The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,109

But I don’t want or need that anymore. Dr. M. condemned him for allowing me to go on the radiation and immunotherapy combination. He was furious because I have now burned a bridge to go on trials for other immunotherapy drugs involving similar agents. I was well aware of this risk, as was Dr. A.C., but he seemed to brush it off and so did I. I now have so much regret for going along with Dr. A.C.’s “crazy” idea. As a friend told me, though, it’s impossible to go through this cancer journey without having regrets, given the number of decisions we have to make at every turn. But I don’t think the detour will make much of a difference ultimately. I’m still going to die.

I went in to see Dr. V. to sign the consent to enter the SGI-110 trial and to tell her that I would be switching my care to her and MSK, even after the trial. I have always been put off by the institutional nature of MSK, the long waits, the lines to enter the elevator, the seeming impersonal nature of it all, but I don’t care anymore. I want the institutional support. I believe that I’m looking at months rather than years now, and so I want an institution like MSK to be behind me.

I’m feeling much better now that there is a plan, and recent events have brought me a strange kind of peace, and calm. My abdominal pain is gone. I went lap swimming for the first time in years, and even though I’ve always struggled to breathe with the proper technique, I learned that day with the help of a friend and a stranger swimming in the neighboring lane.

Despite what I just wrote, I don’t hate any of you.

37

Faith, a Lesson of History

It meant that I was closer to the end, but I didn’t care—I was glad to see 2016 go. With it I felt a great deal of bitchiness go, too. I would rededicate myself to making memories for Mia and Belle.

The Chilean writer Isabel Allende (most famous for her novel The House of the Spirits), in her memoir Paula, tells the story of her extraordinary life to her daughter Paula, as she lies in a porphyria-induced coma from which she will never awaken. I read Paula more than fifteen years ago, and yet a series of sentiments recorded on page 23 have never left me, and they come back to me now more powerfully than ever. Allende tells her daughter of her past—a thing she calls her “innermost garden, a place not even my most intimate lover has glimpsed.” “Take it, Paula,” she tells her, “perhaps it will be of some use to you, because I fear that yours no longer exists, lost somewhere during your long sleep—and no one can live without memories.”

I am a lover of memories, of the past, of history. I majored in history in college, studying American, Chinese, European, African, social, economic, political, and cultural history. I find fascinating how some unique, charismatic figures, like Jesus Christ and Chairman Mao, and revolutionary innovators, like Thomas Edison and Steve Jobs, altered the course of human history. The rest of us are merely swept along by the tide of events set in motion by others, past and present, and by events that are brought about by forces that are entirely beyond our control (i.e., God, Mother Nature, or the randomness of the universe, which brings about things like natural disasters and illness, depending on one’s religious and philosophical views).

It is the stories of the rest of us that I find most intriguing and valuable—the story of the black Caribbean woman who fled her abusive husband for a New York City shelter with her three children, the tale of how an American World War II POW survived months alone drifting at sea and then years of torture by the Japanese, the saga of the incredible will to live of members of a Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed into the Andes in 1972, the unlikely story of one woman’s ability to live fifteen years after being diagnosed with metastatic colon cancer. There are so many stories. Indeed, the truth that has been lived by our fellow human beings is much more inspiring than any yarn woven by the greatest storytellers.

But Allende reminds me that there is value in our individual memories, our own past, our own history; after all, what are we but the