First, of course, when I say “chemo” I’m using shorthand for our own relationship to treatment. Not everyone’s experience is futile or destructive. My husband was not diagnosed with cancer until he was riddled with pervasive, long-standing metastases and his primary tumor was (in retrospect it becomes clear) a decade-old monster. Attempting to push back the tide at that point is a very different project from embarking on treatment after, say, the discovery of a single pea-sized nodule or a bad colonoscopy result.

But the overall point is the same: chemotherapy comes with more subtle side effects than nausea and hair loss. Doctors and patients and families should be alert to the emotional ones: the temptations to duck thinking about death, to relegate treatment to a clipboard schedule, to abdicate personal responsibility and difficult emotional tasks, because … CHEMO. The diagnostic skills to recognize those side effects are needed, along with the ability to prescribe for them. This prescription is one everyone involved should take, and the doses have names like “pulling together” and “listening” and “being present in the moment”–because … LIFE and DEATH.