I have been to a couple of short cancer survivorship panels, and the survivors are always very open about their experience. But you know, I don't think any amount of listening will ever get someone to a point where they can understand what a cancer patient is going through. Here is a short, imagery-laden perspective on  getting a cancer diagnosis.

“Cancer Winter”
By Marilyn Hacker

No body stops dreaming it’s twenty-five,

or twelve, or ten, when what is possible’s

a long road poplars curtain against loss, able

to swim the river, hike the culvert, drive

through the open portal, find the gold hive

dripping with liquid sweetness. Risible

fantasy, if, all the while, invisible

entropies block the roads, so you arrive

outside a ruin, where trees bald with blight

wane by a river drained to sluggish mud.

The setting sun looks terribly like blood.

The hovering swarm has nothing to forgive.

Your voice petitions the indifferent night:

“I don’t know how to die yet. Let me live.”

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Courtesy of The Yale UCL Medical Students Poetry Competition
Excerpted from “Winter Numbers: Poems by Marilyn Hacker” (c) 1994 by Marilyn Hacker. Used with permission of the publisher, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

And I found all of this on the NY Times Well Blog.



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