Hi, this is against everyone with Connor Abeeb, a weekly podcast featuring my conversations

with countercultural figures and presenting complex, philosophical, spiritual, and political ideas

in an engaging and accessible way. This week, I'm doing something a little different in honor of

Mother's Day and also the death day of my mother, which

happened very close together in 2001. So I'm going to be sharing with you a story about my mother

and also Cancer and Susan Sontag. It's a story that first appeared in a magazine

called The Stranger back in 2015 as an essay entitled When You're Sick, You'll Wait for

the Answer, but None Will Come. The subtitle of that is What Happened when Susan Sontag,

My Mom, and I were diagnosed with cancer and how treatment

becomes a metaphor. Originally, this essay was going to be called treatment as metaphor, as a sort of

pairing to Susan Sontag's book, Illness as Metaphor. But I realized I wanted to sound more

desperate and sad than that even.

And hopefully in some sort of caregiver guardian way, the hopelessness of not getting an answer might lead some people to a different kind of hope.

So, yes, I'm just going to present this essay to you.

I'm going to read it.

And it's going out to my mom. I hope she can hear me. And I hope you'll stick with it too.

It'll be shorter than normal episodes and not feature a conversation.

But I do think that this essay has value in the world for people that are thinking about health and medicine.

This isn't just a sort of sad

story about my mom, but it's a mulling over of how medicine and treatment work and what illness is,

which is something that I'd like to explore more and more in the show and we'll be exploring with

some upcoming guests that I have scheduled. So I think this sets the stage

...