Saturday, September 10, 2011

7 Years Later: Chances

I've said it before and I will say it again (for the umpteenth time): If someone had said to me, "Lizzy, we would like to try a surgery where we cut off your head and reorganize some things in there.  It is an experimental procedure, with a 50% chance that it will reduce your dizziness and a 50% chance you will die," I would have said, "Sign me up."  The chance was worth the risk, in my little fantasy world created to describe the level of misery of my invisible injury.

So, I was actually happy to be back in the MRI machine that cold October day.  My symptoms were worsening and doing nothing was not an option.  I waited anxiously for the results from my neurologist.

The call came quickly, (in medical exam results sort of quickly), but strangely.  I expected the easy, monotone, Russian accented voice of my neurologist and instead I had heard the chipper, familiar, Minnesota-esk voice of my primary care doctor.

"Lizzy, it's John.  So - I got the results of the MRI.  The good news is that the lesion in your brain is healing quite nicely...  The other part, though, is that there seems to be a mass on your thyroid..."  The next day at John's office, "So, most masses in the thyroid are benign nodules, but some are cancerous.  There is roughly a 10% chance that it is the latter.  But who wants to walk around with a 10% chance of having cancer when we can know if it is or not..."

Good point.  Is this the point where he suggests that they cut off my head?, she thinks sarcastically.  (Your thyroid is in your neck, by the way).

7 Years Later: Carried to Light

I haven't written since July.  And how fitting that my last reflection reads with such heaviness and stuckness.  The Day of Darkness were long.  Waiting, miserably; therapizing, endlessly; suffering.  I would grieve one thing to lose another.  The biggest black holes were the losses left nameless.  Physically, spiritually, emotionally I felt as a vapor.  I spoke to people through an invisible triple pane window.  Even now I realize just how sick and traumatized I was.

During this time, I wrote a devotional entry for the seminary student handbook at the request of a colleague and friend.  It is the story of a paraplegic man whose friends carry him on a mat to Jesus.  (Does a hole in a roof ring a bell?).  Because of their, (as in the friends'), belief, the man was healed.

And, during the Days of Darkness, it was my friends, (including my family who are the dearest of friends), bold belief that, I think quite literally, kept me alive.  I was carried to Light.

If I started to name the ways, I would be typing until morning.  How appropriate.

"...and you will know them by their love..."