After the first patient died, the phone did not stop. By spring 2015 my number was circulating inside a quiet word-of-mouth network of Taiwanese families whose physicians had told them there is nothing more we can do here. I drove a twenty-year-old Honda kei-car on the expressway to Kurume, and a different stranger sat in the passenger seat each week. Construction bosses, civil servants, men whose work happened in the gray corridor between legal and illegal. Cancer did not care which.

In this episode: Kurume, the patient ride, what cancer makes equal, the strange democracy of a consultation room.

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⚠️ Personal reflections only. Not medical practice, diagnosis, or treatment advice. Please consult your physician. Names have been changed.