Cancer

On September 23, 1951, King George VI was operated on for cancer. It was a grueling, dangerous procedure, conducted at Buckingham Palace by Clement Price Thomas, a leading chest surgeon. The king, unsurprisingly, was miserable at the idea, saying, “if it’s going to help me get well again, I don’t mind, but the very idea of the surgeon’s knife again is hell.” Yet he was kept unaware of the seriousness of his illness, instead being informed that the cause of his health problem was nothing more urgent than obstruction in one of his bronchial tubes, which would require a “resection” of the lung, and that it would cure the “pneumonitis” that he believed he was suffering from.

The ice on my right breast is a painful reminder of the limbo I currently find myself in: the anxiety-provoking space between a biopsy and the results. The time when you try to think positively — as if your magical thinking could change the results, the nature of whatever cells the needle procured. I’m simultaneously telling myself ‘worry is praying to the wrong God’ and repeating the word ‘benign’ over and over and over again. But the knot in my stomach is wondering if I’m about to enter a nightmare. You do your best to stay present but work falls through the cracks. You explain it away by apologizing and vaguely mentioning that you have some ‘health stuff’ you’re dealing with: nothing serious, just annoying.

My first memory of my Aunt Mary involves a rattlesnake and a meat cleaver. I was maybe seven years old when my cousins and I found the rattlesnake near a stack of cardboard boxes in her garage. It was barely 9 a.m. and we ran inside to find her already in full makeup and a silk housecoat, a cigarette dangling from her lips. She grabbed the cleaver and walked up to the recoiling viper — as entranced by her severe face and big red hair as we were — and chopped its head off with a nimble clank. ‘Wait till it stops wigglin’, then go toss it over yonder,’ she said through a cloud of smoke, and motioned toward an embankment at the end of the driveway. My last memory is from a little over a decade later.

Conservative radio host and longtime political commentator Rush Limbaugh announced on his program Monday that he has advanced lung cancer and will be taking time off to receive treatment.Shortly after Limbaugh revealed his diagnosis, prominent leftists rushed to Twitter to celebrate the fact that someone they opposed politically may soon meet an untimely — and likely painful — demise.Former CNN host Reza Aslan, whose show Believer was canceled by CNN after he called the president a 'piece of shit' on Twitter, did a shoddy job of downplaying his joy at the Limbaugh news.‘Ask yourself this simple question: is the world a better place or a worse place with Rush Limbaugh in it?’ Aslan tweeted Monday evening.