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John’s Italian/Lebanese culture? I mean, where did he come off telling me what to do? On the upside, I liked the way I was responding in contrast to how I’d been with Peter. I didn’t feel like I’d been bad, didn’t worry John hated me or might leave. I never felt like I’d be sent away to the home for bad women who sounded like truck drivers. I simply felt he was more uptight than necessary, and that, for things to work out, it had to stop.
    Of course, I needed to stop doing certain things, too. My inability to apologize has always been a problem. It was a problem when I was a kid, and in my marriage with Peter, as well as with coworkers and friends. During an argument I was also prone to name-calling, which John would take offense to. If I called him a baby, silly, or immature—to me, no big deal—he’d get really irritated. “Talk to me, communicate, don’t call me names,” he’d insist. He also made me aware of how many times I had, out of frustration, punched him in the arm. I guess I’d been doing that to boys since my girlhood and never thought much of it, but he didn’t appreciate it at all. He was right. Name-calling and arm punching are immature and childish.
    John and I fought a lot and cried a lot. At first we were always defensive about our own positions, but eventually we traced it back to pain in our childhoods, and that was when the tears came. Through our relationship we began to clean out the cob-webs of our past, put the pain aside, and see ourselves more clearly. I don’t know how we were able to get through this time, 9377 Cancer Schmancer 2/28/02 4:18 PM Page 54
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    Cancer Schmancer
    but something kept us together. Whenever we figured out what was really behind a fight, it brought us so much closer. And with each discovery about ourselves, another brick was set in our foundation as we began to feel no one else knew us as well as we knew each other.
    Meanwhile, nothing had changed symptomatically. My mood swings were still erratic, and Doctor #1’s being so adamant that I was perimenopausal didn’t help. The progesterone pills she told me to take two weeks out of every month might have helped a little, but not much. I was still staining, still cramping, still everything. When I called Doctor #1 and told her the progesterone didn’t seem to be making much of a difference, she said, “Double the dose and see if that works.” So I did.
    It was right around this time that I was being honored in Amsterdam with the Silver Tulip Award. This is the Dutch version of the Emmy Awards, and The Nanny is a well-loved television series there. So John and I decided to make a vacation out of it for my birthday. We met my cousin Reid and his wife, Claudine, in Paris first, as well as my old friend Howie. He and I always daydreamed about the time when we would walk through the art museums of Paris together. And good neighbor Jill, who was working in Prague at the time, planned to fly in for the weekend. After about a week in Paris, our plan was to take a train up to Amsterdam, where we’d do the awards show and enjoy the city before returning to the States.
    Unfortunately, I was having a horrible reaction to the double dose of progesterone—something I didn’t realize until it was almost too late. If I’d had mood swings before, now I was completely jumping out of my skin. I really felt insane, had no coping mechanisms. My face broke out worse than ever. I felt like I was capable of murdering someone or killing myself.

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    The Progesterone Blues
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    Everything upset me on that trip. There were brief episodes when I felt free-spirited, but probably only after a few glasses of wine. The rest of the time I was pulling my hair out of my head.
    Nothing was going right for good neighbor Jill, either. She hated her hotel, the cabbie took her to the wrong place, her shoes were killing her, and I was intolerant of her problems. John and I fought, and Howie,