Today, the topic for the 20 minute writing session at our Wellness Community writing support group was:
"Doubt can be a bond as strong as certainty and it can be as sustaining." When one of the other group members voiced the concept we were all feeling, "How can we write about that?" we got a question to help inspire us to write. "How, if at all, do doubt and certainty play a role in your life?"
What I was inspired to write isn't a poem, it's a bit of a rant.
Doubt and Certainty
by
Henry Farkas
What am I certain of?
What do I doubt?
Half the things they taught me in medical school, things they were certain of, are wrong. I actually know what some of them are. But not all of them.
Werner Heisenberg, of the uncertainty principle, showed, with math, that you can't know absolutely everything about anything. We imperfect souls, who admit our imperfection, realize that Heisenberg was quite right, even if we can't understand the math.
So, now, getting down to cancer in our little writing cancer group, how do doubt and certainty apply?
When they took out my cancer and my one extrapulmonary node, my surgeon told me he'd gotten it all, and he was the chief of surgery at the Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania.
He was pretty certain.
So then, I asked him, "Should I just skip the adjuvant chemotherapy that my oncologist recommended?
Well, maybe not.
Did I detect a shadow of a doubt?
So I came out to Los Angeles, after adjuvant chemo, and after recurrence.
Over at Cedars-Sinai, they said they wanted to treat me with "curative intent." Did that mean they were certain they could cure me? Well, not exactly. It did mean they could make me feel really miserable without themselves feeling bad about it. And they did.
So, can I be certain they've cured me?
They're still scheduling scans.
