My friend Josh recently posted this editorial in the NYT about a woman’s recent cancer diagnosis and her family.  It’s a pretty powerful essay.

She does do a really good job at framing the “cancer experience.” The Just Being of it. I’ve worked with roughly a hundred or so patients on clinical trials and so much of the post diagnosis life becomes that. Even when you hit the five year mark or a complete response on your CTs.  There’s that very “neo buddist” live in the present moment thing that you’ll hear occasionally; I can’t imagine anything more miserable. Maybe it’s not so bad if you don’t have cancer, aren’t constantly thinking of what your family will do when you’re gone.  The blissful absurdity of human experience is ignoring our finite lives and the constant circles we make down the drain of them. The realizing of how much time we actually had and wasted is better left not thought about. Especially at the end.

I can appreciate the author’s catharsis here having seen it so many times.  I understand the importance of it (I even keep a copy of an old patient’s essay she wrote during her dignity therapy because it moved me so).

But I’d tell her we’re far from the end.  We’re just getting started.

It was a gray Saturday morning, my first ever in San Diego, when I laid eyes on the Cancer Center.  Yeah, it was the weekend — but it was the reason I moved west.  It was an idea I had been chasing for almost 3,000 miles.  I needed to know it was real.

Three years later and this building takes on a whole new meaning for me.  When I look at the copper and glass I see a deepness behind it.  Something I couldn’t possibly respect when I first started, let alone know was there.

I needed to live through it first.  I needed to struggle, professionally and personally, to appreciate the miles later traveled by my shoes in clinic.  I needed to see failure after failure to value any victory, no matter how small.  I needed to hear the stories of those near their life’s end to finally hear my own; to listen to that narrative clear of noise.

I needed to go through all of that with others.  I needed crazy work days laughing with my team inside our cramped office.  Or long hours spent drafting manuscripts with my boss well into twilight.  And most importantly, to be side by side with the clinic staff, who gave me the privilege of helping out as best I could within their world.  Who took me for long walks rounding in the hospital, or down to the microscopes to show me secrets told only by blood slides.

I did not know that I was so empty to be so full¹.

And now I’m just another transient shadow that used to walk across the halls, melted away by the following Californian dawn.  Honestly, I always was one.  Just another name written inside friends and colleagues or a string of letters spoken by patient charts and source documents.  I can only hope remembered fondly for the work it represents.

But with that new dawn there’s a new day ahead — for me, too.

I pulled this from Drug Monkey, an excellent addiction med research blog:

There was a farmer who grew excellent quality corn. Every year he won the award for the best grown corn. One year a newspaper reporter interviewed him and learned something interesting about how he grew it. The reporter discovered that the farmer shared his seed corn with his neighbors. “How can you afford to share your best seed corn with your neighbors when they are entering corn in competition with yours each year?” the reporter asked.

“Why sir,” said the farmer, “Didn’t you know? The wind picks up pollen from the ripening corn and swirls it from field to field. If my neighbors grow inferior corn, cross-pollination will steadily degrade the quality of my corn. If I am to grow good corn, I must help my neighbors grow good corn.”

“Curiosity, earnest research to learn the hidden laws of nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were unfolded to me, are among the earliest sensations I can remember.”

–Frankenstein