Anna's Book of Days

I read this piece yesterday by a therapist named Tim Lawrence, and I thought of all the people in my life who struggled to say or do something helpful to me after my diagnosis, or who said nothing because they didn't know what to say. It is about grief, and grief is exactly the emotion that I felt at that time. I grieved for my lost health, for my happy life, for everything that I knew I would have to give up to cancer. Grief is scary, and though I was disappointed I understood why some people stayed away or stayed silent. I had failed to reach out to those in grief before, out of fear of saying the wrong thing. But now I know the truth about grief, and it goes like this: Our culture treats grief like a problem to be solved or an illness to be healed. We’ve done everything we can to avoid, ignore, or transform grief. So that now, when you’re faced with tragedy, you usually find that you’re no longer surrounded by people — you’re surrounded by platitudes. So what do we offer instead...

18 down, 0 to go!!! We made it.

Two years ago this week, the owner of my company, Mark Benjamin, was killed when his plane veered off the runway into a hangar housing another plane at the Santa Monica airport. The plane that he hit had just been filled with fuel, and exploded immediately upon impact. Three others, including his son Luke, were also killed in the accident. I had worked for Mark's company for more than thirteen years at the time of his death, and he was involved in every detail of its operations, right down to selecting the tile in the restrooms and the type of coffee in the kitchen. Since I had started working full time in our office, about a year before, I saw Mark almost every day. He always said hello, asked me how I was, wanted to know what I was working on and how it was going. We spoke dozens if not hundreds of times. But after his death I realized how little I knew him, and how little he knew me. In his obituaries and eulogies, I saw a man who was much warmer and deeper than the man I ha...

17 down, 1 to go!!!

Dr. Hurvitz told us today that the results of our study will be published next June, and that she'll be able to share the preliminary results with us next January after the last trial patient (#444) has her surgery. If the Arm B (test) patients have equivalent or better outcomes than Arm A (control) patients, Roche will probably then submit to the FDA for approval of TDM-1 for early-stage patients. I will be so excited if this treatment becomes available to everyone - the amount of suffering that would be avoided blows my mind. 16 down, two to go!

One year ago today I was diagnosed with breast cancer. In that time I have had four surgeries, fifteen cycles of chemotherapy, 181 doses of tamoxifen, five biopsies, four mammograms, two PET scans, one MRI, six echocardiograms, and countless exams, ultrasounds, blood draws, and secondary medications. I have shed many tears and lost many hours of sleep. When I was first diagnosed, I couldn't believe that it had happened to me. Ridiculously, I kept thinking that I wasn't the kind of person who gets cancer. But the terrifying truth is that breast cancer can happen to anyone. It is the most common cancer in American women; about one in eight women in the U.S. will develop invasive breast cancer in her lifetime. An estimated 232,670 new cases of invasive breast cancer will be diagnosed this year. And breast cancer is the second-leading cause of cancer death in women, after lung cancer. The good news is that breast cancer survivorship has tripled over the last 60 years, and there...

The idea that creativity and suffering are inextricably linked - that creativity in fact demands suffering - is age-old and widespread. Aldous Huxley wrote in Antic Hay, "Can an artist do anything if he's happy? Would he ever want to do anything? What is art, after all, but a protest against the horrible inclemency of life?" Artists from El Greco to Gaugin to Marvin Gaye have echoed this thought, and the list of creative geniuses who have tortured themselves in one way or another goes on almost endlessly. I know exactly when I first grasped this concept. It was 1993, and a wonderful cello teacher named Milly took me and a friend to see the French movie Tous les matins du monde. It's about a famous viola da gamba player, Sainte Colombe, who shuts himself away from the world after his wife's death, and tragedy ensues. I am sure there was much about the movie that went over my 13-year-old head, but I do remember thinking as we left the theater that perhaps Saint...