I’ve always been fond of this part of the Burning Man festival origin legend:

Ten years ago a small caravan of vehicles stopped at the edge of the empty vastness of the Black Rock desert, a place where you could gain nothing or lose it all and no one would ever know. Danger Ranger took a stick, drew a line across the earth, and said “On the other side of this line, there exists a world where everything is different.” Then everybody held hands and stepped across that line.

That quote came to mind when I got back to my hotel room on the outskirts of Paris after delivering a keynote speech about the future of life online. The previous night, on my arrival, there was email from my gastroenterologist in my queue, requesting my permission to waive privacy protections and receive the results of my colonoscopy pathology report via email. This actually didn’t seem ominous. I had been living with the myth that the doctor always looks you in the eye when he or she says the dreaded words. And immediately after the colonoscopy he had told me that the mass he found was “squishy,” not hard, like most tumors.

Nevertheless, when I saw the next email from my doctor, the night after my speech, I knew that when I hit the return key and read the body of the email, my life would be different, one way or the other. I remembered the incident ten years ago when I discovered a lump in my groin on a friday and couldn’t get in to see a doctor until Monday. Suddenly, over that weekend, so many things that had mattered before I found the lump didn’t matter so much. And some things that I had not dwelled on as being particularly important were suddenly important. It was Spring. The light on the grass made it seem as if each blade was internally illuminated. The vividness dial on my perceptions seemed to have been turned up a notch. Then I saw the doctor on Monday and he told me it was nothing, a common benign lump that will go away. And life returned to normal. I didn’t forget that weekend-long switch in my state of mind, but I wasn’t experiencing it any more. Like other numinous experiences, it left me with a certainty that other ways of seeing the world exist, but without continuous direct access to the temporary state of mind that had convinced me. It was the kind of knowing that William James called Noetic — and the kind of knowing that convinced Apollo Astronaut Edgar Mitchell to found the Institute of Noetic Sciences, where I was a staff writer in the early 1990s.

So there I was, staring at my email queue. I knew that if I hesitated a second, I’d sit there all night. So I hit the key and got the words: “Unfortunately, you have cancer.” My gastroenterologist had made an appointment with a radiation oncologist on Monday. I was on the other side of the line. How many fantasy fear scenarios had I run through my brain in my lifetime about discovering that I was a cancer patient? Doesn’t everybody? And here it was. Me. Cancer. Cancer in me. Me in the world of Cancer.  It felt like a dream, but I couldn’t think very far in that direction. I might feel a little woozy after being hit in the head with a baseball bat, but I wasn’t so out of it that I could deny the existence of the bat.

My next, immediate thought, of course was about the way that the unknown but certain deadline to my life that had always been far out on the fuzzy horizon was suddenly much closer in and in much much crisper focus. First I had to think about that — death. Then I had to think about what do with my life now, on the other side of that line. I didn’t have too long to do it, since my long time and dear Parisian friend was coming to meet for dinner in fifteen minutes.

So I promised that there wouldn’t be long walks on the beach with God. However, if only to document for myself a clear set of mental states and sudden decisions that are still fresh in my mind but will likely fade and morph, I need to take you to my fifteen minute hotel room encounter with my life, my death, and what do I do about it.

That account will have to wait. It’s time to get ready for radiation treatment. I want to write something about the very important series running in the New  York Times about the way shaped-beam radiation treatments made it possible to target tumor tissue without damaging normal tissue as never before — but had reached a level of complexity where human or machine or system error had resulted in patients being accidentally over-radiated to a fatal degree. Obviously, this series of articles had been a big topic of institutional discussion, and was the topic of a discussion with my radiation team. I’ll get to that. And the big taboo about shit and what it comes out of.

They tell me that chemo side-effects will begin to hit soon. I might not be able to make long reports. We’ll see. Dragging my ass to my computer to write about what’s happening and what I’m doing about it seems to be an important part of my strategy for winning my health. I’m not big on conflict metaphors. Instead of beating this thing, I’m aiming to get my full health back.