The Two Kinds of Decay

Other People

Most apheresis catheters like mine are implanted in women with breast cancer.

A visiting nurse asked me how long I’d had cancer. Then, after I told her I didn’t have cancer, she swore, and apologized for swearing, and told me all the nurses in the office had gathered for a moment that morning in the break room and comforted one another that someone so young, so much younger than they were, was so sick.

Either before or after that — though it doesn’t matter now, since I remember things in the order that they make sense — my primary care doctor visited me and said I’d already endured something much worse than most people have to endure in an entire regular-length life. His voice shook. He was forcing tears either forward or back.

Before the diagnosis, I would have loved hearing him say that.

The doctor was older than my parents, and he must have had plenty of younger patients, but he didn’t understand yet that suffering, however much and whatever type, shrinks or swells to fit the size and shape of a life.

I refused to let him in my hospital room again, and my parents and I re-enrolled in our health plan with a different doctor. I felt no antipathy, just a certainty that his pity would accrue to me, and would grow in me like the sea of antibodies with which I was already invisibly killing myself, and that I couldn’t take in any additional poison.