Cancer and Boundaries: What the Compass Told Me

Everyone has their orbits, their ranges of motion, their finite, functional horizon between the sun’s rise and fall. Before cancer, these were self-evident; I had no need to articulate them. My body had a momentum that fit the workaday arc of most people my age, and then some: I ran 5 and 10k races, worked out, gardened and wrote, all while maintaining a full-time job and a home. These were facts.

Once cancer entered my life, the ranges and orbits changed. I find myself wanting to find a finite word for those changes here, such as “narrowed,” or “were reduced,” or “became limited,” because in one sense those “reductions” in abilities were physical bricks. Truths. A gash where my breast used to be. My new swollen, compressed arm.

But words implying reduction aren’t entirely accurate either. I say this because reduction implies permanence and certitude. A “reduction in abilities” doesn’t encompass the sudden surfacing of a kind of necessary attentiveness to the body, which is always in flux, always changing. And the cancer body becomes amoebic in its illness: cells die and return, fears resurface, hair grows and falls, skin tenders after sutures and heals, muscles stiffen and restretch, and the mind learns a new vocabulary of being. “Scan” is no longer about the landscape outside; the word beams inward, searching for malignance. “How are you?” is no longer innocuous and quotidien; laden with the weight of mortality, the phrase becomes a question of life itself. How long will you live? What is happening in your body? How frightened should I, the asker, be? There is such freight with the language. A kind of lightness has been lost.

And so, who am I in this new body? Where do I go? Bewildered in some desert, then a city, then a bed, then a corridor – who? Where? What?

One metaphor helps me now: the compass. It is astral in the sense of earth-only, grounded here and then here. It is a traveling re-orienter. To consult it means to know where the one thing is, which is “direction,” which is not a destination per se – for the cancer patient, true north, or “health” is an implied and ongoing possibility. Some of us are further from this than others. And some must close their eyes, rest, and stop.

The particulars:  My body is changing, not for the better. My tumor markers have increased, and despite eating and eating, I can’t gain weight. I get so very tired. Restless legs torture me in the evenings, and scans are coming up. Like the compass, the general sense must reground in the particular and its details. I am here now, and I consult and consult the gravity below. In my hand is a small circle. Not much else is known.