Job 6:11-12, "What strength do I have, that I
should still hope? What prospects, that I
should be patient? Do I have the strength of stone? Is my flesh bronze?"
(NIV).
Job has
intrigued me since I was a child. I was
a weird kid. It's OK. Something I love about Job is his lack of
filters. I can relate. Oh, how I can relate. But...
Even in the
midst of spilling my stuff all over the place, I have been quiet about some
things that have been going on in my life.
I have had very good reasons for this, and the last thing I want is for
this post to circulate widely enough that people I love will get angry with
me. I know that might happen, but I need
to put this out there (wherever "there" is) at this point. I used to enjoy listening to Paul Harvey as
he shared "the rest of the story" on his radio broadcast. Now it's my turn.
As a general
rule, I am about as anti-drama as it gets.
Granted, I love hyperbole, and I have been described as an excellent
storyteller, so you have to understand that there are certainly aspects of
dramatic flair, but the drama that causes blood pressure spikes and hurt
feelings is just not for me. I thrive in
high pressure, hard deadline, 11th hour moments, because I like the adrenaline rush. I
have spent most of my life capable of being very cool in the midst of crisis
(although I do cry afterward), but I have recently learned that I cannot
function in perpetual crisis
mode. I just can't.
As some of my
readers may recall, my family was decorating our Christmas tree last year when
I turned slightly to pick up my phone to take a picture of the kids. It was an incredibly normal thing to do. As I turned back, I heard a loud pop followed
by multiple snapping noises. The noises
were accompanied by a painful sensation traveling down my spine. I am stubborn and have a ridiculously high
level of pain tolerance. I did not
expect to find myself unable to crawl from my bed to the shower, without help,
the next morning, and I was not nice to my husband when he forced me to go to redi-med. I was not nice, at all.
I was also not
particularly nice when the redi-med doctor did not even look at my back and
handed me three prescriptions. I think
two were for pain and one was a muscle relaxant, and even though I did fill
them, I threw them out, because reading about the potential side effects was
more frightening than the pain.
I probably
reached very, very, very not nice at some point during the several hours while
I sat in the ER waiting room and then, when I was finally called back, a well
meaning nurse followed the directions of another
doctor who did not look at my back and shot something in my arm that allowed me
to do incredible things such as floating around the room and walking on the
ceiling. Seriously friends, I could
never be a drug addict, because I have control issues, and I cannot be climbing
walls!
But then
finally, a physical therapist came in and actually bothered to look at me. It took her less than four seconds to suck in
a deep gasp and exclaim, "You popped your ribs!" I had no idea what that meant. It sounded awful, but there was a certain
sense of relief, because I do not like to feel as if I am crazy, and here was
someone who was willing to validate the assumption that I'm not. She spent about an hour trying to put my ribs
back where they belonged, and she did, indeed, make some progress, but I left
with a referral to see a spine doctor and more prescriptions in hand. I decided that I would take something for the
pain. No, in retrospect, I don't think I
actually decided that. I think I was
still strung out on whatever they gave me at the ER and my husband probably
force fed me a Tylenol with Codeine, which is 100% guaranteed to knock me out
within minutes. But the point is, I
finally had some relief and some answers, with hope that more would come.
It took several
weeks to get an appointment with the spine doctor. During this time, I did stupid things like
traveling for hours on end and refusing pain meds unless I thought I was going
to die. I think I popped two or three
pills during this time. When I finally
got in to see the spine guy, I explained that the PT at the ER said that I had
popped my ribs, and he sort of chuckled, as if that was definitely not the
issue. We talked for probably ten
minutes or so, I described how I had injured myself taking a picture with my
phone, and I am almost certain that we were heading down the, "Oh my
goodness, why do they send me crazy patients," road, but he was very nice
and finally decided to look at my back.
He took a deep breath, exclaimed, "Oh!" and I knew I was
probably not going to be committed any time soon. He explained to me that he was adding a note
to my chart stating that I was a very pleasant, reasonable, intelligent
person. No kidding. I began to think that maybe, just maybe, this
is the kind of injury that people do not normally endure while standing up and
walking into doctor's offices on their own.
He ordered an x-ray to determine whether or not I had also broken any ribs, and he ordered PT. You know...
for my ribs that were apparently no longer touching my spine where they
should be.
This is the part
of the story you all already know, though.
Thanks for sticking with me through almost 1,000 words of re-run. That was fun, right?
I did the x-ray,
and armed with a plan for how to resume normal life, Phil and I went out of our
way to stop for dinner at The Cheesecake Factory, where I came pretty close to
having a migraine, because I finally relaxed every muscle in my body for the
first time in weeks. And for about an
hour, life felt manageable again.
When we got back
to the van, I realized that I had several missed calls and a voicemail. It was the phone number from the doctor's
office. The only thing that came to mind
was that I must, in fact, have broken ribs (well that stinks), so I called back
to speak to the doctor who I expected might actually not be at the office,
because he had shared that he was going to see the new Star Wars Movie that
night with his girlfriend and her kids, and, quite frankly, I thought it was
probably well past time that he should have left to go home. Except, he hadn't left, because he was
waiting for me to call back, because my chest x-ray showed a nodule on my left
lung that required a CT scan.
Wait. Hold the phone. At this point, I know he's still talking and
saying lots of affirming things like, "you're young, and you're otherwise
healthy, and you don't smoke, and this is not an emergency, but I did send the
order for the CT and you need to call on Monday to get it set up," and I'm
entirely silent, and shaking, hearing it all but not processing any of it,
really. And I'm hating this adrenaline rush which would normally inspire fight or
flight but has so overloaded my nervous system that I am completely frozen. I don't remember a whole lot more about that
night, but I'm pretty sure it included things like trying to explain this phone
conversation to my husband even though my mouth wasn't working and there were
no words that made sense, and coming home to my computer where I spent far too
many hours researching lung cancer while sitting next to my (then) five year
old waiting for her to fall asleep after reading bedtime stories about cartoon
animals.
Since
non-emergency (yes, please try to define this for me) CT scans tend to be
scheduled well in advance, I took the only quickly available option, 6:30 am on
Christmas Eve morning, because this is, of course, what every mother of five
wants to be prepping for on Christmas Eve, right? I made some decisions about who to share all
of this with, and if you are a close friend who has children who are close to
my children, you didn't make the cut, because I could find no logical reason to
risk scaring my kids half to death. I
chose people who I thought would pray hard and have no inclination to slip this
information to my little people or tag me in a Facebook post that my teenagers
might read. I did not share with
extended family, either. It was easier
for me that way, and I am going to insist that this has to be OK with
everybody, because I did what I was capable of handling.
I have never
felt so panicked and miserable on Christmas, but I hid it as well as I could.
When the test
results came back, every indicator, every... single... one... was sort of
"middle of the road." The size
of the nodule indicated that it may or may not be cancer. The shape of the nodule indicated that it may
or may not be cancer. The composition of
the nodule indicated that it may or may not be cancer. The location of the nodule indicated that it
may or may not be cancer. The radiology
report showed that every common
non-cancerous cause had been eliminated, but that because there were no high
risk factors in my life (minus family history), they still believed the nodule
to likely be benign. I am a detail person. I need to know things with some amount of
certainty. I don't necessarily need to
know everything, although that is helpful, but I need to know something. I just couldn't deal with any of that.
The suggested
option was to wait and to do another CT scan in eight weeks to see if the
nodule was growing. The only other real
option was a needle biopsy that would require puncturing the chest wall and
possibly leading to a collapsed lung because of the location of the
nodule. I have never been such a mess in
a doctor's office. Waiting eight weeks
seemed stupid. Subjecting my body to
testing that could do much more harm than good seemed (at least) equally stupid. And there was seriously no indicator that might sway me one direction or the
other? None? I asked my doctor (late twenties or early
thirties with two babies at home) what she would do if it was her. She said she would wait the eight weeks and
do the next CT scan. With much anxiety,
I decided to go ahead and follow that suggestion. I hadn't slept in days. There was no way I could make a calculated
decision on my own.
I spent the next
eight weeks doing things that are outside the norm for me, some of them by
far. In my desperation to get some
sleep, with all of the typical things I might try (essential oils and lavender
candles and running myself into the ground and stuff) failing miserably, I went
through the rest of the Tylenol with Codeine.
I tried herbal teas. I read and
read and read until my eyes should have shut.
I watched more TV than I have in my adult life. I drank a beer for the first time ever. I listened to music. I put blankets up over my windows. Sleep did not come in more than a couple of
hours at a time, here and there, for the most part. There were a few times when my body was
exhausted enough to shut down in the middle of the day. I am still fighting hard to re-set the natural
rhythms that have long since ceased to exist.
I booked flights
to conferences and weekends away with friends.
I hate flying, but since I was relatively convinced I was dying, anyway,
I figured it was worth the risk. What's
a couple of months in the grand scheme of things? If a plane crashed, it crashed. But there was more to it than this.
I started
pulling way back from my husband and
kids. I wrote a letter to my husband
about all the stuff he should do if I died first, and I posted it to my
personal blog (maybe here, too) and stood back and watched how he would react,
how my oldest kids would react, how everyone in the world (or at least everyone
in my world) would react. After that, I was not convinced that he
thought he could do it... life... without me.
It absolutely killed me to be sitting at the airport in Las Vegas while
my daughter melted down at a quiz meet, halfway across the country, and my well
meaning friends with no knowledge of this crisis, surrounded her saying things
like, "It's hard when Mom's not here, isn't it," and one of my sweet
friends who did know what was going
on surrounded me by sending me live updates on how the finals round was going. But I had to know that my family had
people. I'm a stinking hover mom! I stopped hovering, because I was acutely
aware that I might not be able to keep doing it. I needed to see the kids depending on
Phil. I needed to see that people would
come around them and love them if I couldn't.
We have really good people, but it made me want to throw up.
I pulled back at home, too. I needed to know that the laundry and dishes
would get done whether I was there or not and that somebody would read to
"the baby" and that at the very least everybody could cook something
hot for themselves, even if it was just toast.
I'm in a really weird position, now, because I sort of feel unneeded,
but all parents are supposed to work themselves out of a job at some point,
right? I just accelerated the process a
little bit.
When the eight
weeks had passed and the second CT scan approached, I hit the wall hard at full
force. For most of my life, I have been
prone to worry but not prone to full-fledged anxiety or panic attacks. I might be concerned, but I have it under
control. The day before the scan,
rocking back and forth on the bathroom floor and just about pulling my hair
out, I had to tell Phil to take the kids to his mom's for the night, because I
just couldn't handle being in the same space as them and having them find me
like this. He packed them up quickly and
got them out of the house.
Scan #2 came
back exactly the same as the first one.
This was really great news and allowed me to relax a little bit for a
little while. I mean, there was still
the fact that every indicator told us absolutely nothing, but the nodule had
not grown. It had not grown at all. Cancer supposedly grows at a certain rate, so
there was some relief. Because I had
done so much research at this point, there wasn't as much relief for me as
there would have been for someone typical who would just take the results for
what they were, but some relief was better than no relief. We scheduled a third scan, six months
out. I slept a little better over the
next few months. We told our oldest two
kids about what had been going on, because they're really smart, and they
deserved to know why Mom was a little crazy... and absent... and not herself as
of late. Their reactions were different
from one another and both equally difficult to process. Essentially, my oldest son let go so much it
hurt, and my oldest daughter held on so tight it hurt. It all just hurt.
After some
amount of time, I began to panic that we were waiting too long, that we were
going to do the third scan and find that the nodule was, indeed, growing and
that we missed it because we did the second scan too early and the third one
too late. I started playing with numbers
in my head, and let's face it-that's just a terrible plan for a non-numbers
person. The build up to the upcoming CT
got more and more difficult, because I didn't really feel like I had anyone to
debrief with. I was sick of scaring my
family. I have great friends, but all of
them (who were aware) seemed pretty confident that I was OK, based on the second
scan. I couldn't continue to talk about
it, because I didn't have anything new to say, and I didn't want people to get
tired of talking to me. I didn't want to
make something out of nothing, but I needed some people to talk to, even if I
was just repeating the same thing over and over again. I chose silence, though, even though it
didn't feel good. Ordinarily, I am a
listener. I am a problem solver. I feel most alive when I am helping other
people. And yet I was so wrapped up in
my own disaster, I found myself with nothing left to give and nothing left to say.
I pulled myself
together, enough, before the third scan that I did not have to drop my kids off
with Grandma. I did another early
morning CT, and I went straight home and proceeded to take a six hour nap. I know you can't really call that a nap. Whatever.
I decided not to contact my doctor's office. I decided not to make an appointment for test
results. I decided that I would know
what I needed to know when I needed to know it and that if nobody called me
quickly, there was probably nothing too pressing, too catastrophic, too
deadly. I got an email a couple of days
later telling me that there had, again, been absolutely no change. Because the nodule has been this consistent
for eight months, my doctor is now relatively confident that this is scar
tissue of some sort. Regardless of
previous test results, I have spent two thirds of a year of my life convinced
that I am dying of lung cancer. But I'm
not. I'm
not. I am not dying any faster than
anyone else.
Look,
friends. Me and my healthy lungs could
be hit by a bolt of lightning, tomorrow.
We all know that life is short.
It's always shorter than we hoped it would be. Always.
But we can't stop living.
I have no idea
if anyone has made it to the end of this post.
It's about three times longer than the typical long post I write. But if
you've made it this far, thank you. And
now, breathe in, breathe out, repeat ad nauseam even if it makes you sick,
because it totally beats the alternative.
"I lie down and sleep; I wake again, because the Lord sustains me. I will not
fear..." (Psalm 3:5-6, NIV).
L.
