It’s time to renew my driver’s license! I never thought I would live to see the day. Back in 2008, when pressed to disclose my life expectancy, my oncologist estimated three to five years. Figuring that I was an average patient, I split the difference and believed I had four years left. Yet here I am, about to celebrate my fourth “cancerversary” with a trip to the dreary and backlogged bureau of motor vehicles, elated by the conviction that even if I expire within the next year or so, my license won’t.
This sort of wacky calculation reflects the oddity of cancer temporality. Every facet of cancer and its treatments transforms time, from its smallest to its larger increments. Of course, waiting takes the most time in the smallest units. Its ticktock can be interminable, especially when you are anxiously waiting for test results or fasting for a dreaded operation or when you are going through preparations for a procedure requiring that you drink vials of what looks like Kool-Aid every half-hour for two hours. Any period spent in the hospital requires killing time. Time, in fact, sometimes seems to stop, to stand still. The afternoon after an operation, as one fitfully wakes and sleeps, sleeps and wakes, can feel like an eternity. I surface with effort, muttering, “It can’t still be Thursday,” only to be told, “Yes, it’s still Thursday.”
While you’re waiting, fear or pain elongates minutes and hours and days. Chemotherapy divides into intervals the weeks and months that begin with its slow drip-drip. Just when I determine that I have no time to waste and must relish the change of the seasons, the timetable of chemo-time nudges them aside.
Each of my cycles of chemotherapy included six sessions, given every three weeks. I might not have known whether it was spring or fall, but I always knew that there were, say, two down and four to go. And then I began counting not the sessions but the cycles, though I could not remember the start-and-finish of all three cycles, for the past blurred. I had to draft a sort of chemo-history. Now that I am in a clinical trial, the nurse in charge provides me with a monthly schedule on which all the blood draws, pill dispensations and scans are recorded so I can track the present and the near future. Its rhythms trump those of the Gregorian and lunar calendars.
The zones of remissions and recurrences — registered for many people in years, for me, unfortunately, in months — can also be hard to gauge. Do I date remission at the last chemotherapy session, recurrence at the start of the next chemotherapy cycle? Or do I go by blood tests or scans? I am just as uncertain about the exact date of my cancerversary. Is it the day on which I heard the diagnosis, or the day of the initial operation? I wonder, should either of these time bombs be celebrated?
The limits of time stir me to enumerate constantly. I am always counting on my fingers: remissions and recurrences, the months used up, the months left, the relatives and friends I cherish. I count my steps down to the mailbox, my steps dragging the garbage can back to the garage, the number of my husband’s underpants in the laundry, the hours until the next pill, the number of days in which I must change or flush surgical implants, the weeks until I see my oncologist, the people on whom I count.
If my oncologist is right, and all of her other predictions have been spot on, I am approaching the last year of my life: final time. In the immortal words of Dr. Seuss, “How did it get so late so soon?” Without much of a future, surely time will again change. A lot can happen in a year — think of the helpless infant becoming a walking, talking toddler in 9 or 10 months. Time moves more slowly for small children, since a year of a 2-year-old’s life is 50 percent of that life. A terminal diagnosis may also slow down time. The next year might be 100 percent of what’s left of my existence.
Sometimes the time left seems too long; too many catastrophes could injure those I love. Sometimes it seems too short; there are so many suspenseful stories unfolding around me, and I want to see how they will turn out. Those for whom time’s chariot is indeed winged often attest to a heightened appreciation of their fast-fading prospects. And then there is always the dream of borrowed time, that numinous period beyond the predicted end, like a stay of execution, which must be fraught with its own blessings and curses.
But during apocalyptic times, when natural forces obliterate the precious places of my origins, even the dream of borrowed time can sink under the rising waters, as I brood on the widespread suffering and struggling of others.
In the meantime, I discover that it is now possible to bypass the motor vehicle bureau by renewing a driver’s license online. Voilà, it will appear in the mail — sporting the photograph on the license issued six years ago, before my diagnosis. On the license, at least, the passage has been reversed. It’s about time.
Susan Gubar is a distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University and the author of “Memoir of a Debulked Woman,” which explores her experience with ovarian cancer.
Living With Cancer: It’s About Time
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Living With Cancer: It’s About Time
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Living With Cancer: It’s About Time
