“I’ll start in the middle: Winter 2006:I’m sitting topless in the oncologist’s office on Valentine’s Day. Cancer is a bitch. It doesn’t give a shit about holidays.”

“I want to be brave. I want to be big. I want to be gracious and cool. I want to be the Audrey Hepburn of cancer. ”

“When I was in college, the board game RISK was popular for a while. We’d get stoned and I’d stare at the little plastic pieces moving across the territories and get utterly confused about allies and enemies, arguing that nothing could be that black and white, complicating the whole notion of the game. But I understand that estrogen is my enemy now, the very thing that made me big-busted and fertile and a terrific nurser, has turned on me, inside my milk ducts where my body incubated nourishment that made my babies pink cheeked and roly-poly thighed. It’s all so twisted and ironic and confusing. Tamoxifen, a hero and a hazard, my breasts, a giver and taker of life, and I, the protagonist and the antagonist in this story”

“When does the part where I become a bigger person kick in?”

“It wasn't all that different from any particularly demanding boarding school, except that of course nobody ever went home for the holidays and we had a lot of brain surgery.”

“The things we do to eat! Running from scorpions the size of small dogs, dodging 10 foot long rattlesnakes and squashing monster spiders - all in a days work ”

“There was a Catholic priest and the Seventh Day Adventist minister sitting together on one flight. The priest ordered a Scotch and water. The minister said, "I'd rather commit adultery than drink." The priest looked up at me and said, "I didn't know I had a choice today." That was a fun trip.”