And Dave just texted to wish me a happy fortieth birthday. It’s thirty-nine, Fucker. Happy World Toilet Day to me.

What the Jesus is wrong with you guys, I say every morning. You need me. Without me, you’re nothing. If you just laid low and didn’t try to upgrade and make me so sick and shitty all the time, we’d all have a lot more fun. But Parry, Ziggy, and Fuzzy do not listen. Tumours don’t care that their shenanigans are cramping my farewell-tour style. They don’t care that Dr. Divyaratna is talking about sticking laser blades in my brain, carpet bombing them with radiation, or soaking them in a chemo bubble bath. They don’t care that it’s my birthday. Probably my last. Maybe my worst.

I’ve had craptastic birthdays aplenty. On my fourth birthday, we invited a handful of kids from up the road. Mama made a chocolate cake and a Kraft mix weenie-topped ­pizza. There was pop. Cheezies. Balloons. I had a bubble bath and put on my birthday present from Nanny — my Elly May dress. It was a flouncy, frilly white number with blue satin trim and a sash. Like something worn by Elly May Clampett on The Beverly Hillbillies. It was reserved for the most special occasions, starting with my party. So, there I was all day — dolled up, waiting for my little friends to arrive with smiles and presents — when it started to snow. An hour before the party, a voice on the radio interrupted me and Dolly Parton singing the hell out of “Jolene” to say that the roads were a mess and the blizzard was big. Nobody wanted to be out in this weather. Wiener pizza, pop, Cheezies, and chocolate cake are not meant to be eaten alone, nor with a side of hysterical four-year-old tears.

“Stacey dear,” Mama said plainly, “you’ll have worse than that before you’re twice married.”

But I did get to wear the Elly May dress again, on the day of my Nanny’s funeral a year and a bit later. The one I wasn’t allowed to go to. Everybody else got all dressed up on that day, but the dummies wore black. Nanny hated black. She loved my Elly May dress. So I wore it for her, even though only the babysitter saw it.

There were other shitty birthdays, too. My seventeenth was spent in the trunk of Allie’s car, hiding from Duke the Puke’s psycho girlfriend because she heard I flirted with Duke in chemistry class, although Duke inflicting tit twisters on me was hardly my idea of flirting. On my twenty-first, I passed out on the bathroom floor of some guy’s apartment, and woke up covered in puke that wasn’t my own. Then there was my thirty-fifth, when I caught Dave kissing some skank at a restaurant. But at least I got diamond earrings out of that.

I’ll call this one a win if I can get through it without a snow­storm, puke, or infidelity.