Catia Bitching Cancer

It’s the title of a comic book Bruce gave me for Christmas (visit the author’s site at www.miriamengelberg.com ). There is, as you might expect, nothing shallow about it. I devoured it in a couple of hours. It spoke to me like no other cancer book before or since. I laughed and cried and found myself in the main character more than I would ever imagine. And its author, I found out last night, died in October, from brain/bone metastases of a breast cancer diagnosed in 2000. She had a little boy, must be around Sandro’s age, maybe a little older. It was hard news to digest.

I have a whole collection of new friends. I call them my cancer friends. Most of them I actually never met in person. I found the first one when I wrote to a dissertation support e-list asking if any of them had any suggestions on completing the dissertation while undergoing cancer treatment. She wrote to me privately and we’ve been emailing since. Then there is a friend’s mother, who lives in Bangladesh. My friend emailed me when I told her of my diagnosis, desperately worried about her mother, whom she feared would not get adequate treatment in her country. Her fears are not unfounded, and the reasons for this situation have to do with the tremendous disparity between the obscenely rich north of the planet that like a parasite lives on the misery of the remaining two thirds (yes, it’s most of us, my friends! Guilt-tripping anybody?).

Two other cancer friends are actually friends of friends, one I personally met. I talked on the phone with the other. This last one suggested I join an online support group for cancer patients, survivors, and their friends and families which she belongs to (www.bclist.org ). These women and some men have been an incredible resource of personal support, information, laughter and inspiration. They often refer to the list as ‘the club no one wants to join’ or something of the sort. They are full of humor, in a way that it’s hard to believe, considering some of them have mets (cancer-patients’ lingo for metastases). The downside of belonging to a group like this is that death stares at you shamelessly, mercilessly and continuously right in the face. That’s sort of what happens when you have cancer anyway. Both comic books on cancer I got for Christmas acknowledge that and depict the main characters often conversing with the hooded and sickled sinister figure. But reading the monthly ‘in memoriam’ list and following each member’s journey through exams, old medications, new medications, side effects, tumor markers’ peaks and dips, cancer conferences, families, celebrations and anniversaries is a harrowing trip through the reality that there is no life but life with cancer for all of us, that cancer and the sickled figure are always lurking. That should be sort of obvious and part of everybody’s life, shouldn’t it? After all, who said that life is a terminal illness? But somehow we escape until we are faced with something like this. When cancer happens, there is no escape.

After I learned about the death of Miriam Engleberg, I figured that I wasn’t going to be able to sleep, despite the wee hour. Thank you California voters for passing prop 215! I went out and hit a couple of perfectly legal puffs. Then put my sorry old cancerous self to bed.

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