People whose illness has no name get little sympathy. News of a friend or family member’s fresh diagnosis often brings with it what the poet Christian Wiman calls “that little shiver of pleasure-horror” which, as he puts it, is your self realizing, “I’m going to die!” But when the terms of your disease are unclear even to doctors, that pain-shiver doesn’t come. The people around you might feel the loosest kind of tremble within. But the tremble quickly settles into disbelief rather than the “promiscuous sympathy” Wiman experienced as a young person diagnosed with cancer.
