Blessings In Disguise

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Blessings In Disguise

In January of 1992 I was 22 years old, living in Santa Barbara, CA. I had just moved down there a few months before, away from family and friends and anyone else I knew, to begin grad school. I had just finished my first quarter at school. I had met some friends and was even brave enough to have placed a personal ad in the local weekly, which is how I met a quirky, affectionate, self-described "character" named Sandy. We had been dating for about 6 weeks.

On this January evening, I sat on the squeaky black faux-leather couch in my furnished studio apartment and watched TV. It was late; I was tired. I rubbed my own shoulders and neck to try to ease some of the tension. That;s how I found the lump nestled in the hollow next to my collarbone, between my neck and shoulder. I'd never felt anything like it before. I never really gave my 22 year old body much thought, though. It did what it did and refused to do other things, and that was OK by me.

The next day I mentioned the strange lump to Sandy. This funny, goofy man (who I later found out was a survivor of childhood cancer) was instantly sobered. "Let me feel," he said. He felt my lump. He insisted I had to go to the doctor and get it checked out. I resisted; it was no big deal; I didn't even have a doctor yet in this new town. He gave me the name of a doctor he knew and strongly encouraged me to go see her. I made an appointment.

The doctor felt the lump. She asked me if I'd been scratched by any cats lately. I said no. She wanted to do a biopsy. I started to be scared.

They did the biopsy with only local anesthetic, while I tried to hold my head absolutely still and leaked tears onto the paper-covered table. The nurse held my hand. I felt a tugging and a painless queer snipping and smelled my own flesh burning when they cauterized the capillaries while they worked. After a while they finished and put a big bandage over my collarbone and sent me home.

The next couple days were a blur. I walked around school feeling light and airy, like a brain with legs, almost entirely disconnected from my aching neck. I filled up my brain with lots of chunky academic goodness to avoid thinking about the lump they had pulled out. I had asked to see it. It looked like a shiny, bloody, white, misshapen gumball.

My follow-up appointment with the doctor was on January 22nd: my birthday. I sat in her office with Sandy. She told me gently, "I have some good news and some bad news. The bad news is, it's cancer. The good news is, it's a kind that is really treatable. It's called Hodgkin's Lymphoma." I told her brattily, "happy fucking birthday." I was 23 years old.

I dropped out of grad school, moved back up to the Bay Area with my parents, endured major surgery and 9 weeks of daily radiation therapy, and spent many long months trying to heal, physically, emotionally and mentally. Instead of running away like I had expected, Sandy and I grew intensely closer. By the time September rolled around again I was determined to move back to Santa Barbara and begin school again as if nothing had changed. Except I had changed. So everything was different.

Even my relationship was different. Sandy tenderly and unstintingly supported me long-distance throughout my entire experience. And about a month after I moved back to Santa Barbara, we broke up. The crisis had passed. It was not long after that that I met the man who is now my husband, and fell in love.

People say to me now, usually with some amount of incredulity laced with pity and fear, "but you had cancer so young! How did that feel? Why do you think you got it? Was it genetic? Environmental?" (Underneath the questions I hear them asking "What did you do wrong? Could it happen to me? Could it happen to anyone? Did you learn anything from your experience that you could teach me so I won't get cancer?")

Being diagnosed with cancer so young was a gift, I tell them. It provided me with a breathtaking clarity of priorities and perspective. It gave me a fast-track to personal enlightenment, a precocious understanding of the complexity and miraculousness of life, and an awareness of my own deep inner strength and resources. I was tested; I survived. Everything else since then has seemed ultimately trivial when set against the cancer survivor's perspective.

These days, over a decade later, I often lose sight of that bright clarity in the buzz and exhaustion of my everyday working parent life. But I can still summon it up and touch it any time I want to. It's mine; I earned it. It's part of me now. And now every birthday I have is a reminder as well as a personal victory, a gold medal in my personal Olympics.

Blessings are where you find them. They are rarely obvious when they first appear. Some of the best ones must be wrestled away from the angel of misfortune, or carved out of despair like a precious jewel.