Week 4
It’s booked. Friday, July 26, is operation day – the day in which two surgeons work together: one to remove the tumour and all surrounding breast tissue; the other to put my breasts back together in a...
View ArticleWeeks 5, 6, 7, 8, 9
Today is a good day. I can write today. I was not able to write in weeks 5, 6, 7… I tried, but the result was so bleak, so utterly without hope that I had to call a halt to putting into words what I...
View ArticleWeeks 10, 11
What is a life worth? At which point are you allowed to say: Stop. I want to get off. (And thanks for all the fish!) Are you ever allowed to get off? Scotch that, we all know you are not. Killing...
View ArticleLosing my hair…
It’s a combination look that I now sport – Uncle Fester meets Sinead O’Connor meets Buddhist Monk meets Nazi collaborator accused meets butch lesbian meets Yul Brynner meets aggro skinhead… and so on...
View ArticleBETWEEN 2 & 3
So there I was, standing in my kitchen asking my housekeeper, Samkela, where the… erm, the thing…you know, the thing you put… er… those long pretty things, tall things?… you know… the thing? Sam was...
View ArticleRejoining the Human Race
I am trapped in a Magritte canvas… In The Blank Signature, perhaps, where nothing is as it should be. Woman, forest, horse, melding into one. And not. Witty and frightening in the same frame. Or,...
View ArticleI miss my nipples
I’m looking at my diary, at the last time I found the energy to write anything. Here is what I wrote… It’s a week today since the fourth bout of chemo, the last of the dreaded red devils. I woke this...
View ArticleWHY I STOPPED CHEMO
Nelson Mandela died on Thursday, December 5, at ten to nine in the evening. On the previous Thursday, November 28 – the day before my last chemo session – I had this dream. I’m sitting in a waiting...
View ArticleNow what?
I can’t play the piano. My little brother Shaun (God bless him) could. He was a brilliant pianist and made a career out of it as a composer of a new form of classical music that made him quite famous –...
View ArticleGoing on
Blaise sent me an email telling me that MM had died. He lives in Bangkok but knew M from Durban 30-something years ago when they were all young and reckless and falling in and out of love. He’d seen a...
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