Marilyn Muses
On Life, Cancer, and other stuff
Out of the Cage
Sometime during the spring of 2021 I felt a protruding lymph node near my groin, the spot where lymphoma started over 2 years ago. I called my oncologist right away and they...
Marilyn Muses in ‘Coping With Cancer’ Magazine
Marilyn Zagha-Keeshan
Cancer and Me
My birthday is in July but on March 26, 2020, my life started anew when I was diagnosed with cancer. Learning to live with that is an entirely new life experience. I...
A Coincidence in Dates
As I was looking at my upcoming appointments at Memorial Sloan Kettering, I noticed something amazing, something that has a constant impact on my life in both physical and...
The Weight of Life
My mother’s ongoing weight issues led her to go to Weight Watcher’s when I was about 12 years old. Her sister’s, also overweight, made fun of her for paying money to lose weight....
Coming Out of the Closet
It’s been 11 months after chemotherapy and stem-cell transplant, My hair is growing back, thinner and finer, and I am 60 pounds lighter. I go from feeling energetic and...
Challenges
Part 1- Living When I was a teen, my mother wanted me to train to be a secretary, get a job, and find a nice businessman...
Here, I can fix it
My Dad was a person who was able to fix just about anything. He was able to look at a broken machine or household gadget that was malfunctioning and know exactly what was...
The Quilt of Life
Handmade quilts are fascinating to me; the combinations of patterns, colors, and designs are so intricate and precise. Each individual piece of fabric — and there are...
Before and After
The Life of Brian first aired in 1979. It’s a Monty Python movie, so it has a unique interpretation of events that took place in Biblical times; the retold story is...
Mom and the Firefighter
In January 2019, a firefighter fell to his death on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn, responding to a crash. He was trying to climb over the barriers that separate the eastbound and...
Small Talk
Growing up, my two sisters, brother, and I all wanted to be the first to look at the newspaper my father brought home with him after work. We scoured it for articles to cut out...
The Two C’s
In the last years of my mother’s life, she struggled with dementia. She was a mild-mannered woman who enjoyed reminiscing, so whenever I visited, we would look through...
A New Hairstyle
My husband and I went to midnight mass on Christmas Eve last year, where we met up with a teacher he used to work with. I didn’t know her as well as my husband did because they...
The New Normal
The New Normal “The new normal.” This is a term I’ve been hearing a lot lately. I’ve heard it in relation to COVID-19, which is not going away anytime soon. We are all...
Clearing the Isms of Communication
Clearing the Isms of Communication Just before starting chemotherapy, for T-cell lymphoma, I needed a biopsy of an enlarged lymph node. When I met with the surgeon who...