In late October, a few weeks before my diagnosis, two noteworthy things happened. First, I got a ten week-old puppy: Emmet, a green-eyed chocolate brown standard poodle that I swear looks like Bradley Cooper. Emmet was the result of a campaign combining the irritating persistence of an eight year-old with the pervasive and mournful broken-heartedness of a 50 year-old who had lost a beloved dog. Hours after Chris relented, I had an appointment with a breeder, and then I had a puppy constantly barreling toward me teeth first, nipping my hands and chewing my shoes. There came a point after the diagnosis that I asked Chris to give the puppy away, for I could no longer handle all of the buzzing chainsaws that I seemed to be juggling. Chris pretended not to hear me, and Emmet stayed.

The second thing that happened was that I booked a trip to London. I am perpetually cheap about all the wrong things, and Groupon had a deal that was too good to refuse: A trip for two was almost exactly the cost of all the hair coloring that I had not had over the last 18 months, and if living well is the best revenge, I wanted to exact it, greying hair and all. Chris and I looked at our schedules, and in late October, January 21 was the only week that worked. We would stay in London from January 22 to January 25, a Tuesday through Friday, and then in New York until Sunday.

I booked the trip to London at my own peril, for my mother used to be a travel agent. About 30 years ago, she took a similarly short trip to London, and it made quite an impression on her. So I received a barrage of helpful advice straight out of 1989 like Visit the Paddington Bear shop in Bath! (I should mention here that she offered this advice when I told her that we’d planned to spend a day at the British Museum) and There’s a terrific Holiday Inn on the Thames! Like my own children do, I took a deep breath and thanked her profusely for all of these good ideas.

I took a small notebook with me and jotted down all sorts of things about my trip with the intention of writing a breezy travelogue. These brilliant notations included that Great Britain’s version of T.J. Maxx is T.K. Maxx (which actually does sound more British) and that instead of a grey sign announcing EXIT in red letters in the transportation system, there is a green sign with white letters saying WAY OUT and a graphic that looks like a man desperately in need of a bathroom running out of a door.

I started this travelogue again and again, and my blog’s memory banks are littered with the electronic equivalent of balled-up pieces of paper. I have not been able to write lately. I try to write honestly. And honestly, I lately have had no idea about how I feel.

The closest description that I can give you is this. I have felt like I am standing firm on the ground of Gratitude, which is separated by a wide gap from Happiness. I can see Happiness, and I know it is there, but I have had a difficult time feeling it.

This has been hard for me to understand. One thing is true: Cancer-wise, I won the lottery. I got the enormous fake check made payable to me for an unbelievably ridiculous amount. I found myself standing in a plexiglass wind tunnel, large bills swirling about, as I yelled Show me the money! I was the person answering the door in the Publisher’s Clearing House ad on TV.

But another thing is also true: I have been waiting for the other shoe to drop. There is no reason for me to have had colon cancer, I have reasoned, so there is no reason for me not to have every other type of stinking cancer in this world. It did not help when I got a reminder to schedule a mammogram, now with the words HIGH RISK affixed. Or when I went to a Yoga for Cancer Survivors class, only to be met by a participant who told me about being a 25 year survivor of colon cancer — well, except for the three other types of cancer she has battled in the meantime. I have plunged into a state of what my gastroenterologist calls hyper-vigilance, figuring that if I eat just one more serving of leafy greens and avoid wine at all costs, I can avoid anything bad ever happening ever again. I have felt diminished and scared.

This is the person who boarded the plane to London.

I think we can all agree on this point: Nothing screams ROMANTIC TRIP TO CELEBRATE THE END OF CANCER! like one’s husband vomiting uncontrollably for 12 straight hours. And that is what happened on this trip. To achieve the coveted I-have-not-colored-my-hair-for-18-months price point, Groupon placed us in a DoubleTree in Chelsea. Figuring that the nearby office parks would hold little lure, the hotel was thoughtfully by the Overground, an above-ground rail system that connects to the Underground, London’s subway system. Leaving Chris in the room (or more accurately, the bathroom), I set forth with my Oyster Card (London’s transportation pass, so named because the world is your oyster), no cellular service, and a paper map of the subway system. A scant 40 minutes later, I was downtown.

It was London in January, so it was cold, damp, and overcast. As I rode the trains alone into the city proper, I sang to myself A foggy day in London town/Had me low, and had me down./I viewed the morning with alarm./The British Museum had lost its charm. When I reached Leicester Square, I bought a ticket to a tour boat to ride up and down the Thames to see the sights. Despite the weather, I decided to sit on an outside deck, and given the cold, I bought the worst cup of hot chocolate that I have ever had. I have some genuine concern that confused the pence and pound coins and tipped the proprietor an obscene amount, for I have never been called “m’love” that many times in my life.

I saw the London Eye:

And in a relatively sunny moment, I saw the Tower of London:

Anxiety leads to screwy decisions, and much to my surprise, I began meditating a month ago using an app called HeadSpace. (I think of it privately as HeadCase, for that is what I felt like when I started: slightly crazy for not being able to transform gratitude into happiness, slightly crazier for resorting to meditation.) Shortly before Chris found his head firmly planted in a London water closet, he had taken me to Harrods for tea. I liked the formality and the ritual, the need for patience, the use of beautiful objects, the smoky goodness of the Earl Grey. It seemed like its own meditation. It did not hurt that I overheard the Harrods doorman’s telling someone that he liked my accent.

But sitting alone in the cold drizzle on a boat deck in the middle of the Thames, I let my mind unspool: the cancer, the anxiety, the hypervigilance, the fear. I pictured what my life would be like if I could not get past any of it. It would be like that day’s London weather — cold, dreary, and grey. I thought about the warmth of the tea, and what my life would be like if I simply let things flow. At that moment, like the colossal idiot that I am, I sat down my hot chocolate and spread my arms open wide. (Fortunately I was wearing a beret, so there’s a good chance that any one who saw me thought I was French. And really, who can explain the ways of the French?)

While it is a fiction — a fiction complete with a lot of testing and regular visits to an oncologist — I have decided to characterize what happened as akin to a very bad case of appendicitis. Unexpected, painful, emergent, and solved by surgery. Done.

When I got off the boat, London did a fine job of reminding me that something bad can happen at any moment. Every intersection has the words LOOK RIGHT or LOOK LEFT painted on the pavement to direct hapless pedestrians to look in the correct direction. (Indeed, I used the Automatic Mom Arm at one such intersection to stop Chris from finding out the speed at which a cement mixer could stop.) The Overground and the Underground obsessively remind passengers to MIND THE GAP, the space between the train and the platform. On the street, a woman with a gimlet eye harangued a scared and crouching old man, yelling at him I am a gypsy! I AM A GYPSY!(I believed her.) Hamilton played across the street from the Houses of Parliament. Pre-war and post-war structures stood side-by-side.

I decided to stay off the trains and ride a double decker bus, hopefully in the right direction, to return to the hotel to check on Chris. It was a warm and dry way to see the sights, and from the front seat on the second level, the city flickered past me.

There were modern buildings.

There were old residential neighborhoods.

There was the happy accident of asking the driver how to get back to my own personal land of office plazas one-half mile before I needed to change buses, and my inadvertent but seamless navigation of the switch. And there was the discovery of the Tesco across the street, which sold bunches of daffodils for a pound.

Chris was still sick. But I was not.

So I set out again. At the National Gallery, I was struck by this life-sized painting of a prized thoroughbred made in 1762, only after the artist carefully dissected a horse to make certain he got the anatomy right. He was so enamored of the finished horse that he decided not to add the rider as he had originally planned.

At the National Portrait Gallery, I was embarrassingly drawn to this painting of Ed Sheeran, a fact that made me feel like I needed to obtain a subscription to Tiger Beat.

There, while pretending not to like the Sheeran portrait as much as I did, Chris caught up with me. Whatever plagued him was over. And as I studied paintings of faces, I saw one of my favorite ones. It was just like the rest of the song: For then suddenly/I saw you there/and through foggy London town/the sun was shining everywhere.

Together there was a show, excellent Lebanese food, serviceable British food, and despite the many temptations of the Paddington Bear store in Bath, a trip to the British Museum. Seeing objects that are thousands of years old puts the transitory nature of one’s small human life in perspective. What relics will remain of me?

Even with the federal shutdown and the TSA call-outs, we made it back to New York on time. The Saturday there was one of the finest days of my life — my favorite fabric store, a full day at the Met, a chance to see 16 Van Gogh paintings, cheese and black pepper pasta at an Italian restaurant. There I finally did what I should have done all along: I halved a dessert with Chris, which means that I ate 70% of it, and I ordered a glass of wine, and then a second, and slightly flushed by all of my good fortune in that moment, I raised the glass high and toasted my return to health. I was, at last, happy.

Emmet was, too, when I got home.

ALC