Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin updates her cancer

It has been nineteen months since Xeni Jardin, the LA-based journalist who is one of the core editors at Boing Boing, disclosed that she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. (And last summer she told cancer of her feelings in the picture at left.) She updates the battle in an interview with Liana Aghajanian in today's LA Weekly. Sample:

A year and a half after her diagnosis, Jardin is taking it one day at a time, knowing that she's still in treatment, with more surgery ahead and no guarantees.

"The only closure you get as a cancer patient is the kind that you don't want," she says. "I'm here today, I'm having a good day and doing the work that I love."

Cropped, beautifully shaded gray-and-white hair has replaced the signature Marilyn Monroe–esque blond curls Jardin sported before her diagnosis. But the vivacious spirit of a self-described intergalactic space princess seems stronger than ever.

In fact, Jardin recently returned to her home in Santa Monica after spending six weeks in Guatemala covering the trial of former dictator Efraín Ríos Montt. Montt was accused of genocide and crimes against humanity during the Central American country's 36-year bloody civil war, in which 200,000 Guatemalans, including large indigenous populations, were killed.

Even in California, Jardin had been unable to peel herself away from the coverage, spending every waking hour watching the story unfold in the courtroom through a live feed. Soon she and her boyfriend, Miles O'Brien, a noted science journalist and former CNN reporter and anchor, were headed to Guatemala on assignment for PBS Newshour, where O'Brien is a science correspondent. They reported on how forensics were used to document charges of genocide.