Pow.
Severe chest pain.
Off to the Emergency Room.
No kidding, there I was in patient mode, sitting on
the butcher paper in the ER with an unfinished professional lifetime-plus of
bedside nursing behind me. Years and months and days of dutifully attending the
waylays, wounds and afflictions of everything from hangnails to heart failure.
Now it was my turn.
I wish I could tell you without mixing and abusing too
many metaphors, that I hit the bull running, took the ground by the horns,
leapt into the music and faced the breach, but it was more like being unceremoniously
tapped on the shoulder by the ghost of a mechanical hand:
“You have a
mass on your lung.”
Pow. Pow.
With an inspired aplomb that only a New Englander
would appreciate, I said: “I’m assuming you don’t mean Massachusetts.”
Bang.
Pow. Zoom. (I’m reserving exclamation points for the first finale of my second
act, and that’s my first living with cancer inside New Hampshire inside border
joke).
Of all the care plans and nursing processes I’ve written
and followed in my nursing career,
--- of all the interventions I’ve applied into the
outcomes and moved out of the inputs in each patient’s unique set of challenges,
--- of every vigil I’ve stood and transition I’ve
helped to enable and navigate,
--- of every patient’s very own journey through
sickness and health … now entered mine.
My last first thought: “Sorry, I hate to bother you, but
could you spare a minute for mortality?”
Pow. Pow. Pow.
* * * *
Author’s aside:
You could call all this a preamble to my constitution, but from here on I’ll be
setting aside my usual column approach, at least the kind you and I are long accustomed
to --- the kind with beginnings AND endings --- and instead adopt a rolling
narrative muse. Call it a diary. Call it a reckoning. I call it words from all my
body’s sponsors.
It seems to better suit me in the space and time I now
find myself: living day-to-day, sometimes measured weekly, sometimes in seconds.
I’m ready if you are, and I do promise to do as we’ve always done in this contract
between reader and writer, keeping us close and me as honest as I’m able.
I’m on the eve of beginning treatment. We’ll get
through this. After tomorrow, my humor will be shaped by serious business, as
it always is, but with one new wrinkle:
Moving into my cancer domain, at least for now, I’ll be spending more time as the bug,
not the windshield, as the inflation, not the tire, as the map, not the
destination. I’ll have to adjust life’s driving accordingly.
More as we go. Hop on. Let’s ride.
El
P.S. I’ve named
my cancer “Rad Chemo.” Great moniker for a villain. I needed just the
right identity for a bratty punk interloper with an attitude.
* * * *
