"Ten days after my surgery, I have to go back to work. I’ve been teaching through the months of chemotherapy, but..."

"... despite this, I’ve run out of medical leave. I am driven there by my friends, many of whom have already had to make great sacrifices to help me. Some write checks, some help me drain the surgical tubes stitched to my body, others send mixtapes or cannabis popcorn. My friends carry my books into the classroom, because I can’t use my arms. Delirious from pain, I give a three-hour lecture on Walt Whitman’s poem 'The Sleepers'—'wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory'—with the drainage bags stitched to my tightly compressed chest. My students have no idea what has been done to me or how much I hurt. I have always wanted to write the most beautiful book against beauty. I’d call it 'Cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, paclitaxel, docetaxel, carboplatin, steroids, anti-inflammatories, antipsychotic anti-nausea meds, anti-anxiety anti-nausea meds, antidepressants, sedatives, saline flushes, acid reducers, eye drops, ear drops, numbing creams, alcohol wipes, blood thinners, antihistamines, antibiotics, antifungals, antibacterials, sleep aids, D3, B12, B6, joints and oils and edibles, hydrocodone, oxycodone, fentanyl, morphine, eyebrow pencils, face creams.' Then the surgeon calls to tell me that, as far as she can tell, the drugs have worked, the cancer is gone. The surgery performed after six months of chemotherapy reveals a 'pathologic complete response,' the outcome I’ve hoped for, the one that gives me the greatest chance that, when I die, it won’t be of this. With that news, I am like a baby being born into the hands of a body made only of the grand debt of love and rage, and if I live another forty-one years to avenge what has happened it still won’t be enough."

From "What Cancer Takes Away/When I got sick, I warned my friends: Don’t try to make me stop thinking about death" by Anne Boyer, a fantastically well-written essay in The New Yorker. Her book "The Undying: Pain, vulnerability, mortality, medicine, art, time, dreams, data, exhaustion, cancer, and care" will be out in September.

I've only copied a small extract, chosen not because it's the most impressively written part of the essay, but because: 1. The subject is teaching — the way the students don't know what is happening inside their teacher and a truly heroic carrying on would go entirely unnoticed (3 hours!), and 2. I love Walt Whitman, and I like how Boyer (a poet) follows the invocation of Whitman with a Whitmanesque list of her own.

Would you like Walt Whitman to read "The Sleepers" to you?