November 16, 2009
Monday

Can the child within my heart rise above?
Can I sail through the changing ocean tides?
Can I handle the seasons of my life?
                      — Stevie Nicks, b. 1948
                          American singer-songwriter

I knew there wouldn’t be any answers today. I didn’t know the questions would remain unasked.

In recent days I have been alluding to a “health concern” without actually naming it. “It’s another November, and time for another biopsy,” I wrote last week. “This year it’s a little different. The problem is in a different area, and its solution will surely require an intervention more complicated than ‘OK for now, come back in six months for another study.'”

I did name the condition and the concern on Facebook, but hesitated to do so here. Facebook status reports are, to me, more like verbal speech than like written communication. They’re like the things I used to hear in the faculty room, and checking my page between pieces of my day is like stopping in there between classes. I can say on Facebook “I am going to kick endometrial hyperplasia’s ass, by golly!” and trigger encouraging messages on the page and off and then move on to others’ contributions, some serious (an online friend who updates about her chemotherapy), some amusing (a journalist who went topsy-turvy down a storm-eroded beach embankment in New Jersey while attempting to film the wind and swirling water that was causing said erosion). But I have been hesitant to write a personal essay about it that becomes part of my ouevre, that strangers might (and probably will) read out of context. Further, it is hard to write in general terms without naming and describing specific symptoms and the measures taken to discover their cause.

Briefly, and not too generally but not too specifically, then: I have been displaying symptoms suggestive of endometrial hyperplasia. (The endometrium is the lining of the uterus. Hyperplasia is an abnormal proliferation of cells in a tissue or organ.) The condition was confirmed by means of a pelvic ultrasound (the same procedure I underwent to visualize my fetus preparatory to amniocentesis, only now there is no shrimp-shaped entity promising the wonderful days to come). Today’s procedure, an endometrial biopsy, was designed to collect some of the proliferated cells and study them to determine if they are benign (probably), pre-cancerous, or already cancerous.

The procedure entails certain steps which, when described in the helpful, upbeat pamphlets one is always given, sound like the directions for assembling a turkey filling and delivering it to the turkey. It is a little different, however, when you actually are the turkey. And awake.

Lynn was born by emergency cesarean section, a decision made by the obstetrical resident (my own OB was out of town) after labor “failed to progress” over twenty-four hours. Evidently, twenty-four years later the conditions that caused that failure are still present. “There’s not a lot of room in here,” the doctor said, and sent for different instruments in different sizes. Ultimately, the procedure failed to progress, and on December 22 I will have a different, more aggressive procedure that will take place in a hospital and require a general (but light, he assured me) anesthesia.

Before I left, I sat for a while in the area where surgical matters are scheduled and blood draws are made. It was lunch time, and things were failing to progress there as well. I sat beside a woman who looked like she was craving a cigarette. She had rough hands and coarse hair and she sighed several times as she flipped through an old issue of a celebrity gossip magazine.

“I’ve been here twenty-five minutes,” she said to a lab tech who came out to the desk. (There are signs in both waiting rooms and all the bathrooms directing that staff be informed if you have been waiting more than fifteen minutes.)

“What are you here for?” the lab tech asked.

“I have to sign the papers to get my tubes tied,” she said. “I’m having my c-section on December 22 and I want my tubes tied at the same time.”

I stole a glance at her. She was wearing a down jacket over a sweatshirt that appeared to have a basketball tucked into it. I felt sorry that she had to announce her business in an open room with a stranger present.

She didn’t look any happier about her December 22 event than I felt about mine. But maybe she is, and she was just tired from spending her morning in a doctor’s office with magazines featuring heavily-made-up but scantily-clad women. She’ll be the procedure before mine, I thought. My doctor will deliver into her arms whatever that is under the sweatshirt and then take steps to make sure there will be no more such events for her. Then he’ll move on to me, the cutting and scraping and sewing all in a day’s work.

So there were no answers today, and probably won’t be until the new year. I will carry my mysteriously proliferating cells for another six weeks, deliver them up to be gathered, and settle in to wait some more. In the meantime, I will not let this shadowy concern diminish the joy that can be mine in the days between Thanksgiving and Epiphany. I can handle this season of my life with the love and concern and energy of so many people who care for me. I hope that mother-to-be has the same level of support.

*********

The NaBlos of the Past:

2008: I did not post on this day in 2008.

2007: Fridge Friday III — One observation: I am the least accomplished artist [at the Jentel Artist Residency in Wyoming]. The others (all younger than I am) have books published, have been awarded multiple residencies and fellowships, can be considered “mid career,” while I am not published anywhere but on this website and am embarking on only my first residency. I am also the only one who did not make a stop at the liquor store.

2006: In the Air Tonight — I’ve written about [a grudge] that will have its fiftieth anniversary this spring. In 1957 my fourth grade teacher (called “Violet Stone” in the piece I wrote about her seven years ago), denied me the perfect attendance certificate I had earned by dint of showing up every single day to school even though I hated being in her class. I said then that I had lost the will to retaliate, but that I still bore the anger. On Sunday I wrote about learning of a beloved friend’s death. He’d come to me in a dream, I said, about the time that he lay dying. I mention this today because last night I dreamed about Mrs. Stone.

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