We are cancer comrades—and that makes for a pervasive sense of sympathy all around. The ward is a place where empathy gas seems pumped through the vents to fill the room. It’s where you can fairly safely say (even if you never actually say it), “I know what you’re feeling,” because you do; at least in general, if not in the details.

Dear Journal,

So recently, I was in the cancer ward for another of my destined-to-be-lifelong treatments. There were 30-35 patients in the treatment room, and another 20 or so in the waiting room. That’s a lot of cancer in one place, and I can assure you that it’s a deeply affecting sight. Everyone there (except family members) is quite literally fighting for his or her life. An agent of death is in them, and every type of available medical arsenal there is, is being deployed to kill it. Every treatment is a desperate search-and-destroy mission.

You feel something abnormal when you look into the face of dozens of people gathered in a pretty small space, all of whom are very sick, having been struck with the deadly “c-word.” But for some reason, in my recent “visit” when I was sitting and waiting, I intentionally scanned the rooms to look at people’s faces, and I couldn’t help but feel sadness for them all—old, young, and in-between. As I sat there, I could almost see the “C” letter hanging on every neck in that room. We were all marked for intense physical battles in a fight for life.

But then it hit me that as I was feeling sadness for them, many of them were probably looking at me, and feeling the same sadness for me, even if unspoken. In a cancer ward, it is more than him or her or me; it is us. It’s a club that no one wants to join.

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