thousandth time his depressingly miserable life story—how he had cancer
in his balls and they thought he was going to die but he didn’t die and now
here he is, a full-grown adult in a church basement in the 137th nicest city
in America, divorced, addicted to video games, mostly friendless, eking out
a meager living by exploiting his cancertastic past, slowly working his way
toward a master’s degree that will not improve his career prospects,
waiting, as we all do, for the sword of Damocles to give him the relief that
he escaped lo those many years ago when cancer took both of his nuts but
spared what only the most generous soul would call his life.
AND YOU TOO MIGHT BE SO LUCKY!
Then we introduced ourselves: Name. Age. Diagnosis. And how we’re
doing today. I’m Hazel, I’d say when they’d get to me. Sixteen. Thyroid
originally but with an impressive and long-settled satellite colony in my
lungs. And I’m doing okay.
Once we got around the circle, Patrick always asked if anyone wanted to
share. And then began the circle jerk of support: everyone talking about
fighting and battling and winning and shrinking and scanning. To be fair to
Patrick, he let us talk about dying, too. But most of them weren’t dying.
Most would live into adulthood, as Patrick had.
(Which meant there was quite a lot of competitiveness about it, with
everybody wanting to beat not only cancer itself, but also the other people
in the room. Like, I realize that this is irrational, but when they tell you that
you have, say, a 20 percent chance of living five years, the math kicks in
and you figure that’s one in five … so you look around and think, as any
healthy person would: I gotta outlast four of these bastards.)
The only redeeming facet of Support Group was this kid named Isaac, a
long-faced, skinny guy with straight blond hair swept over one eye.
And his eyes were the problem. He had some fantastically improbable
eye cancer. One eye had been cut out when he was a kid, and now he wore
the kind of thick glasses that made his eyes (both the real one and the glass
one) preternaturally huge, like his whole head was basically just this fake
eye and this real eye staring at you. From what I could gather on the rare
