When I was 23, I was driving home one night from one of many grueling
conversations with an ex who was determined not to let our relationship
end. A drunk driver blew through a stop sign going at least 45mph down a
residential street and struck my car just in front of the driver's side
door. The impact flattened the hood of my car and sent me spinning
until I finally came to a rest in my black car that now had no
headlights facing oncoming traffic. I sincerely wasn't sure I was alive
or conscious until I realized that the sound I could hear was no longer
my squealing tires, but rather, my own voice screaming. A few people came out of
their houses, consoled me on the side of the road, waited for the
police, and took note of the direction in which the drunk driver had run away from the scene.
A day or two later, my mom drove me out to the scrap lot
where my car had been towed to collect a few belongings from the car
(title, books, etc.). I froze up as soon as we found the car, looking
at the twisted heap of metal in the daylight put a new perspective on
what I'd walked away from. My mother cried, terrified at the carnage
before her. It had been easier in the immediacy of the accident to think of other things, to let shock do its job. And so it was when I walked up to the sliding glass doors
and expansive lobby of the University of Michigan Cancer Center.
The drive was easy, light on the traffic and just rushed enough that I was preoccupied with the time, racing to be less late. Frantic, I tapped the steering wheel waiting impatiently for traffic lights to turn, made my up the winding Medical Center Drive and parked near the entrance to the University of Michigan Cancer Center. Six months and three days from the last time I walked into this hospital. Six months, three days, and one hour from when my surgeon came to me to say he wasn't sure he could save the dying tissue on my chest, when I sobbed to nurses and begged them to wait just a little longer so I could at least see Jason before going in for emergency surgery. Six months, three days, and two hours from the moment my surgeon had been pulled from the operating room, abandoning another patient, to evaluate me. Six months was not enough time.
Every step toward the door tightened a vice on my chest, pushed harder and harder on tears eager to burst from their ducts. What a mess. Unconsolable, I steadied my quavering voice as best I could while I answered intake questions. I left my forms at the front desk to try to settle my nerves in the bathroom, only to return for them and jettison myself into the same weepy, shaky state in which I'd entered the medical office.
A nurse practitioner and surgeon each did a physical exam, and arrived at the same verdict: my scars are healing nicely, I am healthy, there is no suspicion of more cancer in my lymph nodes, left breast, or on the chest wall - all clear. Safe, right? But all I could think was that I wanted to leave. My eyes dove for the exit door again and again. I wanted to be away from this place because even in the face of very good news, I cannot seem to associate this building with anything but loss and the agony that was those unsure days after my first surgery, when I sweated and slept in interrupted spurts, when I couldn't eat for days, when I couldn't move or look at my body out of the sheer shock of how I'd been cut apart, when I felt incessantly woozy, itchy, and nauseated from pain killers that seemed to be failing miserably at their job, when I watched my mother crack under the stress of it all.
When my life was saved.
Why, in the face of all this, is it so hard to remember that all of that was in service of making sure I'm still here on this planet?
I'm realizing more and more that this has all been very traumatic for me, as melodramatic as I feel using that word, and I am reminded of my first oncologist's warning that many patients emerge from treatment with symptoms of trauma. I'm not diagnosing myself as such, but trying to lend validity (for myself) to the way I feel.
I think a lot about all the things I should do now that I know my time on this planet could have been so brief, but I've gained at least a few more years. And then I get so fucking scared about how I might still not be long for this earth and I can't seem to move. I fantasize about travel and making art, about parenting and creating some beautiful thing that announces that I've been through some shit but I came out the other end and I love my very precious life. And then, in the way one's heart will steel itself in advance of known loss, I retreat-just a little-afraid to love my own life, lest I lose it too soon.
This is my new work- to take this fear and know it, name it, own it, and set aside, to assure myself that it doesn't belong here. Not anymore.
