A Bald Spot

A few months ago, a reader wrote to ask if Mom had ever felt competitive with the other patients undergoing chemotherapy at the same time she was. His own mother had been through the same thing and obsessively measured her progress against that of her cohorts.

That wasn't something I'd noticed during Mom's treatment and I didn't address it in Mom's Cancer, but as I thought about it I realized my correspondent was right. Most patients' chemo was done on a regular schedule so you tended to see the same people every session. Mom's peers included an annoying loudmouth that Mom prayed wouldn't sit next to her and a young Hispanic woman who always switched the television to Spanish-language soap opera. In a situation so frightening and uncertain, it was impossible not to compare and compete: Who went bald first. Who got fat or thin. Who looked better or worse. Who stopped showing up at all. "Winning" meant living.

I thought this was a great insight and considered adding a new chapter to the book about it. But since I hadn't noticed it in my own family's experience I had a hard time writing about it, making it "real," and fitting it into the flow of the story around it. I couldn't figure out how to express this abstract, internalized concept in drawings. I couldn't make it work.

Instead, I drew a new spot illustration that I thought touched on the idea, and hoped that we might use it to fill out the book's page count. It turned out that 128 pages filled up faster than I expected and the new drawing wasn't needed. So that's the story behind this never-to-be-published piece: