11.19.03 - 4:24 p.m.

The details aren't interesting to most people, but they are interesting to me. I suspect they're interesting to most (many?) cancer patients and the people who love them, as well. Yesterday, we took mom to the infusion center. She will begin receiving chemotherapy there on Monday, a combination of Taxol and Carboplatin that will attack her rapidly dividing cells indiscriminately. The victims of this pair of toxins will include (hopefully), whatever tumor cells remain in her body - and there is no doubt that tumor cells remain in her body - and other rapidly dividing cells. Blood. Marrow. Hair. Nails. It may also cause peripheral neuropathy, may affect her hearing, may cause nausea and vomiting, alteration in taste. And so on, and so on, and so on.

The list of side effects from the treatment is almost as daunting at the end-result of the disease. Right now, I wish I could take this from her, absorb the cancerous cells into my body and take over: chemo, etc. To me, the most daunting part of the whole thing would've been the surgery, I think, the invasion of the body, the terrible pain as you heal. But of course, I don't know how I would really feel if it were me.

I'm frustrated that Mom won't agree to go with me and buy a wig. She says the free one from the hospital is fine, fine, should be fine, she doesn't need much, and I know she's avoiding it because it hurts her to think about losing her hair. That doesn't do her any good, though. How much better if she could just say bald? schmald! I'll wear what I want to wear. My grandmother died of cancer of the mouth. My grandfather died of prostate cancer. My aunt had breast cancer. In the hospital, she started crying over the sponge "lollipops" they gave her to moisten her mouth while the naso-gastric tube was still in place. She said that late in grandma's disease, the sponges were all she could have in her mouth, and were coated with some sort of palliative medicine. I was 12 or 13, and while I don't remember the swabs, I do remember the cases of Ensure stacked in the kitchen, not far from the Frank's Black Cherry soda.

Grandma was too sick to come to our house for Christmas that year, so we went to Philly. She was old, by then, more than 80 years old, and had refused to consult a doctor for a long, long time about the lesions in her mouth, even though she suspected that they must be cancer. When we visited in December, Grandma hadn't been to mass for a long time. Mom lied to the priest and told him that she was trained and registered as a lay minister of the eucharist, so she could bring the eucharist to Grandma, who wouldn't let anyone else from the Church in her house. She was too embarrassed. She didn't want to be seen like that.

My impressions of Grandma and her illness are fitful and fleeting. I knew what was going on, and it was sad and hard to deal with, but it didn't affect me all that much until after my other Grandpa died. There was a lot of death that year.

I'm concerned that I don't know exactly what the pathology report said. I want to read it. I had to sit on my hands to keep myself from calling mom and asking her what it said, exactly. Did she get a copy? With this sort of history, should I get tested for BRCA-1 or 2?

Maybe I'll feel better about all of this one the chemotherapy starts. I thought that before the surgery ("Once the surgery starts...") and now, the chemotherapy. I'm not sure when or how much to push Mom - or Dad, for that matter - about ordinary, necessary things. Wigs, for example. Or work. Or letting go of her perfectionist instincts and just... chilling.

Last night on the phone, Mom told me that David had made some Chex Mix, but hadn't closed the boxes of Chex before putting them away. When she opened the cabinets and got something out, she knocked over the boxes and spilled Chex all over the cabinet and the counter, and made David clean it up (because it was, after all, his fault.) There's no problem with this, thus far. Not until, of course, the classic my-mother moment, "How stupid do you have to be to put the Chex away like that?!" she asked me, rhetorically, envenomed.

Except the kid isn't stupid, and the putting-away-Chex-without-closing-lids isn't stupid, either, just thoughtless. What else can one expect from a sixteen year old? The world revolves around them, on a single, dizzying axis and it's hard to remember where one thing starts and another ends.