CHERNOBYL HAPPY FACE

Really great things about chemo:

1. No matter how ditzy or forgetful you get, you can claim “chemo fog.” Legitimately, most of the time.

2. Cake. That your best friend brings when you whine, “I’m out of cake.”

3. Smoking. That you still really, really want to…but the smell alone would make you throw up.  (Subtitled: Cancer: the most successful smoking cessation plan in the world.)

4. Not shaving your legs. Or anything else.

5. Sleeping like a Neanderthal. A few hours here, a few hours there…in-between foraging for cake and reading at 4:00 a.m.

6. Steroids. An excellent experiment to determine what it would be like to be dangerously psychotic.

7. Tea. I used to hate tea. Two years ago, my friends, Mark & Audrey, gave me a tin of what they described as the best tea in the world – Kusmi Tea from Paris. “A Russian blend of China, Ceylon and India teas with scents of bergamot, orange and mandarin.”

Ahhhh. The tin (a beautiful treasure in itself) remained sealed until chemo – when my taste buds declared that coffee was a drink skimmed from stagnant tailing ponds. I now declare Kusmi Tea to be the crack cocaine of all teas.

8. Hats. Scarves. Turbans. Wigs. When you wear them, they no longer mess your hair up.

9. Feeling like you personify Chernobyl. Because when you have good days – by Goddess, you really appreciate them.

10. Old friends.

11. New friends.

12. Surprise friends.

13. Finding out that you are AMAZING at "Bejeweled." Practically a genius, in fact.

14. Having a sense of serious accomplishment when you do THREE loads of laundry AND do the dishes. ON THE SAME DAY! (Insert approving roar of crowd here.)

15. Realizing that there is a difference between chemical crazy and real crazy and remembering that eventually, you pee and sweat the chemicals out. And you might just outlive the chemo.