Coming to Terms with the Side Effects of Treatment

As a boy, I used to race the sun: I would start in the forest as the sun set, at the bottom of a hill, and try to climb as the darkness nipped at my feet. My body would throb with the blood rushing to my limbs before it collapsed with exhaustion. Now, sitting at the river’s edge, I am at that point again; I cannot go any further without rest. The sun has just touched the horizon, and a chill sweeps through the forest. Through the rattle of the leaves and crackle of bending trees, I can almost see the specter that is pulling the curtain of wind. The summer heat of the day was thick, making the otherworldly chill a satisfying breeze. At my feet, the forest turns to shore, and powered by the wind, the river dances in the final light. The sun moves so slowly throughout the day, but in these last moments of life, when the sun finally submits to nature, darkness moves fast over the country. The trees’ shadows melt into each other and mend their comrades while the space between the rocks grows indiscernible from night. The water is no longer glistening with its mesmerizing movement, but squalled, enraged by the wind. The lamps on the other bank have begun to turn on. Despite the death, despite the darkness, despite the wind throwing water on the shore after another heavy gust, I sit on the edge of the forest and watch and listen. What more can I do? It is time for the cycles of day and night to have their rightful place in my life.

The first time the tumors came, the world snapped into focus. Treatment – being poked and probed, stuck and withered, fighting with all my might against a force of biological inevitability – left me in pain. Pain that stuck to me like the smell of stale beer, lingering, sometimes pulling all my attention towards it, and sometimes so delicate I ask myself if it’s gone. Looking back, treatment was the easy part; I had only to survive. Now, I was aimless. Experience makes sense, but memories just return, repeatedly, without any clue of what they mean or what to do with them. They arrive, unannounced, at the doorstep of your mind, and hold you down, forcing you to watch the horrors you lived through, again and again. PAIN! PAIN! PAIN! Pain in my head, like the snap a tree makes when the last fibers surviving the axe’s temper can no longer support its weight. PAIN! – the surgeons prying my skull open like a bugler with a crowbar. PAIN! – awake in the hospital, screaming but no one can hear me, my button doesn’t work, I want them to stop but the medication keeps dripping, keeps pumping, turning my body inside out. I can only try to turn away, run, chase the sun, but memories always follow.

Now, Time is a gift. I don’t care how much my body decays. If it puts space between me and the past, Time is a gift. When I can only hear the undiluted echo of my memories, Time keeps revealing a new moment, never to be re-created. If I could put enough distance between me and my memories, then I would never need to look back. I could be like Time. I moved to a foreign place, a foreign state, always ignoring the memories, until they finally stopped their echoes, though the cringe of pain stayed with me keeping the world sour. Even during visits, I ignored what was in front of me. A scan, a blood test, seeing a small army of doctors. They could be for anything. Right? I convinced myself I was free, but ignorance is unnatural, like building a levee to fight a river. I would not face what had happened, and then the doctors called me, with news I never imagined, a mountain of waves crashed through my defenses.

The sun is high, but I can tell it’s starting to fall. For now, the shadows of the trees are small pools, just beginning to reach out and morph into the coming darkness. Still, I walk down the rocky path towards the river. It has been years since I have been home, but the path I walk down has the same shape, and the forest still feels like a giant, whose palm is the earth and whose fingers are the canopy, holding me in his hand. First a creaking, next a call, then a thundering: my burden swells up inside me like a lesion filling with puss. PAIN! My memories repeat, my head is squeezed in a vice, but I still walk forward, down, towards the river. PAIN! I have never gotten this far towards the river and stayed, even for a moment, with the oozing gland in me. PAIN! I should have turned and ran by now, but I have no choice. Pain! My burden feels different. Pain! I continue to walk, finally reaching the bottom of the steep cliff, making my way through the flat forest bordering the river. Pain. The cut, still churning out memories of sickness, begins to feel warm, as if it isn’t filled with puss, but an ember, taken from a hearth whose flame has just finished. I find a nice stone amongst many and sit. Though the sun is not yet at the horizon, the eastern forest is already dark. Pain. Tomorrow, they will cut me open again – heal me. My throat feels heavy, and the world has been shattered by the tears sitting on my eyes, like looking through a broken mirror. Pain. I don’t know what will happen, or what cancer will mean to me. I don’t know if I will be ‘a person who had cancer’ in ten years. But I do know that fighting is wanting an unnatural world, without cycles of day and night, without the river’s tides, and to chase such a world is more painful than letting it have its place. Tomorrow, they will heal me, but now I must heal myself.