It now seemed necessary. I knew very few people in my new city. It suddenly seemed beshert that my ex lived and worked right next door. Jarrett was the first person I called from the doctor’s office and there he was, immediately by my side to resume his abandoned duties as my best friend.

I spent the following days in the hospital, my family now beside me, balancing on a wobbly tightrope that separated me as a doctor from me as a patient. My medical team would come in and relay information in the complicated jargon that is often more familiar to me than lay English. I found myself translating everything back to my terrified parents, as if they were my patients and I was trying to soften the blow of bad news.

“Right inferior mediastinal mass encasing and occluding the right inferior pulmonary vein” became “I have something that looks like a tumor in the middle of my chest.” “Favored to represent lymphoma” became, “I probably have a type of blood cancer, but I can get through that.” “Other unusual primary lung malignancies can occur in a patient of this age, but are considered much less likely” became “don’t worry, I don’t have lung cancer.”

The morning the oncologist came in to my hospital room and told me that I had lung cancer, I had just been laughing with my parents. It’s not that I was expecting good news, I wasn’t. But I was just as unprepared to hear “lung cancer” as I had been to hear Jarrett say “I’m gay.”

I felt myself begin to tip from my tightrope and tried to grab back on, terrified to begin the long descent toward the “patient” side. As I wavered, I could hear my mother in the background trying to assure me that “we’d get through it.” The oncologist, her voice cracking, explained to my parents in plain English that some cancers are not curable. Mine is stage IV.

I still tried to translate, but this time I could barely get the words out. “That means that I am not going to live a long life.”

As a physician, I have been trained to be observant, to pick up on subtle clues. I sometimes think that I was so determined to stick to my plan that I neglected to see what was right in front of me. But then I consider that many men like flowers and it does not mean that they are gay, and many 32-year-olds get a cough in the winter and they do not have lung cancer.