I knew five months ago in March as I reached my 5-year cancer remission date and felt something missing. I knew seven months ago in January as people began to call me by my first time instead of my last. I knew, most of all, eight months ago in December as my body trembled when […]
I miss it, but I also miss ME. A year ago while doing yardwork, I asked Kevin to just run over the pink rose bush in the yard that was planted before we bought the house. When we moved in, I was happy to see it there and took pictures of the blooms, but after […]
I’ve tried for over a month to think about a quippy way of beginning this post – I was thinking of a “new job, new me” – but that’s not right. It took slipping into an emotional chasm this week to figure out that I’m still the same person to my core. My core is […]
“Oh Captain! My Captain!” It’s the title and repeated line of Walt Whitman’s poem. It’s also a pivotal scene in many English teachers’ favorite film collection about teaching with passion and gusto. I always imagined myself as a female Mr. Keating, albeit a bi-racial small Asian version with tattoos and a gold butterfly nose ring. […]
Monday was the first time I’ve seen the bottom of our sink for a while. Kevin and I were both off, and we tackled the dishes and laundry with a renewed fervor. As the laundry happily tumbled with detergent, we turned our Star Wars magnet from “dishes have joined the Dark Side” to “clean the […]
We all wrote in the middle of the field. The chilled breeze whipped around cotton sweatshirts, backpacks, and used composition notebooks. I tried to keep the prompts light until after lunch, and I’m still in shock I was crazy enough to take all my classes out. On the senior English writing pilgrimage, students sat among […]
My wonderful friend Heather came to race with me during the Race to End Women’s Cancer and gives her views on having a friend go through cancer treatment. Check it!
My alarm went off at 5:45 AM, and I was wide awake. After crawling into bed under an unfamiliar roof at midnight, Sherlock puked up cat food he ate too fast around 1AM and was kneading my stomach with his small paws ten minutes before my alarm. I hopped out of bed, maneuvering between brown […]
It’s a Monday, and I’m tired but here. I’m sitting in a summer writing class for teachers (Northern Virginia Writing Project) sipping on my coffee that is losing its heat. Everyone in here is doing their Morning Pages. I keep thinking back to the question one of my classmates, Kelly, asked me on the first […]
A student stood before me – his hand gripping his backpack on one shoulder and all his hope of graduating on the other. I was typing in numbers on my school issued laptop which would determine if his final exam would get him to the coveted 60% to pass – and of course graduate:to walk […]
Ovarian Cancer is Nothing 