Andrea Gibson

I got the common cold right after chemo and it lasted 11 weeks because my immune system was so weakened at the point.

I wanted to make a t-shirt that said fuck the common cold.

My partner, my partner, she is heartbroken right now.

She is in a lot of grief and she is sort of floaty in a way that maybe I was in the very beginning, because from the very beginning, I thought, oh,

this is very likely to kill me.

And I had just written a book where I wrote a book and I thought to myself, I want to write about people in this book in the way that I would if I never got a chance to speak about what I think about people again.

Like I want to write people in their full humanity because I was watching our world sort of come to a place of

This is, you know, people are bad or good, right or wrong.

And I wanted to write something more whole.

But my partner, she's wonderful.

And it's been mostly us for two years.

I have a gigantic community of friends.

But for some reason, this time has been very insular, the most insular time in my life.

partially because of the pandemic and because we had to be more quarantined than other people because I was at risk.

But she's been incredible from the beginning.

She was the one when I initially woke up from surgery, she was sitting right beside me.

She was sitting beside my mom and she was the one that told me I had cancer.

And she said it so beautifully.

And

I wrote a poem about it.