomit, which you must avoid because if you do, it might do serious damage to the lining of your stomach and esophagus. There are women who have described finding sheets of tissue in their puke.
Chemo is like mainlining weed killer, which is what, to invoke the perversely feminized metaphor oncologists prefer, my particular "recipe" sounds like. Adriamycin and Cytoxan: they fit right in on the pesticide shelf. You're not sure, however, whether you want to be picked for Team Crab or Team Bermuda and in any case you would have preferred to spend the entire game on the sidelines.
Chemo dosage is calculated by skin area. I have 1.7 square meters of skin. Morgan Fisher once happened upon the same chart my oncologist keeps in his desk drawer. Morgan used it to calculate his own skin area. He produced a self-portrait by painting a rectangle exactly his size on a sidewalk in downtown Los Angeles. To the best of my knowledge, Morgan has never had chemo. There is in addition the matter of chemo brain, a phenomenon announced a few days ago by Canadian researchers. Chemo brain causes moderate to severe cognitive impairment, including memory loss, difficulty in concentration, and reduced logical function. Cancer patients have complained about chemo brain for decades, but doctors have [End Page 290] only recently bothered to consider what weed killer might do to human brain cells.
On your worst days, you think that turds have it better, which is only to say that depression is one of the biggest side effects of chemo, it being difficult, let us face it, to keep up the old chin, or the pecker, or the spirits, whichever you prefer, when you feel like a weed and perhaps, after all, not so very far from a turd. You have episodes of wondering why your sweetheart is spending two hours at the supermarket and where all your friends have gone and why your mother won't behave like a mother for once in her life and just get on a plane and why your therapist has forgotten to call and why even your cat has decided you are so boring she would rather sleep by herself.
The need for contact is voracious. After a week you answer yes to every question on those checklists of symptoms to see whether you are A Depressed Person and should get professional help. Finally the legs get back the energy to climb out of the hole, but the white blood count continues to drop. It does so for another two weeks, after which, all going well, it crawls back to a more or less normal level. You do, in fact, feel better in the short run, much better, but you also know that the weed killer is feasting on you and that any one of a list of unpleasant side effects could be in your future: heart attacks, kidney failure, intestinal parasites, collapsed veins, loss of sexual interest, sores in the rectum, skin so thin it splits, weight loss, weight gain, extreme fatigue, ditto vaginal dryness, olfactory hallucinations, severe skin burns, permanent hair loss, and, of course, the stress induced by waiting for the advent of any of the above. You begin to wonder. Is this how the end begins? The body, betrayed, no longer has confidence that what [End Page 291] it takes in might nourish. Food doesn't fire the muscles. It saps them. You want nothing to penetrate the envelope of your skin. No feasting. No fucking.
On the same day you feel really and wonderfully human again, back to your old self, and happy, for a change, to be that old self, you're ready for the next round. Chemo works by killing all the fast-growing cells in your body, of which cancer is only one kind, and, when you stop to think about it, the difference between your fast-growing cells and you is a matter of splitting hairs and you are not in possession of hairs to split. This is what people are describing when they say that chemo brings you to death's door.
You bond with women who are going through the same thing. I know, for example, that Suzie's disability started two days ago, that she decided to shave off the last of her baby orangutan hair last week, and that she hates looking in the mirror in the morning because before she looks, when she wakes up next to the guy she just married after living with him for seventeen years, she isn't a person with three more rounds to go. I know that Naomi, who has progressed from pate to fuzz, speaks from experience when she tells me not to worry about my blood count because whatever happens there is a drug that will take it back up again. I know that Glenda is going through Chemo Six today and that her sister has come out from Georgia because it was so bad the last time Glenda's heart almost stopped and her ten-year-old daughter had to race for the nurse to take the drip out. Even though I don't really know Glenda, I sit here writing and hope that she got back home safely and that I will see her next week. [End Page 292]
How do you get through the depression? I asked my group last night. You just do, they say. People call you up. People bring you things. People take you out. You let people help. You let them do it now because they'll get bored with you later. There's a name for it. It's called compassion fatigue.
You weed, said Suzie, even if it's only for ten minutes. You just go out into the garden and weed.