The below is an excerpt from BAD THINGS KEEP HAPPENING TO ME, a memoir about cancer. Pssst: there’s a fry recommendation at the bottom of this piece.
March 2, 2026
On day five after my first chemotherapy, I have one task. It is simply: SHOWER. This task is in all caps with a little circle next to it on my phone. Below it, there’s another set of text in all caps: THAT IS ALL YOU HAVE TO DO TODAY YOU WILL FEEL BETTER.
When I get out of the shower, I mark it complete. I pull on my mozzarella stick pants for no other reason than I need to feel something whimsical. I have a few pants like this, ones with silly sayings or cartoon creatures plastered across them. These ones say, “Don’t talk to me until I’ve had my mozzarella sticks,” like a joke about don’t talk to me until I’ve had my coffee. When I put them on, I feel a momentary sense of humor. It passes quickly.
The days blur into each other the first week of chemotherapy. I can’t remember who I talked to about what. My mother used to keep a log of conversations that she had while on chemo, the way some people used to take messages beside their rotary phones. I’ve reached the conclusion that it’s far too much trouble to try to keep track of what I’ve said to other people. They can keep track of what they’ve said to me. If I need reminding, I can ask them. Still, in the morning, I try to strain my brain to remember who came over the night before. The face of the friend escapes me.
It’s the dead of winter, but it feels like summer in my mind, the way things will all get into a haze all at once. Imagine the feeling of sticky, hot July corn sweat in your brain.
That’s what chemo feels like. Like a wet heat, but inside of you.
Chemo is not as bad as I thought it would be. I thought I would be full of nausea. I thought I would be achy. Instead, I feel like the woman in the yellow wallpaper. Instead, I feel like I’m trapped behind something and can’t get out. Instead, I feel like in another era, feeling the way I feel right now, I would be shipped out towards the seaside for bed rest. I feel the way it feels to be inside of a polyester jumpsuit with the heat blasting. I feel like everything is melting.
As the day stretches on, I try to toil, but I am unable. I go to a coffee shop and attempt to work for 20 minutes on my computer, but all I can do is pull up a screen. I somehow am able to empty the top row of dishes from my dishwasher, but I cannot do the bottom. I am also able to pull out an electrolyte tab and put it in a bottle of water. These are the things that I did on a Monday. That is the entire list of an entire day of trying.
I tell my therapist that all I did today was shower and make an attempts at other types of living. I tell her that my nose is bleeding and it doesn’t seem to stop. Maybe it will or maybe it won’t help you to understand me by telling you that I wrote this via dictation on Monday. That I couldn’t write, but that I had to try. Maybe it will help you to understand me for me to say that even peeing, something we see as automatic, takes monumental effort, and that there was a moment where I wanted to cry and held back the tears not out of suppression but because crying feels too expensive.
Somehow, I go to yoga. The sleepy kind. Even the sleepy kind feels like too much in my body, but also not enough. That’s how everything feels. It feels like it’s too much and like it’s not enough. Halfway through the class, I find myself inhaling with the thought this is and exhaling with the word living. I find myself here because it’s all I can be. All I can do is be living. I have no other mode right now.
I am like a pothos plant set up against a wall that is just growing so slowly. Or maybe I am less like a plant and more like a hamster with a short life. Or a mosquito who has one goal: laying eggs. Regardless, I feel less human and more animal or more fauna than I ever have. I am one with all the living creatures of life, just trying to put one foot in front of the other to last another short moment, long hour, or day.
The saying this is living doesn’t necessarily help, but it also doesn’t hurt. These are not the normal thoughts I have in yoga. I am not normally so prescriptive about it.
Normally the thoughts I have are about the things I need to be doing outside of yoga. But there are no things to do outside of yoga. All I have to do is breathe in and breathe out–and shower.
For many people who seek yoga, this might seem like an ideal place to be, but it feels oppressive.
I am doing yoga in my mozzarella stick pants when I put my legs in front of me for a forward fold that is less fold and more lean. I see the outline of one long mozzarella stick and I wonder how sacrilegious it is to go to Arby’s after you do yoga especially if that Arby’s requires you to drive 25 minutes away.
My friend agrees to take me. The last time we went to Arby’s was the day of my biopsy. That day, I knew I had cancer and she still held out hope that I didn’t have cancer. It has been two months since that date and my life has changed so much. She asks the guy for extra honey mustard two times and then teases me for dipping the sticks into honey mustard.
The line moves so slowly, like everything today. But when it comes, the Jamocha shakes are first. I suck hard on the straw and feel like a younger version of myself. She’s the kind of friend where you can throw your straw wrappers on the floor of her car once you’re done and so I throw the straw wrapper on the floor. We sit in the lot in the dark in the suburbs, a long drive for mozzarella sticks, but I was craving dipping them into the honey mustard from Arby’s.
It is the first calorie dense food I have eaten all day. The cheese doesn’t pull the way you might expect a good mozzarella stick to pull. At Arby’s, the cheese is hard. More cheese stick, less ooey-gooey American appetizer.
Our lives have been long and angled away from each other, now coming back together after years spent in different places and with different friends. Time has bonded us. A decade ago, if you asked me who would be the car when I had cancer, I wouldn’t have said her name. Slowly, with time, we orbited each other, like we were always meant to be here in the car together. In the end, time led us here, 5 days out from chemo, in the car, after yoga.
“Thanks for buying me dinner,” she says.
“Thanks for mozzarella sticking with me,” I say.
March 8, 2026
Today is an entirely different day. I woke up and felt hungry. I went to Dahlia to eat quiche and chocolate cake. I got a smoothie from my favorite place, Parcelle, after trying and failing to eat greens for weeks. I downed it.
Is chemo the hardest thing I’ve ever done? So far, it is not. Getting sober tops the list, among other things. Can I do 10 bad days followed by 11 okay ones for 4.5 months? Yes. By mid-summer, when the corn sweat actually comes in on the fields, I will be through this.
As I publish a few more memoir pieces and non-paywalled pieces, I’m going to be giving teasers of future pieces to paid subscribers. I have my entire schedule planned out through the end of my chemo and one of the things I’m working on is fries. I’ve eaten so many fries that it borders on obsessive and I have one fry I go back to again and again. If you want to know what that fry is, it’s below the paywall.