I hardly ever look at the ultrasound screen during annual check-ups, but this time I faced the monitor, violating my apprehension. And there she was, smug and ostentatious, a stain. “How much do we do in life not to get dirty!” I thought as I heard the words puncture and fat needle as if I were wearing ear plugs. Going out into the street, the sidewalks looked like clouds. The urgent was diluted by the word stain, which colonized all corners of thought.
Uncertainty not only displayed its black feathers, but also the mysterious ones, that something new to live. “How are you?” my doctor asked me, two days before I got the results. “Landing on a new planet,” I replied. The world kept turning on the lights in its windows, young people sat in the park, an old woman with a pearl necklace was buying celery next to me.
And there we were, almost 300,000 people a year, walking with our black diagnosis. How are you going to stop hearing the rumor of childishness in the schoolyard, smeared with the aroma of the kitchen pot, after learning that you have a breast adenocarcinoma. What will be your last coffee, while the sun dazzles you and the day does not promise the same for everyone?
These ideas are planted in those who receive that alarming word as a diagnosis, close to death even though it occurs in 66% of cases. I immediately reread Anatole Broyard, Drunken with Disease, one of my favorite books –which Juanjo Millás recommended to me–. In his prologue, Oliver Sacks emphasizes that when human beings get sick, they need to become a narrator, forge a story of his illness. Because inside each patient there is a poet who tries to get out. And for this you need a doctor who knows how to get to your character.
On the cancer planet, every little piece of news that belies a greater evil is a victory. So Miquel H. Bronchud warned me. He did not understand how they could congratulate me so much: “What a marvel of pathological anatomy.” “Luminal A, one of the most curable”. The language changed sides, and cushioned a serious semantic field with happy words.
One of the best medicines was administered to me by Antonio de Lacy, while I was waiting for the results of the PET-CT Full Body, a terrifying test to rule out metastasis. Lacy picked up a white piece of paper and wrote the word NO in capital letters. I grabbed the paper next to the Miraculous Medal, and began to carefully observe the places where pain breathes. I smelled it very closely in the cancer waiting rooms; no one talks there. Downcast gazes, shiny bald spots, uncomfortable scars covering the chemistry scar. In the pits, where they prepare you for nuclear tests, you can’t read or look at your phone. If only Bach sounded!
“I left Vall d’Hebron because I stopped holding hands with patients. One day, a woman admitted wanted to see me. She was very sick, but I had a zoom. The next day she died. I didn’t forgive myself. She had lost the essence of medicine. The one who publishes is rewarded and the good doctor is forgotten ”, confesses my oncologist Javier Cortés, who holds my hand with his rough skin, because psoriasis has been his unconscious way of processing pain.
There are legions of people who fight to humanize medicine and remove the stigma from cancer. But creativity and means are urgently needed. Because once you leave the planet, life changes in relief, even in size. You have felt the breath of the finite, and this makes you unstoppable.
