The Other Side of the Bed

by Lorna Thomson, M.D.

It wasn’t polite. No quiet knock, no warning. Cancer barged in like a wild-eyed beast: snarling and uninvited.

Just a few weeks before, I was out on a trail run, enjoying the crisp air of the high desert. Ian, my husband, was nearby, building natural sculptures from twigs and lava rocks, crouching to photograph them when the light was just right. Our holidays were often like this: road trips with endless horizons, sandwiches and a flask of milky tea balanced on a picnic blanket in any shade we could find.

After we returned home, Ian flew to Ireland to visit family. And then something shifted. He was in pain: unrelenting, inexplicable abdominal pain. I asked the right questions, but the answers didn’t add up. I ordered a CT scan to be done the morning after he landed back home. Desperation eclipsed waiting for a message back from his personal physician.
I was at work, surrounded by the hum of fluorescent lights and the beeping of monitors, when I opened the report. That’s when the irreversible line was drawn. Before, we had a life filled with ordinary joys. After, there was only the beast.
It colonized us. Every conversation bent around it. Every plan paused. Cancer insisted that I stop everything and turn toward it full-hearted and full-time.

How could I not have seen this? In hindsight, the clues had been there — night sweats, bleeding gums, fatigue. But I’d explained each away with medical logic: too many blankets, an electric toothbrush, long COVID. “When you hear hooves, think horses, not zebras.” I had heard only horses.

In the first days after Ian’s diagnosis, a rare form of lymphoma, stubborn rather than swift, we held hands in bed and said nothing. I already knew the world of disease, but now I was on the other side of the glass, watching it unfold from within the story. In a single day, I went from standing at a patient’s bedside with practiced confidence to standing in my kitchen chopping vegetables. I had crossed over.

I believed that if I held everything tightly enough, I could control the chaos. At best, it meant protecting Ian from the many miseries of being a patient: preventing delays, steering him through the maze of American healthcare. I became the keeper of details: remembering every symptom, lab value, and medication. The handoff person. The one who filled in the blanks for the rotating cast of providers. In small ways, I could make it a little less cruel.

Friends said, “You must feel prepared, being a doctor.” As if that made it easier. It didn’t. I knew too much; some days I felt like I knew nothing at all. What I wanted wasn’t wisdom or perspective, but the life we had before the diagnosis. I wanted the past.

Still, optimism was a habit I couldn’t shake. After six months of chemotherapy, when the scan showed no change, Ian’s oncologist offered a scrap of hope: “If we weighed the spleen now, it might weigh less.” We took it as a win.

That summer we traveled to Ireland. At Heathrow, I noticed only one other masked family. Lymphoma, a cancer of the immune system, doesn’t care what season it is. One morning, we stopped at a crowded supermarket. We didn’t wear masks. We were distracted, excited about foods that reminded Ian of childhood. The next day, his father had a “bit of a cold.” I blamed myself.

Back home in the U.S., Ian could barely lift his head. We both tested positive for COVID. Each time he slept, he feared not waking. One afternoon he tried to write me a love note, in case he died before I returned from the store. He couldn’t hold the pen.
Soon his lymphocytes climbed to alarming proportions. COVID may have triggered the rise, but the disease was already poised. I built a spreadsheet, desperate to pinpoint the upswing. It didn’t matter. The beast was awake again: ferocious and demanding to be reckoned with.

We were referred for advanced cellular therapy — a beacon of hope wrapped in science fiction. But first, the spleen had to go. “Good riddance,” we said, with humor born of necessity. After six hours in the OR the surgeon declared “It was like delivering a really fat baby,” she said. I smiled, grateful for her calm.
With the spleen gone, the disease flooded his blood. His white cell count surpassed the lab machine’s limits; his lactic acid bordered on incompatible with life. I had seen this before, but never from this side of the bed. My heart was beating so fast I could feel it in my throat.

The on-call oncologist came in with a full team in tow. I recognized the choreography. This was the “come to Jesus” talk. I’d given it scores of times myself. I made it easy for them.

Months earlier, Ian had asked how physician-assisted death worked. “If it comes to it,” he’d said, “I don’t want to suffer. I don’t want to be kept alive just for the sake of it.” We filled out our Advance Directives, signed and notarized them together. So, when the team asked, I spoke: “We’re not going to the ICU. No heroic measures. No machines.” That night, Ian’s medications were intensified. Astonishingly, his body responded. Six weeks later, he was stable enough to transfer to the university hospital. His own genetically reprogrammed T-cells were now ready for infusion.

The next forty days were spent in another hospital room. Complications came; some expected some not. Fevers preceded by shaking chills so violent the whole bed shook, and vital signs that lay on the precipice of a cliff for days on end. Confusion that reduced a brilliant engineer, the sharpest mind I know, into someone scribbling endless squiggles in place of a coherent sentence. But eventually, something remarkable happened.

The cancer went quiet. Remission, at last.

Victory came at a staggering cost. Ian was a shadow of himself, fifty pounds lighter, his skin loose against bone. I was worn down too, grateful for many wonderful providers yet frustrated by moments when protocol, arrogance, or prestige displaced empathy, leaving my husband a prop in someone else’s performance. One oncologist told us, “Don’t forget your humanity.” I wanted to reply, “Why would we? We’re the ones living this nightmare — right back at you.”

And then, in contrast, a transplant hematologist reviewing eighteen months of medical history turned to me and asked, “What do you think was going on with the liver?” There it was: the acknowledgement I needed. He had me at “what do you think?” Because the truth is, you never stop thinking; you always have an opinion. That small gesture reminded me how much difference it makes when colleagues recognize a physician who has crossed the invisible line into family. It doesn’t take much empathy to make the unbearable feel a little more bearable.

At the beginning, I clung to control, convinced that if I stayed competent, I could hold back the tide. Slowly, the weight wore me down until the titles fell away and only one

remained: a person loving another person through something unspeakably hard.