| Sumario: | This essay centers on the author’s experience of receiving a diagnosis of widely metastasized lung cancer and reflects on themes of interruption, continuity, and mortality through the lens of eighteenth-century literature, particularly Henry Fielding’s novel *The History of Tom Jones, A Foundling*. Drawing on Roland Barthes’s concept of “the long form” and Gérard Genette’s narratological ideas, the author explores how illness disrupts life’s narrative and creative work, while also prompting new modes of writing and living. The essay intertwines personal medical experiences—including a focalized brain seizure and hospital stays—with literary analysis, emphasizing the tension between accepting life’s finitude and the human impulse to carry on. It also critiques conventional “battle” metaphors of cancer, favoring instead a nuanced engagement with interruption, intimacy with strangers, and the coexistence of hope and realism.
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