Welcome to Cancer Town

"Life is understood backwards but must be lived forwards."
-Kierkegaard, 19th century Danish philosopher and theologian


I have always loved to travel. It probably has something to do with my dad's past of truck driving. I think it might be in my blood. I don't know the history of my great-grandfather's moving company, William B. Kent & Sons, and I don't know whether or not they continued the business for three generations in order to survive or because they loved to drive. Regardless, I attribute my adoration of foreign places to their legacy of helping people re-locate.

I have a vague memory of sitting in the bunk of an eighteen-wheeler counting aimlessly on a wooden abacus. Where we were going, I had no idea. I just knew that I was in the dark cab and the vibrations from the pavement were soothing and that when we got there we would stop.

I think that it was the summer before I entered 5th grade that I took my first solo expedition at the ripe age of 10. I was going to take my first flight and I was going all the way to Hawaii to visit my best friend. I remember the excitement and fear mixing in my stomach and escaping my mouth in squeals at my father as he made take-off noises in an airport hallway.

Since then, I have been to Europe and Latin America, each time assessing and adopting aspects of the local culture while finding exciting and scary things around every corner. Like the time I was in a Scottish grocery store trying to recalculate the cost of peanut butter from pounds and pence in my head when a loud woman asked me accusingly, "Are you queueing it?" And I stared at her as she repeated and finally yelled, "ARE YOU IN THE QUEUE?" Until then I hadn't known that the noun queue could also be a verb. It was both scary and exciting to learn something new. Check out the queueing theory (or the theory of waiting in lines) here.

The one place I never daydreamed about visiting is a place that I now call home: Cancer Town. When the doctor first tells you "It could be a form of cancer" you take your first weary steps across the border into Cancer Town. You're a simple tourist like any other, looking up foreign words in dictionaries, trying to comprehend complicated survival rates, attempting to chart unknown territory. The day that the doctor told me sympathetically, "So, we're sure," I became a formal resident.

In Cancer Town, I'm learning aspects of a foreign culture I was never really interested in. It is still exciting but this time a little more scary. I know where all the hospitals are and where to park. I know what floor I need to go to for pre-op, lab work, x-ray, and chemo. I'm becoming fluent in the language. I could give a formal tour to a newly arrived resident.

Now that I live in Cancer Town where I read medical literature and books about how to stay positive and healthy, I can only take small trips to where I came from, to the outside world where not everything has changed. These trips include things like shopping, watching movies, having a friendly beer, or going to someone's birthday party. Usually a trip will only last a few hours before I must return for a doctor's appointment, to the reality that I am exhausted, or to take anti-nausea medication.

Although none of you can really live in this place with me, your short visits and kind gestures are thoroughly appreciated. All I can do is try to be the best hostess possible.

Welcome.