Gabriel Spera writes of how our body changes in sinister ways in his award winning Bellevue Literary Review poem “Throat.” Spera speaks of how aging can alter a previously cherished reality, in this case, a love of food: “… life takes or twists what we hold most dear, / the heart’s fire of youth swapped for the heartburn / of middle age, which ends each feast at the medicine chest.”
In the midst of these bothersome symptoms, Spera’s friend gets difficult news: “She spoke bluntly, the doctor, as though hiding her chagrin / at all the time they’d wasted chasing red herrings— / ulcers and reflux, bacterial infection. They’d begin / with the chemo right away…” This is a constant fear, a threat with any ailment. During a visit, I often ask patients what they are most concerned about to ensure I’m addressing whatever issue weighs heavily on their own mind. Sometimes I’m surprised at their response, their occupation with a worry I would not have considered in the differential of likely, or even possible, causes. Often there are concerns about the least likely but most serious cause of a symptom: a headache is a brain tumor, a cough is lung cancer, a skin change is melanoma. Most of us have a tendency to worry about the worst case scenario.
In this case, the man is eventually diagnosed with that worst case —cancer. Spera’s lyrical descriptions of the ensuing treatment are infused with detail. The IV bag of chemo: “The tube: a string gone slack without a puppeteer / to tug it, a sleeping viper, a vine, a spill / of vermicelli, a nematode keen to disappear / into the cool earth of his arm…” The radiation is “like a cluster bomb / of atom-sized suns. Then the fallout, the scorched earth / of his flesh, the fatigue, the itch of skin too numb / to scratch.”
The reader is transported into this suffering body, the treatment itself causing “A backlash, a body blow: What stunted the tumor stunned / his muscles, his neck’s whole scaffold rigidized / like leather left to the mercy of the sun…” Within the details of this devastating illness and its treatment lies broader truths. Spera reflects that “Sometimes, what leaves us frees us, and what remains / holds soul enough…” Ultimately, the conclusion is that “despite conflicting evidence, / even the least life is worth what it inflicts.”
Writing Prompt: When there is a recurrence of cancer, the patient questions if “He’d had enough, or rather, no longer had / enough to keep losing chunks of himself, ill-equipped / to envision any future worth suffering further for.” Have you had an illness that caused you to question if you’d had “enough?” Have you had a patient who told you that they’d had enough? What does “enough” mean? Write for 10 minutes.