Cancer Colony

In July 2025 Christus Hospital in Santa Fe opened a cancer center that has been a game changer in the region. Archbishop Lamy founded the original facility in 1865; over time it developed a treatment wing for cancer paitients, but as technologies became more sophisticated patients often had to travel to other centers like Denver or Houston to receive care. It only took a minute once the new facility opened for it to become a hub in its own right.

The new wing is state-of-the-art technologically, but culturally too in the way it thinks about the person: the goal is to get patients talking about their experience. I wasn't on board at first, in large part because I was sure none of it had anything to do with me. Walking into the facility you realize you're in a specific kind of assembly, one you never aspired to; one with the trappings of infirmity the closer you look.

Beyond the main check-in area you're funneled to one of two waiting rooms, radiology or chemo. In the former where I went you found less of a sad, zombie vibe than something akin to a party––and sometimes, at the end of treatment, you find the real thing. It seems incongruous. A volunteer helps facilitate conversation while people wait to be called. My first reflex was to perform my best Bartleby impression with an implied I'd-rather-not. It worked for a while at least. 

The problem is that treatment reduces a person; it does hard things to the body. A cancer regimen turns it into another animal altogether, and as treatment progresses things get worse, because it destroys both good and bad cells. Fatigue is added to a series of unpleasant, painful, and in many ways humiliating side effects. 

For that reason it doesn't take long for resistance to give way when you find yourself among others going through similar things. There's a comfort knowing they get what you're slogging through, even if they have a different form of the disease––gamma rays are gamma rays. Over time even the staunchest go-it-aloner cracks, at least in my experience. They develop a sense that the others they're with, they and their caregivers, comprise a unique colony within the broader community. 

It is a diverse group. Anyone looking for a truly democratic space, beyond the ersatz one we give lip service to in this country, is sure to find it in the waiting room of a cancer center. Whatever you might say about the disease, it doesn't give a crap about difference. It comes for people of every demographic. If you want to experience an egalitarian space, even if you weren't looking for it, you'll find it there. Cancer is the great leveler. 

Again no one aspires to be part of that circle, but once you find yourself there there are things to be learned, about yourself for sure, but more importantly others. Cancer changes people; it opens them up. One of the challenges of a diagnosis is dealing with an imminent sense of your own mortality; insights related to the desire to remain among the living flow from there. 

An interesting turn in my experience was realizing that coming out as a cancer patent is not unlike coming out gay. People you may have known for some time surprise you by revealing––who knew?––that they struggled with the disease too but never said anything, for a variety of reasons that make sense when you've had the disease. What's more, others' stories offer a modicum of hope that the disease can be beat, or at least abided; it's a shred of hope amid so many other stories out there to the contrary.

The colony consists not just of cancer patients of course, current and former, but caregivers as well; all manner of loved ones who may have just as hard a time as cancer patients themselves, albeit in different ways. Caregiving is stressful, and exhausting. In some cases caregivers have also had the disease, though in most cases they haven't, which means they're learning hard truths in real time along with their loved ones. By dint of a connection they've been roped in, and most important of all they choose not to run away.

The spirit of assembly is rare these days given the balkanizing effects of technology, the way it separates us, but also the ever-numbing emphasis on things, as though they were enough to fulfill or define a person. Cancer loops you beyond all that. It strips existence to bare bones, to what matters; to the importance of people. It's lamentable that it takes a disease, and a colony, to bring a person back to such an old chestnut.