A vanishingly rare, highly terminal diagnosis placed Christopher Ingraham on a precipice and left him there for a year before another diagnosis pulled him away from the edge. What lingers, in this rollercoaster of an essay from Slate, is the precision of Ingraham’s interiority. He charts the rise and fall of his dread like a tide; he begins to strategize about eventualities that are impossible to perfectly plan for. He looks down for a long time, and returns with perspectives that some of us don’t necessarily have the time or good fortune to develop.
I couldn’t believe I would be dying in fucking Minnesota, of all places. I wasn’t even from here. I had only ended up here because of a stupid article I had written on a lark a decade ago. “Reporter moves to town he called America’s worst place to live” was a good viral story, a great hook for a book. “Reporter gets cancer and dies there” was, in some ways, even better, a darkly funny prank played by an indifferent universe.
More picks about medicine and health
What 100 Million Volts Do to the Body and Mind
“The odds of being struck by lightning in America in a given year are one in 1.2 million. How does the experience reorient a person’s sense of chance, of fate?”
Phantom Pains
“These losses—my limb, my students’ hopes, Thoreau’s mammals, the wings falling from our skies—they are not all that distinct from one another. They can’t be, because all of us, all of the material world, we are one and the same thing.”
My Unraveling
“I had my health. I had a job. And then, abruptly, I didn’t.”
