We cross many different borders throughout our lives, some of them metaphorical, some of them geographical, some of them emotional. I spent much of Friday at the doctor’s office, undergoing bone scans and x-rays to rule out a stress fracture—something that would have meant postponing my trip to Okinawa, where my youngest daughter and her family live. The night before the doctor’s appointment, sleep evaded me. I was anxious and worried, not only about cancelling my long-awaited trip, but how my life would change if my hip was fractured, even only slightly.
Thankfully, there was no stress fracture, and although I still feel some pain in my leg as I walk, I’ll be boarding the airplane as planned, crossing the international date line and the Pacific en route to Tokyo, then flying another thousand or so miles south to reach the Japanese prefecture of Okinawa, where my daughter and her family have been living since 2011. It’s my third trip there, so unlike my first three years ago, I am familiar with the disembarkation process in Tokyo, going through Japanese customs, claiming my bag before re-checking it on to Naha and then finding the gate for my flight–all during my brief layover in Tokyo. Having done this twice before eases the anxiety I’ve experienced the first time I travel to a particular foreign country.
I am reminded, though, that there are other border crossings that may not go as smoothly as an international airplane trip–they are the ones that involve major life transitions or serious illness. The shift from one’s familiar life to an unfamiliar one may be unexpected, abrupt and thrust upon us with little warning–like hearing the words, “you have cancer” for the first time.
Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. 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 The New York Times, Jan. 26, 1978)
In the Kingdom of the Ill, no one asks for your passport or smiles, “Enjoy your stay.” You’re cast into unfamiliar and rugged terrain. The roadmap you’ve been given is a maze of choices you must make, ones that branch into multiple—and equally confusing—pathways. Worse, there’s the strange-sounding terminology to decipher — colloquialisms and multi-syllabic utterances from your physician’s lips that leave you feeling dizzy and confused. You’re forced to leave what you took for granted behind, and cross into a new reality that you feel ill prepared for.
There’s a moment, not necessarily when you hear your diagnosis, maybe weeks later, when you cross that border and know in your heart and soul that this is really serious… The hardest thing is to leave yourself, the innocent, healthy you that never had to face her own mortality, at the border. That old relationship with your body, careless but friendly, taken for granted, suddenly ends. Your body becomes enemy territory …The sudden crossing over into illness or disability, becoming a patient, can feel like you’re landing on another planet, or entering another country… (Barbara Abercrombie, Writing Out the Storm, 2002).
This is the foreign territory of your body’s betrayal, where nothing seems quite real, and fear is your constant companion. It’s lonely–You feel lost. You’re traveling without an interpreter in a confusing and difficult place. Try as you might, there’s no escape, no going back, no refund for your ticket. You must learn how to cope and navigate your way through it all, and you must learn it quickly. Your life may depend on it.
But along the way, a glimmer of hope—and you discover it as you find other travelers, men and women like you, who are also struggling to make sense of this foreboding landscape.. You find comfort and support in the community of other survivors. You feel less alone and together, experience comfort in the sharing of fears and hopes, making those things seem more manageable. You join hands and together, begin finding your way through this dark and fearful kingdom.
Somewhere out there in that darkness are hundreds of thousands … like myself …new citizens of this other country… In one moment of discovery, these lives have been transformed, just as mine has been, as surely as if they had been plucked from their native land and forced to survive in a hostile new landscape, fraught with dangers, real and imagined. (Musa Mayer, Examining Myself: One Woman’s Story of Breast Cancer Treatment and Recovery, 1994.).
Write about crossing the border into the unknown territory of life threatening illness. What was it like at first? What old assumptions did you have to leave behind? How did your relationship with your body changed? What was most helpful to you as you that landscape Sontag called “the kingdom of the sick?”
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