By Henry Flesh

KINGDOM OF THE SICK 8 I was released from the hospital after nearly five weeks, during which time I'd been for the most part immobile. My spleen had been removed, I'd received numerous blood tests several times a day and I was extremely weak, much of my muscle strength having atrophied due to my inertia. I'd lost more than 40 pounds. But I was alive.

I rested at home for a month, trying to finish the novel I'd been writing before I got sick. After a few weeks, I started chemotherapy; ultimately I would have nine rounds of it. I was lucky in that the chemo produced few debilitating effects on me: I experienced only a slight nausea after each treatment and felt just a small decrease in my energy level.

Because I was doing so well, I was eager to return to work and resume my normal schedule as quickly as possible.

Initially my diagnosis had been chronic leukemia, a condition that my doctor had told me I would have for as long as I lived. Still, he'd said, there was no reason to think that I wouldn't be able to lead a full, normal life; it was an illness that could be managed with chemotherapy and other types of treatment. Later, the diagnosis was changed to mantle zone lymphoma. But I was given no reason to believe that this disease was any less manageable than I'd been told chronic leukemia was.

Once I was home, though, during the time that I was recovering, I did some research on the internet and found that, in fact, mantle zone lymphoma is a much graver condition than I had thought. Indeed, I learned, most people with it live only two to four years after diagnosis. Needless to say, I was shocked by this discovery and very frightened by my prospects for long-term survival. I began asking my doctor more probing questions about my chances of dying. He confirmed the dire things that I had learned, but told me that for the past two years people with my disease had been given stem-cell transplants with encouraging results. However, the transplants themselves carried risks, since 15 to 20 percent of the patients given them died, succumbing to opportunistic infections brought on by the immunodeficiencies that are a byproduct of the procedure.

I felt a terror that grew more palpable as weeks, then months passed and the day when I would have to return to the hospital for the transplant got closer. Yet I was determined to do as much as I could with whatever time I had left. I maintained a social life, one that became even more active than it had been before I fell sick. And I continued writing with a stamina that bordered on desperation, working on both my novel and whatever newspaper and magazine assignments came my way. If I were to die, I reasoned, I wanted to leave behind a record of my existence. It's an idea that has motivated me ever since. o