It’s the sixth anniversary of my taking this photo, which was sometime in the middle of my first week of combination radiation and immunotherapy treatment to try to chase the tumors from my lungs. This was the gowned waiting room in the radiation department, located in the basement of the NYU Cancer Center.

(Spoiler alert: it is six years later, and there are no more tumors on my lungs.)

I think what’s so riveting to me about this photo is the absence of people. It was 5 p.m., not a very popular time for treatment, but they’d had to schedule mine in a hurry, so I went with what would work. That would have thrown our family schedule into disarray, since I would have normally been home with the kids at that hour.

As I look at the photo, memories flood back: the radiation technician who was genuinely surprised I refused to let him tattoo the spots where the beams would need to go (he gave me waterproof stickers instead). The women sitting in the waiting area with me, all of us in seersucker gowns, either trying hard not to connect with each other, or trying too hard (I was mostly the former).

One afternoon, there was a woman sitting next to me in the waiting room with the most fabulously strange shoes on, like lace-up high heeled oxfords crossed with red patent overshoes from outer space. I was considering asking her where she’d gotten them when they called her in, by her last name and first name, like everyone else, and I realized she was a very famous artist.

Another afternoon, I needed to use the restroom and there was a cop posted outside of it. A prisoner had come for her radiation treatment, and was using the bathroom before heading back to the van that would take her back to jail. I thought for a long time about those precious few moments she had to herself in the cancer center restroom, before the handcuffs went back on. The violent juxtaposition of high-level cancer care with the certain squalor to which she would be returning was too much to bear.

I think this blog is approaching its sixth anniversary, too, because Yom Kippur was yesterday, and six years ago on Yom Kippur was when I decided to skip observing the holiday in order to take stock of my new life as a metastatic cancer patient and decide what this blog would be (and wouldn’t be).

I’m still so grateful to still be here. I’m still gutted about the people who aren’t. And I resumed observing Yom Kippur, because I find it helpful, in the absence of any actual healing I can perform, to pray for the health of others. Just in case it helps.

I want to thank you for still being there, reading along. I hope you are doing fine, or as fine as is possible in a world like today’s. I will keep doing fine as long as I can. So far, that’s been longer than anyone could have imagined.