A Traveling Companion

My friend Dvora uses scrap fabric to make stuffed animals she calls Binkies. Usually she makes them for foster children, but she sewed one for me. It has very soft fur, wonderful flower-button eyes and red tufts of yarn for ears.

I suppose in a sense all cancer patients are foster children. We are turned out of the bodies we've always inhabited, and we are made to live in new ones. We are entirely at the mercy of The System, which might treat us kindly, or not. The past, which--whatever it was like, was, after all, the only life we knew--is seen in a new and distinctly unfriendly light: why is this bad thing happening to me? Was it something I did? Then, too, we are afraid to attach to strongly to any particular vision of the future.

Under such circumstances, a Binky is a welcome traveling companion. Mine is quite pettable, and its bean-bag body sufficiently floppy that it would mold to my face if I wanted to sleep on it. If it came to that, I could probably suck on its tufted ears, too, though I probably won't. I do have to remain somewhat germ-conscious.