8/4/26 - 8/9/26: Using gouache to paint a Teletubbies character is not something I thought I'd ever do in this lifetime.

8/4/26 

Bullet points:

• I should be living in a world where cancer isn’t real.

• Some might say I should be mad at him but I’m not. Never was.

• I should be terrified 24/7 right now but some days I’m weirdly calm. Maybe it’s just part of the survival mode I’m in. I don’t want to be in survival mode, though anymore.

• 'Death on the Precipice?' would be the title of my book right now. Similar to 'Death on the Nile' just with a little less Nile and a lot more precipice. I’d like to jump into a different book with a happier, hopeful title such as 'Death NOT on the Precipice!'.

• Whip cream is a lovely go-to if you're in the midst of an "I'm eating my feelings now" kind of moment. Just standing in the dark kitchen at 3 A.M., gluttonously spraying whip cream into my mouth, the sliver of refrigerator light highlighting my deadened eyes and I give up posture.

 

 

I feel floaty. I feel thrown into something I can’t handle but am handling nonetheless. I feel transported into absolute chaos each and every day. It’s unclear how anyone could handle this. I'm starting to think it isn’t handle-able. I must partially black out or something when things get to be too much, but go through the motions nonetheless, looking probablytotally fine on the outside (though I haven’t been looking at mirrors much). My brain feels different. Constant survival mode must physically change it.

It started again recently. The insane stress of counting calories for my mom, keeping desperate track of everything she eats. It’s my hell. This week feels extra intense. Her treatments keep getting postponed because she’s not eating enough. Appetite is lost and nausea is gained during immunotherapy and anti-nausea meds are your only saving grace. We finally are on a better track and are in the 1,500-2,000 range of calories. The more we postpone the treatments the more chance the cancer has to spread. So no more postponement can happen.

How will I ever adjust to a non-caregiving life without cancer and death the stars of the show? The freedom of it. I dream about it a lot. I’m absolutely desperate for it at this point. Just drooling for it. It’s the hungriest I’ve ever been for anything. The kind of basic freedom that health gives you is beyond beautiful. To put it in bumper sticker terms: Health is a glimmering gift and illness is a treacherous trap.

8/5/26

When that man came into my life last year it reminded me about the expansiveness of happiness, and the exciting possibilities of the kind of life I want and the people I want in it. I definitely wanted him in it. He pulled me out of the trap of cancer I’d been stuck in for two years at that point, and he showed me the beauty in the kind of meaningful connection that feels electric and makes one feel like anything is possible. It was quite a feeling to get to experience in the midst of everything. I was me again for a moment with him. It felt like he saw me. It’s why I can’t be mad at him.

I miss him. I wonder about him. 

As I help my mom do things most people take for granted (like walk from a bed to a chair, for example), I say to her “I got you”. I do.

Since I can’t go out to swim, or go to the clay studio, or Zumba, or go walk in the redwoods to clear my head, or meet folks at the craft club that meets once a month, or go to an event at the library to learn to fix my bike, or date, or make much art, or hang out with new friends, or do any of the things that make me feel like a normal human, I have to make due while I’m hunkered down here during immunotherapy with my mom. I have to find little ways to stay sane. I think mini zines might become a new part of my sanity regimen.

Food is everything. Food is my obsession. Not for myself but for my mom to be getting enough of it. Food is what stands between her beating cancer and not beating it. Food weighs so heavy. Food stresses me out. Counting calories is my hell. So many treatments for cancer, including the immunotherapy my mom is currently on, make eating difficult. A really good anti-nausea med makes it slightly easier to get to the necessary amount of calories. Cancer is an evil nightmare that is monstrously elated when it can turn the joys of life, like food, into a torturous ordeal.

8/6/26

Just saw a skateboarder with a t-shirt that says amazing grace, which is a handy thing to possess when you're a skater. In this particular case, it was an aspirational slogan. For me, as well. My shirt would say amazing clumsiness. Absurdly buffoonish. 

What does it say about me that if I had only one song I could listen to forevermore that it would be Amber by 311? That I’m an utter unrecoverable dorkus?

Eating an Oreo McFlurry gracefully while driving safely is a skill worth putting on your resume.

8/7/26

The chances of my mom dying from this rare form of cancer is quite high. Technically they have been this whole time.

The immunotherapy drugs that she started recently have a track record of successfully killing the kind of cancer she has. We’re lucky to be on this treatment. But they also make eating quite difficult, and yet to keep taking them you have to eat enough. And it’s been hard to eat enough, and the second treatment has already been postponed two weeks now. The last few days were decent but only because of 800 calorie McDonald’s fries and 200 calorie Cokes. Today was not a good day, though. And I kindofsortof lost it and I let the feeling I try my very hardest to avoid  sink into me. And I couldn’t stop crying. I drove to my friends birthday get-together, parked, sat there in the car and couldn’t stop crying, then drove away. I was able to finish making their birthday presents, though and wrap them. One of the presents for them is a painting that includes the Teletubbies character Tinky-Winky. Using gouache to paint a Teletubbies character is not something I thought I'd ever do in this lifetime.

I can’t seem to be able to stop crying. She can’t die.

8/8/26

What it means to hold the weight of someone:

It means love, but it’s also complicated and it can also mean a muddled-up mixture of exhaustion and emptiness to the point where you don’t know who you are anymore.

Right when I thought maybe we were exiting cancer and entering remission with the trial she was on in San Francisco, we’re now back to things being bad. The amount and velocity with which I sink into the deepest depression during all of this is impressive. 

The good news is that I made beef stew tonight and have started working on watercolor drawings in my isolation. I’m ever so cleverly calling them the isolation watercolors. I mean, I might as well get into watercolors at this point. Why the fuck not?

8/9/26

I love the things that have simple solutions: If you spill something, wipe it up.

 

I’m constantly reminded of the nightmare I had as a kid where I was being chased by a multi-colored figure in this completely grey, cemetary-like landscape. I had this incredibly frightening dream in the yellow house in Maine we lived in for a year when I was a kid, and it has never left me. There was a lion in it, too. It's as clear in my memory as that first night when I woke up from having it, in a cold sweat. 

More and more during this soul-sucking/heart-wrenching time of deathly disease, I feel like I’m living the real life interpretation of this nightmare I had when I was six years old. Running from something that feels impossible to outmaneuver.