Some articles simply stand out in your mind more than others. And that was certainly true of Amanda Hazelton’s article for our issue on Medicine 20 years ago this month. Called ‘How shall we live?’, it recounted the terrible moment when she was told by her doctor that she had leukemia – and then talked about the changes in her life and in her sense of herself that inevitably ensued.
‘The hospital world,’ she said, ‘is limited by the assumption that you will go through medical hell (“slash-and-burn medicine” as it was once described to me) just to survive, and that nothing else really counts. But this ignores what I see as the nature of healing. I was grateful for medicine, but I needed more. I needed to find meaning and adventure, to plumb the mysteries of life, to fill some of the gaping holes that hospitals do not even pretend to patch up.’ Ultimately her journey in search of herself led her to explore ‘all sorts of creative avenues until I realized that I wanted to play and sing and be a clown. This has blossomed into a strange kind of vocation.’
