Although time is a notion that lacks the order that humanity gave it, grammar provided for the use of the present continuous, that action tied to the gerund, which I have always imagined as a round spiral. To this day I still don’t know if I should say that “I had”, “I have had” or “I may be having” cancer. It is similar to the language of ex-alcoholics, who will never stop being alcoholics no matter how long they stay sober for decades.
We remember the sword of Damocles, a flattering courtier whom Dionysius the elder wanted to teach in an original way: they exchanged roles for a day, allowing him to be monarch, but Damocles fled when he saw a sword held by a single mane swinging over his head. And the threat was so profound that we still use it to define latent and inevitable risk.
That is what those of us who have become familiar with a word that previously gave us frozen 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 it only existed. the black cloud that does not clear. When we go to bed, the damn sword sticks into our pillow.
Despite the moonlight and the laughter in the patio, we thought what would happen if at that same moment our body’s machine failed again and let out a selfish cell, as Professor López Otín calls them. Or “a coup d’état 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 told it and chose some verses from the poet E. E. Cummings to solve the dream-life equation: “It looks like something that has not happened.”
Statistics affirm that it happens, since one in two men and one in three women will have cancer throughout their lives. After going through it, you have the palpable – not just rational – certainty of being living at the time of dying. The distance that death once represented has come closer in a radical zoom. “Hurry every moment of life,” they recommend to those of us who have overcome it, perhaps forgetting that you enter a protocol in which you must pass a vital selectivity every three months.
It is the “silent trauma of the revision” that clearly seems like a lesser evil, but whose steely edge causes an overdose of anxiety and fear. We advance in our intimate relationship with the machines that perform tomography (CAT) scans. They are imposing, and their thunderous roar seems an indispensable condition for delving into our bodies, as if they were fighting the devil himself. The next day, we will enter the application to get the result. Nothing.
We will alternate routines and commitments and we will tell our loved ones: “I am in chapel.” But one cannot stop thinking about the name and surname of the new stain. The application remains silent. They would have to think that we are short of nails for that wait, and stir up compassion for the thousands of people who await their results 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 must transform that lifelessness into a tightrope walker’s attraction.
