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When you get an illness like cancer, you can do all kinds of things to prepare yourself for what is about to happen to you, both physically and emotionally. Preparing, having some information as you begin working with your doctors, will help you know what questions to ask them, and will give you some sense of control at a time when so much of your life will feel like a runaway train. So educating and preparing yourself is a good thing. You can research it, being cautious about going to reputable sites with a strong medical track record. It's the Internet, people, and there are a lot of trolls and kooks out there with too much time on their hands. And you don't want some twisted 18-yr-old giving you advice about treatment under the handle Dr. FeelBetter(Suckers) on www.DrsRUs.com. Ask around. Your friends or your friends' friends may have already gone through it. While every patient's experience will be unique to them, it can help to learn from someone who has lived it. You may not feel up to a full exercise routine while you're in treatment, but if you're going to be lying in bed a lot, you may...
Tonight will be the final episode of Mad Men. But this is what "advertising" once looked like in France. There aren't many of these stone wall billboards left in Paris these days, and I love those rare moments when I spot one.
First, I want to wish my readers who are mothers a very happy Mother's Day. I think you are heroic, because parenting is so damn hard even in the best of circumstances. And I hope you have someone who is making you feel special today about being a mother. But there's another side of me that kind of hates this holiday. Yes, you heard me: hate it. To me, Mother's Day is one of those Hallmark/FTD holidays, just like Valentine's Day, that are designed to point out that there are haves and have nots in the world when it comes to love and relationships. On Valentine's Day, if you're single, you're not going to get any flowers or teddy bears or heart-shaped boxes of chocolate. If you're in a relationship with a jerk, you also won't be getting any of that swag. So when everyone around you is ooo-ing and ahh-ing about their dozen long-stemmed American Beauty Roses, you get to feel like shit. Well, it's the same for some of us on Mother's Day. Not all of us got to become mothers. For some of us, that was a choice. For others, its just how it worked out for...
The past month hasn't been easy. In fact, it's been mostly lousy. My family vacation in the south, that I had imagined being so wonderful and restful and full of days resting on uncrowded sandy beaches with azure blue waters before me and all the sunshine I could want, turned into me having some sort of new pain in my right side and my appetite tapering off (so much for all the Pastis I had planned to drink) as I spent more and more time in bed because it was the only place I felt even a little comfortable. Phone consultations with my GP in Paris were only partially helpful, as without seeing me in person, there was not much he could do in the way of diagnosing or treating what might be wrong. Here I was, taking a welcome break from the chemo where I should have had more energy, and yet I felt worse where I had expected to feel better. I wanted to be out with Georges and our boy, and all I could manage was to send them out to enjoy each day and smile when they came back to tell me about it -- it...
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