A tale of two bus rides, two hospitals and the upside of ‘ifs’

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It’s seven a.m., November 8, 2023. Soon, I’ll board a bus to Boston to take the T and a bus to West Roxbury. There, I’ll walk into the VA hospital to be chemically knocked out. A surgical team will put an instrument down my throat. That mechanism will, I believe, snip off tiny bits of the nodule in my lung and, perhaps, a sample of nearby lymph nodes. These pieces of me—and how strange to think of a cancer as part of ME—will be sent off to mystics and sorcerers in the mountains—sorry, I mean pathologists in a lab. They’ll read my entrails and divine my future. What a funny world, huh?