New Jersey cannot seem to come up with a state slogan to capture its universal essence.

Here’s one that probably won’t make it: “Cancer Alley.”

Harsh, perhaps, but the phrase captures an issue that dwarfs all the issues that provide fodder for Jersey jokes and slurs, from its endless incidents of political hanky-panky to corrupt health care systems, to failed superfund cleanups, to “pay-to-play” loopholes.

“Cancer Alley,” of course, may not be as boosterish as “The Nation’s Medicine Chest”: Nevertheless, the prodigious manufacturing of emollients to attack serious medical disease smacks up against the incubation of some of the worst carcinogenic media in medical history.

These cheery thoughts follow as my wife and I barrel down the New Jersey Turnpike toward yet another cancer research center that may possibly offer something beyond the conventional toxin du jour, as I continue to slug out my own bumpy survival issues of the past decade.

This time we are heading out of the state. Eighteen-wheelers push us past the circuitous tangle of airport cutoffs and service roads that bleed into the highway. With the cacophony of Port Newark behind us, the real sideshow begins: tanker farms, chemical plants and their attendant transportation, storage and rail yards, and cities that cannot shake off the grit juxtaposed with shiny refineries urging motorists to “Drive Safely.” Malfunctioning energy plants vent the air with semilethal byproducts, converting the highway into a giant emissions sluice that diagonally bisects the state.

Verdant landscapes and occasional farms have been given over to runaway development. Planned communities reeking of myopic architectural redundancies and ubiquitous golf courses, in the state with the least amount of living space per resident, proliferate like fauna without a natural enemy.

How to capture the myriad of moods and emotions: hope, hopelessness, pain, fear, anger, stoicism, denial, relief, fatalism, random acceptance, and rejection without resorting to cliche and caricature? Still, you sit there and are part of the theater. Commentary is compelling.

Treatment centers have taken exceptional strides to develop an aesthetically pleasing atmosphere. My own facility reminds me of a 1940s upscale Fifth Avenue hotel lobby with beige walls, rich-colored woods, stuffed furniture, and the natural light of wide windows. The check-in area emulates a loan officer’s reception desk for private clients rather than a mass registration counter, although the fiduciary purposes are not that dissimilar. It is an ambiance that is both inviting and off-putting. Ambiguity is so characteristic of this disease and its treatment.

The center staff, at all levels, conveys their understanding of patient concerns and feelings through their empathetic support. The physician class and its acolytes are the usual idiosyncratic, specialist bunch — there, but not there — with appalling responsibilities and, more often than not, a preoccupation with getting it right.

Cancer patients are their own social paradox. They were heretofore, in the main, vigorous communal participants who gradually descended to the never-land of the stricken. In their marginalization, they are removed from the everyday, objectified and viewed in the past tense as victims of environmental neglect or genetic assassination. Nothing to worry about, though — it is not contagious.

After patients leave the main reception lounge, they enter the waiting room, reserved for those who are medically cleared for treatment and are waiting to be assigned to their own private rooms, generally for chemo infusions. The waiting room exposes the hard truth — this pernicious disease does not discriminate by race, class, gender, or age. You never know whom you will regret finding in the waiting room. Unlike the subdued atmosphere of the reception lounge, some patients in the waiting room begin modest bonding attempts. People sit ruminating with those who accompanied them in sub-rosa tones as if they were guarding a deadly secret (which they are). Or they raise their voices to assure that others bear witness to their own ordeal and possibly be drawn into the discourse. Their hope is that others might reveal something of their own misery or develop a momentary rapport and interest in the patient’s trauma.

There are patients who affect a bravado, the almost jovial front of a seasoned survivor, and those who are terrified no matter how seasoned they are. Generally, most patients in waiting rooms are not looking for friendships, but wish to get on with their own private hell and flee the place — at least for the time.