介绍： 018 | A Path to Fatherhood, With (Shared) Morning Sickness

Three weeks before my wife, Ingrid, and I were to move to Mexico, where a coveted job awaited me, my doctor phoned with results from my latest CT scan. My thyroid cancer had spread to my lungs. He suggested I see an oncologist right away.

I let the ...

介绍： 018 | A Path to Fatherhood, With (Shared) Morning Sickness

Three weeks before my wife, Ingrid, and I were to move to Mexico, where a coveted job awaited me, my doctor phoned with results from my latest CT scan. My thyroid cancer had spread to my lungs. He suggested I see an oncologist right away.

I let the phone go silent. My excitement over the job as foreign correspondent for The Associated Press had been building for months. We had sublet our Brooklyn apartment, put a deposit on one in Mexico City, and sold our car.

We had also married — not just for love, but so that Ingrid, a Colombian doctor on a student visa, could travel freely across borders with me. My cancer had been stable in recent years, and I was itching to start my new life.

Suddenly everything felt shaky. How could this happen? Now was the time for packing and saying goodbye to old friends, not visiting new doctors.

Something hardened inside me. When Ingrid arrived home that evening, I played down the news. I had spots on my lungs, but they were all under a third of an inch. “Nothing I can’t take care of in Mexico,” I said. “We leave in three weeks. No way I’m squeezing in another appointment.”

Ingrid’s eyes glistened. “Have fun in Mexico,” she said. “Because I’m not going anywhere if you don’t take care of yourself first.”

A passionate woman who speaks from the gut, Ingrid is no stranger to setbacks. She had watched her father die in a Colombian hospital, the victim of a carjacking gone awry. Speaking little English, she had fled the violence there to become a doctor in America, cleaning houses to pay her way. She married me knowing all about my disease, a rare, incurable form of thyroid cancer, which had required three neck operations. But she wasn’t about to watch another man she loved die.

“Make the call,” she said.

A few days later, an oncologist was urging me to start a drug regimen at his clinic as soon as possible.

I had a better idea. “Just give me the recipe,” I told him. I would share it with a doctor in Mexico and get treated there.

Ingrid shot me a scolding look; the doctor frowned. “It’s not like you’re making enchiladas,” he said. “These drugs can have nasty side effects. This is not the time to move to another country.”

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