My portacath was the last visible sign of my cancer treatment. Radiation acted on my internal organs in a way I’ll never see with my eyes. Chemotherapy traveling through my bloodstream accessed every cell in my body, targeting stray cancer cells wherever they tried to hide. Multiple scars on my abdomen are visual reminders of …
Smell The Color Nine*
What does cancer look like? What does it smell like, or taste like or feel like? To me, it feels like melting and it smells like the inside of an N95 mask during a four hour chemotherapy session. Even after I’m home and the mask is off, it’s the metallic taste that coats my tongue; …
Worst Case Scenario
What plays out in your head when you’re not concentrating on anything specific? My husband and I were talking earlier today after a second botched delivery of a piece of furniture we’d ordered and he commented that we should plan for the worst again on the next attempt. I agreed. I tend to plan for …
Delectable Faith
What makes a banana split or a buffet better than just plain ice cream or simple salad? The layers of goodness heaped on the already delicious base. Of course ice cream alone is a treat but add on your favorite toppings and a pile of fresh whipped cream and it only gets better. Faith is …
How Suggestible Are You?
When you have the munchies, it seems like nothing really satisfies the craving, but anything close at hand looks appetizing. Four years after the birth of my third child, I was still carrying around what I not so affectionately referred to as baby weight. I joined a fifteen week accountability group at my church to …
More Light
The older I get, the more light I need in order to see clearly with my physical eyes. I’m continually bumping into things in the dark in spite of the night lights placed strategically around my home. I once was able to read without a reading lamp or glasses far into the evening, but now, …
Fan the Flame
My freshman year, the egg in a bottle experiment was banned from the science fair. Overused and unoriginal were descriptors my teacher chose even though no one in my grade had seen it barring those with older sibling. That may have been when I first learned that a fire needs oxygen to burn because the …
Can You See?
My daughter and her husband both love ice cream. She always ribs him because he asks, “is yours good?” meaning he wants to taste hers too. She forgets that when she was small and said she wanted to share, it meant she wanted to taste ours. If I asked her for a bite, she would …
Whatever You Can Carry
By far my favorite scene of the 1998 movie EVER AFTER: A Cinderella Story with Drew Barrymore plays out in a dense wood. Prince Henry has been detained by a band of Gypsies while he is walking with Danielle(Barrymore). The leader of the Gypsies has taken Danielle’s dress from where it was discarded on the …
Fitting In
The year my daughter received a fifteen hundred piece puzzle for Christmas and determined we would not to go to bed until it was finished was the year I stopped enjoying jigsaw puzzles. We finished it, framed it, and said never again! She still enjoys puzzles and games, but with a newborn at home, they’re …
A Fitting Reply 