In 2014, my father was diagnosed with cancer in Kenya. I was thousands of miles away, teaching at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and the helplessness I felt was total. Kenya’s medical infrastructure meant that every appointment required hours of travel from our home to Nairobi, hired drivers, constant coordination by phone and text across an eight-hour time difference, and out-of-pocket payments that drained the family’s savings. There was no local oncology clinic. No patient navigator. No one to sit with my father and explain what his doctors were telling him. In 2016, he was gone.
When my mother received the same diagnosis in 2020, the cycle started again: the scramble for transportation, the coordination of caregivers, the financial devastation. She died in 2022.
Two parents. Two cancer journeys. Both defined by isolation, inadequate resources and a health-care system that, for all its dedicated practitioners, simply could not provide the kind of community-based support that might have eased their suffering or my own. The grief settled into something I could not shake, and for a while, I did not know what to do with it.
ED Issues New List of Professional Degrees After Court Order
