All My Sour-Sweet Days
Ah my dear angry Lord,
Since thou dost love, yet strike;
Cast down, yet help afford;
Sure I will do the like.
I will complain, yet praise;
I will bewail, approve:
And all my sour-sweet days
I will lament, and love.
- George Herbert, ‘Bitter-Sweet’
… my cancer has waxed and waned, my prospects dimmed and brightened, but every act and thought have occurred in that shadow.
– Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss
The suspense is over: I have cancer. I have been telling people that I have “the worst-looking version of the best kind of breast cancer—probably. Or a worse kind—possibly.” That’s the difficult thing, of course: the uncertainty. As far as cancers go, this was caught early. But all it takes is one errant cell, one cell which we cannot see and which I cannot feel.
That’s the strange thing, right? That your body cannot feel it. That cancer cells somehow mutate and replicate invisibly, under the radar of an immune system that flags just about everything else, from a cold to a paper cut. But a bunch of rebel cells eating away your own tissue? Your body has no idea. And so the whole thing feels surreal. Even though you feel perfectly healthy and functional, you find yourself suddenly poked with needles (as Wiman puts it, “blood in the tube, blade in the veins”) and contemplating having parts of your body chopped off and zapped with rays and flooded with poison, making yourself sick to make yourself well.
My current moment feels a bit like déjà vu: after the initial biopsy confirmed malignancy, a follow-up MRI discovered a new, smaller lesion in the same breast, which an ultrasound then confirmed was likely to be cancerous, after which a second biopsy was performed, from which we are awaiting results, again. The suspense is over, and not over—and I am getting the sense this is what having cancer is like, a life where the waiting never stops, because the uncertainty is always there. You’re perpetually awaiting the results of some biopsy, pathology report, or scan. You’re perpetually wondering about that errant cell.
Life is the same, and not the same. Most of the time, it goes on as usual, work and kids and school, only now it feels like an existential filter is overlaid on top of everything. Sometimes this lends an inchoate poignancy to the most insignificant of moments: how remarkable, I think, the softness of my child’s cheek or the immersive genius of their imagination as they play. How lovely these alfalfa sprouts taste as their flavor bursts in my mouth. How beautiful the sun on my dog’s back as we jog together. It’s as if the anticipation of pain and loss has heightened the brilliance of everyday life.
It's also heightened my awareness of people around us. We’ve been overwhelmed with support: friends who cry with me and pray for me, who offer quiet whispers of encouragement and fierce hugs. Colleagues who make calls to expedite clinical care, teachers who promise to look out for our kids. Parents who I know would take the pain for me if they could.
But in the end, I’m alone. Nights are the hardest, when distractions cease and an underground sorrow and fear emerge to be reckoned with, reminding me of what Stephen Cope calls “the night sea journey.” Mornings were strange at first too, because I’d wake up thinking, darn, it wasn’t just a bad dream.
And slowly, I feel myself slipping into the world of clinical care, into which I alone must go. A few days ago, I got into scrubs to do procedures all morning, then in the afternoon changed and went in for a biopsy where I was injected with the same lidocaine solution I had used that morning. It’s strange to be on the other side, and all I can say is: you can know exactly what’s happening, and going to happen, on a medical level, yet still feel afraid as you lie there naked under a gown, waiting for someone to punch cylinders of tissue out of your body. Sometimes, it feels like all I do in hospitals is wait, alone, in pain or anticipating pain.
Last week, a patient came to see me who was so nervous about learning her eye test results that her hands had turned to ice. Needless to say, I understand a lot better now what she was feeling. That was the thought I had as I held her clammy hands and delivered the news: her eyes were fine. None of her vision had been lost. As she melted with relief and left, I thought, oh, for such tidy endings. Me, I will go on to wait, all these sour-sweet days.
