I'm done with the red one. I keep saying it out loud to see if it sounds true. Four rounds of Adriamycin and Cytoxan, done, and nobody gave me a medal, so Josh made me one out of a canning lid and a pink ribbon off a birthday present. I'm wearing it right now. I may wear it to Taxol.

Taxol starts Thursday. New drug, new rules. The nurses say it's easier on the stomach but it makes your bones ache and can make your fingers and toes go numb and tingly, and they'll give me Benadryl and steroids first in case I'm allergic to it. I nodded like a good student and then went out to the car and sat there for ten minutes. Everyone keeps saying "you're halfway!" like it's a hike. I know how halfway works. Halfway also means I have to do the same amount over again.

Last night it wasn't raining, which in Tacoma in late September is its own miracle. Mark and I sat on the back deck in our coats with two mugs of decaf. He took off his baseball cap and the porch light shone off his head and off mine and he said we looked like a matched set of headlights. I laughed so hard I cried and then I just cried. He let me. He still shaves his every Sunday night in the bathroom sink so we match. He says he's keeping it till mine comes back. I think secretly he likes not paying for haircuts.

Kelsey came out in her pajamas and sat on the step below us and put her head on my knee. She's twelve. She hasn't done that since she was eight.

Chemo brain report: Today I called Josh "Kelsey," called Kelsey "the dog," and stood in front of the open refrigerator for a full minute trying to remember the word "lettuce." I found my reading glasses in the freezer. I did not put them there. I definitely put them there.

The wig has a name now. It's Barbara. Barbara is a nice light brown, a little shorter than my real hair used to be, and she cost more than our first couch. She's also hot and itchy and she slides back on my head when I laugh. I wear Barbara to things where I don't want to talk about cancer. At home and at church I wear scarves, and I have eleven of them now because everyone who loves me has bought me a scarf. The pink paisley from my sister Kathy is my favorite.

Thursday was open house at the middle school. I wore Barbara, for Kelsey. In the car on the way over Kelsey asked me very carefully, not looking at me, if I was going to "keep it on the whole time." I said yes. She said okay. I understood completely and it still went right through me.

Then in her math classroom a boy she knows came up and said, "Is that your mom? Is she the one with cancer?" And before I could say anything Kelsey said, "Yeah, and she's still coming to open house, so." And took my arm. My daughter took my arm in front of a seventh-grade boy.

I didn't cry until the parking lot. I'm getting good at the parking lot.

Crawling out of the hole from round four. Thursday was the last AC. Pam, my chemo nurse, who has pushed every drop of that red stuff into my port with her own two gloved hands, gave me a hug at the end and a pink carnation from the grocery store, and I told her I hoped I'd never see her again, and she said that's the nicest thing her patients ever say.

The Zofran works. I want that on the record for anybody reading this who is about to start. It doesn't make you feel good, but it keeps the bottom from falling out. I take it on the clock like they say, not when I feel bad, because by then it's too late. The steroids they give with it are another story. Saturday night I scrubbed the grout in the upstairs bathroom with a toothbrush from 1:30 to 3:00 a.m. Mark found me and just stood in the doorway in his shorts, bald, and said, "Honey. It's grout." I said I know. It was the cleanest that grout has ever been.

Mark's mom, Ilona, brought over chicken paprikash and a loaf of bread and sat with me all afternoon. She prays for me in Hungarian. I don't understand one word and it works anyway.

First day of school. Kelsey in seventh grade, Josh in fourth. I made the lunches last night so chemo brain couldn't sabotage me this morning, and this morning I found the peanut butter in the refrigerator and the milk in the pantry, so chemo brain got me last night instead.

Josh's new teacher called me at lunchtime. Apparently at sharing this morning Josh stood up and told the class that his mom is bald "on purpose, to fight cancer," and that his dad shaved his head "to be a team," and that he wanted to shave his too but his mom said not before school pictures. All true. The teacher said two kids asked if their dads could shave their heads too. I told her I'd be glad to discuss it at conferences.

Kelsey went off without her lunch. It's still on the counter. I'm looking at it right now, a paper bag that says KELSEY in my handwriting, and I'm sitting here being grateful I'm here to forget it.

A lot of you have written asking about the name of this page. Chemo brain is what we patients call the fog. You lose words. You lose your train of thought halfway through a sentence and have to stand there like a lamp until it comes back. Today I lost the car in the grocery store parking lot for twenty minutes. It's a red minivan. It was in the second row.

I asked Dr. B. about it at my checkup. Dr. B. is my oncologist, a very kind, very careful man who looks about sixteen. He said a lot of women report it, and it's probably the chemo plus the stress plus not sleeping, and it should get better when I'm done. He said it in the voice of a doctor who believes me about eighty percent. That's okay. I'm writing it all down here so I'll have proof.

What scares me about it isn't the car. It's that I used to be the one who remembered everything for this family. Dentist appointments, permission slips, Grandma's birthday. Mark bought a big calendar for the kitchen and writes everything on it in marker now. It's the most romantic thing he's ever done and I'm not being funny.

Round three yesterday. Here is how it goes, for the ladies who have written asking what to expect.

You sit in a big recliner in a room with other people in big recliners. Everyone has a blanket and a bag. Mark brings the crossword. The nurse hooks up your port and first you get the Zofran and a steroid through the IV. Then Pam comes with the Adriamycin in big syringes and pushes it in slowly by hand, and it's bright red, the exact color of cherry Kool-Aid, and she sits right there with you the whole time. Then the Cytoxan drips in on its own. The whole thing is a couple of hours. You go home and feel all right for a few hours and then you feel like the flu is sitting on your chest wearing a lead apron.

That's today. Lead apron. Couch. The kids are being very quiet, which is its own kind of sad. Josh brought me his Game Boy "for if you get bored." I got bored. I lost at Tetris to a nine-year-old's high score for two hours.

Low counts this week, which means my white blood cells are hiding and I'm supposed to stay away from crowds and little kids with runny noses. So I missed church and Kelsey's last softball game and sat home and read your e-mails instead. Thirty-one of you now. A woman in Ohio who is five years out from her own chemo wrote to say her hair came back curly and gray and she loves it. A man in Texas wrote on behalf of his wife, who isn't a computer person, to say she is praying for me by name. I printed them both out and stuck them on the fridge next to the calendar.

I'm scared most at night. That's the truth. In the day I'm busy and funny and stubborn and everybody tells me I'm so strong. At 3 a.m. I'm just a person lying next to her husband thinking about a very small thing in my body that nobody can see anymore and wondering if it's really gone. Then Mark rolls over and puts his arm across me without waking up, and I count his breathing until I fall back asleep.