Two days after my first chemotherapy treatment, muscle fatigue has set in. I feel as though I’ve exercised strenuously and pulled every muscle in the body. The one thing my husband and I didn’t purchase for me was the powder that helps deal with that. Ah well, such is life in Chemo City. I asked friends to fill in for me on days like this. One such is Julie P., a woman I met when we worked for the same publishing house twenty-some years ago. Julie went on to work for the Los Angeles Times and Forbes Magazine. Today she lives and freelances in San Francisco, Calif.


I’m filling in for Juli while she’s having chemo treatments. I was touched that she would ask.

I have to confess, my reaction when I heard of Juli’s diagnosis was all too standard: shock that a friend—a contemporary—had cancer. After all if Juli, who had been healthy, took care of herself, and looked at least ten years younger than her actual age, could get cancer what about me? Compared to JC, I’m a slacker. Mine was a typical boomer reaction, both narcissistic and delusional. (How can we get sick? We’re not that old.)

Never mind that the Bay Area reports a higher than average rate of breast cancer, one that scientists still insist is mere coincidence. And that cancer runs in both my mother and father’s families. My paternal grandmother died of pancreatic cancer when she was only forty-seven. Her daughter, my aunt, received a clean bill of health at her annual physical only to discover a few months later that cancer cells in her cervix had spread to liver and would kill her before the age of fifty. And, six years ago I cared for my mother, a non-smoker, who was terminally ill with lung cancer. Her longtime doctor had said her coughing spells were due to asthma; by the time cancer was found she had only months to live.

So I have more than a passing acquaintance with cancer. I have seen the terror in the eyes of those who are diagnosed, how it devastates the body, and I have felt that strange mixture of relief and grief when a loved one dies of this ugly disease. I remember when a hospice doctor asked me if my mother had made peace with death. The man was young and earnest and I liked him. But his question made me angry. No, she hasn’t made peace with it, I told him. She wants to live and she thinks if she prays hard enough she will have a miracle and be spared. The young doctor backed away. I don’t know whether he was shocked by my answer or the ferocity with which it was delivered. He wanted my mother to have a tidy end. As her daughter and one of a clan of fierce women, I knew she would not go quietly.

So how do I explain that I had my first mammography this year at the age of fifty, even though my health insurance would have paid for screenings after forty? I rationalized that since no one in my family had been diagnosed with breast cancer, I was safe. I have since discovered that most women diagnosed with breast cancer have no family background of the disease. Juli who is more sensible than I when it comes to her health, caught the cancer in its earliest stage and her prognosis is good. I will cheer her on as she undergoes treatment and I will take better care of my own health. I will not let my dumb luck run out. I owe it to my husband, a kind and loving man, and my nine-year-old daughter who has yet to hear all the stories of our fierce women.