Caught in the Current

It wasn’t polite. No quiet knock, no warning. Cancer barged in like a wild-eyed beast: snarling and uninvited.

Just a few weeks before, I was out on a trail run, enjoying the crisp morning air of the high desert. Ian, my husband, was nearby, lost in his own rhythm. He loved building natural sculptures from twisted twigs and lava rocks, then crouching to photograph them when the light was just right. Our holidays were always like this. Road trips where the horizon never seemed to arrive. We packed cheese and tomato sandwiches, a flask of tea with milk and sugar, and sat cross-legged on our picnic blanket in any shade we could find.

Two days after we returned home, Ian boarded a flight to visit his family in Ireland. I went back to work. And then something shifted. He was in pain: unrelenting, inexplicable abdominal pain. In just two weeks, he lost twelve pounds. I listened closely. I asked the right questions. But the answers didn’t add up, and the unease began to gnaw. I ordered a CT scan to be done the morning after he landed back home. I wouldn’t have ordinarily intervened this way, but there was a sense of desperation that eclipsed waiting for a call or message back from his personal physician.

I was at work, surrounded by the hum of fluorescent lights, the soft beeping of monitors, and the faint smell of antiseptic, when I opened the report. That’s when the irreversible line was drawn. Before, we had a life filled with ordinary joys. After, there was only the beast.

It was demanding and all consuming. It colonized us. Took over our calendars, our language, our sleep, our hope. Every conversation bent around it. Every plan paused. Every decision was made in its shadow. Cancer insisted that I stop everything I’d spent my life building and turn toward it. Full-bodied. Full-hearted. Full-time.

And I would. Because the person I loved most had been hunted. And I had no choice but to stand between him and the beast.

I kept thinking: How could I not know this was coming? In hindsight the clues had been there for a few months. As a hospital-based physician, I was trained to approach symptoms with disciplined logic—always starting with the most likely explanations first. In medicine, we have a saying: “When you hear hooves in the hallway, think horses, not zebras.” So, the night sweats were from too many blankets, the bleeding gums from the electric toothbrush, the extreme fatigue from long-covid, his increasing abdominal girth the signs of middle-age, the discomfort in his left flank a strained muscle.

One day, I was at the hospital, rounding on patients and explaining treatment plans with clinical clarity. I was wearing my white coat, answering questions, reassuring families with steady eyes and practiced calm.

The next, I was standing in my own kitchen, chopping carrots for soup—trying to predict what might go down smoothly after the next round of chemo, what might offer calories without provoking nausea. My hands moved like a doctor’s: precise, efficient, practiced. But my heart had no protocol for this.

How do you unlearn decades of training when the person you love most becomes the patient?

I couldn’t switch it off. The diagnostic part of my brain still hummed, scanning labs, never quite second-guessing the plan, but always quietly recalculating. I was still a doctor. But now I was also the wife. The housekeeper. The scheduler. The one who packed the chemo bag and remembered the anti-nausea meds and folded the laundry while trying to rein in the anxiety—an anxiety that gripped my stomach, ringed my heart, and ran away with every ounce of logic and reason.

Caregiving is not what I was trained for—not like this. In medicine, we speak of detachment. Objectivity. Compassion wrapped in clinical distance. But there is no detachment when it’s your husband whose cells have run amok, whose skin turns sallow, whose eyes—those beautiful blue eyes—begin to look too much like the patients I used to care for.

People would say, “You must feel so prepared for this, being a doctor.” As if that made it easier. But it didn’t. It made it worse. I knew too much—some days I felt like I knew nothing at all. I read between the lines of every test result, every vague reassurance. We soldiered on, not with blind hope, but with clear eyes and quiet determination.

Still, I clung to the routines. I made the soups. I created schedules. I kept the house running—quietly, efficiently, like I was trained to do in a crisis. It was how I coped. If I could anticipate the nausea, time the meds just right, stock the fridge, chase down the lab results, track every symptom—then maybe I could tame the beast. Maybe I could keep the worst of it at bay. I knew I couldn’t cure him, but I believed—deep down—that if I just held everything tightly enough, I could control the chaos. I could control something.

I’ve never believed that doctors “save lives” in the way people think we do. What we do—if we’re lucky—is slow the damage, soften the blow, or guide someone through the worst of it. But I could try to protect him from the many miseries of being a patient. I could hustle on his behalf—smooth the road ahead. I could try to limit unnecessary lab tests, prevent delays, help navigate the maze that is American healthcare. I became the keeper of the details—the one who remembered every symptom, scan, lab value, trend, and medication. The handoff person. The one who filled in the blanks for the rotating cast of providers. Sometimes, I could intervene when the risks clearly outweighed the benefits—when inertia or protocol threatened to do harm. I couldn’t cure him, but I could protect him. I could make it just a little less cruel.

In the first days after Ian’s diagnosis—a rare form of lymphoma, stubborn rather than swift—we held hands in bed and said nothing. No words could meet the moment. I already knew this world—the scans, the protocols, the meds with long, jagged names. I’d cared for patients with similar diagnoses. I spoke the language. But now I was on the other side of the glass, watching it all unfold from inside the story itself.

First came the shock and then came the horror. The shock of diagnosis, the horror of treatment.

We became one unit—our cancer, our treatment, our future in the balance. But we were still two separate bodies. He cried when I couldn’t. I worried in ways he couldn’t see. I held things together when falling apart might have been more honest. He felt the poison in his veins. I felt the impossibility of protecting him.

Friends tried to help. They implied things like “seize the day,” “savor the moment,” “be grateful for what you have.” They didn’t say it in so many words, but we heard what they inferred—perhaps they were confronting their own mortality. This was the kind of situation that likely made our cohort of friends stop and say, “there but for the grace of God go I,” or “if it could happen to them it could happen to us.” Ian wasn’t old—fifty-five at the time of diagnosis—athletic, slender, and prone to almost no vices. No high-risk habits or concerning family history.

I was already fluent in the language of mindfulness—live a day at a time. I’d been journaling for decades, searching for meaning, practicing presence. I’d logged thousands of miles on foot, trying to run my way into peace, calmness, and a way to cope. My whole adult life had been an exercise in making the most of things, no matter how hard. And yet now, I wanted none of it. I missed the most important diagnosis of my life—perhaps because I was too busy smelling the roses and finding the beauty in the structure of the trees.

I didn’t want to savor the present. I wanted the past. I wanted the life we had before the diagnosis, before the shadow. I wanted to believe that my share of heartache had already been paid—that I’d earned the right to live in peace, wrapped in the safety of love and hard-won stability. Screw carpe diem. I wanted what was mine.

Still, optimism was a habit I couldn’t shake. After six months of chemotherapy and a scan that showed no change, I clung to the oncologist’s phrasing like a lifeline: “It will take time for the tablets to shrink the spleen.” He added, “If we weighed it now, I bet it would weigh less than it did six months ago.” That was enough. We took it as a win.

I even threw a party. A celebration lunch in our backyard—lime green tablecloths (lymphoma’s signature color), rented furniture, catered sandwiches and salads. I made a video in secret, collecting short messages from the healthcare team who had walked beside us: doctors, nurses, infusion center staff. When I played it at the party, there wasn’t a dry eye in the house. For one afternoon, we allowed ourselves the illusion of progress, of hope blooming.

But there was no remission. The spleen still pressed like a ten-pound stone against his stomach, leaving little room for food. Ian could manage only small meals, naps twice a day, and brief spells out of bed. The celebration wasn’t for his health. It was for his resilience. For ours.

A week later, we traveled to Ireland to see Ian’s family—two weeks that were meaningful but exhausting. First-class tickets gave us space but not comfort; turbulence triggered hours of vomiting. We were careful, masked, vigilant—remnants of pandemic-era caution still stitched into our routines. At Heathrow, I saw only one other masked family. Summer 2024. Lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system, doesn’t care what season it is.

In Ireland, no one mentioned the cancer. There was a polite silence, a refusal to speak the word aloud. We found it baffling. In the U.S., we talked openly—about tests and setbacks, chemo and scans. I felt restless. I missed home. But the thought of going home made me feel even more depleted—back to caretaking, housework, job-juggling. There was no real rest anywhere.

We were responsible; until we weren’t. One morning, driving back from a seaside hotel with Ian’s father, we stopped at a crowded supermarket near Belfast. We didn’t wear masks. I don’t know why. We were distracted, excited about small indulgences — foods Ian might enjoy, things that reminded him of a carefree childhood. The next day, his father had a “bit of a cold.” We tried to isolate, unsuccessfully. I blamed myself.

By the time we got home to San Francisco, Ian could barely lift his head. We both tested positive for the covid virus. He was too weak to come downstairs. Too weak to speak some days. Each time he fell asleep, he feared he wouldn’t wake up. One day, while I was at the store, he wanted to write me a love note—just in case he was dead when I got back. He was too weak to get pen to paper.

We delayed checking his labs, knowing covid would skew the results. Two weeks later we finally made it to the lab. Once back home the results hit my phone. I was standing at the bottom of the stairs. Ian was asleep upstairs. His white blood cell count was higher than anything I’d seen in my decades-long career. My hands shook. My heart was beating so fast I could feel it in my throat. I stood there, quiet and alone.

His oncologist called immediately. Additional testing confirmed it: the cancer was back, or perhaps it had never really left. Covid may have triggered the spiral, but the disease was already poised. I built a spreadsheet, trying to calculate when exactly the numbers had begun to rise. Before the party? After? It didn’t matter. The beast was awake again—ferocious and demanding to be reckoned with.

In the months that followed, everything accelerated. Ian was started on a new regimen—targeted medications, cutting-edge and astonishingly expensive, couriered directly to our doorstep. Each bottle cost tens of thousands of dollars. The goal was to buy time, stabilize the disease, and bridge us to something more powerful.

Soon, we were referred to the nearby university research hospital to be evaluated for advanced cellular therapy—genetically engineered T-cells designed to hunt and kill cancer. This wasn’t experimental. It had FDA approval for certain leukemias and lymphomas, including Ian’s. It was a beacon of hope wrapped in science fiction.

But first, the spleen had to go. That massive organ, long overstretched by disease, had become a liability. “Good riddance,” we said, with humor born of necessity. After six hours in the OR, the surgeon met me in the waiting room and described the resection like it was a birth. “It was like delivering a really fat baby,” she said. I smiled, grateful for her calm.

But the path wasn’t smooth. On the first day of the next hospitalization, Ian’s labs came back dangerously abnormal. His white blood cell count had climbed beyond the lab machine’s upper limit. Worse, the lactic acid level in his blood bordered on incompatible with life. I’d seen this scenario before—only a handful times—but never from this side of the bed.

The on-call oncologist came in with a full team in tow. I recognized the choreography. This was the “come to Jesus” talk. I’d given it scores of times myself. Now I was the one seated at the bedside. I made it easy for them.

A few months earlier, Ian had asked me how physician-assisted death worked in California. He wanted to know the rules, the timing, the steps. “If it comes to it,” he’d said, “I don’t want to suffer. I don’t want to be kept alive just for the sake of it.” I’d told him the details of the Right to Die Act. We filled out our Advance Directives, signed and notarized them together. Still, I wondered whether part of his resolve came from not wanting to be a burden on me.

So, when the team gathered that day, we knew what we wanted. Ian asked me to speak. I said, “We’re not going to the ICU. No heroic measures. No life support. No machines.” We also knew that if things didn’t turn around fast, Ian would no longer qualify for the cellular therapy. The window was closing.

That night, the team adjusted his medications again—more aggressive this time. Astonishingly, the white blood cells began to fall. Slowly, his body responded. Six weeks later, he was stable enough to transfer to the university hospital. His own genetically reprogrammed T-cells—collected weeks earlier and engineered in a specialized lab somewhere across the world—were now ready for infusion.

The next forty days were spent in another hospital room. Complications came; some expected some not. Fevers preceded by shaking chills so violent the whole bed shook, and vital signs that lay on the precipice of a cliff for days on end—that line between stable and critical. Confusion that reduced a brilliant engineer—the sharpest mind I know—into someone caught in a terrifying neurological loop, scribbling endless strings of the letter “r” in place of a coherent sentence. But eventually, something remarkable happened.

The cancer went quiet.

Remission, at last. A hard-earned victory—one that came at a staggering cost. For a year and a half, we battled the beast, each of us in our own trench, drawing on courage we didn’t know we had. When the final fight was over, Ian was a ghost of the man he’d once been—almost literally. He was down nearly 45 pounds, a quarter of his body mass gone. His red blood cells were half what’s needed to power a body through the day. His eyes were sunken, bruised with fatigue. His skin pale and loose against bones that had no fat left to soften them.

We had lost our sense of humor somewhere in those last 40 days in the hospital. Once, we might have smiled at the indignity of lost eyelashes or the oddity of a bald head. But now there was no laughter left—just exhaustion, a quiet hollowing.

When the oncologist finally said the words—no cancer cells on the bone marrow biopsy—we nodded, but the joy didn’t come. We were too depleted. Worse, we were angry. Not at the science or the illness, but at how indifferent some of the staff had been to basic human dignity.

I’ve spent a career inside hospitals, and I know the tension that builds in people forced to live in crisis. I’ve seen how grief and fear can curdle into anger. But this felt different. This wasn’t just the stress of the sick. This was something colder.

Ian felt it most acutely—the particular humiliation of being ignored when you’re most vulnerable. When a hospital-acquired intestinal infection left him writhing and weak, he still had to endure a blaring bed alarm each time he tried to stand. It had made sense when he was confused—but now he was lucid, humiliated, and still shackled by protocol. When I tried to warn staff via the call system that he needed help, I was met not with concern, but with condescension. The assistant nurse manager pulled me aside—not to ask how Ian was doing—but to lecture me, to “explain how things are done here,” as if compassion required clarification.

I couldn’t protect him anymore—not from the systems, not from the small cruelties of care that forget the human being inside the bed. His nutrition went overlooked. His fluid balance spiraled. They poured in IV fluids for weeks, and with no spleen to drain help the fluid and no protein reserves to hold it in his blood vessels, he ballooned. Nine liters collected in his abdomen. And still, no one seemed to put the whole picture together.

Much of what happened to us was standard medical fare—necessary evils in pursuit of a cure. But what broke us wasn’t the treatment. It was the arrogance. The way the institution seemed to orbit itself—its outcomes, its protocols, its prestige—while the patient became a prop in someone else’s performance.

A well-meaning oncologist once told us, “Don’t forget your humanity.” I wanted to say, Why would we? We’re the ones living this nightmare, not visiting it. If anything, I wished I could have said, “Right back at you.”

When we finally made it home, there was a fragile kind of relief. We weren’t whole—but we had survived.

The next priority was nourishment. Ian’s body had been starved by illness, stripped to its scaffolding. A feeding tube was recommended, and the standard path would’ve meant readmission to a hospital. But neither of us could face another institutional hallway, another sleepless night under fluorescent light. He had spent more than three months in hospitals. I had spent fourteen hours a day at his side. We had nothing left to give to that setting. So, I leaned on the quiet power of community and my place within it. With the help of generous colleagues, same-day deliveries, and years of clinical knowledge, I orchestrated what would have once felt improbable: tube feeds started in our own home, within twenty-four hours.

Ian could still eat, but between the lingering gut infection and a vanished appetite, it wasn’t enough. The tube feeds weren’t a defeat—they were support. A gesture of faith in his body’s ability to come back.

And then, almost overnight, it did.

Within days, Ian stopped napping—something he hadn’t done in over a year and a half. He began spending time at his computer again, designing 3D objects. He washed the car, cleaned up the garden. His vitality returned not with fireworks but with a quiet, astonishing steadiness. In four months, he’d regained all his weight. One night, while we shared his homemade pizza, I gently said, “I think it’s time to take the feeding tube out.” We’d needed it for just three weeks.

Soon, he was walking three miles at a time and once again ordering meals at restaurants instead of just nibbling at home. His body, once in ruins, had come back to life.

Now we prepare for the next step: a bone marrow transplant—the only chance at a cure, or at the very least, more time. We are filled with gratitude for the donor out there in the world, someone whose name we don’t know, who is offering this extraordinary gift of hope.

And as I stand at the edge of this new threshold, I can see, more clearly now, how this journey has changed me.

At the beginning, I clung to control—to the delineation of roles, to data, to precision. I wanted to be the competent doctor, the steadfast wife, the efficient caregiver, the meal planner, the spreadsheet maker. I imagined I could keep the chaos at bay through sheer organization. But somewhere along the way, the lines blurred. I began to let go of the titles and simply become one thing: a person loving another person through something unspeakably hard. I still catch myself needing to explain that I’m a doctor, as if that buys me authority or influence—but I see now how much of that is just ego, and fear dressed up in credentials. I’m trying—slowly, imperfectly—to let that go. To trust the team. To stay present. Not with blind faith, but with earned hope.

I’ve learned that being informed doesn’t always make things easier. That sometimes knowing the worst-case scenario doesn’t protect you from the pain of living it. I always knew this, intellectually—but now I feel it in my bones. In my breath.

And here we are—healthier, more grounded, more whole than we’ve been in a long time. Not because the nightmare is over, but because we’ve come through so much of it together.

Just now, Ian looked over at me—his eyes soft and steady—and said, “We’ve got to just let it all happen.”

And for once, I didn’t feel the need to fix anything. I just nodded and held his gaze.

Yes. We do.