Diary
The Scan Report
The oncologist does not mince words when delivering the scan report. Good news (“Good Pet”) or bad, it’s the facts minus emotion. December 2016 brought the first bad
Summer Diary: Making friends, silver and gold, new and old
Old-age friendships are slightly different from those made in the past, which consisted largely of sharing whatever happened to be going on. What happens to be going on
Cancer Gadfly: Drinking the Big Pharma Kool-Aid
“Immunotherapy Drug Fails Lung Cancer Trial.” Naturally the headline caught my eye since I have been reading about lung cancer since my husband was diagnosed in 2009 and
Scanxiety
“Scanxiety,” a coinage not of my making (I wish!) but that makes the point efficiently, is an attempt to represent the limbo I described in an earlier diary
Partial Remission
After the last appointment (June 2016), my oncologist doubled the time between scans to once every six months from every three. Almost five years later, I’ve progressed, it
Summer Diary: Father’s Day
Today I found myself purging the files from the research I did for What They Saved. I’ve been wanting to do this for a while, but today I
Is Waiting Also Living?
We wait in our chairs to hear our name called. Some in wheel chairs, Others with carers, canes, oxygen tanks, or neck braces. Soon my turn. —Elizabeth Bishop,
Cancer Gadfly: Still Alive, or The Mortifications of Survival
Readers of the London Review of Books will know that Jenny Diski has been writing diary posts about her cancer for over a year. In “Who’ll be last?”
Welcome. Some musings on my current preoccupations with the worlds of illness and the worlds of books: the vicissitudes of living with cancer and the need, for now, to launch (a k a promote) my new memoir, My Brilliant Friends: Our Lives in Feminism. Naturally, I inhabit both spaces, which makes for a strangely bifurcated, though far from boring, existence. Click to view both Feminist Friendship Archive and My Multifocal Life projects.