5 Tips for Living With Radical Uncertainty
A Black oncologist and cancer survivor passes on her wisdom
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I would hate to think that cancer has taught me any lessons.
In the deeply clichéd sense, that is probably true. I have not changed my diet. I am still impatient, flappable. I do not cherish every moment. I do not consider my experience “a gift.” I did not alter my career trajectory much, if at all. I spend my time mostly inside and among people like me, people with cancer, when perhaps I should be outside enjoying nature’s splendor. At a basic level, I continue to be who I am, who I have always been. For better and for worse.
Nevertheless, in the first days of March, I gave a talk at TEDMED about my experience inhabiting the narrow Venn diagram space of people who had cancer first and became oncologists second. I spoke, in person, unmasked, to a room full of people about learning to live joyfully with radical uncertainty. As I recounted the details of being misdiagnosed with metastatic cancer, then correctly diagnosed with two independent cancers, subsequently undergoing multiple brutal and long treatments, and then, finally, starting medical school all within the space of a year, I asked the audience, “What’s the worst that could happen?” What more heartbreak could possibly befall me? There is always more, of course. But I have tried to live without worrying about the ghastly specifics.
That was less than four months ago. Although the month as a unit of time is not particularly meaningful when time is moving at the pace of worldwide tragedies. Slow and fast. Even with all that I have lived through, I could never have anticipated that the worst was this. By mid-March, even the last holdouts believed that the world had changed with Covid-19. And by late May, many who had long refused to reckon with anti-Black racism — also global, also deadly — were confronted with the collective demand for oxygen from those of us who have not been able to breathe easily, move freely, or live equally for centuries. So what have I learned from my cancers, from my oncology training, from my Black life that might pass for advice on the problems at hand? That is, how on earth do you live with this worst, with this uncertainty that has undone in days that edifice which we were sure would stand…
