A Fighting Chance

“The treatments aren’t working,” he said quietly. “The lymphoma is back.”


I felt like I’d been kicked in the chest—and I hadn’t seen it coming. I remembered the stats from Otis’s doctor: half of all the dogs treated for lymphoma are alive a year later. Half. One year. We’d had less than eight months.

I felt cheated. If half the dogs were alive a year later, how could he possibly be sick again? Couldn’t the treatments be changed? As I tried to talk this through, my voice kept rising. Finally, I was shouting at Bruce—no, I was shouting at the fact that Otis was sick again, as if I could somehow hold off reality by force of will.

Bruce let me rail on. When I finally fell silent, I was breathing hard. He gently pointed out to me the other side of what the vet had said: half the dogs die within a year, even with treatment.

I started to cry. I wanted someone to bargain with. Please, please don’t take Otis.

Bruce said Otis had started a new round of treatments that day, and we’d see what they could do. When we picked him up at Angell Memorial the next day, he was obviously sick but clearly glad to be back with his people. He dropped his head and wagged his whole back end as he slowly made his way toward us.

Later that night, we huddled together on the couch. We took up our usual positions: Bruce on one end and Otis sprawled across the other, with me wedged in between them. As I rubbed Otis’s ears, I whispered, “Please be okay. Please be okay.”

Corporations Don’t Dance

In early September, Bruce and I headed to Charlotte, North Carolina, for the Democratic National Convention. A few weeks earlier, the word had come from the White House: President Obama wanted me to speak on Wednesday night, right before Bill Clinton.

I had never been to a national convention, and on Tuesday morning, September 4, I went to a rehearsal. While I waited for my turn, I tried to think of when I had first seen this political spectacle. I must have been about seven, sprawled on the floor with my dolls, on a tweedy rug in front of a black-and-white television. All three channels carried whichever national convention was taking place just then. I thought it was boring and hoped I Love Lucy and Gunsmoke would come back on soon. While my parents dutifully half watched, my father smoked and read the newspaper and my mother kept a book propped in her lap. My parents weren’t especially political, but I had some general idea that my father thought President Eisenhower was a decent man.

Now I looked around the giant arena in Charlotte and thought about how the woman standing here would have seemed as far away as the moon to that little girl in front of the television set.

“Don’t shout,” someone said. “This microphone is so sensitive it can pick up your heartbeat.” I got jolted back to the present.

I was standing on the stage of the awkwardly named Time Warner Cable Arena, and while one technician was warning me about the sound system, another was checking the podium height. (The thing actually moved up and down so it would look just right in front of shorter and taller speakers.) The hall was largely empty, although a number of people were setting up seats or adjusting camera equipment or just wandering around.

I tried to stay calm and focused. Tomorrow night, I would speak right before former president Bill Clinton. In front of a live audience of about twenty thousand people and a television audience of twenty-five million. During the homestretch of a race in which I was still behind. Nope: no pressure at all.

The arena had been built in 2005 as a home for the Charlotte Bobcats of the NBA. The stage was big, and even though the basketball court had been filled in with rows of seats, the place still looked like a giant gym—a nice, new gym, but a gym all the same. Maybe the Democratic Party should have spiced things up by putting us all in jerseys and baggy shorts.

After we finished the run-through, I walked back to the hotel with Ganesh and Tom Keady. As we headed down the street, some women on the other side shouted, “Hey, there’s Elizabeth Warren. Woo-hoo! Elizabeth! Elizabeth!” I looked over to wave and walked straight into a pole. I wasn’t hurt, but I felt really stupid.

After that, Ganesh and Tom walked closer to me, watching me carefully to make sure I knew there were obstacles ahead. “Pole!” one would yell. “Curb!” the other would caution. My life now had a sound track. Worse, I had proven I needed it.