Beyond Awareness: Komen Westchester Metastatic Conference Keynote Address 2019

In November, I was honored to be the keynote speaker at Komen Westchester's Inaugural Metastatic Conference. The best of my speech is below, and the video of it can be seen here. The poet Anya Krugovoy Silver, who died in 2018 from metastatic breast cancer, wrote, in her poem Stage IV:  Suddenly, gloved hands empty …

The Blur of Illness

My days seem to go by in a strange blur these days. Often, I find myself not knowing what day of the week, or the month, it is. This isn't a cognitive defect, but the artificial ebb and flow created by ongoing illness, driven by medication schedules, changing treatment plans, symptoms, side effects, sleeping at …

2019: A Lengthy Recap

I don't have anything particularly wise or insightful to reflect on 2019. It was a year of waves irrepressibly pummeling our family - bad news following bad news. A year of absence, being torn from my life over and over, captive to the ever-changing treatments and side effects, each one worse than the last. And …

No News Isn’t Good News

Well, well, well. Look who's scraping away the cobwebs over here. Unfortunately, the title of this post probably gives away my essential update - so, no, I haven't been absent due to scan results so stupendous that I had no choice but to buy tickets to Europe and galavant my way across the continent, celebrating …

Brain Fog

I'm currently writing this post from my back porch - there is just enough sunshine dappling my chair to be warming and soothing, but not enough to feel harsh on my sensitive eyes. It's been nearly two weeks since my SRS brain radiation, and barely a month since the brain MRI that set all of …