Milford, Connecticut
December 5, 2000

Dear Readers,

Today’s letter is the third in an ongoing series of letters by Aliza Pollack, a twenty-nine-year-old marketing consultant in Los Angeles, about her treatment for cancer. (You can read her first letterhere, and her second one here.)

Aliza’s last dispatch, which we published in September, was written at a particularly dark moment in the course of her chemotherapy; on the day it ran, we received the following response from a reader in Seattle:

Dear Editor,

I just read today’s letter.

Like Aliza’s technique for taking a needle, toward the end, I was breathing deeply to endure the sight of her text.

I imagine that there are many other people who would also take Aliza’s letter like taking a needle. Many of these people may have other faces or other hospital rooms in their minds as they read Aliza’s report. I know that I do. Someone I love, someone who is too young and with too many gifts, flew to a hospital complex in Houston two weeks ago, this after most of a year and a half of life organized around chemotherapy treatments. I’m told there is a chance, not very good, that he will still be living when he leaves Houston.

You mention that you will be bringing your audience up to more or less real time with Aliza. I don’t know what this means for her condition now or for the editorial conditions it implies. If she is well, or even just better, you will bring us one kind of story and if she is not, you will bring us another, with the peculiar stresses surrounding its transmission to us impossible to ever completely address.

The things I appreciated most about Aliza’s letter were the discoveries she made while balancing at the edge of infinite fear and the changes that happened over time in her understanding of what she can handle. Maybe these are things that anybody can appreciate, not just people who read other hospital rooms into Aliza’s. I guess I hope so, but I don’t know. I think we are all members in The Club, but we maintain a world where it is easy to pretend that we are not.

I don’t want to read too many more letters like Aliza’s but I’m glad I read this one and I will be breathing deeply and slowly to endure the others.

Yours,

A Reader

This reader identified an important fact of Aliza’s contributions to Open Letters: her condition as described in her letters has always been out of sync with her actual condition at the time that the letters are published.

This time warp dates back to August, when we published her first letter – as I said in my editor’s letter back then, Aliza’s letters weren’t written with Open Letters in mind: They’re actual emails that she sent to her friend Miriam last spring and summer, when she was first diagnosed, and as she began her chemotherapy treatments. The letter we published in August was actually written in March; September’s letter was written in April.

This week we mean to catch up. We’ll be running three dispatches from Aliza over the next few days. She wrote the first one, today’s letter, to Miriam in July, as she began radiation treatments. The second, which we’ll run tomorrow, was written in October.

This week’s third dispatch from Aliza, which will appear on Thursday or Friday, represents something of a departure for us – it’s a series of emails between Aliza and me, exchanged as we worked together on the editing of her letters, in September and October and November. That exchange will bring us up to the present, a development that carries with it “peculiar stresses,” as the Seattle reader astutely pointed out, above.

Aliza’s letters are part of our week of letters about medicine. Yesterday’s letter, if you missed it, was by Kevin Patterson, a Canadian doctor working in the western Pacific. It’s about leprosy, on one level: but on another it’s about how doctors think, and why North American medicine is often so boring to practice. As with all of Kevin’s writing, it’s equal parts science and poetry.

Tomorrow, Aliza’s chronicle continues.

Yours truly,

Paul Tough