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#273 – Jo Anne Indestructible
I am increasingly asked, by reader e-mails and players I run into while playing on Full Tilt, about various aspects of my private life. Though I have a zone of privacy – theoretically … I suppose – I recognize that the more I tell you about my life, the more you want to know. Especially because of what I’ve disclosed about my wife Jo Anne’s battle with breast cancer, I’ve gotten a lot of requests about her.
Jo Anne is doing fine. (So am I, though no one ever asks about how all this is affecting ME. I may even propose to write a book about my near-experience with breast cancer, which I will call PRAY FOR EYEBROWS – THE HUSBAND’S GUIDE TO SURVIVING BREAST CANCER.) She was fine through the cancer, fine through the surgery, and has been fine through the first two of her eight chemotherapy sessions. She has them every three weeks and the third treatment is this Thursday.
She’s living her life. She has an incredibly busy teaching schedule this year and, other than times she’s had to miss for particular medical appointments, has stayed on top of it. Because she has to go full-bore all day long, she’s pretty wiped out by the end of the day. That could even be the case if she wasn’t undergoing chemotherapy, but now she’s so tired that she sometimes falls asleep at 8 PM. (So I’m lonely without her sometimes in the evening. To combat this, I’m playing poker online.)
Her hair has fallen out, but as it was she gave in to my impulse to shave her head (as well as shave my own again). As of this writing, her eyebrows remain inviolate. Mine have mostly grown back, but shaving mine off was clearly a stupid move on my part.
The other challenge is her white-blood-cell counts. Chemotherapy so ravages cell production that it can wreck the body’s capacity to make white blood cells. Even though she’s been working every day, walking and bike riding, her white blood cells are almost non-existent. This is bad news. When white blood cells go, the immune system follows, so Jo Anne is extremely susceptible to germs, disease, illness, etc. They have shots to combat that, but the shots bring on MORE fatigue, bone pain, and other crummy stuff.
But she’s indestructible. She’ll get through chemotherapy by March, radiation soon after that, and will regain her health and vigor. And I have to tell you, I think there’s something very sexy about a woman who’s cheating death.
