![]() ![]() The complexity of another’s illness has made my own life appear simpler in the march to death, I have begun to catalog the tragedies of survival. In clinic, in scientific meetings, I have felt like a fraud, a posturing intellectual phony. I have learned new things about what I thought I already knew: like the difference between illness and disease between what it means to cure and to heal between what it means to feel no pain and to feel well about the harrowing nature of keeping appointments one never made. I have learned to reexamine things I took for granted, to seek comfort in odd places. My surroundings may not have changed much, but my perceptions have. Because the disease I treat is generally fatal, solace seems contrived, personal academic success egregious. It is because of the experience the intervening decades have given me as I cared for thousands of cancer patients and accompanied many to their deaths. It is not because of any great discoveries I have made or research papers I have published since. ![]() ![]() I COULD NOT HAVE WRITTEN THIS BOOK WHEN I WAS THIRTY YEARS old. ![]()
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