If I Had Cancer

The pain was incredible. I had to bend down into a crouch to wash my hair as the water fell around my body. We had dinner plans in less than an hour, and I was still in the shower, doubled over with pain.

“I don’t know what’s happening” I called to Chanterelle from the bathroom. “It feels like an ulcer!”

The pain would take me to the floor several times in the next hour. But somehow, I made it onto the subway car and up the steps to our host’s home without passing out from the pain. I don’t know what possesses me to keep going when I have issues like this. Perhaps it is denial that something has changed. Perhaps it is just an innocent desire not to get taken in by the injury. Not to let it slow me down. Lord knows, my mom felt that way when she was diagnosed with cancer earlier this year.

And as I laid, sprawled on our friend Samantha’s couch an hour later, I tried not to think that there might be a connection. After my mother, her father, and her sister passed away from lung cancer, you can bet it’s high in my mind whenever I have breathing troubles or feel sick. You can’t help but think about it, especially when the pain is as crippling as it was last night.

The pain very slowly cleared up over the next couple of hours, to the point that I could comfortably walk to the subway station on my own. But I had been driven into a frightened, forced state of zen.

This morning, as I stared at my reflection in the subway window, the thought once again crossed my mind, and my mind ran with it. I imagined the pain increasing daily. Myself going to the doctor, complaining of a possible ulcer in my stomach. I imagined him coming into the room after running tests, telling me I had some form of tumor where the pain was occurring.

And this was all very depressing. I thought of Chanterelle. How much she would miss me. How sad it would be to know so long in advance that I would have to leave her so soon.

Then the good part came. I began to think of how my life would change if I received this diagnosis. What I would do with my last 5 months. My last year. It was all incredibly clear.

Were I to get the phone call right this minute, while I’m sitting on this subway car taking me to class, I would:

Get off at the next stop. Ride the next train home to Chanterelle, using the last of my laptop battery to write as much as I could on the way.

I would get there. Tell her. We would cry. Hopefully not all day. We would talk about the treatment options, and I would probably strategize the main one that day:

Go traveling. Go hiking. Go camping. Sleep outside as many if not mare days than I sleep inside. Feel the cold biting at my skin as wind whips by my tent. Feel the warmth of a warm cup of tea on my couch as I’m writing.

I would write 3 novels, a couple of volumes of the little bit of wisdom I have gained since I was born, and a memoir, just in case. I would think of my mom. Kneel at her picture and pray for her to notice me from whatever universe she was in, and give me warmth and mothering, healing energy.

I wouldn’t go back to school. Not for a minute. I would sit in no classrooms but my own home and the mountain. I would amass a list of the books I had always wanted to read, whittle it down to 30, and read one every day for a month.

I would make life my art. And I would write as much as I could. I would stop refreshing my traffic statistics. Stop looking at who was signed up for my newsletter. And live.

I would write for Chanterelle. A love letter every morning, and a short synopsis of the day we had and what it meant to me. I would write the story of how we met. How we fell in love.

And if somehow, after all of this, the tumor was still there. I would make an example of myself and go gracefully, like my mother did, to the other side of space.

1. “Living Life to the Fullest” doesn’t work
2. Don’t Wait Your Turn
3. The Poison Pill