The call from the doctor’s office became a DREAD to you, translated…
Monday after work, I saw a brown envelope, lying in my box. I loved receiving mail, only this one isn’t included. I’d torn off the seal, took out that crystal blue card, opened it up after taking a huge breath, a thick printed line leaped into my eyes, “There’s something up with your pap smear, please make an appointment ASAP!”
Back then, my mind went blank………
Last spring, I’d found that something abnormal showed up on my pap smear, and afterwards, I’d become a parolee, every three months, I’d headed back to the hospitals, the last two check ups showed normal, I thought I finally need not be tortured, by this karmic emotional up and down. In the evenings, that line in bold and italics became like the neon signs, started running off my mind, making me think of and feel ALL the worst case scenarios; the bad cells quickly multiplied, took over my cervix, and flowed along into my limbic system too…I’d become a fish that’s out of the pond, kept waking up in fear, covered in cold sweats.
The very next day, I’d quickly arrived at the clinic. The female physician who’d treated me before read my charts and records, said to me, with a heavy heart, “Just to be careful, I’d signed you up for the female cancer treatment clinic, so you can get an ultrasound.”
After I’d gone home, I’d become limp on my bed. It’s just the start of a brand new year, I’d set up my gatherings with my friends and families already, signed up for a literary class, and paid for my summer trip too, and now, everything became unknown. What’s more depressing was, as a doctor, I’d often consoled my patients, and still, when I’m in a situation like this, dealing with the unknowns, my thoughts circled around it, my plans were stalled, and my life became a clogged river.
Medically, the amigdala is the emotional control center of the brain, perhaps, I’d already, planted a seed called “fear” into it, and I’d watered it, fertilized it, with the coming of age, it’d become, even more rooted and stronger. As I flipped through the pages of the leaves, it’d recorded down all the mishaps, big and small in my life: last year, something foreign was in my throat, I’d gone to the ENT doctors, and gastroscopy; when I was pregnant, I have the risk factor of having a Downs’s Syndrome child, and I got an amniocentesis and waited at home, with my heart in my throat, and, as the phone starts to ring, my heart was about to leap out; in elementary school, I had scoliosis, and that iron brace started following me on my back like a ghost until my teenage years.
All of a sudden, I’d realized,, that I’m not just afraid of the pains and discomforts brought on by being ill, but even more so, tied up and bound by the me that’s been plagued with worries. My prefrontal cortex that’s in charge of reasoning scolded, “STOP second guessing, and just start living your life already!”
I’d hurried myself back up and out of bed, picked my daughter up from school, cooked supper, hear her yap about the happenings of her day. In the evenings, I’d recited the Buddhist verses to myself several times, then, as I’d opened up my eyes, it was, a brand new day, I was so surprised that I’d waken up my husband next to me, “Hey, I slept through the night last night!”, at noon, I’d gone out with a long lost friend to eat, the fish was fried to a crisp, and it’d tasted amazing.
Following the orders of my frontal lobes, I’d focused on my strides, my steps, the conversations with the patients, the world of the novels I’m reading, the notes chiming from the piano, as I was doing yoga, I’d focused on my breaths. When the bud of anxiety start to sprout again, the guards inside of my brain immediately disarmed it. A few days later, I felt, that a few leaves had, fallen off.
The cold fronts hit on the weekends, I’d hid in the bed, beneath the quilts early, and, the delusions from the bold italic prints came to attack me once more, I’d recalled how I’d attended the wake of a former college classmate, she and I both have a child at age eight, how did she pass through her nights, with cancer? Compared to her, what I’m going through, is nothing……….
Finally, it came time for me to revisit the doctor’s office again, I’d held my breath, as I’d climbed on to the hanging stage of the gynecologist’s examining bed, my heart started racing. The endoscopy showed nothing out of the blue, but cut off a polyp, the male doctor, as he’d tapped away on his keyboard, announced to me like it was formulated, “Come for your results next week”. Perhaps, he saw my face looking so awful, he’d added, “Looks like it wasn’t malignant, don’t worry!”
As I walked out of the doctor’s office, the tensed up portion of my brains immediate released itself, as I was about to contact my travel agency, I saw so many other women, sitting on the long benches, gazing into space, or lowering their head to work on their cell phones, or whispering to the person sitting close by, they were all just like the me before, waiting, to be called, to be examined, to pick up the verdicts of their lives; I know, that that letter will come back over and over and over again, until I’d finally gotten to my head, that anything in it couldn’t be as bad as I’d imagined it to be.
So, this is the state of mind of you, being in waiting, living with the uncertainties of whether or not you have cancer, and, the hardest part of it all is still NOT the diagnosis of cancer, it’s the period before you were told whether it is or it isn’t, because you’re up in the air, you’d stalled, because you don’t know what comes next, that, is why you were so anxious…
