www.bclist.org <\/a>). 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.<\/p>\nAfter 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=33"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=33"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=33"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/longbeachit.com\/catia\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=33"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}