Nexus

I wrote a poem a couple years ago that contained the line

'a life divided into before and after'.

I have been thinking a lot about those moments that divide my life into clearly demarcated "Befores" and "Afters".  None of those so clearly divides my life as a day in early November 2001.

On that day, I got a phone call at work from my doctor who asked if I was sitting down (nothing good EVER comes after that does it?) and then proceeded to inform me that my tests came back and that I had uterine cancer.  Part of me will never forgive him for breaking the news to me this way.  Although what way would be better, I just don't know.  I still feel that this kind of news would best be delivered where there are soft hands to catch you when you fall.  Because you ARE going to fall.

I tucked my experiments in early for the evening and left in a whirl as a big swirling life-sucking nexus began to form in what had been my life.  I don't remember much.  It was raining.  I remember that.  Not a little spitting kind of Scottish rain, but the kind my dad called a real gullywasher.  I drove blindly through it crying in heaving sobs.  No idea how I didn't wrap my car around a telephone pole or another car.  Not sure I cared about either at that point.  I drove the fifteen miles to home where I curled up on the bed with my dog and poured out my grief onto her.  She had no idea what the tears were about, but she was the best and ablest of every being I knew of coping with it.  

Due to an insurance snafu, I couldn't arrange surgery for three months.  Three whole months of imagining this strange 'other' growing inside me that would kill me if I let it.  Hoping it was not growing too fast.  Fearing it was.  Hating something that was part of me - only different.

Trying to figure out how to tell my family, my boss, my friends.  Most of whom had never had someone close to them get sick.  Amazed that my mom was a rock.  I was strong for all of them and did not shed a single tear.  Not until my sister-in-law Cindy broke down and cried in my arms and that gave me permission to do the same.  I didn't realize until then how much I needed that - to share the feelings with someone instead of being tough and going it alone.  That is one of my life's lessons, to allow someone to care for me.  I am still working on it.

I learned how to say things like cancer, metastasis, hysterectomy without flinching.  I kissed any chance of children of my own good-bye even as my brother Phil was expecting his first.  And the nexus sucked me in tighter.

As surgery neared the stress became intense.  The day before surgery I escaped the best way I know how - the movies.  I treated myself to a double feature of Harry Potter I and The Fellowship of the Ring. 8 hours of movie magic that took my mind off of what was to come.  In between I ate Schlotzky's at five minutes before my cut off time for NPO (an action I would come to regret mightily after they took my bowels out looking for metastasis and then re-instated it.  Add 3 weeks of narcotics and what you get is a holy mess).

Most of the three weeks around surgery are a hazy fog of percocet.  I took them liberally as prescribed.  I don't know that they helped with the pain, but they certainly helped keep me from becoming mired in depression.  That would come six months later when my dog moved on and my niece Tori was born.  I would see nothing but the shadow of the nexus for the next year as it squeezed me breathless.

For five years my life circled the nexus called uhavcancer.  There was no yesterday.  There was no tomorrow.  There was only now.  Everything was offered up in sacrifice to the gods of recovery.   And the price that they demanded was steep indeed.  No children.  No more binge drinking.  No more recreational drugs.  Giving up every friend I had, who in retrospect were fellow alcoholics, to move toward a better life.  Instead those things would be replaced with organic food, holistic remedies and lots of meditation.  Those are the things that sustained me thru those years circling.  That and a few great new friends who materialized as if by magic.

I guess the gods of recovery smiled on my offerings, because one day eight or so years down the road I broke free of the gravitational field of that singularity that kept me in thrall.  I have never looked back except in gratitude for the spectacular changes that came into my life as a result of this experience.  It was a great gift to me albeit the toughest of tough love.

But it is time to stitch the Before and After back together into one seamless ribbon again.  While I am not that person any more, I still remember her and want to offer her memory a soft place to fall.

About damn time too.