Anna's Book of Days

This past Sunday marked two years since my last day of treatment. Two whole years! It's so long, but it's so short. I remember everything, but everything's a blur. Early in my treatment, my mother, a breast cancer survivor herself, promised me that the day would come when I would no longer spend every waking moment thinking about cancer. At the time, it was very hard to imagine that day. But she was right - I can go for weeks now without giving it a thought. Life does indeed move on, and the enormous mental, emotional, physical, and logistical space that my treatment took up has quickly refilled with my family, my career, and my interests. But October will always be my own personal Breast Cancer Awareness Month, even if it wasn't for the rest of the world. The change in the air that happens in LA this month, the chill in the mornings and the low slant of the setting sun in the evenings, will always bring back memories of the end of my treatment. I wept off and ...

For the first year after I finished treatment, I felt invincible: a conqueror, a warrior princess. I had come through chemo, surgery, more chemo, and hormonal therapy with fewer side effects, less pain, less downtime, and more energy than anyone around me had ever seen before. My psyche, my marriage, my family, and my career were all still strong - each impacted in different ways by the long slog through my cancer treatment, but fundamentally sound and perhaps even strengthened by adversity. Cancer gradually faded from my thoughts, and, I felt, from my life. But as much as we survivors might wish to be done with breast cancer, breast cancer is never done with us. (Olivia Newton John recently announced her recurrence, 25 years after her initial diagnosis.) Of the fifty or so breast cancer patients and survivors I now know, the statistical reality is that five or six are likely to have a recurrence sometime in the future. I could be one of them. It's hard even to write, but it...