5. Seeking Solace

        Finding the right words can break a person’s mind.  Death is a hard thing to cope with, especially if you have not come to terms with your mortality.  


        Seeking solace.  Those two, simple words rekindle something in me that I have tried to forget for years. I suppose it is time to get this out, even if it is for a Deviation.

        It has been almost five years now.  Five years and it still seems like yesterday I was taking that ill-fated trip to the doctor.  It was February; the air was still cool enough to practice my form for volleyball in the front room.  That always annoyed the neighbors underneath us; spiking a ball on the second floor of a condominium will do that.  I paused after a few moments, rubbing my tender and swollen shoulder.  According to one of the other player’s mother, this was just a muscle knot.  What I was too terrified to tell anyone was that it was growing.  I knew muscle knots did not grow until your right shoulder was visibly larger than your left; that muscle knots did not create bumps along the left side of your neck.  I tried to ignore it—how easily winded I became after a while and constantly yearned for sleep.  I did a pretty good job too for a month.    

        Then one day my mother noticed and I could not avoid it any longer.  Admitting that the lumps had grown to enormous sizes, I asked to go to the doctor as soon as possible.  She finally took me a month later.

        Though we were simply going to my pediatrician, I could not get my body to stop quaking anxiously.  It did not want to know the answers to all the unspoken questions running around my mind.  Neither did I.  Looking back on it now, I think the answer was always there in the back of my mind, locked away in my vain attempt to run away from reality.  

        The female doctor looked worried the second she started to examine me.  After following strange commands to move this way or that, she told us in that uncaring way most doctors speak that she was not certified to diagnose what was wrong.  Directing us to a clinic that specialized in some fancy word that meant they dealt with any problems concerning a person’s lymph nodes, she charged us the standard price of a rushed admission and we went our separate ways.  

        Naturally I was very put off in a relieved sort of way.  Waiting for the next week was hard.  Volleyball was becoming a very depressing chore on top of middle school drama.  You know how young pre-teens are.  At this point in my life I had no one I could confide in aside from journals or my cousins, and they were too busy to bother with their strange sister-like relation.  At least, that is what I thought at the time.  Needless to say, my mother revealed a few truths over the years.  She stopped going to my cousin’s house because she wanted to focus on selling our condo.  In other words: I had no friends and could not visit my family because she was tired of living in the ghetto and wanted better for me.  I suppose I should be grateful, but I find that I am not.  Maybe if she would have spent more time with me, things would not as strained between the two of us today.  Maybe.    

        Dr. Mazziotti (I know I spelt that wrong) was a kind, very young man.  He promised to find out what was wrong with me and fix it.  I believed him, of course, because he seemed very devoted to his job.  The next part is very jumbled.  I do believe I took an X-ray along with some other tests that, if they were painful or tedious in any way, I do not remember them.  The visit was rather short.  He told us he would contact my mother when the results came in.  I honestly did not expect that phone call to be so disastrous.                   

        There are a few things no one ever wants to hear.  “I’m sorry, but we are almost positive this is Hodgkin’s Lymphoma” is one of them.  For those of you who do not know: Hodgkin’s Lymphoma is a type of cancer found in the lymph nodes.  To put it simply—I had cancer.  Try choking on that when you are thirteen and think God would never let anything bad happen to you.  What a deluded little Christian I was back then.  

        To say that I was angry at God would be the understatement of a lifetime.  I had lost a father, a grandmother, and now He decided that I should be cursed with six months of constant torment.  It never occurred to me that I should thank Him that it was only six months.  The average time spent in that hospital for cancer was two years.  I was one of the lucky few that had the most “cured” type of cancer known to man.  That does not really matter when they take you in for surgery.  As far as you are concerned you are in just as much pain as the newborn with leukemia.  What a selfish thought.  

        They said the surgery was five hours long.  The only thing I recall is going to sleep then waking up in so much pain and feeling like there was a tube shoved down my throat.  They had done two things during the operation: Perform a biopsy to make sure it was Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, which it had been; then, they inserted something they called a catheter—a round metal “port” that had a tube connected to the main artery leading to your heart—into my side.  I cannot tell you how much agony that stupid piece of junk put me through for those six months.  To this day the place where it had rested for so long will randomly start to sting like it is still inside of me.  On those days I want to cry and forget everything but I cannot… no matter how hard I try.   

        I lost something the first day I did chemotherapy.  My Aunt Joan and mother were there with me in that little room.  The nurse was so kind; all of them were.  The only problem was that some of them did not know how to insert a needle into a catheter very well.  Have you ever felt a needle scrape against something metal inside of your body?  You can hear the screeching in your ears louder than anything and you just want to cringe and beg like a spoiled, broken child for them to take it out.  I lost count of how many times I begged like that.  I still feel bad for the nurses.  Their hearts reached out to me every time because they knew I was trapped; it was either chemo or death.  And I was not ready to face my mortality yet, even though I prayed for God to stop picking on me and just end my suffering.  The ironic thing is He did answer my prayers—just not in the way I thought He would.  

        Do you know what it is like to watch your hair fall out; to see your strength and happiness flutter away along with it?  I cannot express how your heart cries out before turning colder than stone, ready to face the pain with frigid perseverance.  

        I cannot tell you what happened in those six months.  I am still trying to forget it.  I wanted so badly to let it out, but it seems I am not ready.  I am not looking for your sympathy or kind words; I am looking for solace and peace within myself.  That is what this piece is all about, is it not?  Seeking solace.  How I wish I could find it.


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