Going Rogue

In the days after my cancer diagnosis, I began to develop a mental image of the cancer cells and what they were doing in my body. I knew they were in my lymph nodes—little pockets of tissue in remote and strategic areas of my body—and I started to create a picture of who they were and how they were spending their time.

I imagined them migrating to my lymph nodes in small numbers at first, then multiplying and welcoming others of their kind, creating little Hodgkin’s Lymphoma cell communities. They were clearing land and building houses and planting gardens. Some were also building bunkers and walled compounds while others were planting weed. Oh, so much weed.

I thought of the cells as belonging to one of two rogue separatist groups. Both wanted to isolate themselves from society and take up residence somewhere, but they had different reasons for doing so. They weren't malicious per se; they were just doing what separatists do.

Some of these rogue cells wanted to carve out their own place in my body so that they could practice free love and play folk songs on the guitar and live in peace and harmony together. They didn’t want The Man telling them what to do or whom they could sleep with (or making them pay taxes). Some of them took their tents and RVs and hosted a big Burning Man festival, where they shared their food with each other, created oversized sculptures, and danced around bonfires until the wee hours of the morning. They also smoked a lot of pot.

Another group of the rogue cells—the bunker builders—was stockpiling weapons and hording supplies. These cells also didn’t want The Man telling them what to do (or making them pay taxes), but they weren’t as into free love and folk music as the hippy cells. These guys wouldn’t set foot in a Burning Man festival, but they might accept some pot now and then. They had freeze-dried food and big containers of water and more survival gear than REI. These cells were preparing for the apocalypse when, ironically, it was they who were threatening my body's survival, not the other way around.

Both groups were taking up residence in my lymph nodes to escape the rest of the body, as separatists do, and to thumb their noses at white blood cells, the primary residents of the lymphatic system, who should have been deporting the rogue cells. It is the white blood cells, after all, who travel the lymphatic system's network of interconnected highways ridding the body of infections. Instead, these lymphatic highways made it easy for the rogue cancer cells to spread and build new communities in other parts of my body, which they did, very systematically.

They started at the top, in my neck, and worked their way down, forming settlements under my arms and in the space around my lungs and heart. One prominent lymph node under my right arm must have been the site of the Burning Man festival. They moved to the area around my stomach and were doubtless preparing to go further south, to my groin and ankles, when they were discovered and their progress was arrested.

When the National Guard was called in to disrupt all their rogue settlements, I imagine the cancer cells were very displeased at having to stop smoking so much pot.