The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,95

flew to Los Angeles sans husband and children to join Cousin N in a little adventure of our own, during which we saw and came within five feet of meeting Oprah. I’ve loved Oprah since I was a kid, watching her show while I did my homework. I posted pictures of me smiling and having fun and living large.

That’s what I’m supposed to do, right? Live as large as I can to show myself and the whole world and the cancer itself (as if it were some sentient being) that it cannot and will never defeat me. Bullshit! I call bullshit on myself and everyone else who constructs those façades.

Those pictures only told half-truths, and in that way I was lying; I was being disingenuous. Beneath the sometimes strained smiles and laughter lay the darkness and the ugliness that had come to the forefront of my mind again. Don’t misunderstand me—we had a wonderful time in Sicily. It was the first time that I took possession of this family I had created. Until Sicily, I never felt that Mia and Isabelle were truly my children or that we, with Josh, were a family in our own right. My family was the family into which I was born, of course, not these two little people who had their own personalities that I was still trying to understand. And Josh—well, he was my husband, my lover, my best friend, my partner, but not my “family.” It was sometime during the many hours we spent in our rented Mercedes station wagon, driving 1300 kilometers around the not-so-small island over eleven days, as we played verbal games, like “I Spy” and “What would you rather have?” (as in “Would you rather have apples or oranges?” “Would you rather live in the city or in the country?”), that I realized that those moments were reminiscent of my own memories with my parents, siblings, and me making long road trips to San Francisco and Las Vegas when I was a child. And weren’t these shared memories, together with our joined bloodlines, the heart of what it means to be a family?

And then I wondered about how many more family vacations we would be able to take, how many more crazy adventures we would have, how many more precious memories we would be able to make. And as I answered those questions on the basis of my fears, I could feel the sadness and the bitterness and jealousy mounting and then the pressure to make as many great memories as I could on this vacation, because this vacation might very well be the only vacation with me that Mia and Isabelle would ever remember. Therefore, I couldn’t be sad, and I had to push all the cancer stuff out of my mind. But the reality is you can’t ever push the cancer stuff out of your mind, not when you live with metastatic disease, and the harder you try the more present it becomes. Josh felt the same pressures. So we would fight and then cry. The pictures don’t tell that part of the story.

We returned to New York on a Saturday. First thing Monday I had another abdominal and pelvic MRI and chest CT. I had been off treatment while I was on vacation, so I expected the scans to show growth. My lung nodules had grown one to two millimeters in the six weeks since my last scans. But more concerning, my left ovary was enlarged, which likely meant that cancer had spread to my ovaries. Dr. A.C. wanted me to see a gynecological oncologist, Dr. B. As soon as I knew about the enlarged ovary, I started to feel discomfort and pain in the area—the mind can be so powerful. I couldn’t get an appointment with Dr. B. for another two weeks. Completely unacceptable. I texted my oncologist, telling him about the growing pain, and asked him to help. He called her and told her she had to move up the appointment, and she did.

I did see Oprah and had fun with Cousin N, but mostly I worried and stressed and cried, playing out every conceivable scenario in my mind, convinced that disease had spread to my peritoneum, in which case I had only a few months left, that the cancer while I was off treatment was working its way up my spine and into my brain, that I would need Gamma Knife radiation, and how would I be able to write