People like to tell me stories of their friends who’ve survived breast cancer. “She’s more beautiful than ever,” they’ll say. “Fit. Glowing skin. Gorgeous hair.”

I can understand the urge to remake oneself in the wake of this ravaging disease. I have the desire myself, though I’m not yet mid way through the treatments.

Senator John Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz, revealed last month that she is being treated for breast cancer. “Chemotherapy is serious,” she said. “It’s very painful. And it’s very destructive of people’s--most people’s--lives for a while, anyway.” How true that is.

There is nothing in the world to prepare a woman for the ugliness of breast cancer. First, there is the angry red eyebrow-like scar above the most personal of organs. There is the slit under the arm where the lymph nodes were removed. There’s the hair, coming out in tufts. Then there’s the body, weakened from surgeries and recoveries and the destruction of chemotherapy. Too depleted for any real exercise, the body grows flabbier by the day.

Food must be taken as the system needs nourishment. Yet, digestion can be painful and many foods leave the throat feeling sore.

There is the wider fallout as well. Family and friends grow weary of hearing the story. The writing, or whatever work one does, suffers. And the home, once well kept, could use a good scrubbing.

Yes, I understand the need to rebuild one’s body following the war with cancer. Though, at the moment, I’m too spent to do much about it.