Walter Wangerin Jr. - Letters from the Land of Cancer

For my sister-in-law, Dorothy Bohlmann,
who made her dying
a radiant witness

This Kind of Cancer Doesnt Go Away

Now, AS I SIT TO write these words, I have cancer.

I call myself the Professional Patient for the amounts of time I spend with doctors, lying under their searching examinations, sitting before their estimations, their opinions and their consultations. Professional Patient, I say, for the even vaster amounts of time I must spend in their waiting rooms, waiting for examinations and consultations.

Cancer kicks off a swarm of symptoms and conditions which vary from patient to patient. Not all of ones secondary troubles could be predicted or even clearly explained once theyve arrived. Its the body whole that takes the shock. Hence the large array of specialized physicians necessary for treatment. Besides the chemical oncologists and the radiologists and the family doctor, I have had to keep regular appointments with a pulmonologist, an ear, nose and throat specialist, a dentist, a psychologist; returning weekly and biweekly to the hospital and to various laboratories for blood tests, CT scans, PET scans, simple X-rays, physical therapies; constant traffic to the pharmacist, constantly rattling pills morning and eveningand Im prescribing oxygen. Heres where you can get it.

I have cancer. Its a business. It initiates one into its own peculiar community. It encounters a host of attitudes and personalities among its medical practitioners.

One of the bluntest said to me, Have they prepared you?

Who? For what?

Have your attending physicians been direct with you regarding your cancer?

Well, I think so. I rattled off the cool, stainless-steel-like, scientific diagnoses which I had received already from my attending physicians.

The doctor who was speaking to me at that particular moment is a short, grim, aggressive sort, lunging headfirst when he walks, tick-ticking away at his laptop even while hes talking to a patient. He commands that piece of equipment as much by the hard glare in his eye as by his flying fingers. It was the same glare that met me then.

Thats not what I mean. Have they prepared you? Your heart for what must come of the cancer you have?

I blinked.

Without hesitation, without modulating his voice, lungetalking onward, the doctor said:

This kind of cancer doesnt go away. It will kill you. Sooner or later, this will be the cause of your death

so long as other causes dont beg to be first.

I have cancer. It has dominated the time of my outward living. It has put death central inside of me. It isnt going away. For this there is no cure.

ON THE OTHER HAND, MY tumorsthough presenthave slowed their metabolic activities so much that I and my physicians have entered a waiting game, a period of watching whether the cancer shall have jumped back to a busier life again.

It is in this time of surcease that I find it both good and possible to look back over the past two years of my experience with cancer and, thereby, with my approaching death. Perhaps my story will give shape and meaning to the stories of so many people who are involved with terminal conditions: those sick, those who love and comfort the sickand even those who for other reasons find themselves thinking deeply of death, and of their own deaths particularly.

Here is the story which must ultimately embrace every living body, every physical person. Here, too, is the story in which our faith in Christ most can shine. Such faith will surprise the most faithful. A patient thinks she will be afraid to diebut then she finds herself (astonishingly!) peaceful at the prospect, simply because there has never before been such an opportunity to test, to prove, to discover the real quality, of her faith, which is the presence of the Holy Spirit in her.

Let my story become your story too.

ILL TELL MY STORY STEP-BY-STEP from within the ongoing experience. I neednt draw upon memory.

Shortly after the cancer had been diagnosed I began writing letters to the members of my immediate family, to relatives and to lifelong friends. I wrote with news almost immediately after I myself had heard the news. I wrote even while sitting in the oncologists easy chair, receiving an infusion of the chemicals which would eventually take my hair and leave a scalp as bright and white as the moon.