lunhs cancer

Eight months ago today I was lying on the couch eating Trader Joe's fish sticks. Those days, I was so short of breath that sitting at the dinner table and eating was a lot of effort, so I took most of my meals on the couch. The phone rang, and I got the terrible news: the biopsy confirmed that I had cancer. Eight months. I am officially at the median survival time predicted by the (most likely outdated) statistics.  What better day than today to dust off Stephen Jay Gould's great essay, " The Median Isn't the Message ," writing that is often circulated among cancer patients, with good reason. He does a great job of explaining why he felt confident that he would outlive his cancer's median survival of eight months (and he did). He reminds himself, and us, that the median tells us 50% of the people with this disease will live longer than that point. The right tail of this graph can stretch out for quite a ways, and based on reports from several lung cancer patie...

I was at the grocery story the other day and caught sight of an acquaintance I hadn't seen for over a year. I started to walk across the store to say hello, when I froze. I realized that she had no idea about my diagnosis, and I would have to decide whether or not to jump into that minefield when she asked how I have been over the past year. So instead I walked the other way. Meeting new people is sometimes a bit awkward for me now, since I never know if or when I should drop the "I have cancer" bomb. I still have my hair, so there is no tell-tale chemo sign. Overall, there is really no external way to tell that I have anything wrong. Yet, lung cancer has become an important part of my identity. There is not a day that goes by where I do not think of it. I have become active in the lung cancer community, and I have made new friendships because of it. It has profoundly affected who I am and how I think about life. So, like it or not, it is part of me. I am not ashamed of h...

Jason and I adamantly believe in being honest with the kids. No matter how difficult or awkward the question, we always strive to answer in a straight-forward and age appropriate way. This includes all topics, from Santa Claus to where babies come from. (Side note - like most kids of his age, Zander has this fascinating ability to simultaneously believe in something and know that it is imaginary. He knows that Jason and I fill his Christmas stocking, but he also believes that Santa is real.) (Side side note - when I was pregnant with the girls, I prepared an explanation about where babies come from, complete with gardening analogies. Two-year-old Zander was totally disinterested.) So how do you tackle telling kids their mom has cancer? Mom, is Casper the Ghost real? No, he is a character in a story. We told them that I am sick, with a big sickness that requires some really big medicine. And sometimes that medicine makes me feel really tired and crummy. We told them that it is a sickne...