leukemia

I watched the grainy, blocky video in silence. My friend was singing “Land­slide” and I felt a cer­tain taut­ness in my eye­brows and a pecu­liar heavi­ness in the cor­ners of my mouth. By now it had become a famil­iar feel­ing, this phys­i­cal expres­sion of sorrow.

Can the child within my heart rise above
Can I sail through the chang­ing ocean tides
Can I han­dle the sea­sons of my life?”

~Fleet­wood Mac, “Land­slide,” The Dance, 1997

Sonia Lee ’06, whose mel­low and res­o­nant voice was cap­tured in that video, passed away in 2007, during my second year of medical school. For most of our mutual friends at our college Christian fellowship, her pass­ing became our first encounter with the death of a friend. In many ways, it chal­lenged my most deeply held con­vic­tions about the way the world works. I went to med­ical school with the grow­ing con­vic­tion that my call­ing was to deal with death and suf­fer­ing on the pro­fes­sional level, but this experience — so unex­pected, tragic, and ter­ri­fy­ingly personal — cast every­thing under a dif­fer­ent pall.

Sonia had acute myeloid leukemia. The onset was rapid and com­pletely unex­pected by friends and fam­ily alike. I can still remem­ber the dread of the moment I first found out: a string of e-mails with the titles “Urgent prayer for Sonia…” wait­ing qui­etly in my inbox. Sonia and I had been good friends dur­ing our under­grad­u­ate years but had fallen out of touch since my grad­u­a­tion two years prior and I had not heard much from her since then, which made the sud­den­ness and feroc­ity of the dis­ease all the more shock­ing. A full year in med­ical school did noth­ing to pre­pare me for the daily anx­i­ety of open­ing my e-mail in antic­i­pa­tion of an update from the fam­ily on her con­di­tion. I still have all those e-mails: seventy-seven mes­sages with head­ings rang­ing from “A pos­i­tive turn for Sonia!” to “Sonia — Chemotherapy day 3” and “Emer­gency request for platelets.” [Read more…] about The Pursuit of Suffering