Presence, Security

Like Christmas Morning

March 15, 2025

I had a morning last week that felt like Christmas morning. Or like the memory of one of my teenaged days when I woke up and my Mom and I would get in the car and drive to town and spend the day together, maybe go shopping and out to lunch, and there wasn’t anything tremendously special that happened, it just was that we were together, a golden ordinary day.

Funny that I am tearing up a little as I write that.

I had a day like that last week because I went to an imaging lab and had a second set of scans performed on an area of my left breast. I had gone in for a mammogram the week before, a procedure that always sends my hypochondriac-prone self into spasms of anxiety. Because it’s a thing that you are supposed to do every year, but you never know what will be discovered. Will everything be fine like it’s been for years or will there be a shadow, something amiss that will change the trajectory of how your life is going, suddenly veering you off in a new unwanted direction with appointments, an oncologist, unplanned expenses, new kinds of pain?

There is a sign on the wall of the mammogram changing room that says you should receive results in a week to ten days. Sometimes it can take longer if they have to hunt down scans that were taken at other facilities. I remember that last year I received my results quickly, much quicker than I thought possible, and everything was fine. Of course, this year, I hoped that would happen again.

It did not. My mammogram was on Saturday. I did not hear anything until I got a voicemail from the imaging lab on Thursday, asking me to call them back. You do not want to get calls from doctors after scans like mammograms. It generally does not mean good news.

Continue Reading…

Presence, Success

Trashcan Full of Tissues

March 1, 2025

I was feeling well enough to go for a short walk around the park on Friday. Lovely to see that the trees are starting to bloom.

My trashcan overflowed with tissues from the cold I caught this week. I made my way through an entire tissue box.

At first, I refused to admit I was sick. I didn’t want to be sick. I had things to do! My annual mammogram was scheduled for Saturday morning and I desperately needed to go to Costco. When Sunday rolled around, I still wasn’t feeling great, but my next door neighbors had started a burn pile, and I had piles of brush that needed to be burned.

Of course, this was something I could do on my own, anytime when it was a “permissible burn day,” which is something you can easily find out by checking our county’s website. Since we’ve had good rain lately, burning has been permitted. I even have a space toward the back of my property where someone had burned before, a circle of rocks and some charred logs. But I was nervous about this, and if my neighbors had a pile going, I could wheelbarrow my brush down to them and take care of it. It took a couple of hours of loading and wheeling, but I was victorious. Sure, I was coughing a bit as I did it, but I wasn’t that sick, right?

Monday morning dawned. I needed to work. One tricky thing about being self-employed is that you don’t get paid sick days. If I don’t work, I don’t earn. I was sure I could work, though, especially if I fortified myself with the magic elixirs of Sudafed and Advil and carried unwrapped cough drops in my massage apron. I had made it to Costco and had worked in the yard just the other day! Surely, it was only a little cold and I wasn’t that sick.

But late Monday morning, as I sat at the kitchen table, drank my hot tea, and tried my best to motivate myself to get ready for work, I finally accepted reality.

I was that sick. Continue Reading…