I was prepared for the nausea, the exhaustion, and the hair loss. I was not prepared for The Taste. 

After a recent chemotherapy infusion, I tried to describe the sensation in my mouth and how it affects my appetite. “Imagine putting mustard on everything you eat,” I said to my husband. “Even ice cream.”

Except The Taste is not like mustard. It’s like cotton balls that have been soaked in aluminum and old orange juice. It’s like not brushing your teeth for five days, popping an unwashed retainer in your mouth, and then rubbing a stale cracker over your gums. It’s like licking an old sponge covered in paperclips. It’s the taste of something gone horribly wrong. 

Several years ago, when my father was dying, his body took on a smell that I could only describe to close friends as corpse-y. He seemed caught between two worlds, the world of bagels and traffic, and the world of after. I sometimes cleaned his gums with a Q-tip dipped in mouthwash. 

Now, in the middle of the night as I gargle with baking soda and salt to help avoid mouth sores, and then with Listerine to try and escape The Taste, I think about my dad’s breath in those last few weeks. And then I think about my own body and how quickly it has changed. My breast tissue has been replaced by expanders, which are holding the place for future implants. In my armpit is a scar from the removal of several lymph nodes. I have a port in my chest that looks like a rogue Adam’s Apple. Except for my eyebrows, my hair is gone. And my mouth tastes like the lid to the compost bin. 

I am trying to maintain a sense of curiosity about these changes, focusing on what my body can do as opposed to what it looks like. When not curled up in a fetal position with nausea, I can still walk, stretch, swim, and dance. Apart from my breasts, everything else is temporary. These scars will heal, the port will come out, my hair will return, and The Taste will fade away. 

While my mouth tastes like copper and old yogurt, it is difficult to enjoy food. Last night I topped my turkey chili with extra jalapeños. My mouth was on fire but I felt elated to be experiencing a different sensation. Then later, while I was watching Grey’s Anatomy and sipping ginger tea, The Taste returned with a vengeance. “You thought you could burn me away,” it snickered. “Nice try.”

Chemotherapy is the use of chemicals to treat cancer, and The Taste is the byproduct of the unavoidable damage to the cells in my mouth. “But I don’t have mouth cancer,” I want to say to the toxins traveling around my body. “Stay below the neck.” But chemo is a social butterfly who wants to meet everyone at the party. So here I am, chewing peppermint gum while halfheartedly baking a chicken, marveling that one day I will struggle to remember this.   

My middle name is Ilse, after my grandmother who sold her belongings for diamonds that she hid in the soles of her shoes when she left Nazi Germany with my father and his baby brother. She had breast cancer. Died before I was born.

My tumor was on the side of my left breast. I wanted everyone to touch it. I kept offering as a teaching moment. “This is what cancer feels like,” I’d say. 

The tumor was two centimeters. Peanut-sized. My daughters were once peanuts and now one has a boyfriend and the other has blue hair. This tumor won’t get a driver’s permit because it’s gone now. As is the other one they found after they opened me up and removed all my breast tissue. 

I learned about the cancer one month before my first novel came out and scheduled my double mastectomy for the week after the launch. People asked me what the book was about. “Secret keeping,” I’d respond. 

People keep telling me it’s not fair. But it is common, and so why not me? One in eight women gets breast cancer. It’s not even that interesting to have it. Everyone seems to have breast cancer or has a sister, mother, or close friend with breast cancer. 

After my diagnosis, my family took me to Sonoma for the weekend where we played games, soaked in a hot tub, and drank gin and tonics. When we played Celebrity and my mother got Kristin Wiig, she looked at me in horror. Because, you know, wig.

The surgery took six hours. When my surgeon visited me in the recovery room, she shared that each of my breasts weighed the exact same, a first for her. For a moment, the strange delight of this trivial news overshadowed the pain and pressure I felt with each inhale. 

The moderator of my support group put it bluntly: A double mastectomy is a trauma. And your brain might respond as such. My dreams have been frightening. The other night I was running through a city in painful high heels, desperately thirsty, grabbing at glasses of water that kept breaking in my hands.

Last month, I started chemotherapy. Earlier this week, the hair on my head started coming out in clumps. Yesterday it covered the shower floor like a shag carpet. I had underestimated how awful this would feel and sobbed into my husband’s chest. Later that day, I sat in a salon chair as my hairdresser ran the clippers over my scalp. She complimented me on the shape of my head and refused to take my money.  

Due to the aggressive nature of my cancers (plural), I am having 16 infusions of chemotherapy. This is what I’m doing this year. I am also swimming, planning a B’not Mitzvah, and watching The O.A. And when I am not suffering from a kind of nausea I can only describe as absurd, I am writing a new novel. This one is about a woman whose life may or may not be a figment of her imagination.