“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” writes Susan Sontag in the opening of her landmark book Illness as Metaphor. Although we prefer to use only our “good passports”, she says, sooner or later each of us will emigrate to “that other place” – the land of the sick.
The lucky ones will spend days there. Others will spend years. Most of us, however, will arrive alone, frightened and entirely unprepared.
