My trip to the night side
A pea-sized lump, hard as a bullet. A dull pain in my left breast. A haunting thought that something was brewing.
Susan Sontag perceived illness as the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. There’s the country of the well, and the country of the sick. The border between the two can be breached in an instant - a fact we suppress. Death, the one sure extinction that we are constantly travelling towards, is something that happens to other people. Not to a fit, outwardly healthy woman in her forties, a single parent of two young children.
A few days after I discovered the lump, I was sitting in a surgeon’s consulting room. Brisk and business-like, no makeup and a sensible haircut, she bore
