The Yellow World Read Online Free Page A

there’s been a relapse, that the cancer has returned in some part of your body. (That’s the shortest way to put it: A relapse means you can definitely say you’ve got cancer again.)
    All of my friends in the hospital, all of them, opened their envelopes. Of course they did. How can you think that it would be possible to keep something so important closed for two weeks?
    I’ve recently been giving some feedback to doctors about how they should treat patients and I always tell them that this is the first thing they’ve got to change: It’s such an old-fashioned procedure. The doctors always smile as if they are saying we know you’ll open it. It’s like an unwritten pact: You’ll open it, you’ll read it, you’ll stick the flap back down, and then we’ll pretend we don’t notice. I’ve always been shocked by this sort of pact; I don’t know why everyone knows things and then pretends that they don’t. It doesn’t make any sense.
    Anyway, the important thing is not the envelope but what’s in the envelope. The problem is how to face an important piece of news, one that could change your life. We learned how to do it in the hospital; we learned by making mistakes, which is how you learn almost anything in this life.
    To begin with, we would open the envelope frantically, right there in the hospital, two minutes after it was handed over. I remember a few images from the hospital corridor: my father, my mother, and me leaning over the sheet of paper, reading (maybe better to say devouring) what was written on it.
    A little bit later we realized that it wasn’t a good idea to open it in the hospital: You shouldn’t give or get bad news in a place where you have spent or are going to spend a lot of time. You have to find somewhere neutral. So we would open the envelope in restaurants (ones that we were going to for the first time), in unknown streets (whose names we later forgot), or in the metro. But we were still making a mistake: We never let more than fifteen minutes pass from getting the envelope to opening it. Without realizing, we looked for nearby restaurants, streets, or metro stations. We had an urgent need to know what was in the envelope, as if something were burning us from the inside.
    With time, after they had given us forty or fifty envelopes, we discovered the perfect method. There’s no doubt that you can become a professional even when it comes to reading medical diagnoses: All you need to do is repeat the action over and over again until it doesn’t seem like you’re repeating it.
    The perfect method:
    1. Take the envelope calmly, put it away, and take it home without thinking about it.…
    2. Wait for exactly half an hour without thinking about the envelope, without giving it a single second of your time. And when exactly half an hour has passed …
    3. Go to a calm place and open it. This half hour is all the time your body needs to calm down and all the time your mind needs to become serene; it’s as if all your anxiety disappears. The best thing about this is that when you react to the results, they’re half an hour olderas well. It’s as if they were old news and this takes away their strength and gives you power.
    I know this might seem strange. Why half an hour and not an hour? Why not ten minutes? Are these thirty minutes that important? Yes, they are. I think that through receiving so many pieces of important news, I’ve discovered that there’s something in us that wants to know the news immediately, and this something blinds us. It’s like a passion that vanishes after exactly thirty minutes and activates other energies in us, energies that also want to know what’s happened but that are capable of looking for solutions. These energies are a form of anxiety but a form with a different aim, anxiety that fights, that resolves problems.
    When I stopped going to the hospital I thought that I would never be faced with dilemmas as powerful as the ones I had about the X-rays.