1. On Wednesday, I had surgery. I was talking to Dan on the phone, somewhat surprised, somewhat realizing that this was more serious than I had thought. He asked me how I felt and I asked if he was referring to the pain or the fact that my trip to Italy would be delayed a couple more weeks. I don't remember my ultimate response as the anesthesia was still heavy and the morphine drip may have begun. I'm guessing I noted that I didn't like the tube that was up my left nostril, down my throat, and into my stomach. I may have been equally disappointed that my trip to Italy would be delayed yet another few weeks. I didn't understand cancer. And if I did, I didn't understand that I was it. Maybe some of it might have been in me. Maybe there were some complications, but now I was recovering and I was still me, otherwise healthy as always. Everyone was around me before anyone told me why. At around 11pm, my dad explained to me my situation, my cancer, but I don't think he put it that way. If he had said that I had been diagnosed with ovarian cancer, I would've known. Perhaps that would have changed everything. But there were so many technicalities. The technicalities barely sounded different from the technicalities I had heard when it was just a benign cyst, a routine, out-patient operation-all the terms that mean no worries, healthy, off to study abroad so soon. Maybe he did say cancer and I didn't hear it, or not in the terms that everyone else had. I was just me.

Dan compared my state to drunk driving. Wednesday, I had thought I was fine, definitely mentally, almost physically. Fine to think, to express, to be. Then Thursday I thought that I had not been fine on Wednesday but that, yes, I was fine today. And then Friday was the most different because I really was fine. Or maybe that day is today. I continually thought I was completely fine while initially foggy and gradually getting better. My mind and my body were out of my hands. I was a dependent, and not just to decrease my parents' tax burden. I was a dependent, recovering in the women's cancer ward. Hopefully recovering.

On Thursday, Jonathan was feeding me and I have never loved him more in my life. I told him what to do and he did it, like a professional brother, a caretaker, like I was his child or more, I guess, like I was his baby sister, truly the first baby to ever come into his life. He played with me. I think we regressed in age. I became seven and he became thirteen again. He treated my breathing machine like a toy. He brought me a stuffed diva dog with a hot pink patent leather hat and studded sunglasses that sings "What a feeling. Bein's believin'" until you're ready to throw it up against the wall for some calm and some sanity. Sort of like his high school days when he used to use his school bookstore account and ultimately my parents' money to buy me beanie babies because, well, I was his baby, and what didn't I deserve?

On Friday, Matt walked around the unit with me. I walked funny, different and uneasy. My belly was distended and my butt was small, still is. I was stiff, and my walk had turned from sexy to sick. I walked weakly and I felt skinny. I walked around with two IVs in my left arm and two hospital gowns, one forward and one backward, so that I wouldn't reveal myself to the other hospital zombies. I think I said twice to Matt that I felt like a cancer patient with all of my new equipment-my impersonal, sexless, garb. I felt like I was acting still, playing a part that wasn't and couldn't ever be me. I wonder if he laughed or cried inside recognizing that I was, in fact, a cancer patient, recognizing that I somehow hadn't recognized it yet.

I loved the nurses. I loved Sandy and I loved letting her bathe me. I surprised myself in my willingness to relish every thing that everyone did for me. Since the slight age of eight, I have refused all help that has in any way hinted at my lack of independence. And yet I pulled the cord in the shower when I was ready to be dried and dressed. I was ready for Sandy's warm, smiling, and utterly sincere face to help me back to a clean bed. I suddenly didn't care if my dad or my brother saw me half naked, or if the door was open when I went to pee. I wouldn't have cared if the interns had completely undressed me when they came in to check on my incision. I'm not sure when or why that instinct kicked in. Some incognizant part of me must have realized that I had no other choice and so I never thought to challenge my new dependence.

All of this time, I was fine, completely unemotional. I had physical discomforts and pains, of course, but no melt down, no discouragement, no doubts or bouts of depression. My hospital room would have been mistaken for a party or a lively living room were it not for its hospital bed, its hospital workers, and its hospital building. My family doesn't know calm or quiet or any form of holding back. Nothing was a lie because the cancer was out there, but I just didn't feel like cancer patients seem like they should feel. There was no talk of fatality and no awkward or painful visits from people who I cared little about. No ugly flower arrangements or cliche cards. I slept worse at night because there were fewer people around and so the hospital room and its use came into clearer focus. During the day, I enjoyed drifting in and out of sleep as my brothers and parents and sister-in-law talked about people, places, ideas. I vow not to have fewer than three children because I couldn't bear the quiet or the loneliness and I think that a bigger family means more fun on fun occasions and more fun on unfortunate ones, too. I felt like a little girl again, the listener always-sometimes at the dinner table and sometimes on the landing between the first and second floors when I should have been in bed.


2. My hair started falling out on Thursday morning and I chopped it all off with a pair of kitchen scissors today. Matt said it looks hot and I have to admit that I agree. I am crying but not out of desperation, outrage, or sheer cancer blues. Maybe this cancer brings out the best in me --- the kind of rashness, boldness, and true chicness that only a last resort, unwelcome kind of situation can. My hair is incredible. It seems to still like my head and it appears to fall on it kindly, even in the graceful, accidental sort of way that I like best. I love this fucked up excuse to be crazy. And yet I had no choice but to put the hair into a pony tail and amputate the poor pony's tail. Within two days my longer haired look would have shown even clearer signs of chemotherapy-induced thinning and by tomorrow morning's shower the shed strands would have both clogged the drain and strangled my ankles. I would not stand for another morning of long brown sections coming out on my fingers and dropping lifelessly to the shower floor. I would not go for the sick, balding, passive cancer look when I could preempt it with a cool, controlled, cutting aggression. So it's gone and I'm freed from the waiting. Freed until my treatment really balds me by the end of the week and I go act in response to it again-act in whatever relentlessly defiant way that I know how.

3. I woke up at 7am on my first post-chemo Monday, feeling nauseated and cancerous but trying to will my body to get ready for my first day of classes. I threw up and Mark called upstairs, offering up a trip down the street to borrow some pot from a neighbor. This is an eggs and sugar kind of borrowing street with kids on bikes and couples on runs and dogs on walks, but Mark scored me some pot. He dragged my 21-month old niece with him, and he surely felt a high of illicit activity, a flashback to the infrequent college days when he feigned rebelliousness over studiousness. And he now had the best excuse of all -- if his little sister could get an ounce of relief from a puff of the magic dragon, she could start her Yale semester, her 9 am Constitutional Law class with the acclaimed Akhil Amar. High, maybe, but in attendance nonetheless. I was high. I felt the glaze of chemo weakness mixed with some brotherly love.

My dad got on board. He'd pay for all the pot I needed and wanted and could make use of over the next four months. He wasn't okay with this new prescription, he was excited about it, practically high over it. The next day, he started bonding with my boyfriend over street prices and "doobies." His face lit up when he started recounting his debates with my mom over how much it costs to get high, how much they would provide for me.

Dan and Jess and Jolie visited from Texas the next weekend and in some kind of once-in-a-lifetime family pot-smoking bonding opportunity, Dan suggested just that. Dan, my parents, and I toked up in the backyard while my niece Jolie toted around the little ziplock drug bag, handing it around happily to the next smoker - be it aunt, or father, or grandparent. My mom nearly coughed up a lung but we kept her inhaling, or at least pretending to. Dan, my dad, and I took the hits smoothly, talked doobie, talked giddily about what we had come to, and relished this opportunity to make cancer rather badass. We returned to watching Charlie Gibson's interview of hockey mom Sarah Palin, rattled off insulting remarks about this country and what its people have in mind (if they have minds at all), and then munched on tasty garlic crackers.

I call my parents hippies behind their backs sometimes, but only to distance them from their conservative, uptight, and straight-laced counterparts. They aren't pot connoisseurs, and have never openly condoned the use of marijuana. If I had to guess, they would rather have seen me spend my high school weekends toking up a bit than engaging in the heavy-drinking house parties that I preferred, but they would never have found it appropriate to post a bulletin in the kitchen regarding their preferences. Either way, ours was not a home for free love. Liberal politics, yes, but not a liberal household. No boys upstairs, no drinks, no drugs, no free reign over my pre-adult life. Sex was had and not really prohibited, but not talked about and certainly not encouraged.

Now my parents are fine with the talk. I am twenty and I am one of them, one of my older brothers, one of the adult Oppenheimer clan. And I think that my parents' consensus on the No's of my teenagehood has gradually become more laissez-faire and to their credit, impressively appropriate and unassuming. They know I participate in sex, drugs, and alcohol. They trust, I think, that I use caution and moderation. And they believe that they have instilled in me the good sense to make my own decisions, or at least that they have little place or authority to try to instill that sense in me now.

Now I have a near pot craze on my hands. I got cancer and I got chemo and I got near gift baskets of street marijuana. Dime-bags, pieces, bowls, dutch-master rolling papers, blunts and joints, paraphernalia and advice. I now know that when my dad smokes up he calls everything a doobie, in a way that I would perfectly expect from my dad had I ever tried to imagine him hitting one before. And suddenly I'm nearly embarrassed by my lack of knowledge on the subject. I can't roll yet and I usually pass off the packing responsibilities to a friend. I don't know how much to break the shit up and I'm pretty indifferent to the quality of the green that I suck down.

4. I'm bald now and I have a new aesthetic. I ultimately chose scarf over wig, a statement of pride over one of concealment. I have four scarves on rotation, two from Urban Outfitters, none from cancer catalogs. I don't take fashion too seriously or pretentiously but I do take it as a hobby, and often use my body as a canvas for experimentation. I'd say that my look has gone from eclectic hipster prep to a bohemian conservative contrast, because the scarf adds a hippie component that I feel a need to balance out with fitted neutrals. I tie my scarves in messy buns at the nape of my neck, approximately 20 degrees off center to my left. I always wear big hoop earrings now-I think they give purpose and proportion to my head. The look is similar to one I saw Tyra Banks rock a few months back as host of America's Next Top Model. People stare, because my head is adorned with bright fabrics rather than flowing locks, because they think my style is funky and off, or because they suspect that I'm hairless and feel a sense of pity or discomfort. With this relatively new minority status, I have found it impossible to be self-conscious all of the time and when I become aware of myself on occasion, I simply smile and relish in my cancer secret. I may no longer appeal to the average college male subset, but the Mexicans who work at the burrito cart on the corner of York and Broadway now hit on me every time I frequent their stand. They insist on transacting in Spanish despite my English responses. Today I managed a "bien" to their "como estas?" and they seemed to appreciate the effort. I suspect I look more ethnic now, and in this other culture, my scarf gives off a hot vibe rather than an eccentric one. So I'll take what I can get.