It simply never occurred to me that I would have to make room for cancer in the middle of a life that was already full of other priorities, possibilities, and promises. But cancer interrupted with no warning. My life began shifting in ways that would forever alter the living of it and the sharing of it with my husband, my daughter, and my parents on the other side of the Atlantic. From a different distance, it would affect my colleagues and aquaintances. Up close and personal, it would alter me.
With no family history of breast cancer, and the “all clear” on my baseline and subsequent mammograms, I was wholly unprepared to add the position of cancer patient to my curriculum vitae. I am, therefore, learning on the job. It has made me see myself as an immigrant once more, navigating her way within the context and complexity of cancer country. Again, I perceive a gulf between myself and others who do not yet understand the politics, the language, the business, the norms of this new, strange culture. Cancer country, where within confidences shared between kindred spirits in hospital waiting rooms and in the advocacy for change that ripples through the online community, I feel more a part, and at the same time, strangely more apart from the people who know me best.

Edited "Documented Dreams" a collection of bilingual letters from undocumented high school students living in Arizona.