Summary

Harriet Burden Notebook T

This chapter chronicles Harry's discovery of her cancer. She discusses hearing the diagnosis, her returning home to Bruno, then going through the first of several surgeries. She is in intense pain and writes about the various doctors that come in. She is looking forward to Dr. F, her long time psychiatrist, who is coming to see her later. She writes that it is an awful thing to think that you've been attacked from within.

The fact that all of her female reproductive organs have now been removed seems ironic to her since she writes that she has been ambivalent toward them all along. She writes that birth, like illness, and like death is not something that one wills into existence, but that it happens when it will. A person's will or ego have nothing...