I wake up with more energy than I've felt in weeks. Overnight the tumors pushing up like gerbils from my left armpit, the right side of my neck and my left jaw have shrunk to half their size. Deeper down, the swollen lymph nodes pressing on the nerves of my left leg and thigh have receded, too, leaving the bottles of oxycodone and vicodin at my bedside like idle workers in a chemical factory. I swing out of bed, step into my slippers, hurry downstairs to the kitchen and walk into the kitchen wall. I step back and realize I can't stop swaying. Slowly, I work my way to the bathroom, lower myself onto the toilet seat and pee from a safer height. My urine is the color of peach jello.

Subtler effects of the chemo come later at breakfast. The freshly ground coffee is flavorless and my slice of toast carries a sickly-sweet aftertaste that appears when I stand up and disappears when I sit down.

I stay seated.

Whatever coordination I have left I'll need for later. In a few hours I'm due back at the Treatment Center for the follow-up shot to R-CHOP, an ornery new drug called neulasta that can strengthen your immune system while misleading your body into thinking you have a deadly fever. Neulasta has another downside probably not seen anywhere outside the American health care system. If the hospital gives me the shot on the premises, my insurance will cover the cost, but if I choose to inject myself at home and avoid the drain of a second trip outside in two days, it will cost $3000.

I'm not a stranger to syringes in the house. In Mexico where I lived as a child, my father injected me and my older brother Jim regularly with vaccines and anti-toxins ordered from a supply house in Mexico City, some sixty kilometers away. Back in the 1950s reliable transportation to a reliable doctor was unheard of in the town where we lived, so whenever we fell ill, my father would pick several ampules of the proper medication from his closet, saw off their tops with a serrated blade, draw the liquid into what looked to me like a syringe big enough for a horse, and plunge the contents into our buttocks or arms.

Unusual behavior for a father, perhaps, but I was getting used to it. I was too young at the time to understand why, but I knew my father's approach to things had already caused quite a commotion back in Los Angeles, where we had lived. The things he believed in had cost him his job as a screenwriter in Hollywood, made him lots of enemies in the movie industry and the government, and forced him to flee to Mexico when I was five years old. It had been a year before I'd seen him again, in the mountain town of Cuernavaca, where he'd found us a new home. Besides, during those early years in exile an occasional shot from him could be a lot less daunting than boarding the local bus to school every morning with its load of live chickens and starving farmers, or facing my angry Mexican schoolmates when I got to class. Mexico at the time was dirt poor in everything but pride. Beer was cheap, guns were plentiful, violence and suffering were commonplace, and it seemed that every child had been taught from birth to feel contempt for every nation that had ever ruled on Mexican soil during its long history of defeats, especially the United States. Mexicans didn't care that people back home called us communists; here in Mexico we were something far worse—gringos, and although the grown-ups might be too polite to say it to my face in public, their kids were only too happy to tell me every day at recess they'd rather see me dead.

As soon as Andrew, Harriet and I get to the treatment center, Andrew finds me a wheelchair and insists on pushing me from the indoor parking lot to my appointment on the seventh floor. From day one of my diagnosis, he has anticipated my needs and seen to my comfort with far more care and kindness than I ever could have summoned for myself. By coincidence, he is from Mexico, too, the fourth child of a twenty-one-year old unmarried housemaid in Mexico City. We adopted him when he was eight days old, twenty-two years ago.

We join the other patients sitting with their friends or family in the waiting room and amuse ourselves trying to guess, without looking for ID tags, who is sick and who is well. It's not always easy to tell the difference, but Andrew gets it right every time; he seems able to see deeper into people than I can, past the calm and soothing colors of the waiting room to the world behind their eyes.

Once Andrew identifies the other patients, I find myself looking less into them than at them for an image of myself. When I grew up cancer was not only a personal tragedy but a public disgrace, with a face so drawn by suffering and pain you could spot it on its victims a block away. As a kid I would pass the Stricken with eyes averted, afraid of revealing, in case they didn't already know it—and few were ever told—that they were going to die. Had medical science so tamed cancer that its victims could sit in public without recognizing each other, or had I finally found a group of outsiders to whom I could finally belong without shame?

Andrew and Harriet drive me back from my appointment. I don’t usually eat breakfast, but on the way I ask to stop at a local Whole Foods store and celebrate the completion of the first round of chemo with a bagel, some cream cheese, and one of those overpriced peach juice concentrates in a box. We sit bathed in sunshine from the broad windows of the dining area, looking out on the parking lot. My wife and son sit across from me and my heart fills with love remembering how much we've already been through together, how often we have stood by each other even when every fiber in our bodies may have wanted to run away. I reach out and touch their hands and feel my eyes fill with tears.

None of us is religious, but the conversation turns to God. Andrew, with a young man's bravado and a hint of an old man's regret, says he doubts that God is anything but "an imaginary friend for grown ups." Harriet speaks of her certainty that life—life once, brief and only—is all we can ever know. With all the newfound certainty of cancer, I agree, but, though I don't say it, I feel the truth endures and that through the fourteen billion years before I was born and the trillions to follow when I'm gone, part of that truth is the love I feel right now, and seem to have felt forever, for the dear souls before me I'm so lucky to have.

On the way back to the car, Harriet jokes we could probably qualify for a wheelchair permit now. What a perk! Admit it, we all want a better parking spot. We laugh like naughty children about to steal a prize cookie from the State. "God, I love cancer," I shout.