Last fall, after an unhealthy bout of doctor self-denial, I had surgery to remove a small tumor that had grown on my hard palate. Some wayward salivary glands apparently felt deglutition was far too easy for me and partook in the gradual obstruction of my oropharynx. The growth was benign, but it was the first time since being a physician that I traipsed the divide and became a patient myself. Before I learned that it wouldn’t end my life, my mind scribbled doomsday scenarios about what the tumor could do to me. It’s natural, I would remind myself, for patients to construct narratives of the worst possible outcome, but looking back now, what was most striking about my reaction was how I so readily othered the tumor. I behaved like it was an unwelcome invader of my physiology, a derivation from what I considered my homeostatic norm. It was not a part of me and I wanted it out.

But how could it not be me? The thing had arisen from my own cells. Yet it challenged my sense of normality, how I perceived myself as a healthy whole, which in turn led me to think about the nature of self and how the human mind creates artificial boundaries between me and everything else in the universe. The problem of othering a tumor that was clearly a part of me originates as a conceptual problem, namely, the fallacy of self.

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