July 18, 2024 | By Hannah Loomis

Santa Fe tutor Christine Chen has an unusual medical history that has intersected with St. John’s College in unexpected ways. Her children, Kai and Mika, are now eight and six. In January 2018, on the same day she gave birth to Mika, doctors discovered she had a massive abdominal tumor masked by the pregnancy. Twelve hours after delivery, Chen found herself in an examination room at the University of New Mexico Cancer Center.

Doctors determined that Chen had a very rare type of sarcoma tumor wrapped around a major artery, requiring chemotherapy and surgery. Over the next two years, Chen underwent intensive chemotherapy in Santa Fe and traveled back and forth to MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas for a clinical trial. She was able to co-teach a junior seminar during the second year, but her fatigue was relentless. Unbeknownst to Chen and her doctors, a new and terrible surprise lay in wait.

Nearly two years after her initial cancer diagnosis, Chen was diagnosed with acute myeloid leukemia, a rare outcome of certain types of chemotherapy. The MD Anderson doctors said she needed to stay there and move her family to Houston so they could treat it immediately. At that point, Chen reached out to Dr. Stephen Forman (A70) at City of Hope Cancer Treatment Center in Los Angeles. They had met and became fast friends when he gave a Santa Fe commencement address in her early years as a tutor.

“City of Hope has one of the largest and most successful stem cell transplant programs in the country, largely because of Steve,” Chen says. “He is world-renowned for his expertise in leukemia and lymphoma, but he is also undoubtedly the most beloved person at that enormous hospital. He said, ’Yes, of course, you can come here, and we’ll take care of you.’”

This new treatment plan was ideal, as Chen had grown up nearby and her parents still lived 15 minutes from the hospital. So, she and husband drove out there with their two dogs and young kids in January 2020—right before COVID-19 hit the United States.

New types of targeted treatments for AML had just been FDA-approved, allowing Chen to go into remission in preparation for a stem cell transplant from an unrelated donor that would replace her own diseased bone marrow, which she received in May 2020. She spent the next six weeks in near-total isolation at the hospital.

In non-pandemic times, some family members are permitted to visit the patient, though doctors are cautious, as the patient lacks an immune system. During COVID, though, things were different: for six weeks Chen saw nobody except for Forman and her nurses. To occupy herself, she read—a lot. Her list included St. John’s staples such as Middlemarch, Moby Dick, War and Peace, and To the Lighthouse, among others. A professional violinist, she also practiced on days she felt able.

Chen looks back on this time as “life-affirming, but also life-stupefying… Questions came up, like: what is the shape of a life? What if my life ends now? I mean, with having kids there is more of an imperative to feel like I have to get through this. But I don’t know ... I felt like if anything, maybe the books just gave me a kind of freedom to say that the story continues even without you.”

Prior to becoming a tutor at St. John’s in 2006, Chen had not read many Program books. She loved Jane Austen and Russian history and literature, but only when she began teaching in Santa Fe and started seriously studying philosophy for the first time did she note how books have conversations with one another.

“To be educated means many different things, of course, but to have the sense of ‘Oh, actually, this idea is not new. This speaks back to something that’s been profoundly interesting to humans for so long’—this feels both humbling and exciting, particularly in conversations with young people,” she says.

Chen and her family eventually said goodbye to California, and she returned to teaching at the Santa Fe campus once the cancer went into lasting remission. But between her bedside Program texts and Dr. Forman’s treatment, she never really left St. John’s College at all.