About 30% of people diagnosed with breast cancer at any stage will develop distal metastasis. I am one.
Sometimes I just can’t tell the difference between being in touch with my feelings and expressing them appropriately – or playing the Stage IV card and milking it for all it’s worth. I’m having a rotten week or so and you, Internet, are the lucky puppy who gets to hear...
Once upon a time there was a little middle-aged lady who didn’t feel well. She had an uninvited guest that had come to stay. The guest stayed and stayed and just wouldn’t leave. Sometimes the guest stayed quietly in a back room, so quietly that she barely remembered it was...
On Sunday I fell victim to a drive-by attack of the weepies. I had no idea what set me off, but boom! there I was – was just sitting and crying. There was little content to the tears; I just felt sad and desolate. Disconsolate. I wasn’t anxious. I just...
This poem by Ben Downing appeared in the July/August 2012 print edition of The Atlantic. By means of simple couplets and just four uncomplicated sentences, it communicates a home truth: “[umbrage] makes us less”. Umbrage Taken, given: friendships riven. From shadow or shade, it instantly puts paid to hard-won clarities and causes us...
