The All Clear (Gnats and Semis)

I walked into Moores Cancer Center, bumped into my favorite phlebotomist, a nice guy from Manila, likes craft beers, usually chats about his favorite downtown pubs while draining my arm of blood. But it’s been a while. Today, he doesn’t recognize me.  I pass through the chemo lounge, everyone looking down, in their own zone. It’s hushed in there, and has the tinge of a sacred space.

Down the long hallway, I head to the multi-specialty lab — and there I wait.

My onc comes in only thirty minutes late, and hands me a sheet of paper from the imaging center. The words on the sheet of paper say: “No evidence of recurrence of tumor.”

He says, “Congratulations.” It feels like the wrong word.

I leave the building quickly. I can’t wait to get out of there. Inexplicably, part of me feels some lingering sadness, a wistfulness. I am clear! So why aren’t I dancing a jig, happy happy happy?

Instead I feel freaked out, blown away.

I feel like I have been on a highway, and a semi just missed me. And I am still standing there, shuddering in its draft.

I was explaining this to a friend. She wrote back that, after fourteen years of clean scans, she still gets uptight and teary at her mammogram. But that it gets better. This all gets easier, year by year. Now, she says,  it is just a gnat.

I love that. Just a gnat.

Well, I will wait and hope that for me, this tangle of emotion also will subside and diminish, too. Eventually, I expect it will be a gnat for me too. A gnat I can squash on the window of my semi. So to speak.

It’s a complicated thing, illness and wellness, guilt and gratitude.

I am well. I am grateful.

I feel guilty, somehow. I think the of sacred chemo lounge. I have a strange mix of feelings. I’ll just have to keep sorting them out, I guess.

I have the time, now, to do so. Now I have the time.

Fear and Laughter

It’s four a.m., and I’ve got scanxiety-induced insomnia.  I’ve seen every hour blink at me on the digital dial this night. Four more hours, and I’ll be in the oncologist’s office awaiting results of the one-year-mark tests, labs, and scans.

So, I’ve been laying in bed laughing.  I am recalling an evening a few years back, dinner with two fellow writer-editors.  Wine! Wine was involved! The three of us, after dinner, decided to stroll over to the newly renovated town library. We heard it was wonderful in there, new ergonomic chairs and work tables and fireplaces, and we wanted to check out the improvements.

So, we headed into the library, and what did we see? They’ve got these big signs up over their media collection. And the signs were grammatically incorrect! The sign for “CD’s” had an apostrophe..  You don’t use an apostrophe when adding an s to make a plural. It’s only used for contractions or possessives. Everybody knows that! Right?  At least everybody who works in a library should know that!

So there we are, my friends and I, clutching our proverbial pearls, gasping in horror at a misplaced apostrophe.

And then, slowly, our gasps turned into laughter. At how pathetic we were.

Because who, in their right mind, decides that a “fun evening out with the girls” consists of heading — not to a bar, or the movies, or a club — but to a library, to check out the grammar on the signage?

We were peeing-our-pants-laughing at ourselves. It was the best laugh I’ve had in years.

The three of us live in three different states, now. Every once in a while, we’ll text each other a screen shot of misplaced apostrophes on signage, and burst out in great snorts of hilarity.

Good times. You find ’em where you can.

🙂

GIfts! Cardio Crying!

I was at Zumba class this morning at the gym — zumba being this crazy latin-dance-style “jazzercize” class I’m addicted to now — and in the middle of jumping up and down like a maniac to a Shakira song, I realized that it was March 5.

Exactly one year ago, at that precise moment, I was just coming out of surgery, with no knowledge about whether my cancer had spread, or what post-surgical life would be like.

So I suddenly found myself sobbing while I was dancing and jumping up and down to Shakira. Joy. Relief. Sorrow. Cardio crying.

I am healthier now, one year post, than I was before March, 2012. I eat healthier, live healthier. I exercise. These have been my some of my GIfts from Cancer.

Because there have been gifts, you see. Oh yes, there have been gifts.

Onward we go, to Year Two . . .