WTFsanjo

the wine i drank tonight was from walmart and i am not apologizing

i wrote an entire post about how much i hate san jose, which is why i took the banner down from the top of the page, but upon deep reflection it a) seemed needlessly mean to anyone who still lives there, b) is incredibly obvious anyway.  i will go back and add to it when i'm alone; the litany of ways it destroyed my heart and made me dress badly.  someday it will be published at rest stops on I-5 as a discouragement from stopping anywhere between coalinga and sacramento.  just keep driving.  don't turn into me.

everyone broke up this year.  and when i say "everyone" i mean nearly everyone i know.  but not everyone got a gay haircut and lives with a mouse that shits under their sink.  but everyone is figuring out how to realign expectations.  sometimes this means looking at the wrinkles on your face as you wonder if you can call your mommy to pay your bills for you.  i meet women who show me their gigantic diamonds and designer handbags and nicely cut hair who think that i have never had that taste before.   i'm not always sure if i should feel bad for myself or for them.  i chose poverty!  that either makes me a fucking moron or a genius.  fundamentally it doesn't matter.  i still have a mouse that shits under my sink and my house smells like everyone else on the block's old ethnic food.  i also have no heat.  do you know i used to have a cleaning lady?  i liked her a lot and tipped her well.  now i am nearly 31 years old and my mother has to sweep my living room for me. 

don't get me wrong, there is nothing i like more than building my own character.  whenever parts of my kitchen counter crack off or when i find pieces of my ceiling on my floor i think "yes: quaint."  but right now i have black stitching through my chest and massive purple bruises all over me.  my role at the meeting i went to today was - again - to stand awkwardly in the corner and then take notes for more important people.  i have to use my ti-82 from 1993 to take a math-based midterm tomorrow at 8am.  i will take a yellow school bus to get there.  four years ago i had a bmw and was trying to have a baby in a condo with vermont maple hardwood floors.  these days i set off my car alarm before i reach the back of my building because i'm afraid of getting robbed in my alley. 

anyone that tells you life is rich is not fucking kidding. 

Download 07 The Spell You're Under

why i love her

if you offer me a pink ribbon, i will shove it up your ass

life may be complicated at the moment, but i did not forget.

TOMORROW IS THE BEGINNING OF BREAST CANCER AWARENESS MONTH!  so, in the event that you were not yet aware that breast cancer is cancer of the breast, let me fill you in:  breast cancer is cancer that starts in your breast.  it's really super sad, and more sad than all other cancers because it makes people's breasts look ugly,  sometimes it makes their breasts go away entirely, which means they stop being women.  and if you ever try to have sex with someone with no breasts it will make you feel kind of weird because they won't entirely look like a human woman.  more like a naked barbie, but a lot less good looking.  that is why breast cancer is extra sad.  

oh, the other thing about breast cancer is that it's not actually pink.  i know!  it's weird!  and it's not shaped like a ribbon inside your boob.  no, not a heart either! 

and when you get breast cancer it doesn't make you feel like going on a really long walk with a pink tshirt on.  it also doesn't make you feel like linking arms with thousands of women in "save the tatas" hats.  no really!  it makes you feel like killing yourself!  and if you are very very lucky, you get to keep that option open, rather than have breast cancer do it for you. 

i hate october.

WTFmylife

oh hello there.  does anyone even read this thing anymore?  for those of you who do, were you afraid i died?  because some days i wish i had.  no, instead i left my husband and turned into a huge lesbian.  because that is what one does during the summer after their first year at hopkins.  naturally.

in the last three months i have traded in my custom made diamond ring for a really gay haircut, a fancy dishwasher for a shitty dish drainer, a disposal for a kitchen that smells like bits of old food, the luxury of buying $14 dollar cheese for nights of ramen and chef boyardee, a 9th floor apartment with an elevator for a fourth floor walkup with stairs held together by random two by fours, subway rides for trips around town on a big yellow school bus with no shocks, a sense of profound dissatisfied security for abject yet hopeful terror, and a perfectly poised man for a wonderful woman whose occasional lack of grace makes me love her all the more.

just to be clear, on september 21, 2006 - three years ago - i had no intention of going bald, losing my breasts, facing death, moving to baltimore, starting a phd, leaving my marriage, or owning up to my sexuality.  so what the fuck happened? 

i am torn between this being about cancer - like TIME TO LIVE YOUR TRUE HAPPY LIFE - or me figuring out how to do economic evaluation relatively well and being like "oh shit, if i can do math, i can do anything?"  which was honestly not a comforting thought.  the responsibility that comes with the knowledge that you are capable of doing smart and challenging things can feel like a curse.  i did not eat for a while.  i drank many bottles of wine and smoked a million cigarettes until i could not speak or walk.  because leaving was not the hardest part.  it was realizing that i had to. 

i think i have always thought of myself as a very selfish and self-absorbed person.  however, going through this process has made me realize that i've been pushing my needs away for many years in order to meet others' expectations.  and the part of this that kills me the most is not the empty bank account or - once again - not having children (it's pretty brutal to have to go through this process twice by 31;  all the more brutal to know this time it's self imposed), but letting everyone down.  i think about all our wedding guests shaking their heads in disdain, like "we knew katie couldn't do it."  i can pretty much do anything.  i couldn't do this.  it is my biggest FAIL.  and i'm bringing jay with me on this one. 

hard things: i am tired of them.  

small successes

i went topless at the mandalay bay pool.
in front of hundreds of horny drunk people.
and i got hit on.

cancer, chemo, surgery, break-ups, moving, deaths

johns hopkins can now be credited with subjecting me to the most challenging week of my life. 

my greatest insecurity and the only thing i actually covet

i can't believe i just realized this. 

it's fun to be pretty - and on occasion, i am.  it's also fun to eat nachos and wings and beer and popems and jalapaneo poppers, and wake up the next day and drink four cokes with regularity and still be able to pour yourself into a tiny wedding dress, five years later. i can type fast, and i speak well in public, i'm good at small talk: i am particularly good person to have at parties.  my house is sort of clean.  i am honest but not in a bad way.  i am also good at remembering lots of detail.

i want math. 

i dream of chemo

last night i dreamt that dr. man wanted me to do four more rounds of taxol.  this was fine with me, considering my last chemo dream, over a year ago, was about being paid $35,000 to do one more round of AC, which i absolutely could not do.  taxol, though, is easy in comparison, so i had dr. man send me over the bag.  i was at my parents' house, and i knew i had to have breakfast and i figured i would do the taxol at the kitchen table while i ate, but my parents didn't have an IV pole, so i started looking around the house for some way to hold the bag over my head.  i then realized that i had gotten my port out and therefore needed an IV, which my mother offered to do for me.  even in my dreams i know that my mother is not qualified to find a vein with a needle, so i refused her offer and went upstairs to my bedroom.  i looked in my mirror and i was bald and skinny, but it didn't make me feel sad or weird or anything.  it just looked like me. 

always blow dry

any curl in my hair feels like chemo curl in my hands.

my funeral plans

i forgot how great they were:

cashing out my entire 401k and all my savings, renting this 20k a night castle in palm springs that oprah sometimes throws parties at, hiring caterers and bartenders for a three day weekend. on the six month anniversary of my death a select group of 25 people will receive special lithographed invitations in the mail with a mix cd of all my favorite songs. two months later, after reflecting on my death over my mix cd, everyone will converge in palm springs for an insane bacchanalia with tons of liquor and blow and naked people and craziness. everyone will be sad that i'm gone, but party extra hard in my honor. there will be a short ceremony during which some animation by my favorite band, mew, will play on a screen (because when i am dying, i will call mew and they will let me have it because they'll feel sad for me, okay?) and then when the seven minute song is over, everyone will go extra crazy and drink and eat everything in the house. no tears. just wreck the shit out of the castle.

here's to feeling like being dead.  best party ever.

i have absolutely nothing to say

tomorrow i'm getting what will be, perhaps, my gayest haircut ever, and i could not be more excited.

then i will go back to school and sit in an auditorium with hundreds of brilliant 23 year olds, and think - just for that hour - that i understand biostatistics.  i'll walk back down to the subway with my headphones on, making a mental mix tape.  but then i'll be home again, witnessing the mess of journal articles and dead highlighters and empty beer bottles and piles of clean laundry and hop right back on pubmed to search for studies that don't exist so i can start reading them and realize i need to reference like one thousand older studies but they're all from 1957 and dinosaur journals that are only in print.  i don't even have a library card.

yesterday for one second i thought "i'm in love with pubmed."  finding the right paper is like kissing someone you always wanted to kiss.  and this is how i know i probably, sadly, belong here. 

sometimes i forget

how much i hate this motherfucking disease. 

not tonight.

please don't ever forget, amidst the pink ribbons and the stupid avon breast cancer walk commercials and the pink m&m's and the goddamn bumper stickers, that this disease is killing people; ruining lives.

motherless children, partnerless partners, friends with holes in their hearts.

i will never stop hating this.

that one time i turned 30

today i turned 30.

i also hit my head on the wall right when i woke up, almost dropped my ipod into the subway well, and blew a massive snot bubble out of my nose when i couldn't feel my face in the freezing cold outside.  i am out of soap so i didn't wash my feet.  i've been wearing the same tights for three days.  i spent all last weekend furtively using jay's toothbrush.  which is all to say: so far 30 is not a whole hell of a lot different from 29 or 18 or 7.  i am just much much prettier.

a few things about this birthday:

it really is true that you never know how the fuck your life is going to end up.  walking to school today across dirty snow in baltimore to attend a class on managed care and economic evaluation i thought to myself "????"  then i remembered about the cancer, which is basically the reason i was wrapped in wool standing in the freezing wind at 8am on a baltimore street corner, and i wasn't even that angry anymore.  i tried to remember myself bald and sad and i tried to think about seeing my chest for the first time and all i could think was oh.  that was a strange time.  which, to look back on the days of rocking back and forth on the bathroom floor sobbing about wanting to live to see this birthday, made me feel very accomplished. 

the other thing about this birthday, which was also true at 27, a time when i enjoyed afternoons of planning my funeral, is that these 30 years have been quite badass.  soccer practice, first kiss in the long grass at sunset, taking acid at church camp, having crush after crush after crush break my heart, taking apart computers to turn them into coffee tables, living with my best friends in pittsburgh right next door to our other best boy friends who pretended to hate us but then made out with us anyway, moving to LA and drinking miller light in a folding chair with no lamp and watching a 9 inch black and white tv until i fell asleep on an army cot, owning the gaslite with a girl that i loved, crying the whole way up the 5 when i had to leave her, marrying someone who lets me be me and then running up an absurd bar bill, nights at the bear's sitting in wet office furniture watching stabbings and gun deals, a twelve bottle of wine night in manhattan, the shine and sleepwalking and getting cancer and then getting better and fourth of july and palm springs and the steelers and the best part is i could go on. 

the final thing i will say is that i absolutely have the best friends in the universe.  trite?  maybe at first blush, but when i say "best" i don't mean that they are even remotely nice to me.  they are just the best people.  perfect people.  people who will actually wait for the "talking wig" to speak in a circle (except for colin), people who were genius enough to even think of something as retarded as the "talking wig" in the first place, people who send a golfing owl dressed in breast cancer gear to me in the mail, people who deign to BUY a golfing owl, people who get into fights with the floor, people who buy tons of clothes but then still only wear the same bob seger t-shirt every day, people who buy mylar balloons for every occassion, people who use bathrobes as doorstops and have the best parking space parties, people who are fucking genius funny, genius smart, and give me horrible gay porn for my birthday.  people who laughed at my cancer and poured tecate on my mastectomy scars and tried to take shits in huge trashboxes on the beach.  people who know the meaning of F YA.

people who love AMERICA.

tumor found!

my tumor, after what was apparently a whirl-wind trek around the continental united states, has surprisingly re-surfaced in baltimore!  how do i know this?  oh, because johns hopkins sent me an $80 bill for having to touch it.  did they call me to tell me that a critical piece of my medical files had been located, after i had left many a teary message with them?  no, just the bill.  does the bill say why i need to pay $80 for them to accept a fedex package?  no, just "REF LAB/WANG MD, BRANT."  this "wang md brant" better be treating my tumor like family for 80 bucks.

now what i've learned about johns hopkins medicine since i arrived here is that you pretty much do not want to accept any sort of care from them unless you are near certain death and have no other options. "but katie!" you say, "is johns hopkins not one of the premier medical institutions in the world?"  i have no answer to that.  all i can tell you is that for my port to be removed - a procedure that is generally done under light local anesthesia in a surgeon's office and takes about an hour - i was stripped naked, given a pregnancy test, wheeled out on a gurney, x-rayed with no reproductive shield (direct quote: "anybody who wants to save their ovaries get out of the room right now!"  where was i?  laying uncovered on a slab of metal.  apparently the cancer patient's ovaries are not worth saving.), told that nobody at hopkins had "ever seen a port incision like mine before and therefore did not know how to get it out," asked if it would be okay if they gave me "a new incision across my chest?" (answer: no), only mildly IV sedated while six different people tried to pull the port out, which took so long that my local anesthesia wore off and i woke up screaming "STOP!" at which point the nurse asked the anesthesiologist if i was still sedated, and as he said "yes" i screamed "no?"  four and a half hours later, covered in blood and surgical glue, with a massive yellowing bruise across my chest, and what is sure to be a thousand dollar bill for what should have cost about $100 - i was no longer convinced that johns hopkins was a "premier medical institution."

that said, if you are ever involved in any sort of gang warfare in east baltimore and need assistance for a gunshot wound, and you are bleeding so profusely that you cannot possibly travel two miles to mercy or university of maryland, i suppose hopkins is acceptable.

progress

home alone drinking cape codders listening to sad songs on itunes in the dark.

not a tear.

fucking finally.

two down

two years ago today i was diagnosed with cancer. 

the first year is about confronting your own death.  the second year, from what i can tell, is about figuring out how to be alive.  this has proved to be, for me, a significantly bigger struggle than i had anticipated.  which is why, at year two, i have no pearls of wisdom.  the "get through this by whatever means you can" line of advice ceases to apply, as you realize that thrashing your way messily through the foreseeable future is not a viable option.  you have to return to form, find a way to let go of some (not all) of the anger, and stop personalizing every sentence about cancer.  this is the new normal - that elusive post-cancer state that nobody can ever figure out.  it's the transition from collective freak-out to "nobody cares" - your cancer is old news.  shit, it's even old news to me. but passe or not, i still have too much knowledge, know too many dead people, have been poked and prodded and poisoned and cut apart, and now - ultimately - put back together.  sort of like a quilt of skin pieces and thousands of distinct vignettes of human trauma.

a year ago i might have claimed that cancer was the best thing that ever happened to me - the clarity!  the wisdom!  i'm not sure i would go that far today.  it is, however, the most important thing that ever happened to me, and good or bad as it may be, importance has independent merit.

all of that philosophizing aside, i am indebted to the universe for letting me make it to this point.  i also know that there is no reason, cosmic or otherwise, that i have hit this milestone with so little to report.  there are too many people who never make it to their "new normal," and it is those people who have not only taught me everything about dying, but everything about living, too. 

three days left in october equals 72 hours of bitching

this morning the today show (full disclosure: i love the today show) they highlighted an organization called Be Bright Pink that is focused on empowering young women who are at high-risk for breast and ovarian cancer based on BRCA testing or family history.  as you can probably predict, this makes me mad for absolutely no reason.  i guess it's the whole "pre-vivor" thing where very young high-risk women - in the total absence of cancer - live like they already have cancer.  and it's difficult for me not to believe that at least a few of these women sort of want breast cancer - the sympathy, the cachet, the commendation.  so they turn their whole lives into fighting cancer in advance, which i can only imagine feels pretty retarded.  oh, maybe because it is pretty retarded.

you know, i am really trying to be less mad about a lot of things, so when i perused the forums on this website and found women who had undergone prophylactic bilateral mastectomy complaining about their cosmetic outcomes (yeah, no fucking shit) i was sort of like hm, move on.  but just as i was about to navigate away from the website forever, i read something on the front page that made my blood boil:

"Each and every one of the Bright Pink girls are brilliant, bold and beautiful. "

i'm sorry, but what the fuck.  because when i think about the "Be Bright Pink" women's ostensible counterparts, the actual survivors over at YSC, i don't think all the same words apply.  on the whole we are bald (maybe you have an afro, if you're lucky), sick, neutropenic, neuropathied, lymphedemaed, hurt, angry, struggling with clinical depression, fighting PTSD, dealing with destroyed marriages, missing friends, and watching each other die. 

must be nice to "be bright pink."  shit.

jawlee for no reason

you can dress me up

you can not take me out.

what the fuck am i doing in this program?  i can do the work, it's just work.  spend 90% of your free time at a dimly-lit kitchen table playing with numbers and you've got it.  be nice to faculty, make some asinine ass-kissing comment in class once a week, and you're good.  it's really not that fucking hard.  but this "giving a shit" part: i struggle.

i care about what i care about - cancer - and i really do not care about anything else.  i don't care about comparative health systems.  i don't care about sustainable planning.  i don't care about obama's universal health care plan.  i don't care about bisphenol-a.  i literally care about these topics so little that i can't even be manipulated with free food to listen to some asshole talk about them.  in fact, i will literally PAY to not have to listen and eat five-dollar mercury-filled tuna sandwiches by myself.  i must hate public health.  what am i doing here.

i guess the only way i could describe my present experience is that it's like i went back in time to 10th grade and decided to be an entirely different person: played in band, brown-nosed, dreamt of ivies, joined clubs, life-guarded. 

what i actually did in 10th grade: learned how to use thick black eyeliner, smoked cigarettes, ate acid, blew off class, slept a lot, lost my virginity.

liveblogging from the cancer center

what a fucking genius idea to have wireless.  i can't even imagine how much more pleasurable chemo would have been had i not been forced to read 1,000 new yorkers.  i would be less smart now, i guess.  i would know less about the history of the mustard seed or ballanchine choreography.  perhaps i could have done without both of those things had i been able to partake of some lolcats while contemplating suicide from the chemo chair. 

holy shit people are ghetto at hopkins.  a toothless tattooed dude with a wifebeater and super big gulp just accompanied his preteen daughter into the exam room.  she looks like she has some sort of osteosarcoma.  she can't walk.  she's so pretty.  i hate this place.

maybe i'm not sick enough to be here.  maybe i'm NOT SICK AT ALL.  i mean, am i really?  is it worth two hours of dr. wolff's time to entertain my wild environmental toxin fantasies and to help a super well-educated wealthy insured stage 1 semi-white girl prevent some as yet theoretical recurrence? 

the spectrum of pain is so unbelieveable.  this morning people balked at the fact i have a mediport.  "how weird and disgusting and implicit of scary shit" they thought.  now i am here and bald people in wheelchairs hooked up to oxygen are screaming for fentanyl.