When Your Cure Becomes Your Enemy

What a Poet Learned About Surviving the Impossible - Brad Buchanan

Brad Buchanan carries his brother’s DNA in every cell of his body. It’s keeping him alive. It’s also trying to kill him.

This is the paradox of graft-versus-host disease after a stem cell transplant. The new immune system that destroyed Brad’s cancer also attacks his body as foreign territory. It’s ravaged his eyes, his esophagus, his skin, his organs. It could flare up tomorrow and send him back to the hospital.

And Brad—a poet and former English professor—uses the exact same tools he taught his students for analyzing literature to make sense of this impossible reality.

Here’s what he learned that might help you survive your own impossible thing.