The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,100

able to remove two organs, one of which was grossly enlarged, through those tiny holes. In case you are wondering how exactly that was possible, the surgeon chopped them up. And to prevent cancer from spreading everywhere (which is what would have happened if she had cut them where they lay), she detached the ovaries, lifted them into a bag she had inserted under my skin, performed all the chopping inside that bag, and then sucked the entire bag out through one of the three tiny holes. Medical science is simply amazing.

I continue to be baffled by how either the scans missed this massive growth in my left ovary all this time or the cancer managed to grow to the point of detection in the span of six weeks, which was the period between my last sets of abdominal MRIs. The doctors can’t answer that question, either. Really reassuring…My oncologist is less inclined to believe that the cancer grew that rapidly and so is thinking that the scans missed it. And obviously, the cancer in the ovaries was resistant to months and months of treatment. Also very reassuring…This time I am really being facetious.

I restarted treatment ten days after the surgery. The three treatments I’ve had since the surgery have been uneventful. I have been experiencing pain in my hips and knees. I cannot determine if the pain is bone- or muscle-related. Perhaps it’s attributable to the sudden loss of all the estrogen that was once produced by my ovaries. Perhaps it is due to weight gain from the steroids and my failure to go to the gym for months and months. Or perhaps I can blame it on all the hours I spend on my feet now taking the dog out in my efforts to house-train him.

The five weeks after the surgery found me pretty much MIA from social media, and to a lesser degree, my friends and family. Unlike prior periods of reclusiveness, this one was not because I was in some dark cancer-induced malaise. For the last nearly three years, I have always chosen to confront my disease head-on, to live it, embrace it, forcing myself to walk through the fires and feel the pain, in the belief that I would emerge from the other side stronger and wiser. But not this time. Running and hiding was what I wanted. It was what I needed as part of some kind of mental and emotional recuperation.

My little bichon frise puppy, Chipper (named after the Atlanta Braves player Chipper Jones—Chipper came from Atlanta and Josh is a fan of the Braves), facilitated that objective. Two days after my first postsurgical treatment, as I was crashing from the steroidal high, Josh, the girls, and I drove to the airport, searching for an obscure building in the bowels of La Guardia, to which little Chipper was brought. He was adorable, all white fluff with dark black eyes and velvety, floppy ears. And I was terrified as I clutched his crate in the passenger seat, wondering how I was going to have the energy to take care of yet another living thing, and a living thing that was even more foreign to me than a newborn baby had once been, no less. He came home and almost immediately pooped on our wood floor as I lunged to place a wee-wee pad under his butt; I wasn’t fast enough. That night he cried incessantly, waking me up every hour. I would take him out of his crate, he would suddenly run from me (a sure sign that he was about to do his business), I would run after him with a wee-wee pad, he would pee or poop not on the wee-wee pad. I would clean up the mess and put him back in his crate, and then the cycle would repeat an hour or two later, and on and on this seemed to go over the next few days. I was exhausted thanks to the sleep deprivation and the treatment, on the verge of hysterical tears, convinced that I had made a serious error in judgment by getting this dog and wondering if the breeder would take him back if I begged.

House training was made much more difficult by the fact that we live in an apartment building and by the vet’s directive that I not take Chipper outside (or that at least I prevent his paws from touching the ground) because he wasn’t fully vaccinated yet, and it would