Monday, January 31, 2011

Heading into surgery tomorrow - last one!


Pamela Anderson watch out. I have Dr. Scott Spear - Washington's answer to Dr. 90210. My hope is these new ones are not as unforgiving as the current placeholders (expanders). This is the last reconstruction and Luke is preparing to ice my boo-boos - or else he had a very late night last night and didn't tell me!
Will be home recovering for the next 2 weeks. Keep the faith.
xoxo

Saturday, January 29, 2011

This Burning Land (and I don't mean chemo)


I promised a 3rd book recommendation and this one you must pre-order on Amazon just as soon as you finish reading this posting.
The kids like to joke that the above cover is a picture of me carrying Annalise on my way to the grocery store when we lived in Jerusalem - M-16 slung over my shoulder. Very funny. Actually, that's a picture of an Israeli settler - M-16 slung over HER shoulder - and that's not Annalise as a baby, though it could have been. This is the book that Greg and I co-wrote about our time in Israel and the Palestinian territories covering the Intifada from 1999-2007. It was the era of suicide bombings. Both our girls were born at Hadassah Mount Scopus in a delivery room with a plate glass window overlooking the Old City of Jerusalem and the golden Dome of the Rock - the ultimate room with a view. When Amelia was born it was on the eve of the invasion of Iraq and when we left the hospital we were given a gas mask tent to put over the baby's crib in case of a chemical weapons attack, a reminder that Israelis prepare for war from the day they are born. We write about this and other experiences covering the conflict for Fox News and the New York Times. We like to joke that we are the Mary Matalin and James Carville of the Middle East. At dinner parties people will literally turn their backs to one of us depending on their politics and whether they are NYT readers or Fox News viewers. It got to be laughable as they would heap one of us with praise and insult the other. We laughed because we covered the news straight down the middle. "Just the facts, Ma'am" to quote Joe Friday. No one believed us.

So the book is called "This Burning Land: Lessons from the Front Lines of the Transformed Israeli-Palestinian Conflict." Published by Wiley and written by Greg Myre and Jennifer Griffin, but Greg deserves most of the credit. It was his baby.
It is available starting March 27 but can be preordered online and if you are in Washington, DC on Sunday, March 27 please stop by Politics and Prose on Connecticut Avenue because we are doing a reading at 5 pm.

The reason I am particularly proud of this book is that Greg and I did not get divorced while writing it. In fact, one of Greg's favorite things to do during chemotherapy was to bring his Toughbook laptop and sit just far enough away from me so that I couldn't reach him (to strangle him) when he would then start peppering me with questions about what I remembered about this or that episode during our seven years covering the war in the Middle East. Yes, while burning chemotherapy agents seared through my veins from a mainline drip, Greg and I wrote this book.

The book opens with the lines: "The phone rang with urgent news from the Gaza Strip, and I immediately grabbed my two most essential items: my flak jacket and my breast pump...." I guess I should have known that I would end up with breast cancer. How oddly strident I must have been to insist on nursing my babies while traipsing down to Gaza to interview the head of Hamas or the mother of a suicide bomber. I did both times. And sometimes the milk curdled when the Israeli soldiers didn't let us pass through Erez crossing quickly enough. It was a Medela Pump in Style. Can you picture me in Gaza, head and hair covered to do my interview with Sheikh Yassin and a Medela Pump in Style slung over my shoulder. I was much too attached to my breasts and in fact I was never that modest when it came to them (now I feel such detachment that they are literally an object but in those days they were still functional.) I remember the time that I was still pumping and had closed the door to my office and we were there really late for a Fox Report hit (around 2 in the morning) and an intern came barging in the door to deliver something to me. I think he was so shocked that he became paralyzed and instead of turning on his heals he simply stayed there and continued talking to me and I said, "Avi, I'm pumping." I don't know why I worried so much about breast feeding my girls. I sometimes wonder if I hadn't breastfed Luke if I would have found this cancer (my 9 cm tumor) a little earlier. But no need to go there. Justin and I had some of our best news scoops at the Pentagon because I would kick him out of our booth to wander the halls while I pumped.

"This Burning Land" is really a quote from two poets: one Israeli and one Arab. My favorite chapter is: "What To Do When Friends Are Kidnapped." Unfortunately, too many of ours were. (It's one of the reasons we moved back to the U.S.) In this chapter I describe in first person the kidnapping of my Fox colleagues Olaf Wiig and Steve Centanni. "The Palestinian men greeted one another with kisses on both cheeks. We were invited to sit under a tin-roofed garage attached to the apartment building. The chairs were arranged in a circle, and all of the major Palestinian factions were represented. It was pitch black because there was no electricity in the neighborhood. Israeli war planes had knocked out Gaza's power supply in the recent weeks of fighting. The headlights from the pickup trucks were turned on and provided the only light...."

But it is the conclusion about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict - the last lines of the Afterword - that I find most compelling. "It can at times feel like a perpetual war, but life goes on. It is never an easy lesson to digest but one that I had already learned: some battles must simply be managed." The same can, of course, be said about cancer.

Preorder here, if you'd like:
http://search.barnesandnoble.com/This-Burning-Land/Greg-Myre/e/9780470550908/?itm=9&USRI=this+burning+land

Monday, January 24, 2011

The Foremost Good Fortune (Surviving Breast Cancer in China)


http://vimeo.com/19130985

Crazy Sexy Diet


http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/book-excerpt-crazy-sexy-diet-kris-carr/story?id=12633095

http://crazysexylife.com/

Q and A with Christopher Hitchens


http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GeuLDRwfOhs

"Do not go gentle into that good night..."

OK, girlfriend, I know it's been a long time. Call it paralysis. Maybe I have said it before. If not, it bears repeating. If the year of cancer treatment is a marathon (Juliette reminded me as I began my 17 rounds of chemo in 2009 that I, ever the sprinter, needed to prepare for mile 15, when it really starts to burn...) Well, if last year was a marathon. The year after is a sprint. A sprint to get as far away from the anniversary of the diagnosis and every anniversary since so that you can get that next year under your belt. Well, I guess I have been busy sprinting because I haven't felt like sitting down and updating all that has been going through my mind. Trying to get back to work, though at times I find myself distracted or dangerously engaged in too much multi-tasking. So this is why I have not been writing. Please forgive me and know that I have been saving up a number of posts so you may be hearing a lot from me in the coming days and weeks. I've always been a bit all or nothing and now I have realized I have a few things to say.

For one, I am preparing for my last surgery next week on February 1. The final reconstruction. Had a final meeting with my plastic surgeon, Dr. Scott Spear at Georgetown today. Genius. But glad I met with him. I was concerned when his nurse told me that the implants they would replace my place-holding expanders with would look "more natural" a.k.a. less in your face. I made sure that Dr. Spear knew that, in fact, I am not looking for something more "natural" i.e. showing the effects of gravity. I told him that I did not go through all I went through last year to look more "natural". Afterall, everyone in the world now knows they are no longer real so why be coy now. I want perfect.

More on that tomorrow. In the meantime, everyone who has had a cancer diagnosis knows that nighttime is the hardest so you may ask why I just tuned into Q and A with Brian Lamb to hear Christopher Hitchens' musings on cancer and death. Well, I found it gripping, as will you. I will include the link along with two must buy (actually three) books. For now, goodnight. And sorry for the period of quiet. I now have found that in fact I have a lot I have been meaning to tell you.