Three days before Christmas I called my oncologist. Is it possible, I wanted to know, to reduce the intensity of chemotherapy? I described the symptoms following my first treatment: four days of bone pain, fatigue to the point of not being able to cross the street, and the two-day migraine that flattened me. The doctor said these were side effects of the neupogen shot I’d been given to raise my white blood cell count. On the next go-round, December 28, 2009, we’re going to try not giving me that shot. I hope it works.

I’m thinking, in particular, of the two-day migraine I experienced. At its worst, I realized I had no medicine in the house to treat a migraine and was too incapacitated to fetch it. I had a doctor at my HMO telephone the prescription into the pharmacy. My mother picked it up and delivered it to my bedside.

When my mother arrived that day, we both burst into tears. “Two days ago I was trying to have a day of normal activity,” I told her. “It’s so frustrating. One normal day lands me in bed with migraine.” She hugged me, then sat and chatted for a while about everyday things.

Others in my life have provided me with exceptional stability and good humor during my bout with breast cancer. But I cannot imagine going through it without my mother as my friend. Some years back, a dear friend of mine lost her own mother. “When that happens,” she said, “you’re never the same.”

The women on my mother’s side live into their nineties. My grandmother reached the age of ninety-one. My mother’s sister, my aunt Mary, is ninety-four. I hope my mother lives well into her nineties. I am, in fact, counting on it.