Hey, I wouldn’t mind someone saying that to me every once in a while. I’ve been sick for a while- a long while. In that time I’ve felt my womanly wiles slip away day by day. It’s easy to do when you are only able to take a bath once a week. So when I heard the new trailer for Beverly Hills Chihuahua, I thought the trailer was fairly cute, (The male lead issues the immortal words in my blog title…) and it brought a couple of things home to roost. The first being that I had become the female equivalent of a eunuch. Not something that a woman who has been married a quarter of a century needs to be hit over the head with.

This past week a friend of mine came to visit and brought a DVD to help pass the time. She had picked a comedy and was all ready to while away a few hours. Of course, it was only a few minutes into the movie until one of the main characters was hugging the toilet from chemotherapy and my friend was appalled that she had brought something like this back into my home. Me? The Bucket List had made me uncomfortable for a few minutes, sure. One, no one likes to be reminded of hospital visits where they, too, were hugging hospital toilets. Two, I couldn’t dream of a hospital visit lasting so long that you could plan a Bucket List and three, I couldn’t imagine beginning to feel well enough to even consider one. Mostly, I was struck by how movies treated illness and my friend’s reaction.

When your body turns on you, your world becomes a vast, unfriendly place. A dark room filled with monsters underneath the bed and who lurk in the shadows of the closet. I had visions of Bette Davis in Dark Victory and friends at the bedside. Instead its been months where after the initial hospitalizations the visitors dropped off and we were left to cope on our own.