TWO TRUTHS ABOUT CHEMO | William Doan
The call comes at 9:12 a.m., a normal hour for life-altering sentences. Clear, she says—
a word that should belong to water, to glass,
to a morning sky after a storm.
Clear marrow, no malignant signatures.
No ghost colonies writing their names in your bones.
We stand in the kitchen
holding mugs we never drink from.
Steam lifts like prayer we don’t know where to send. For a moment gravity loosens its grip.
The house forgets how to be a hospital annex.
The calendar forgets its numbers.
We almost laugh at nothing.
Five days later the infusion chair again,
vinyl cracked in familiar constellations, nurses moving with their practiced gentleness.
“Just finishing the protocol,” they say, because victory still requires fire.
Poison by design, hope delivered through tubing, a cure that must first
convince the body it is dying. Your eyes dim in degrees
I have learned to measure better than time.
The ride home is quiet - the way thunder is quiet just before it breaks.
2:07 a.m.
Your skin is ash-cool, breath shallow like someone borrowing air.
Emergency Room light—a second sun that never rises or sets, only interrogates.
They wheel you away again, another curtain, another border I cannot cross.
A doctor says, “reaction, complication, expected sometimes”—
language that tries to domesticate my terror.
Morning finally arrives.
Your marrow holds no cancer. Your body still holds the war. Both
truths stand in the same room, refusing to cancel each other.
Victory does not end the battle.
It merely changes what we are afraid of.
I hold your hand between monitors and discharge papers and understand—
survival is not a moment, not a bell,
not a word spoken over the phone.
It is this: walking out of the hospital after almost losing you
to the thing that is saving you.
William Doan is a past president of the Association for Theatre in Higher Education and a Fellow in the College of Fellows of The American Theatre. In addition to articles in scholarly journals, Doan has co-authored three books and several plays. He has created solo performance projects at a variety of venues across the U.S., and abroad. His work includes multiple short graphic narratives published in the Annals of Internal Medicine/Graphic Medicine, Cleaver Magazine, Intima: The Journal of Narrative Medicine, and the AutoEthnographer, as well as several award winning animated short films. He is an emeritus professor in the College of Arts and Architecture at the Pennsylvania State University where he served as the Penn State Laureate for 2019-2020.