The Egomania of Blogging

http://youtu.be/Jp9N2Vipm6w click here to see eiger and bucky camping on video.

It’s all about me! In Grade 13 (hard to recall there was one, eh?) I looked up “egotist" and “egoist” in the dictionary and learned they are the same thing except the former one talks about it. Blogging really is the egotist’s wet dream. I found my niche!

As I write this, Bobo (Bobbi) is lying at my feet, where she returns, after I squeeze her from behind and kiss the back of her neck. She jabs her tongue in my lips and then returns to the foot of the bed where she is happiest. She is so funny. It’s like she humours me and then goes back to her personal space. 

Tulip, the one-year-old girl’s girl, a four-pound, long haired chihuahua, smiles in her doggie-bed, bat-ears back, listening to the birdsong outside, atop a pillow at my left elbow, snoozing. It is girls-only in here for the moment and we love it. 

Dexter, the furry bedcuddler, let me cuddle him last night; a heavenly, warm-puppy armful of crazy black curls. Love is in the air. He and the ‘boys’ (Buchans... pronounced Buckans... or Bucky, as we call him...and Eiger) are in the back garden with rawhides on the deck. Dexter’s mommy and daddy are at a Lamaze class. Life is blooming in the springtime.

Tulip’s mommy, Allison, is off to Lake Opeongo to canoe-camp for a week and I am nostalgic about the silence, the visual breadth, the time-space continuum disappearing in a sweet dripping-from-the-paddles sound, into the depths below, with the cut of the paddle’s blade. 

The thrill in the dogs’ faces in the prow of the boat, as they sniff the wild air; absolution for civilization’s sins all round us, worries left behind under the canoe’s bottom, as the boat glides through the water. 

My best memories are of Tim and Doug and me in Lady Evelyn Lake in Temagami, swimming with the young fledgling loons in flight school, picnic fires on eskers in the setting sun. 

As the canoe drifts and the destination is marked by natural landmarks: bays, outcroppings, marshes, cliffs, natural beaches, and wildlife sightings better than Vegas shows, the mind turns to lyrics and melodies that capture the beauty that is the human experience on this gorgeous planet in this, the best of natural scenery on earth.

Out of nowhere, a sight like Babylon appears: a sleek helicopter descends and two otherworldly people descend, inflate a raft, strip naked, laugh, swim, disappear round a peninsula, returning in a couple of hours with a giant fish they cook on a woodfire. 

In the darkness, after our own supper, we build up the fire, lean back and Doug and Tim listen while I belt out Irish ballads. A conversational male voice startles us in the pause between songs: “Do you know any Simon and Garfunkle?” 


Our burst of laughter signals our amazement at the natural acoustics of the bay; that the gorgeous, presumably celebrity-rich, couple of Olympians has heard every single sentence we, a half mile across the water from them, have uttered, including my bawdy praise for the glory and beauty of their nude figures.

An estimated 1.3 million women are diagnosed with breast cancer worldwide each year and nearly 500,000 die of the disease. According to the Canadian Cancer Society, breast cancer is the most prevalent form of the disease among women in this country, with the exception of non-melanoma skin cancer. 


An estimated 23,400 Canadian women will get a breast cancer diagnosis this year and another 5,100 women will die from the disease.Read more: http://www.ottawacitizen.com/health/Drug+slashes+cases+breast+cancer+high+risk+groups+trial/4894949/story.html#ixzz1QJ5s1RdW In sum, all the women in developing countries die straight away, no surgery, chemo, hormone therapy, radiation therapy, immune therapy. 


All the women in our jewel of a country get a whack, of some degree, depending on early detection, of scientific and medical assistance; the bulwark against the darkness.

The egomania of my blog, for example; the millions of dollars made by publishers of breast cancer books; the co-branding of the Pink Ribbon campaign; in short, the Marie Antoinette-ness of my bourgeois situation, is not lost on me, as I am showered with gifts and loving concern.

A friend tried to give me a New-Age Oprahstyle book on the stress and the psychology of illness, and I basically, rudely, batted it back. How self-involved can I let myself get? 

I have received more good fortune on this earth than a Saudi Arabian prince. My clients’, my former students’, my friends’ and family’s and my dogfriends’ hearts are bigger, funnier, more wry, more loving, more generous, more fun, more soothing and kind, than those around a prince or princess. My eyes have absorbed more natural beauty, my ears more great music, than a songwriter’s or a painter’s. I am ready to let go, and I am ready to tell fear to go suck itself.

Yesterday I went through all five stages of grief when the surgeon, who was draining another litre from my cipherbreast, told me my pathology was completed. 

Hormone-positive breast cancers comprise 80 percent of breast cancers. This is the group of cancers with the good news because you can block the hormones with drugs. I have the other kind. Mine are hormone negative. Estrogen, progesterone and heredity had nothing to do with my getting cancer. They don’t know what caused it. The prognosis for my kind is not good.

All my life I knew at a deep level I would not make it into old age. I knew it at an irrational level, a haptic knowledge, a listening to something either deep inside or way above us. I did not have children for this reason.

My eight tumours tested positive for the kind of cancer that, rather than being hormonally responsive, is immune responsive: the minority-case HER2. You can battle hormones, but you can’t really battle your immune system. 

This means that I have a very aggressive cancer. This kind of cancer means the cells multiply a million times faster than the hormone-responsive ones. 

One source said it is so aggressive the tumors generally develop their own blood supply. As I wrote Christine yesterday, it is kind of funny when you think of HER2 cancer cells as "freeloading" bums, who don't just burglarize the house that is your body, like the hormone-responsive majority of cancers, but actually call up the local Enbridge and Hydro offices and order in a supply of hot water,
cable t.v, gas, electricity and regular pizza delivery.

When the doctor told me yesterday, at first I was all happy as a book I'd read painted this rosy pic in which it revealed a thirty percent reduction in recurrence rates was possible by taking the antidote to being HER2 positive, the drug, herceptin.

What that first book left out was the fact that if you needed that drug in the first place it was cos you were fucked.

Thirty percent reduction in recurrence is a figure presented in absence of the other statistic i need to know. By what percentage am I fucked in the first place? Thirty percent reduction in a five hundred percent increase in recurrence isn’t much. I have looked all over the net and cannot find that statistic.

This morning Christine booked a cottage for us third week in July. I am over the moon to be next to a Canadian Shield lake, to be once again gliding in a canoe, swimming, reading, laughing, sleeping, building fires, singing, watching dvd’s, and laughing with two of my best friends on this good earth.

Yesterday morning at 8:00, Kate’s mom died of cancer. Her final hours were filled with mute, violent, terrified seizures in an emergency ward of the Toronto Western Hospital. Valerie Duer Eccles: Rest in Peace.