Rocking the Pink by Laura Roppé

there,” she said. She looked so tired, but she smiled at me warmly.
    When I arrived home from visiting Sharon in the hospital, I called her immediately, ready to heap another stack of complaints on my already rising pile.
    But, to my surprise, a nurse answered Sharon’s phone.
    â€œSharon’s been rushed to the delivery room. She just delivered her babies.”
    I gasped. Sharon’s due date was over two months away!
    Oh, labor must have come on in a flash! I had been there just forty minutes before. A chill went down my spine.
    I waddled frantically back to my car and raced back to the hospital. As I ran through the hospital front doors, breathless and clutching my belly (which had started contracting erratically because of the stress), a crowd of hospital staffers descended upon me, ushering me into a wheelchair.
    â€œWho’s your doctor?” they wanted to know. “Do you want us to call your husband?”
    â€œNo! No!” I shouted, waving away their helping hands. “I’m not in labor! I need to see my sister!”
    I was on the verge of panic.
    By the time I got to the delivery room, my sister’s triplets—two boys and a girl—were already nestled in Plexiglas incubators, hooked
up to monitors and wires. Born eleven weeks premature and weighing almost three pounds each, the newborns looked like animatronic Yoda-babies. Thankfully, the doctors said they’d all be fine.
    Sharon looked pale but beatific.
    Mom had already arrived and was talking nonstop, her standard reaction in times of stress.
    My sister is a mother of four, I marveled, gazing at the babies’ sixty combined fingers and toes, Mom’s yakkity-yakking fading into white noise in the background.
    Sixteen hours later, our Sophie made her grand entrance, looking as if she could squash all three of her preemie cousins with one chubby fist, or, alternatively, gobble them up as a midmorning snack.

Chapter 16
    Now that my diagnosis and treatment plan had been confirmed by an actual oncologist, as opposed to “Dr. Brad,” I decided to do some research online to find out what I was up against. I clicked on an article describing chemotherapy in detail: It is not a “targeted” cancer treatment, the article said. Chemo drugs seek out and destroy fast-growing cells of any type, including cancer cells—but also cells of the bone marrow, oral mucus membrane, linings of the stomach and intestine, and hair follicles. Due to the shotgun nature of chemo, the website explained, a chemo patient may experience lots of side effects, including fatigue, nausea, vomiting, loss of appetite, mouth sores, hair loss, premature menopause, bone loss, low red-blood-cell counts, low white-blood-cell counts, diarrhea, and constipation. And leukemia.
    What? I could get leukemia from chemotherapy?

    I threw my hands up into the air. And then I put my head on the desk. It was all so doomsday, I just didn’t want to know. I didn’t want any more information, I decided; what I wanted was support.
    I navigated to the only triple-negative website I could find—for an organization called the Triple Negative Breast Cancer Foundation—and was momentarily paralyzed by the shocking array of pink ribbons that littered the site.
    I saw a heading for “message boards” and clicked on the link. Wow, there were a gazillion postings. So many women dealing with this crap. Women had posted messages to each other covering every aspect of the disease and its treatment—surgery, hair loss, metallic tastes caused by the chemo drugs, nerve damage in extremities, depression. It was overwhelming. My predicament seemed insurmountable.
    After reading other ladies’ posts for quite some time, alternately biting my lip and wiping away tears from my cheeks, I did something I’d never done before on any website in my life: I posted a message—not to anyone in particular, but more to the universe at