Medicine and Magic

I had a dream six days before the diagnosis. 

I’d flown home to say goodbye to my grandmother who was dying of lung cancer. My parents were out of town so I stayed in my childhood home all alone.  I decided to sleep in their bed because I felt like their mattress might hold things I needed to know.

I don’t know how else to explain that except I’d had this sense for months now that I was tracking something, sniffing a scent, that something was hiding in the undergrowth and I needed to pay attention. 

I laid down that night asking, “What is it I need to see?” and right as I drifted off to sleep, the vision came.

It was dark night and I was standing by myself on a sidewalk bathed in a sickly yellow glow.

Across the street was a high concrete wall sprayed in graffiti.  I had just enough time to see the wall before a car sailed through the air in front of my face.  It spun halfway so that the roof of the car faced the concrete wall and then it hit the wall with all the force of flight.  In the moment of contact, the silver car, because that’s what it was- a souped-up silver version of my first car, a Pontiac Bonneville station wagon- exploded into bubbling mercury.  All the liquid flew through the air and entered my body.

My eyes snapped open.

 Six days later, my seven-year-old son is in a ball on the bathroom floor, sobbing because his stomach hurts so badly. 

I’m resentful.

I co-run an interior design company and a not-for-profit and this morning I have carved out the only two hours I will get for myself all week.  

I sigh and tell him to get his clothes on because we will go to Urgent Care after I drop the three bigger kids at school. At Urgent Care, they do bloodwork, a strep test, check for a urinary tract infection.  Everything is fine. Then the doctor does the physical exam.

I am on my phone canceling meetings when she says, “Come over here right now.” 

She is palpating my son's stomach.  “Feel this,” she says and puts my hands on the outline of a lump. She watches me while I feel all around the edges of it and it is more than a lump.  It is a huge mass.

She says, “I need you to go to the ER right now.”

The nurse comes back in with some shitty plastic toys- a maze with a tiny silver ball, a little blue man tied to a parachute.  My seven-year-old son blows on a red kazoo because he doesn’t know yet. He doesn’t know what I know. No one in the world knows what I know except for this doctor and this nurse who are already trying to make things better because they know they cannot make anything better.  

I call my partner and I say, “Hey, I’m at the urgent care with Phoenix. The doctor thinks she’s found something in his stomach.”  Silence.

“Like a mass?” he says.

“Yeah,” I say.

I hear him breathing.  I refuse to say the thing out loud. I refuse to say the thing out loud to a man who has already lost his mother and his grandmother to this thing.  I refuse to say this thing while I stand over my seven-year-old son who is trying to get a tiny silver ball into a tiny hole in a tiny maze.  

“I’ll get there as soon as I can,” he says.

By that afternoon, the ER doctor and the ER nurse have done the thing that the doctors and the nurses do in the movies. They have sat us down in the corner with the vinyl chairs and they have told us it looks like our son has cancer. They have told us that we need to drive to Denver Children’s Hospital right now. They have told us that they are so very sorry. They are so sorry.

Within 48 hours, our seven-year-old is under anesthesia for a biopsy, a catheter, stents, a spinal tap, and the insertion of a central line port because yes, cancer. 

After surgery, they send us home for two days.

When we return, they tell us Phoenix has a mature B cell lymphoma stage III. He starts chemo the next day.

At some point in those first few weeks, I remember the dream. 

What was it that had to explode?

Three words flash into my mind: car of certainty. 

The Pontiac Bonneville of my dreams is the vehicle I was handed to get me all the places I needed to go in life, the belief that good things happen to good people and by making good choices, you can earn a good life.

This is what exploded.

Because the car of certainty might look slick and feel safe but it will never get you out of the parking lot and it certainly can’t take you through your seven-year-old son having cancer. 

We are never certain. 

We try to forget this horrific vulnerability through all kinds of things. 

But it’s the truth: we are always standing naked in the moment with nothing but the view in front of us and how we choose to respond to it. 

We can allow suffering to enter us, to transform us, to become the medicine by which we transform the world.

Or we can find another car to crawl into. 

I choose to open and allow.