THE KINGDOM OF THE SICK

"Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place." Susan Sontag, in Illness as Metaphor.

My entry into Sontag's "kingdom of the sick" was marked by a dull terror. One day I was an ambitious novelist and editor, as socially active as I was hard-working, a 56-year-old man who had hitherto known no major affliction. The next I was primarily defined to some by the disease that I'd just discovered I had: mantle-zone non-Hodgkins lymphoma, an extremely serious blood disorder that is potentially life-threatening.

I was given the news that I was ill at 11 a.m. on November 25, when my doctor called to say she suspected I had leukemia (a diagnosis later changed) and that a bed was awaiting me at St. Vincent's Hospital. Without warning, I'd been transported into that other world—although my shock on hearing her words was so great that I couldn't grasp at first how very much my life had changed. All I could do was grab whatever I thought I would need during my hospital stay and toss it into a duffel bag. I looked plaintively at my cats, then called a neighbor to ask that she take care of them during my absence. A friend arrived to help me, and we headed out my front door.

The numbness I was feeling stayed with me for half the taxi ride to St. Vincent's. I think I babbled inanities to my friend much of the time, though I'm not quite sure what I said. I realize, however, that at some point, as we neared the hospital, a sudden feeling of an almost preternatural calm came over me. I am, certainly, not a religious person—having been agnostic for most of my life—yet as we drew closer, I saw with a startling clarity that I had to accept what was happening to me—to take it all in and absorb it, then, as much as I could, try to right things I thought had gone wrong: rifts with my family, serious disputes with some friends. The misunderstandings that now seemed petty. To some extent, of course, my resolve arose from stunned feelings of regret and sentimentality. Yet it came, too, from an incontrovertible sense of what I needed to do in order to survive.

I couldn't have foreseen then what was to come in the months that followed: a stay in the hospital that lasted five weeks; the countless consultations with countless doctors; the removal of my enlarged spleen; the rounds and rounds of chemotherapy and other drugs; the stem-cell transplants that I will undergo later this year. But I do know the tenacity that came over me that first day has been with me ever since. I intend to keep it there.