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Patient
The Plan
You lie in a hospital bed. People in and out of your room, introductions, tests, bloodwork, scans, IVs, all a blur. This wasn’t part of the plan. You repeat your speech: name, date of birth, and why you’re here to all the hospital staff who enter all day and night. This wasn’t part of the plan.
Read More...I wish someone told me
I wish someone had told me—Told me how much it would hurt. Not the blade that cleaved my skull, To extract the unwelcome guest, Nor the threads that stitched the wound shut, Or the scar, fracturing my head, Like parched and cracking earth.
Read More...Raspberry Sorbet Swirls in the Sky
I woke from the deepest sleep the doctor was above me what happened? I asked wearily you had a hysterectomy she said
Read More...The Part That Died
When I found out I could not carry a child, a hush fell inside me—not silence, but something colder. A part of me dropped dead.
Read More...The Give and Take of Cancer
Cancer is greedy, in the most ravenous and insatiable way. It has taken my energy, my routines, my sense of stability, and any sense of predictability I ever thought I had.
Read More...Cancer Molded Me
I don’t like talking about what I have lost from cancer because it is an enormous reminder that some abnormal cells in my body that I created, which are so tiny, have had such a humongous impact on my life forever.
Read More...The Glorious Gap
Heading into the interview, I look into the car mirror one last time, and adjust my head scarf. Hmm…will they discriminate against me for wearing a headscarf?!
Read More...Negative Results
It hasn’t killed me yet—
but it spreads.
From marrow to memory,
it seeds the femur,
threads the ribs,
scrapes its code into the curve
of my pelvis—
then metastasizes
to the contact list.
Remodeling My Emotional Kitchen: Healing Through Cancer
Cancer changed my relationships with others by forcing me to face and process my trauma. Eve Ensler, the playwright of The Vagina Monologues and a cancer survivor herself, reported that she survived cancer by confronting her trauma, along with making lifestyle changes and using traditional Western medicine.
Read More...Why Not You?
For some people, when they experience a particularly arduous time in life, or when they are dealt a bad hand, so many think “Why me?” “Why did this awful thing happen to me? Why do I have to deal with this hardship? I think this can be traced to the age-old question “Why do bad things happen to good people?”
Read More...