What Keeps Me Living
How not dying has made me stronger
What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
This axiom, found in Ecclesiastes, surfaced in my mind last New Year’s Eve as the final hours of 2018 bled slowly away. As I stared glumly into the bathroom mirror at yet another volcanic eruption studding my 51-year-old mug, echoes of my pimply-faced adolescence began ping-ponging around my brain. In a perfect world, zits wouldn’t occupy the same territory as hard-earned wrinkles — nor should one ever need reading glasses to properly inspect them.
I have my oncologist to thank for this pimpled absurdity. One year earlier, as 2018 rose unsteadily from the ashes of 2017, the stubborn beast of a cancer in my head reincarnated itself alongside the new year, thumbing its nose at all previous efforts to slay it. I wasn’t keen to risk another craniotomy after four mighty kicks at that can. I’m all for being open-minded, just preferably not via surgery. So, after lengthy discussions with my cancer specialists, I pinned my hopes on a novel drug, arming myself with the lotions and potions needed to keep the inevitable side effects at bay.
Wondrously, despite the affront to my dermatological vanity, the drug appears to be working. I’m still here, more than a dozen years after the…
