How to Beat Cancer

Howie Good

1.

Dr. L stood on the other side of the room, as far from where I sat on the exam table as he could get. He was explaining how my form of cancer spreads via the bloodstream, causing murder and mayhem along the way. Later at home, reading on WebMD about the survival rate of sarcoma patients, my mouth went dry, my heart raced, I forgot to breathe. All of us alive now are dying, but some of us are dying more painfully or obviously than others. “Chemo week,” a friend, the poet laureate of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, texts. “No sleep last night. Jabbing cramps today. And I’m still dying.” The truth is always revolutionary. At any moment, and for no justifiable reason, you can suddenly be pulled out of line and marched to the showers to be gassed.

2.

Online acquaintances—I hesitate to call them “friends” despite being so designated by Facebook—offer unsolicited advice on how to “beat” cancer. One asserts that the body repairs itself when denied food and recommends that I undertake a series of seventy-two-hour fasts. Another cites a man in Blue Springs who got rid of his Parkinson's on the keto diet. Someone else affirms the healing power of crystals. Meanwhile, a neighbor who once worked as a counselor in a cancer unit stops me in the parking lot of our condo complex. She says she was able to predict just by looking at them which patients would survive and which wouldn’t. The ones who survived, she claims, maintained a positive attitude. My head feels like a crumpled ball of paper. Then she hands me a half-full baggie of pot.

3.

Anyone waiting on the hard chairs crammed along three sides of the low-ceilinged basement—a long reception desk occupied the fourth side—was either a cancer patient or someone who had been guilted into accompanying them to radiation treatment. As a newcomer, I sneaked glances at the other patients from under the brim of my Red Sox cap. Some dozed. Some nodded and trembled uncontrollably. Some had a book open on their laps while staring unseeingly into space, their faces leeched of color. If they weren’t old when their treatment started, they looked old and shriveled now. Every fifteen minutes or so one would have his or her name called and disappear with a radiation tech in blue scrubs through a set of metal doors. Birth is a death sentence.

4.

Everything has changed, and nothing has. It still rains when the forecast says it won’t. Hummingbirds still come to the oriole feeder. The angel of history still hosts orgies of torture and murder. Doors still open from both sides. The abandoned buildings of defunct chain restaurants are still converted into Hispanic churches. Cancer still kills young and old alike. I still put drops in each eye first thing in the morning as if there’s an afterward I still have a chance of seeing.

Howie Good is a professor emeritus at SUNY New Paltz whose newest poetry book, The Dark, is available from Sacred Parasite, a Berlin-based publisher.