“What was so remarkable about my encounter with cancer,” V told me, “was that the whole journey from waking up after a nine-hour surgery and losing several organs and seventy nodes—I woke up with bags and tubes and everything coming out of me, but for the first time in my life, I was a body . . . It was painful, but it was also exhilarating. It was like, ‘I’m a body. Oh my God, I’m here. I’m inside this body.’”
