These posts are excerpts from My Eye Fell Into the Soup, a woman’s cancer book, compiled from entries wherein Martha Blowen preserved her experience of living with and treating cancer and finally succumbing to it in 2008.

A lifetime of journal writing

Martha began writing a journal before I knew her and wrote consistently for the 31 years we were together. My own habit of writing a record of my life began in my early twenties—over fifty years ago. We might both have said, as did Anaïs Nin in the first volume of her first published diary, “I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived.”

The journal habit

Sometimes, usually on the weekends, we would sit together in our livingroom to journal, morning coffee steaming on a low table between us, but most often we wrote separately—I was an earlier riser. In the last years of Martha’s life, that writing time was likely to be at the Central Maine Medical Center’s Infusion Center as she spent interminable hours receiving a weekly dose of the prescribed, toxic chemical du jour. Journaling about cancer was a natural for her and it helped her to focus herself and deal with the onslaught.

With her permission given to me before she died, I selected a number of her journal entries and have compiled them. Along with entries from my own journals that complement her experience, into a book which is a moving account offered as one woman’s cancer journey. It is a woman’s cancer book.

In conclusion

Below are excerpts from My Eyes Fell Into the Soup. I hope stories from this woman’s cancer book encourage you to live your life with courage—whatever your challenges are.

Read about Martha’s early years in excerpts from A Sugary Frosting, A Girl’s Life in A 1960s New England Parsonage. Click here.