I clutch at certitude but remain open to surprise. The positive ones. Not a first episode of psychosis in your adult child. Or a diagnosis of cancer. These events flaunt my bargains with life. Walk the dog and play tennis. Eat plenty of garlic and greens and lentils. Follow a moderation in all things. Surely those choices buttress uncertainty.
But life doesn’t come with guarantees. A child is shot at a homecoming parade. A loved one suffers a debilitating car accident. A global pandemic kills millions across the globe. Money, fame, or status protect no one.
I was born into privilege. But the unexpected came for me: a white, 60-year-old mother and wife. As my husband and I entered our retirement years, we crafted lists of the lands and places we would go.
As Covid-19 shuttered the world, our daughter’s mental health worsened right as my doctor discovered malignant lymph nodes near my shoulder. The situation forced me to remember that life on planet earth is a gift, not a contract. Plans can take detours, or collapse. Joseph Campbell knocks on our door with this from The Hero’s Journey. “We must let go of the life we planned in order to accept the one that awaits us.”
On April 24, 2020, I drove to a hospital surgical center. Unidentified nurses inserted IVs in a raised blue vein on top of my right hand and taped it in place. Puffs of condensation clouded their face shields. In a lineup, I’d never be able to identify those who skirted my gurney in identical yellow scrubs.
I waited and weighed the benefits and risks in life everyone encounters, rocking the scales back and forth in my mind. A surgical nurse informed me they must filter the air in a surgical theatre for thirty minutes between patients. My hand ached. My fear of contracting Covid-19 during this surgery was as extreme as the fear of what it might find.
“Yes,” my tall oncologist said later, in his white lab coat with a Star Trek pin on his broad lapel. “This is a blood cancer,” he reported, tapping the flat keys of his laptop with a Pink Floyd sticker on the computer lid. “The good news,” he said, “is that it’s lazy. Your brand of lymphoma is like my neighbor’s grown sons. It’s content to stay planted on the couch and play video games all day. The motivation to move out, do something and invade the rest of you is not high on the list.”
His optimism bewildered me. Cancer was not on my twenty-year plan. Guilt showed up and whispered in my ear. “You are fortunate: they found your stage 1 lymphoma from an incidental procedure.”
Still. I dangled back and forth from the shock of bad news, coupled with the relief of early detection and a good prognosis.
Fear. Relief. Guilt. Where to land in this uncertainty? I sought guidance from the silver Star Trek pin on my oncologist’s white coat. Who was I now, if not the healthy person I felt I was? Beam me up, Scotty.
During the summer of 2020, I drove along Mt. Hope Avenue to the radiation center. At the entrance, a woman took my temperature, asked if I had any Covid symptoms, then instructed me to sign my name and phone number before letting me through. “In case me need to contact you for an accidental exposure.”
In a small changing room, I slipped off my shirt, unhooked my bra, tucked it inside my folded blouse. I donned a thin lavender-pink gown and secured my items in a square locker.
The radiation center maintained an empty waiting room by spacing out patient appointments to prevent exposure. On one corner table, a magazine, Cancer Today, sat next to a set of brochures for wig styles. On another side table rested a wicker basket of handsewn cotton bonnets labeled: Help yourself.
But the centerpiece of that waiting room was a wall. The wall of water made with a 200-gallon aquarium. Beneath an array of lavender lights, a formidable pump aerated the water and funneled currents that rustled the purple tipped seaweed and clumps of emerald green moss clinging to the rock-reefs below.
When I approached, a clown fish I’ll call “Nemo” swam near, waving her orange striped attire as if to say hello. She considered my face with curious, benevolent eyes.
“Dory,” an electric blue tang, flashed by with her patrician forehead and dubious mouth. Along the glass bottom of the aquarium, a scarlet reef hermit crawled opposite a biscuit plump tuxedo urchin. I marveled before this glass display of swimming jewels.
Over that summer, I developed a favorite. The one that sashayed to greet me when I came close, fanning her slim body next to the glass, her rounded lips breathing the water’s oxygen, “Who? Who are you?”
I leaned forward and peered into her flat, round, cellophane eyes, desperate for divinations from her tranquil water-world. Did I look like a creature consumed with uncertainty and a hyperactive imagination?
A human who appeared fine as she provided crucial care to a young adult dealing with a serious mental challenge. If I became ill, who could help my husband provide the care she needs?
“Courage is not one of the virtues,” C. S. Lewis wrote, “but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality.”
What higher reality could exist other than facing one’s death? I felt anything but courage. My radiation physician prescribed External Beam Radiation Therapy for this stage of follicular lymphoma. An external beam arcs and rotates around a person, mirroring the malignancy’s shape and dimension. From any angle, it delivers the calibrated dose of radiation.
After two gentle clinicians hoisted me onto a table, tucked my bare shoulder into a plastic mold, positioned my left arm over my head, and nestle my left clavicle just so, they left. Heavy metal doors locked. Lights dimmed. A delicate bead of lime green targeted my bare chest. I held still and gazed at a transparency of a forest of emerald evergreens filtered through a faint ceiling light.
A galactic whirr started- then increased- like the jets of a plane before liftoff. As it orbits my body, the linear accelerator shapes the radiation beam from every angle. I felt dwarfed beneath the immensity and sophistication of this computerized Cyclops as it nibbled away any errant lymphoma cells.
I pictured my black spined urchin that shapeshifted over rocks and crevices. The precision of its dark spines rotated like this battalion of radiation rods as they zeroed in on my node. As this innovative medical machine completed its navigation, I pondered how much time I had left. I’d been drunk my entire life, squandered time, then woke up sober.
The lead-colored fractal rods-that resembled a collection of graphite lead from yellow Ticonderoga pencils- hovered above me and replicated the exact contours of my malignancy. As they did, the rods shaped themselves into a land mass. Almost the exact perimeters of the Australian continent.
If this was a Rorschach test, why Australia? Was it a need to make familiar patterns out of an unfamiliar situation? A random attempt to make meaning as I laid bare on my back, bereft of certitude?
During a January intercession trip to Yosemite, a student pointed to El Capitan’s towering 3,300-foot rock face. “Look!” she exclaimed, “I can see Our Lady of Guadalupe. Follow my finger. Right there!” she said with unexpected joy.
The dictionary defines pareidolia as “the perception of significant patterns or recognizable images, especially faces, in random arrangements of shapes and lines.”
At the testing point of a mortal illness, why did my unconscious offer Australia? I wanted the comforting face of Our Lady. Did I clutch too hard at finding meaning in all of this when I needed to pay more attention to discover it?
The lights brightened, the doors swung open; the attendants entered the room, took my elbows, helped me off the table. At the end of treatment, staff applauded as I rang the brass bell three times to celebrate the end of an unwanted journey. A hospital counselor approached me and introduced herself, saying, “Hello, I am here for you. Are you interested in sharing how you are coping with your diagnosis and treatment?”
My chin dropped. Someone asked me how I was doing? In a quiet room with a couch and picture windows with a kind and attentive woman I did not know, I said, “I know this sounds odd, but coming here for radiation is the best part of my day.” I laughed at hearing this. “Laying down on that warm table, giving my body over to the warm hands of the technicians, who adjust my shoulder while all I must do was rest and look at a thriving forest?”
Then I broke into tears, followed by laughter, a frisson of uncertainty.
Uncertainty is Not the Disaster You may Fear, wrote Maggie Jackson in a January 2024 NYT article. “A toleration for uncertainty readies us to learn and adapt, Jackson writes. “Each day, the brain uses honed mental models about how the world works to process a shifting environment. Our uneasy sense of not knowing triggers a host of beneficial neural changes: heightened attention, bolstered working memory, and sensitivity to new info. Our brain prepares itself to update its knowledge of the world.” Jackson continues, “At heart, being unsure demands a crucial admission that the world is unpredictable, dynamic, and flawed and so are we. But we are not alone.”
Australia was, for me, a childhood exotic land. A continent on the other end of the globe where winter is spring and spring is winter. A land filled with coral reefs, kangaroos, koalas, kookaburras sitting in that old gum tree. Australia remained the unknown, upside-down world in which comfort rose beneath a summer of radiation, a place where tears of loss mingled with tears of laughter.
I stood one last time next to my aquarium friends, took a deep breath, felt my lungs expand and release, like my jeweled tangerine and lapis lazuli companions’ gills, breathing in the waters’ oxygen.
It’s a vast ocean, but with each stroke I learn new strokes, float the swells, dive beneath crashing waves and keep swimming.
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