Chapter 55: Let's go for a walk

Chapter 55: Let’s go for a walk:

“Fighting” is an easy cancer narrative. There is a goal: beat the cancer and live. And there is a way: suffer on medications and treatments and stay strong and stoic (if possible). But “fighting” is also a parasitic narrative: it invades our stories like the lancet liver fluke to an ant’s brain. Over many months, it had invaded my own mind’s home, left vacant by old dreams who hid now quietly in the basement. Cancer was my new goal and dream, an enemy to be beaten and subdued. Every moment was a battle. Travel assaulted the absurd. Good sleep preemptively struck against fatigue. Walking and skiing struggled to reclaim my body. Nonetheless, I needed a way to avoid bushwhacking through life.

…

 It’s early morning in mid-November morning. The sun shines at a particularly low angle behind the Eastern Wasatch mountains. She glances around the sharp, rugged peaks like a light through torn battlements. I stand on my balcony with a nearly finished cup of coffee. The sun touches me. She’s gentle and warms me like a long-away friend. From that moment on, I add walks to my morning routine. Maybe it was some effort to reclaim my life or my body. After what seemed like countless days of relative inactivity and consumption, my body felt like naught but a vessel to carry my damaged brain. I hoped walking could reconnect my mind and body, and perhaps even prepare me up for the coming ski season.

It wasn’t healthy: to see everything through the lenses of fighting and victory and defeat. What is it in us that makes the narrative of opposition so easy to reach for? It’s exhausting. I’m exhausted from waking up like in the middle of a war. I’m exhausted from keeping vigilant each day for changes that may signal a novel assault from cancer. I’m exhausted with looking and acting well (even when true), believing that maybe that if others thought it, then I were actually well. And I’m exhausted with trying to escape—fun activities, immersive trips, absorbing activities—anything to feel more alive or distracted.

I want a denouement—a tail to collect my narrative’s fragments and piece them into a meaningful story from which something profound could perhaps be learned. Sure, I inch towards that tail through writing. Yet the reflection is compressed within climax and lacks the quietude of a true denouement. I’ll make my own.

 As I walk, I think about my imagined lives. Where would I be if none of this had happened? Am I at the hospital as a 2^nd year resident, excited at being closer to becoming a full-fledged physician, Am I fighting burn-out from a two-year pandemic, and now feel regret in my choices? How have my friendships grown differently? Have I met a special companion who will walk with me through life? Do they brighten and enliven my world? Did I join that orchestra, or did I get a dog? Is that Dylan out there? And if everything turns around, can I switch with him and rejoin my imagined life? These imagined stories are both comforting and distressing. I’m comfortably convinced that I’m a continuation of who I was. Distress arrives as a strange nostalgia: I’ve lived that life in some sort of imaginative space and now I remember it as though it had already happened. I feel as though I’ve gotten off at the wrong train stop. I only slowly begin to discover my mistake as I walk away. But the train has stopped for the day, and I am now without directions or a way to continue forward.

I wonder if I am rambling. I guess what makes this so difficult is that I cannot connect my past to both my current and imagined narratives. Cancer’s growth and domination over my psyche was insidious. Cancer asked to revise my past. The old was no longer congruent with the present. I listened. I remade my past. In this story, cancer waits on the horizon like a foreboding and dark cumulonimbus. It imbues new meaning and consequence to old choices. I get into medical school, but now I pay for the honor with my future. In this world, time has no meaning: the future causes the present, and the present the past, as though someone took the threads of time and tangled them into a tight ball. Was this how it felt to die? Was death a slow transition into timelessness and dissociation from causality? In some ways, the revisional thought mazes opened doors: In my imagination I could live many lives at once, I could create a new, connected, beautiful story. Curses became gifts; gifts became curses.

So how does it end? Do I complete the three-act trilogy? Childhood, college, then medicine with a slow descent due to cancer. It had promising story architecture. Is the 3^rd act abruptly aborted without closure? By some miracle the cancer is eradicated, and I’m allowed a brand-new 4^th act? What would that look like? My sense of self and past and future have been so scrambled that it’s difficult to even imagine a real future. How could I, or even should I resume yesterday’s road? I suppose the question of returning was unimportant. I would start again: I would recollect the bricks abandoned 2 years ago, and the ones I’d accumulated since. I would take what I had and build a new road to old dreams. I couldn’t return to a life that I had only lived in imagination, like some script to be followed. Whatever happened, it would be time to pick up a new kind of pen and open a new journal.

Since being diagnosed, I’ve developed new “what if” goals. Ambitions of novel science and academic pursuit of my past had dissipated since visiting that world as a patient. If there’s another chapter post-cancer, then I’d like to complete medical residency and still become an internal medicine doctor. I’d like to work in outpatient medicine with a relatively small patient panel so that I can get to know the patients closely and personally. And I’d like to write about their stories as I learn more about them and try to paint a literary picture of life. I don’t want to appear as though I am wishing for a different life. By almost every emotional or spiritual measure, cancer has enrichened my life at only the cost of a relatively unknown future. To be cured would be a miracle, but I would change nothing that has happened.