Wings of a Bird

Learning to Heal: Suddenly, a medical student becomes a cancer patient - Seattle P-I
Greg Lipski exudes a quiet strength as he takes on leukemia
...
He thought little of it at first, until he started waking at night drenched in sweat, as though he were on a never-ending phantom climb. He started needing 10 hours of sleep plus two-hour naps to get through his days.
"I thought, maybe medical school is getting to me," he says. "Or maybe I'm getting old."
...
"Dear Class," he wrote in an e-mail to his fellow students. "It's tough to see your world turn upside down so fast. The perspective from this room makes sitting through T-wing lectures seem pretty good. Good luck spanking spring quarter and surviving through boards. Remember when you're bumming in that next boring lecture, that someone wishes they could be there."
He wished for that so much, he asked one of his doctors about continuing his classes.
"Don't even think about it," came the answer, news almost harder to take than hearing he had cancer. Lipski could feel everything he'd been working for skid out from under him as though he were in a slow wipeout on a slick road.
He sought a second opinion. A different doctor said he could try to keep up.
"I knew right then I would," he says. "It restored me to having a daily purpose."
...
Outside, in the waiting room, [his mohter] Masako Lipski twists a rolled-up information sheet on total body irradiation. Her short wavy black hair is slightly grayed. She has deep circles under her eyes. She already knows about radiation.
In 1945, Masako was on a ferry on her way to her seventh-grade classroom on the mainland in Hiroshima when she heard the air-raid sirens. She was excited. It was a beautiful day and that meant no school. The boat turned around. But when she got back to her yard, she saw a blue flash. Startled, she looked up. There was a noise. She searches for a word to describe it. Not like exploding, she says. Like a gong: Vaaahhhn. She raises her arms to show the noise expanding. And then the wind came.
"It was already warm," she says. "I thought, what is the wind for?"
People were running out of their houses, looking up at the sky.
"We'd never seen that kind of cloud."
News didn't reach her island for days about the devastation.
"I didn't suffer much," she says. "I just see other people suffer."
There will be three more days of radiation after today. She knows each day, her son will be progressively worse. He will retch without warning. He will start to waste before her eyes.
"The future is very unknown," she says. "It gives me fear."
...
In Lipski's case, he will emerge from the transplant with the immune system of an infant. His body will need to reprogram all its infection-fighting cells. Until that happens, he can't risk any undercooked meat. There will be no sushi or aged cheese.
"Or caviar," Lipski points out.
It also means a common flu virus could take him out.
The list of other instructions is long. Avoid large crowds and animals. Stay away from construction sites. (Machinery stirs up molds.) He will take cocktails of drugs.
"There's a whole world of things waiting to get you," he says.
...