Chemotherapy, or: Your Miracle Aging Drugs

 Consider the alternatives, pal, consider the alternatives. 

That's what I tell myself as I remember the day's events: I was on my way home from my dose of Eribulin, the latest miracle drug, "a laboratory-made form of halichondrin B, a substance derived from a sea sponge," says the nearest reliable site. Chemos come from surprising sources--another one comes from yew tree bark.

This one, like all that I have experienced, is no beauty treatment. Partly it's the shutdown of estrogen receptors--not that you don't have any estrogen anymore; pleasant sources of the hormone include broccoli, red wine and orgasms--but the conveyor belt is slowed or closed. This results, as far I can tell from a stare into the mirror, include dryer skin--the lines in the forehead become more pronounced and hello crow's feet! Dewlaps, lines here, lines there--a plastic surgeon's dream. But I'm not in the mood for plastic surgery.

Plus there's the hair loss. Without eyelashes, take it from me, you look like a lizard. Eyebrows also do something for your face--I like them--but I guess one could always go for that penciled-in thin 1920s-30s look but, well, no.

Anyway, there was I was, heading home, with the fuller brush chemo look on my head and my missing-a-few eyelashes look when I stopped before crossing the street: a child waited on a toddler balance bike with her dad, who was explaining she couldn't cross yet because a car was coming. Especially in Germany (most of Western Europe) you don't let a child see you cross if a car's there or the light's red. 

Then the child didn't want to cross. It was fun to watch the car park. Her dad said, "Lass die alte Dame rübergehen!" (Let the old lady cross!)

Ouch. 

Fast forward: a few hours later I was having dinner with my two of my children and my son's girlfriend at the local Chinese restaurant. 

 The waitress was watching us. "Are you the grandma!" 

"No, I'm the very old mom!" I said.

 I really must do something about my skin and my hair. But I don't want to invest in surgery or La Mer Creme de La Mer face creme at Sephora or Nordstrom's or similar items. 

Hmm. Cucumbers?

 

On the Arrest of Gabriel Olds

 

When I read about the arrest of Gabriel Olds, the actor, I remembered him playing  a rapist on Grey’s Anatomy—pushed in a wheelchair, he’s somehow threatening the person pushing him.

I’m not sure this memory is accurate, since I can’t find the scene on YouTube, but he’s done a lot of television. I, however, have often thought of him as the son of one of my favorite poets, Sharon Olds, and of the psychoanalyst husband who left her. Did the husband push an inhibited wife into psychoanalysis and then not like it when she got cured and wrote vivid, graphic, uninhibited poems? That was always my theory. He loved his privacy? Didn't realize the poems were more about the human condition than about him? 

I loved her poems about her children. In one, “The Clasp,” her daughter, four,  about two years older than her son, is always pushing him over, face-first. The exhausted mother and narrator—they’re all home with colds—clasps the daughter’s wrist hard for a moment, and reflects on that moment. Oh, the moment when a mom loses her temper on no sleep! I know that moment well.

In another poem she observes her five-year-old boy accidentally breaking things. Filled with energy, he looks with amazement at a sieve he’s just busted and pees on the lawn. The poems ends with a humorous jab, the house collapsing behind the kid. Oh, I know that feeling too. There are more poems about her son, one in which as a seven-year-old he plays tough guy at his birthday party, and another  about him becoming a man.

Could this well-observed child, son of two Upper West Side professionals, really be a rapist who lures women in with his charm and violently assaults them? It doesn't sound likely. Unless the kid sustained a serious head injury or is on drugs.

 He has pleaded not guilty. I hope he really is not guilty.  His mug shot shows shock, horror; he can't believe his situation.