It's 7 a.m.  I've been up since 5:30 (call of nature), though I'm not sure what I've done for the last 90 minutes--read the news online, I guess, taken my morning pills, including the three chemo pills, waited an hour so that I could have something to eat, wakened Mohamed, who has given me my morning shot, fed Kimber and let her out twice.  Her morning routine is invariable: she goes outside, but I'm sure does nothing because she's waiting for her breakfast.  She eats while I swallow pills, and then she goes out briefly again.  Once it's daylight, she'll be happy staying outside for the next twelve hours, but it's too dark to see the squirrels and rabbits, so she's now snoring contentedly on her orthopedic bed.  Yesterday we had a break from winter with temps in the 70s, so that when my friend Raylene came over (with an asparagus frittata and oatmeal raisin cookies), we could sit out on the back deck.  Today it's supposed to be even warmer, perhaps record highs, before winter returns on Saturday.

I'm 78% of the way through the Best American Essays of 2012.  One of the small disadvantages of my first generation Kindle, which Mohamed gave me for Christmas over two years ago, is that a reader doesn't know how many pages a book has (or even what page s/he is on) but only the percentage of the book read.  (Mohamed: this is not a hint for a new Kindle.  I already have a tablet, and I love my Kindle and the soft leather cover that makes it feel as if I'm holding a book.)  I've found this collection of essays more interesting and more varied than the Best American Short Stories 2012, which I had just finished.  I've been a little disappointed that there are no essays on political subjects, and humor is in short supply.  Sandra Tsing Loh in "The Bitch is Back" tries to be funny, but she's too self-conscious in striving for an I'm-a-female-Woody-Allen tone.  Indeed, I think the two weakest articles are both about feminism: Loh's and the novelist Francine Prose's "Other Women," a reflection of her experiences with women's and "consciousness-raising" groups, which could have been written by any woman of her generation at any time during the last twenty years.  She tries for a hook--in narrating her experience, she tells people that her first husband slept with every woman in the group, when in fact, he had slept with only two--but she can't find any place to go with the trope, and even she seems to tire of it.

The tone of the essays ranges from very angry to analytical to sad.  The most forceful essay is probably that by the medical muckraker, Marcia Angell, "The Crazy State of Psychiatry," which analyzes the unholy connection between Big Pharma and psychiatry and the enormous profits which the move to prescribe everyone psychotropic drugs have enabled.  She points out, for one thing, the high percentage of Americans who are now diagnosed as suffering from depression or anxiety and the enormous increase in drugs that this ever increasing proportion of the population takes, posing the question that if these drugs are so effective, shouldn't we be seeing a decrease in the number of people who are still depressed or anxious?  And now, of course, that so many are taking Zoloft or Paxil or Prozac, Big Pharma has created a whole new class of drugs (Cymbalta, for example) to supplement the earlier generation.  Big Pharma spends more on advertising than on R&D, and we're inundated with ads for Cymbalta and its ilk with soothing pictures and music while the voiceover mentions such side effects as "potentially fatal events" (which I believe means You Can Die if you take this drug). 

There are two essays about cancer.  The first, Miah Arnold's "You Owe Me" describes her decade-long work teaching writing to terminally ill children with cancer at M. D. Anderson.  Arnold's tone is never maudlin, and her portraits of the children are vivid and lively.  She strikes a fine balance between the despair of the situation and the value of the children's writing and lives.   I'll have to admit, however, that I cried non-stop from about paragraph two to the end of the essay. 

The other essay about cancer, Ken Murray's "How Doctors Die," describes the reasons--sometimes innocent or unavoidable, sometimes not--that doctors, hospitals, patients, and family often end up opting for "heroic" measures to keep someone alive, when, if reason prevailed, almost no one would really want these expensive, often painful, and finally futile measures taken.  Doctors, Murray suggests, are themselves usually much more realistic about death and rarely die in such a prolonged fashion.  Murray's esssay produced a moment of panic.  When I was first diagnosed with cancer, I redid my will.  Mohamed wasn't in my life when I had done the last version.  But, although I knew I had all the papers about end-of-life decisions, I hadn't even looked at them again.  What if I hadn't been clear when I filled out all the forms--22 years ago, as it turned out?  So I rummaged through all the papers (the lawyer has everything organized in a professional looking binder with tabs for each section) and discovered to my relief that everything is in order.  Even in 1991, I knew what I wanted and what I didn't.