A Sea of Blue

When the thoracic surgeon at Mass General was trying to figure out if I had lung cancer in 2008, before he knew I did, he ordered a bone scan. For some reason, he decided to do it backwards. I would find out if I had lung cancer that had spread to my bones before I even knew if it was in my lungs.

If I had lung cancer that spread to my bones, I had a fifteen percent chance of surviving.

I was lying on a metal table with two male technicians running the bone scan, while two women on the other side of the room, also technicians, were viewing the scan from behind a blue hospital partition.

I could hear the women talking even though I couldn't see them:

"Oh no."

"Did you see that?"

"What a shame."

And a tsk sound.

A tsk that reverberates to this day.

I knew that these women were reading my scan. I also knew that I had two children back in Hawai'i whom I needed to see grow up. I had never needed to see them grow up more than I did in that moment.

One of the male technicians was in training. They told me that when they started the scan. Mass General is a teaching hospital, connected to Harvard, and I remember begging him to tell me the result. Maybe he wouldn't know that he wasn't supposed to give me an answer, he was training. I needed to know if I had cancer that had spread to my bones. I needed to know at that moment, not later, if I was most likely going to die.
 
There was no oxygen in the room and the world had become too small to contain what was left of me that day.

I told that young technician about my kids... an entire soliloquy from that metal table... I told him how frightened I was, that I had never even smoked so this didn't make sense... I told him that I was 5,000 miles away from home, that my husband was alone there with the kids and needed to know if I wouldn't be coming home... If he would need to bring up the kids without me.
 
I knew he could hear the Boston in my voice; I had the same accent he did because this was the place of my childhood. I was still in my forties, realizing, in that moment, that it would be in the place of my childhood that I was going to find out if I would die from inexplicable lung cancer that had spread to my bones.

Everything was inside out.

The tech started to say something, he was clearly upset, and the other tech swooped in with, "Only the radiologist can read this scan. You'll hear from your doctor."

And they both left the room.

The female technicians left too. They had been wearing powder blue scrubs and hospital masks, and, still in my too-big blue hospital gown, I ran down the hall, chasing the women I hadn't seen. The women behind the blue partition. They were women... they might have kids... I needed them to tell me what they meant when they said what a shame. When they said oh no. And the frightening tsk, what that meant.

I found myself in the front lobby with an ocean of doctors and hospital workers in identical blue scrubs. I ran from blue scrub to blue scrub, not knowing who I was looking for. "Was it you who just did my bone scan?" "Was it you?" I was the crazy women saying to the wrong person, "What did you mean when you said, ‘What a shame’”? “What did you mean when..." I was out of control, hysterical.

And then the worst moment of all... I looked towards the front of the hospital, and through the giant glass windows I saw my mother. She had brought me there that day for the bone scan. She was outside, looking in. Frozen, like me. Seeing me running in a circle, lost.

It was the lowest moment of my life.

As it turned out, I did have lung cancer - I would find that out days later after a surgery - but it had not spread to my bones. The technicians weren't even talking about my scan; they were apparently having a conversation about something else.

I told the story to the hospital later, after I knew I wasn't going to die. Not in that moment, anyway. I told them what a conversation like that during a bone scan does to a patient waiting to hear if it's fifteen percent. In my case, a mother with young kids.

What I think of when I think of that day is the misinformation. The panic of not knowing. It was the moment I made a pact with God and the Universe that if I survived this, I would do more. Live louder. LIVE. This was also the moment that I saw what this cancer fiasco was doing to my aging parents. My mother outside the window.

This was when I realized how far away I was from home.

Here's the thing...

When I came out of this, I made a decision to become macrobiotic - which I am to this day - so I pay attention to what I put into my body. Only whole foods. I truly believe this is part of why I'm still here. After all that, I was healthy and whole, even with one less lobe of my lung. I was ready to write and perform a one-woman show and lead these writers workshops and direct a youth acting troupe. And to continuing singing on a stage. To hit the high note. And most importantly - see my kids grow up.

The worst moment of my life reinvented me. So much of the minutia of before that disappeared. There was no time for anything but living.

The panic around a pandemic reminds me of me that day, of me running helter skelter through that Boston hospital. But the thing is, when I came out the other end, I was more than I had been.

Because crisis does that. Because overcoming fear / panic empowers us. Because at a low time, even in the worst of times, we gather our resources because we see what we could have lost. And then we see what we're capable of.

The world that opened after that day I ran like a desperate mess from blue scrub to blue scrub was technicolor. It had always been bright, but afterwards it was brighter.

Here's to us getting through the Coronavirus together, each of us knowing that on the other end (because there will be the other end) is the joy of having made it through the fear and the isolation and the unknown.
 
We just have to hunker down and ride it out. To stay connected, even if we're not in the same room. We just have to visualize the beauty that comes out of surviving something.
 
And then we're more than we were because we got through it.
​ 
We're more.❣️

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