Life is Funny
Kabuki by David Mack
My life has been interesting as of late… and I’m not sure if I would qualify it as Chinese curse interesting. It certainly has fet that way for me for months. Each event seeming far worse and harder to overcome than the last. It was so bad that I felt as though I were on the brink of despair.
Sometimes life gives you something that is horrible at the time, but in hindsight might have been precisely what you needed in the first place. There are some things that wind up being blessings in disguise. And as much as I’m remiss to say it, I think what I went through may have been just that.
So, just after the Fourth of July, I got the results of a back x-ray that I took to see what was causing the pain in my back. That turns out to be early arthritis in my lower back. Not a surprise as I’ve had arthritis since I was 13 and had it in my knees. Not really surprising, and now it’s something that I’m going to fight against. I’ll be damned if I wind up in a wheelchair before my time.
More worrisome is that they also found a 5mm density in my lung/internal organ area.
So, of course this means something a lot more important… and dangerous. That means that they need to take another x-ray to make sure that something’s there… and if there is, it’s more than likely cancer. After all, cancer does run in my family. My grandmother died 2 years ago from cancer. My dad and grandfather have had to have tumors biopsied to make sure it wasn’t cancer.
While I was sure that I didn’t have cancer… it didn’t change that I was still scared. I’ve been in immediate fear for my life before. I’m even familiar of being in fear for my life at the hands of someone else for some time. This is the first thing that is hard to fight against. This is the first time I couldn’t watch something that could kill me. That scared me more than any of the other things that I could imagine. I’ve been abused and have had to handle plenty of other things in my life. This is different.
The two days I had to wait to have my chest x-ray were both long and excruciating. In that time, it makes one evaluate what it would mean if it turns out to be something, if it really is cancer. How would my life change? What would I need to do in order to have the longest and best quality of life is possible? How painful is chemotherapy?
It’s not a pleasant thought train, but it was a possibility.
The day of the x-ray came and I went in and did it. Tomo was super supportive as that’s the job he thinks he needs to do, be puppy emotional support for mommy. Then they asked me questions of why I was there to see if I understood why. I answered and broke down half of the way through. The x-ray tech read the reason and apologized. It didn’t take much for him to realize the reason for being there.
I took the x-ray and then all that was left was to wait. Thankfully my doctor wanted to give me an answer sooner than later. I wasn’t expecting to hear anything for a day. I heard back within the hour.
It came back that the density was an artifact.
That is the best news anyone could hope to get. I felt entirely relieved. All the scary thoughts that I had thought had gone.
Something more interesting came from this situation… something I didn’t know was possible. A week after finding out that I wasn’t in for having my life altered, something unimaginable happened. For the first time in about as long as I could remember I didn’t feel so anxious about things. It’s something I’m still not used to.
I don’t feel as awkward as I used to in social situations. Thinking about other things in my life doesn’t make me dreadful. This is both wonderful and weird. Because of thinking about everything that could have gone bad and that it could have been a very real situation. I think it helped put things in perspective for me. Life is so temporary and can change in the blink of an eye. There’s no time to fret over things that don’t matter. It sucks that I had to have a health scare for that point to settle into my brain. But here it is.