When I was diagnosed with highly aggressive breast cancer, I was confronted with a cure so poisonous that, if I survived, I could lose my eyesight, speech and memory
When the technician leaves the room, I turn my head towards the screen to interpret any neoplasms, the webs of nerves, the small lit fonts in which my pathology or my future might be written. The first tumour I ever saw was a darkness on that screen, round with a long craggy finger jutting from it. I took a photo of it from my examination bed with an iPhone. That tumour was my own.
To be declared with certainty ill while feeling with certainty fine is to fall on the hardness of language without being given even an hour of soft uncertainty in which to steady oneself with pre-emptive worry. Now you don’t have a solution to a problem, now you have a specific name for a life breaking in two.
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