Please Talk about Me When I'm Gone

Machinery (1)

(1997)

When we're young or healthy enough not to know better, or to need to know any differently, we don't spend a great deal of time pondering the ways our bodies work. We learn in school that our bodies are like machines (or, if religion gets there first, we're instructed that our bodies are borrowed blueprints, at once made in God's image and the perfect alchemy of His divine experiment, begun in the Garden of Eden).

When the body is unencumbered by illness or self-inflicted duress, it works best when it's inconspicuous. We don't necessarily notice when we breathe, swallow, sweat, absorb, or any of the other invisible responses that keep the organs thriving and the synapses firing.

When we're sick, everything changes. So many of these considerations come into focus and we remember what our bodies allow us to take for granted. When we get fevers or infections, we can acknowledge-and appreciate-that the aches and chills, even the coughing and the phlegm, are evidence of our systems in action, combating the viruses and bacteria that might otherwise incapacitate us. We may marvel at the way a body can cure itself: illness runs its course, scars heal, skin grows, and symptoms dissipate. It's possible that we never feel healthier than when we're recovering from a minor ailment.

A malignant illness, like cancer, obliges a humbled concession to the limitations of any single system's resources. When the body, invaded by an opportunistic cell, starts to turn against itself, we look to medicine-and the professionals paid to dispense it-because we have few other options. Anyone with a sense of history has the perspective necessary to perceive the ways medicine has enhanced our lives.

At one point in our human development we considered bad health or sickness an infestation of evil spirits; later we used remedies such as leeches and burning glass to drain or expel malevolent fluids. And yet, the way we poison our bodies to thwart the cancer inevitably seems more than a little antiquated, even barbaric: chemotherapy can seem like the modern application of a medieval concept. Our method of making the body a less hospitable host and rendering it almost uninhabitable can cause us to question the progress we've made along the continuum of disease and mortality.

If we're not prepared for what cancer can do, this is a blessing of sorts. Being unprepared means we haven't previously had occasion to think deeply about the disease. The initiation makes us look at things differently, and we never again look at the world, our loved ones, or ourselves in quite the same way.