Halfway through chemo, Jessica was annoyed with me.
The Architecture of Showing Up
“This would suck less if we did it together.”
2009. We’d each had our third child in 2007, and I wanted my body back. My sister, an extraordinary athletic trainer and entrepreneur, told me that I needed a combination of high-intensity cardio with lifting heavy weights to make my body strong, resilient, and (hopefully) closer to my pre-pregnancy dimensions. I’m active, but I don’t love working out. Doing it as my dedicated time with my best girlfriend three times a week would ensure I did the work AND had fun. Jessica agreed to join me, and so a three-mornings-per-week routine was born.
We track everything to measure progress and share with our amazing remote trainer (from Tracey’s FIT business), who programs for us to achieve our goals, rehab our aging parts, and push us. She always had a heavier back squat. I always had a heavier bench press. Even mid-chemo, I could still out-deadlift her. Mighty Mouse, she’d called me for years. It was, she told me, maddening.
What she didn’t know at the time was that the lifts were doing more than building muscle. They were improving my odds on many dimensions.
A Friendship of Diagnostics
Jessica Rosenbaum is my best friend for 25 years. A licensed clinical psychologist. I met her in a parenting prep class twenty-some years ago, when we were both seven months pregnant with our first kids. We just clicked. We’ve been each other’s person ever since.
When I was diagnosed with triple-negative breast cancer, she didn’t ask what I needed. She claimed her role.
She set up the meal coordination, but didn’t cook.
She built the driver sign-up, but didn’t drive me to chemo.
She set up the CaringBridge, but mostly laughed as I wrote about being the secret shopper at my cancer center.
She’d been watching me long enough to know the patient ends up doing logistics weather-watching for everyone else’s well-meaning help. So she became the air traffic controller. She kept her workout slot but adjusted the time and location to help me. The workouts, it turned out, were critical.
