Cancer's Crystal Ball
“People who haven't experienced cancer, who haven't come close enough to feel its breath, or to feel its arms tightening around our lives, those people ask sometimes, 'What is cancer like?' ... Cancer is pain. ”
"Insomnia is good for productivity. Personal pain is good for creativity." Now, I know all of us try to keep a positive outlook on all this, but that's just ridiculous. But that's what my horoscope said in the newspaper yesterday morning. Is that some kind of sick joke? As I've said recently, I'm not a morning person. I haven't been getting much sleep, and I'm in pain. So you can imagine what my reaction was when I saw that in the morning paper. And if you guessed "productive and creative," you're wrong.
Actually, sleep deprivation is a very powerful thing. Various groups, the military, for instance, use it for indoctrination. In its extreme form, it's used for interrogation. In normal times, it just makes us cranky. I was out on a story one time and we were up for five or six days straight, at most an hour or so of sleep each night. At that point, that little bit of sleep is worse than nothing. I'll never forget the last night when, totally exhausted, I sat there reading typed words on a page. There was only one problem. There weren't any words on the page, even though I could see them clear as day.
As for pain, it has a way of crowding out everything else. It makes you nervous, because you're never quite sure what movements might bring new agony. It makes you forget whatever you wanted to do, or what you were thinking about, or what you needed to do. It makes you forget yourself. The other day, one woman wrote in, I'm pretty sure it was Liz but I was a little sleep deprived when I read it, to say that, "Cancer is pain." Those three words pretty much say it all.
People who haven't experienced cancer, who haven't come close enough to feel its breath, or to feel its arms tightening around our lives, those people ask sometimes, "What is cancer like?" Well, for all the words I've written, Liz's three words may get at the truth more directly. Cancer is pain.
That person who wrote my horoscope wasn't entirely wrong. Pain can teach us things. Some people don't like it when I anthropomorphize my cancer. Probably the biggest and most unwieldy word I will ever use here, but I wanted to see if I could pull it off. They don't like it when I make my cancer into some sort of living being, with its own desires and goals and feelings. But as I think about it, my cancer, at least in the form it's in now, isn't quite life threatening. Oh, it is in the broader sense, but right now, all that those tumors are doing is causing pain and damage. So when I'm sitting awake in the dark hours, listening to the night, and I feel my muscles and tissue fighting to repair the damage, I think about that hot glue hitting the tumor cells in my spine, the heat burning them to cinders in my lung, the cold needle in my ribs freezing them to death. And I hope that those cancer cells are alive enough to feel pain. And I hope that it hurts like hell.
7:13 AM ET | 08-14-2007 | permalink
