The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,85
side. He said he would, and that gives me great comfort.
Chris was the first true friend I lost to colon cancer. Yes, I’ve written about others, but they were more in the nature of virtual friends. I didn’t meet them for lunch. I didn’t visit them in their homes.
J was another friend I would see from time to time, most often in her Manhattan apartment, which spoke of a fruitful life. I never knew just how famous J was until I saw her obituary in The New York Times. You have to be someone relatively important to have your obituary written by a third party and published in The New York Times, no less. But J always downplayed her professional success—she was a renowned animator with forty years of prolific work behind her, work that has been displayed at MoMA and the Met for its innovative significance—and I had absolutely no idea. To each other, we were simply two women, two wives, two mothers, suffering from the same horrible disease. We met to discuss the pros and cons of HIPEC surgery. She was an extremely private person when it came to her cancer, and so I was perhaps the only person in the cancer community she befriended and spoke to on a somewhat regular basis, and one of the few friends she allowed into her clouded world. She gave my children two books she had written and illustrated and an app on the iPad to help them learn the alphabet. I was shocked by her death, for it happened too quickly for me. At our last meeting, just before the summer, she didn’t look like she was going to die so soon. In fact, I told her in an email that her desire to go into hospice seemed premature; she never replied. I would learn subsequently that she died two weeks later, at the end of June, with a disease progression that astounded even her doctors. I didn’t get a chance to say a proper goodbye, which I regret deeply.
I regret it because she was my friend, but I also regret it because although most normal people are scared to be around dying people, I find that other dying people are not scared. I am not scared. Because J just arrived at my ultimate destination. She was simply on an earlier train, is all. That proximity to death is a powerful draw to a dying person—to be near it, to commune with it, to give and take comfort from it.
Apart from the departure of friends, which can never be mastered, I feel that I have just about otherwise mastered the rhythms of this elaborate game of Clue known as Stage IV disease: You fall in and out of love with doctors. You may even be tempted to cheat on your oncologist, have flings with other major hospitals, only to go back home to your faithful oncologist with your tail between your legs. You will enthusiastically embrace different modalities, only to see them collapse. Different drug combinations or clinical trials will have you convinced that each of them is the one. It is not the one. You will spend time and money on alternative therapies, only to be alternately frustrated and really frustrated. You will, throughout, be a basket case, and you will scream and cry and then you will wipe your face and meet with plumbers and look at samples for the new master bedroom that you’re in charge of, then go have dinner with friends. Because life must be lived!
Nearly two months ago, after the surgeon in Germany told me laser surgery on my lungs was not possible, I made the decision, with the support of my oncologist, to start the drug Erbitux (generically known as the even harder to pronounce cetuximab). Erbitux is the drug for which Martha Stewart gave up a few months of her freedom. It is an option only for patients who do not have the KRAS mutation in their tumors, for in patients with that mutation, it seems to do more harm than good. So I suppose I am lucky to be KRAS wild (i.e., normal), since that mutation is actually quite common, affecting 40 to 60 percent of the colorectal cancer population. Erbitux comes with nasty side effects, including bad rashes and acne. However, because it is a targeted therapy, it tends to be gentle on the blood counts and platelets.