Despite the fact that time is a notion that does not have the order that humanity gave it, grammar provided for the use of the present continuous, that action linked to the gerund, which I have always imagined as a round spiral. Today I still don’t know if I should say that “I had”, “I had” or “I may be having” cancer. It’s similar to the language of ex-alcoholics, who will never stop being alcoholics no matter how many decades they’ve been sober. We remember the sword of Damocles, a sycophantic courtier whom Dionysus the Elder wanted to challenge in an original way: they exchanged roles for a day, allowing him to be a monarch, but Damocles ran away when he saw a sword held by a single hair that oscillated over his head. And the threat was so impressive that we still use it to define latent and unavoidable risk.
This is what those of us who have become familiar with a word that once earned us frosty respect feel: oncology. Today we see it written on the screen of the medical center and we head towards its door with dignity – that quality so necessary in clinical medicine – but also with egotism, because the disease is so colonizing that it tries to separate you from the world, as if there was only the black cloud that does not spread. When we get into bed, the cursed sword sticks into our pillow.
Despite the moonlight and the laughter in the playground, we think what would happen if at that very moment the machine in our body failed again and let out a selfish cell, as Professor López Otín calls them. Or “a coup of your own cells”, compares oncologist César Rodríguez. Metaphor is a way of expressing reality through suggestion, which our imagination usually receives with hospitality. Borges explained it and chose some verses from the poet E.E. Cummings to solve the dream-life equation: “It resembles something that has not happened”.
Statistics show that it happens, as one in two men and one in three women will get cancer in their lifetime. After going through this, you have the palpable – not just rational – certainty that you are living while you are dying. The distance that once represented death has been approached in a radical zoom. “Make the most of every moment of life”, they recommend to those of us who have overcome it, perhaps forgetting that we are entering a protocol in which every three months we must pass a life selectivity.
It’s the “silent trauma of revision” that certainly seems like a minor evil, but its sharp edge causes an overdose of anxiety and dread. We are moving forward in our intimate relationship with the machines that perform CT scans. They are imposing, and their deafening roar seems to be an indispensable condition for burping in our bodies, as if they were fighting with the devil himself. The next day, we will enter the application to get the result. Nothing.
We will alternate routines and commitments and tell ours: “I’m in chapel”. But one cannot stop thinking about the name and surname of the new stain. The application is still mute. They should think that we lack nails for this wait, and kindle compassion for the thousands of people who are waiting for the result every day. After insistence, they send me mine: “Benign”, the most optimistic word in the dictionary. “See you in three months”, they tell me with learned joy, and you have to transform this gap into a tightrope walker attraction.
