The Tumor Trio -- Now

Jen and I are visiting Cynthia and Giovanni at their sweet, rambling home in Randolph, Vermont. She's coming to the end of her treatments for ovarian cancer and doing tremendously well.

It's been a bumpy road but corners have been turned and futures are looking a lot rosier.

WHEW!!!

This post is from back in August when she broke the big, fat, scary news to me.
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 My mother had lymphoma. Jen had breast cancer. My very good friend Cynthia was recently diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She announced this, via email, saying that we -- her, Jen and I -- are now The Tumor Trio. We’ll have to reconfigure our super hero shtick. Instead of NF2 Woman and Cancer Girl we’re The Tumor Trio. That sounds sorta like a World War II era Boogie Woogie group though.

Yeah, I can dig it.

Jen’s been talking with Cynthia about treatment options, types of chemo drugs and the whole what to expect when you’re expecting to lose all your hair deal.

Turns out, my mother who was molto squeamish when it came to ANY discussions about girl parts, totally dished with Jen about how it felt to have her pubes fall out.

This is the very same mother who, when I was a tender-ish thing of 13 and had my very first red sea tsunami, tossed a box of Kotex and a ‘belt’ through the bathroom door. This was the entirety of our ‘conversation’ about my becoming a woman. Judy Blume’s book Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret. had come out the year before, in 1970, but neither mother nor I knew about it. Too bad.

OK, to be fair, when I was utterly stuck as to how to configure the pad/belt thingie, she showed me -- quickly and with moues of distaste. To my teen WTF oogie faces she responded with ‘when I was your age, we  used rags. We had to wash them out each night and reuse them the next day’ etc., etc.

Yeah, thanks Muti. Gross.

So, back to Jen and my mother’s discussions about inadvertently vogueing the Sphynx look. Somewhere between 1971 and 2002, mia madre loosened up enough to at least giggle about our strange anatomy. Cool.

Cynthia, who researched the living hell out of all her treatment options, has just begun chemo. Will she don wigs a la Samantha Jones of Sex and the City? Will she go all biker babe chic as Jen did? Will she rock the Ellen Ripley look -- badass and tough? Or maybe Persis Khambatta -- gorgeous and stoic?

Stay tuned!