Then there were the episodes of simultaneous diarrhea and vomiting that sprayed the bathroom from floor to ceiling! Dry heaves and then dry heaves with bile and then dry heaves with blood. You could drink a quart of tequila and then a quart of rum and have some sloe gin too and eat pink birthday cakes and five pounds of licorice, Epsom salts, a pint of kerosene, some Southern Comfort—and you’re on a Sunday picnic compared to cisplatin. Only an archfiend could devise a dilemma where to maybe get well you first had to poison yourself within a whisker of death, and in fact if you didn’t die, you wished that you had.

There were visitors in droves. Flowers. Various intrusions at all hours. Go away. Leave me alone…please, God, leave me…alone.

Oh, hi, thanks for coming. Oh, what a lovely—such beautiful flowers…

There were moments when she felt that if she had one more episode of diarrhea, she’d jump out of the window. Five stories. Would that be high enough? Or would you lie there for a time and die slowly? Maybe if you took a header right onto the concrete. Maybe then you wouldn’t feel a thing. Cisplatin: she had to pace. But she had to lie down, but she was squirrelly as hell and she couldn’t lie down. TV was no good—she had double vision, and it was all just a bunch of stupid shit, anyhow. Soap operas—good grief! What absolute crap. Even her old favorites. You only live once, and to think of all the time she pissed away watching soap operas.

If only she could sleep. God, couldn’t they give her Dilaudid? No! Wait! Hold that! Somehow Dilaudid would make it even worse. Ether then. Put her out. Wake me up in five days. Just let me sleep. She had to get up to pace. She had to lie down. She had to vomit. Oh, hi, thanks for coming. Oh, what a lovely—such beautiful flowers.

The second treatment made the first treatment seem like a month in the country. The third treatment—oh, damn! The whole scenario had been underplayed. Those movie stars who got it and wrote books about it were stoics, valiant warriors compared to her. She had no idea anything could be so horrible. Starving in Bangladesh? No problem, I’ll trade. Here’s my MasterCard and the keys to the Buick—I’ll pull a rickshaw, anything! Anything but this. HIV-positive? Why, just sign right here on the dotted line and you’ve got a deal! I’ll trade with anybody! Anybody.