Kenneth Sherman - Wait Time: A Memoir of Cancer

L IFE W RITING S ERIES

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Sherman, Kenneth, 1950, author

Wait time / Kenneth Sherman.

(Life writing)

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-1-77112-188-0 (paperback).ISBN 978-1-77112-189-7 (pdf).

ISBN 978-1-77112-190-3 (epub)

1. Sherman, Kenneth, 1950 Health. 2. CancerPatientsCanadaBiography. 3. Poets, Canadian (English)20th centuryBiography. I. Title. II. Series: Life writing series

Cover design by Sandra Friesen. Cover image by Ziviani, hourglass, iStock photo. Text design by Mike Bechthold.

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Sickness sensitizes man for observation, like a photographic plate.

Edmond and Jules de Goncourt (Journals, 1865)

There is, let us confess it (and illness is the great confessional), a childish outspokenness in illness; things are said, truths blurted out, which the cautious respectability of health conceals.

Virginia Woolf (On Being Ill, 1926)

The patient has to start by treating his illness not as a disaster, an occasion for depression or panic, but as a narrative, a story.

Anatole Broyard (Intoxicated by My Illness, 1992)

Kenneth Sherman is a writer. But with this publication he is also a subject, a patient. As the subject, he patiently writes from the point of view of timekeeperthe person who measures time in order to call times up should the time limits be exceeded. He keeps time as he waits to find out how ill he is, which treatments he must endure, and ultimately how long he might have to live: What is the rate of OS (overall survival) in his case? What are the time limits?

Shermans endurance is measured by his method of note-taking. The book is metred by a collection of dated entries that begins with his first medical appointment and ends with a brief meditation on time and how it means differently to those whose time has come to enter the world of the healthy.

Waiting to hear from physicians about the state of ones health is both a blessing and a trial by fire. Most of the time we are told not to worry while we wait, which every good, mature human being will try to accomplish; and most of the time the news is good, or neutral, and requires no further expenditure of emotion or pain or waiting.

But sometimes the news is not good. Sometimes it is a diagnosis of cancer, the word that was once only whispered, not even spoken out loud.

Sherman does suffer getting the bad news (finally) that he has kidney cancer and that the cancer has spread to a bone, a single rib. Adjusting to such news is difficult for him, as it would be for anyone; but because Sherman is both a patient and a scholar, he is able to write, with expression and nuance, about his experience, and about the disease and the feelings that accompany it, and about numerous other wise patients who became narrators of illness. He is particularly aware of philosophers whose own diagnoses of cancer provided the fodder for their first-person narrations.

Sherman experiences a sea change of identity as soon as he learns he is a sick man. Before that moment, on March 18, 2010, he is waiting for a diagnosis; after that moment he is waiting for health, ideally to be disease-freewhich is not always possible when cells exchange normalcy for malignancy rapidly and energetically. The institution of Medicine and those who agree to uphold it and apply it are in the arduous position of keeping up with these cells as best they can without always being able to see them, measure them, target them, halt them, kill them. As Sherman says elsewhere, these cells are more vigorous and intelligent than their vanquished brother and sister cells. He refers to Siddhartha Mukherjee, the highly regarded author of The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer, who insists that cancer is a parallel species more adapted to survival than we are (6364).

A change of another sort occurs on March 18, 2010, too. Sherman that day becomes a patient with a potentially death-dealing illness and also a writer who uses his illness to fuel a creative act. Luckily for other patients and readers, Sherman embarks on an extemporization. Once the doctor tells you you are ill, you begin to eke out your existence as a patient. Your life becomes an improvisation around the theme of illness (46). For me, that improvisation is the only saving grace in what other narrators have called their cancer journeya ubiquitous and tedious phrase used to give the personal experience of a cancer a metre, a continuum respecting its development through stages and types. To improvise is to write around the event, an event that does not often have a foreseeable end, and if it is deemed a happy ending by good readers of this book, it is not as comforting as happy endings are meant to be. The ending, of course, is of necessity made up. There is a lull: we have made progress; things are much better; the side effects are nothing when compared to the disease. And yet most patients I know live in the middle of this lull where arguably the main concern is the returnthe return of the same cancer or of another canceror the appearance of a different transformed disease or a new cancer induced by the treatment.