Some of her physicians will know her name and what she was before becoming a cancer patient, and some will not. She’s given a case number, a bracelet, a hospital gown. The ward is what the sociologist Erving Goffman once called a “total institution,” like asylums, armies, prisons, monasteries, and Oxbridge colleges-an institution that strips you of your identity and equips you with a new one. is “often curable.”Ĭarla now enters not just a cancer ward but a cancer world. She’s terrified, and she may not be in a state of mind to take in the oncologist’s reassurance that A.L.L. Carla knows nothing about lymphoblasts, or why she’s going to have to have a bone-marrow sample taken, but she knows about leukemia. The aspirin doesn’t help, so she finally asks for some blood tests and soon she winds up at Massachusetts General Hospital, in Boston, where a young and talented physician gives her the preliminary diagnosis: acute lymphoblastic leukemia (A.L.L.). Try some aspirin, he says maybe it’s a migraine.
She goes to her doctor, but he can’t tell her what’s wrong. There are bruises on her back that she can’t explain her gums have been going pale and she’s very, very tired. These headaches come with a sort of numbness, and now she notices some other things that aren’t as they should be. She has been having headaches, but not of the normal, take-a-pill-and-relax type. Carla wakes up one morning feeling that something is wrong. Targeted therapies hold out the promise of a new era in cancer treatment, but will we fear cancer any the less? Illustration by Guy Billout
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