LJ Idol: Week 2
LJ Idol: Week 2
Three Little Words
Some people believe seven is a lucky and powerful number but I’ve always felt power was in the number three. People swear that good things come in threes or bad things come in threes. Or they’ll say death happens in threes or they always sneeze three times. There’s the trinity of Past, Present, and Future. There are the three Moirae, or fates: Clotho, the spinner of life; Lachesis, the one who measured the length of life; and Atropos, the one who cut the thread and decided the manner of death. And at some point in everyone’s life there are always three words they want to hear.
The summer of 2001 was filled with three important words for me, starting out with three words that are always met with either dread or joy: "My period’s late." I was just shy of twenty at the time and still a college student so those three words spun me into a frenzy of buying pregnancy tests and sitting there muttering "please be negative" over and over. For a month, I took a test a week and while they continued turning up negative, my monthly visitor never showed up.
Reluctantly, I went for my first pelvic exam and dragged my mother along for moral support. After the exam, my mother was brought into the room with me, and the doctor dropped her bomb. "There’s a mass," she solemnly told us. It was a fairly large mass, about the size of a fist, and she wanted more tests done to figure out what it was and what the next step would be.
The next few weeks were a whirlwind of doctor’s appointments. I was poked and prodded and examined until I felt like a lab rat. The doctors kept looking baffled and two phrases stood out for me during those weeks, the reluctant admission by each doctor of "I don’t know" and the follow up of telling me there seemed to be no major signs to indicate what the mass was but reminding me that it "might be cancer" and prompting me to deal with it quickly.
I can hardly describe the panic and fear I felt over those weeks. They passed in a blur and within three weeks of finding the mass, I was being prepared to go under the knife to have this mass removed. My head spun with the never ending repetition of "might be cancer" and "I might die." It was agonizing.
The day before the surgery my mom rushed into my room all but glowing with happiness. "It’s a sign!" she gushed, grabbing me and dragging me out onto the back porch with her. Sitting there on my brother-in-law’s head, calm as can be, was a little dove. For about half an hour that dove stayed there cooing and let itself be held and pet by all of us. It walked over our arms and shoulders, climbed up onto our fingers or anywhere else we’d let it climb, and was just generally content to spend time getting attention. Eventually, it flew off and my mother kept insisting it was a sign and telling me "it’ll be okay."
I wish I could say that I shared my mother’s optimism. I agreed it was a sign because it made her happy and seemed to calm her nerves, but that night I still prepared my "in case of my death" letter and left it out somewhere where it would be easily found. I still worried and felt like I was going to die or that I would find out the mass was cancer and my days were numbered.
I remember lying in bed that night, staring at my ceiling, and wondering if this would be the last time. I wondered if the doctors I had seen up until now didn’t know what the mass was and couldn’t tell me if it was cancer or not until after the surgery, would they even know how to make sure I lived. Would they be able to treat it if it was cancer, or if it wasn’t cancer, would they just be able to remove it? Or would I die there on the operating table and would the doctor then go to my parents afterward and tell them he didn’t know what went wrong?
Surprisingly though, as scared as I was, I didn’t lay awake all night. At some point I drifted off and slept like I was dead until my alarm went off.
I had expected my alarm to wake me sounding like a death knell but I actually woke up feeling great. Sometime in the night the terror melted away and I woke up determined and telling myself that “I will live.” There was nothing more important to me that morning then knowing I would live and somehow I did know. It wasn’t just confidence that things would work out, I truly felt like I knew things would be fine.
My mother kept asking me if I was all right during the morning, and the nurses who helped prepare me for the surgery kept quietly whispering to one another and to my mother to ask if I was just slap-happy from the nerves. I just kept trying to reassure them that I was fine and that I knew I would be fine but no one was convinced and I could tell they thought it was just bravado.
Finally, it was time for them to wheel me in for the surgery, the sedatives were starting to work and I was feeling groggy. My mother hugged me one last time and told me she’d be there when I woke up and I tried to comfort her.
"It’ll be okay. I will live."
One day my thread will be cut but Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos haven’t decided it yet.
Three Little Words
Some people believe seven is a lucky and powerful number but I’ve always felt power was in the number three. People swear that good things come in threes or bad things come in threes. Or they’ll say death happens in threes or they always sneeze three times. There’s the trinity of Past, Present, and Future. There are the three Moirae, or fates: Clotho, the spinner of life; Lachesis, the one who measured the length of life; and Atropos, the one who cut the thread and decided the manner of death. And at some point in everyone’s life there are always three words they want to hear.
The summer of 2001 was filled with three important words for me, starting out with three words that are always met with either dread or joy: "My period’s late." I was just shy of twenty at the time and still a college student so those three words spun me into a frenzy of buying pregnancy tests and sitting there muttering "please be negative" over and over. For a month, I took a test a week and while they continued turning up negative, my monthly visitor never showed up.
Reluctantly, I went for my first pelvic exam and dragged my mother along for moral support. After the exam, my mother was brought into the room with me, and the doctor dropped her bomb. "There’s a mass," she solemnly told us. It was a fairly large mass, about the size of a fist, and she wanted more tests done to figure out what it was and what the next step would be.
The next few weeks were a whirlwind of doctor’s appointments. I was poked and prodded and examined until I felt like a lab rat. The doctors kept looking baffled and two phrases stood out for me during those weeks, the reluctant admission by each doctor of "I don’t know" and the follow up of telling me there seemed to be no major signs to indicate what the mass was but reminding me that it "might be cancer" and prompting me to deal with it quickly.
I can hardly describe the panic and fear I felt over those weeks. They passed in a blur and within three weeks of finding the mass, I was being prepared to go under the knife to have this mass removed. My head spun with the never ending repetition of "might be cancer" and "I might die." It was agonizing.
The day before the surgery my mom rushed into my room all but glowing with happiness. "It’s a sign!" she gushed, grabbing me and dragging me out onto the back porch with her. Sitting there on my brother-in-law’s head, calm as can be, was a little dove. For about half an hour that dove stayed there cooing and let itself be held and pet by all of us. It walked over our arms and shoulders, climbed up onto our fingers or anywhere else we’d let it climb, and was just generally content to spend time getting attention. Eventually, it flew off and my mother kept insisting it was a sign and telling me "it’ll be okay."
I wish I could say that I shared my mother’s optimism. I agreed it was a sign because it made her happy and seemed to calm her nerves, but that night I still prepared my "in case of my death" letter and left it out somewhere where it would be easily found. I still worried and felt like I was going to die or that I would find out the mass was cancer and my days were numbered.
I remember lying in bed that night, staring at my ceiling, and wondering if this would be the last time. I wondered if the doctors I had seen up until now didn’t know what the mass was and couldn’t tell me if it was cancer or not until after the surgery, would they even know how to make sure I lived. Would they be able to treat it if it was cancer, or if it wasn’t cancer, would they just be able to remove it? Or would I die there on the operating table and would the doctor then go to my parents afterward and tell them he didn’t know what went wrong?
Surprisingly though, as scared as I was, I didn’t lay awake all night. At some point I drifted off and slept like I was dead until my alarm went off.
I had expected my alarm to wake me sounding like a death knell but I actually woke up feeling great. Sometime in the night the terror melted away and I woke up determined and telling myself that “I will live.” There was nothing more important to me that morning then knowing I would live and somehow I did know. It wasn’t just confidence that things would work out, I truly felt like I knew things would be fine.
My mother kept asking me if I was all right during the morning, and the nurses who helped prepare me for the surgery kept quietly whispering to one another and to my mother to ask if I was just slap-happy from the nerves. I just kept trying to reassure them that I was fine and that I knew I would be fine but no one was convinced and I could tell they thought it was just bravado.
Finally, it was time for them to wheel me in for the surgery, the sedatives were starting to work and I was feeling groggy. My mother hugged me one last time and told me she’d be there when I woke up and I tried to comfort her.
"It’ll be okay. I will live."
One day my thread will be cut but Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos haven’t decided it yet.