The All Clear (Gnats and Semis)

by Sally

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.