Divya Anand is a second-year student at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.
Suffering is a cornerstone of healing. It appears in the redness of inflammation, the hypersensitivity of a fingertip after a papercut, and the poison drip of chemotherapeutics substantiating the fragile hope of recovery. In “During Chemo, My Father Ate Canned Mandarins” by Amy Ratto Parks (Intima, Fall 2022), Parks delivers a poignant description of the narrator’s father in the hospital, tired, receiving chemotherapy and in pain, deriving joy from canned mandarin oranges in the cancer ward. The hope of recovery might be fueling him through the struggle—the imagination that one day he will be cancer-free and his mandarin orange will be a mountain sunrise. My character, Annie K, from “Living” (Intima, Fall 2022) can no longer dream of a cancer-free future. Her diagnosis is all logistics and no hope. How long will chemotherapy buy her? She does not wish to barter with God with her last days as currency. She feels like a time bomb; her cancer lurks, waiting to pounce on her, and she wants to rush to live before she dies.
Annie is rushing to Naples to be who she is: free, willful, and unhindered by the pressure to stay alive at all costs. The narrator, an oncologist but in this story a human, thinks of saving life as a binary in which a life is either saved or it ends. She has had a fruitless search for happiness and, in the setting of chronic stress and silent depression that is so prevalent in the healthcare community, has lost the ability to appreciate contentment in others. She pushes her need to see the next day—just in case tomorrow comes and turns everything around—on Annie, refusing to accept the end of Annie’s life as it comes. Annie reminds her that for many, palliative care is not a forfeit but rather a triumph over terminal illness.
Divya Anand is a second-year student at Robert Wood Johnson Medical School.