Leave of Absence

When I discovered that I had cancer 1 hour and 40 minutes before leaving for Paris, I was transported into an eerie seam between thought and feeling. In this wordless void, I groped for understanding and emotion—the usual evidence of my existence. The shock of my disembodiment unmoored me from physical time, and I drifted chaotically through future, past, and present. When thoughts and feelings did stir, they seemed to belong to someone else, to some body that I had inhabited. It was as though I were watching them projected onto a screen from an archival recollection of my being.

Pressing against me in the void were the words the pathologist articulated through the phone: “cancer,” “surgery,” and, several times, “uncertainty.” These words tried to penetrate me and locate meaning and emotional resonance. But I was not there in the usual ways to receive them.

While the pathologist spoke, I stared at my desk clock. The first thought that stirred was, “How long does 10:20 last?” At 10:19 I had been a healthy, 43-year-old physician embarking on a year's sabbatical from work. Suddenly, I became someone who might be as old as she would ever be, someone with a midlife journey violently foreshortened. Within seconds, I traveled through decades in a worm-hole that delivered me closer to my death.

The airport taxi would arrive at noon. As I clutched the airline tickets, a strange logic supplanted my medical mind, which knew that disease did not heed human desire. But I am leaving for Paris, I told myself. I begin my sabbatical today. I can't possibly have cancer now.

“Would you repeat everything you said?” I asked the pathologist. I needed her words to charge at me again. I wanted them to pierce me and register an emotional or intellectual reality. …