🩺 Illness & health · 🙏 Faith & doubt · 🌅 Facing death
On becoming the patient
I spent thirty-four years on the knowledge side of the microscope, and then one biopsy moved me to the other side, and I will report the finding honestly: nothing I knew about lymphoma prepared me for having it, and everything I knew about uncertainty did. Science had trained me to live without final answers — to act well on incomplete data. It turns out that is the entire skill of being seriously ill. The scans come back ambiguous, the odds are ranges, and you must live anyway, Tuesday after Tuesday. If you can hold 'I don't know yet' without letting it become 'I fear the worst,' you have the only equipment that helps.
To someone younger: Learn to act well on incomplete data. Everything serious requires it.
— Dr. Priya Sharma · Immunologist — thirty-four years at NIH, BethesdaDemonstration