As I get more comfortable behind the wheel, a hazy idea begins to crystallize into a grand plan.
My first foray into this new selfhood is learning how to drive. The way forward is going to have to be my own.
No treatment protocols or discharge instructions can guide this part of my trajectory. I’m done with chemo but I still have my port, which my doctors are waiting to remove until I’m “further out of the woods.” I’m left with the question of how to repatriate myself to the kingdom of the well, and whether I ever fully can. Cancer no longer lives in my blood, but it lives on in other ways, dominating my identity, my relationships, my work, and my thoughts. This is where I find myself, at the threshold between an old familiar state and an unknown future. It’s time to say goodbye to the eerie and changeless fluorescence of hospital rooms. In many cancer wards, there’s a bell that patients ring on their last day of treatment, a ceremonial tolling that signals a transition. It was the outside world, the kingdom of the well, that had grown alien and frightening.īut for me, for all patients, the end goal is eventually to leave the kingdom of the sick. In its terrain, I built a home, accepting not only that I might stay there for a while, but that likely I would never leave. This piece is adapted from Jaouad’s recent book.Īs months bled into years, I adapted to the mores of this new land as best I could, befriended its inhabitants, even carved out a career within its confines. With my bald head, pallor, and the medical port lodged below my collarbone, illness became the first thing people noticed about me. Even my molecular identity had morphed: After my bone-marrow transplant, my brother’s stem cells engrafted in my marrow and my DNA had irreversibly mutated. In place of my name, I had been issued a patient-ID number. But as I grew sicker, I watched my old self vanish. I resisted the label of “cancer patient,” believing I could remain the person I’d been. Initially, I’d clung to the hope of a short sojourn, one where I wouldn’t have to unpack my bags. “Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.”īy the time I reached my last day of treatment for leukemia, in the autumn of 2015, I’d spent nearly four years -the majority of my adult life-in that other realm: the kingdom of the sick that no one cares to inhabit. “E veryone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag wrote in Illness as Metaphor.