It was like any other Tuesday –
Routine. Work. Long day. Going to pick up my kid from softball practice. Plans for dinner when we get home.
Except what was different –
Friday is looming. Denial will soon impossible. Answers are coming. Secrets will be revealed.
Add on the unexpected –
The impact out of nowhere. The semi barreling toward me. The tire…is that MY tire?…flying by in my peripheral.
How am I not dead? Why survive if I’m just gonna have cancer? Maybe this means I don’t have cancer! I can’t believe I’m walking. What just happened? I’ll be pissed if I have cancer. I’d rather die by semi than by chemo. Oh God, chemo. But since I didn’t die—wow, how am I alive—what if I have cancer? I can’t wish to come back here and die instead. There’s no way I have cancer. No way. Not after everything I’ve been through this year already. And now this? Ugh, I still have to go on Friday…since I didn’t die and all. I have cancer, I just know it. This is a separate shitshow. Great. Just.Great.
“Are you alright, ma’am?”
“Uh, what? Oh, um I don’t know. Maybe? I think so?”
“Do you know what happened?”
“No. Just the impact came out of nowhere and then there was the semi.”
“I saw it! This car hit her from behind and jackknifed her into the semi. Are you okay? I can’t believe you’re alive.”
“Since you’re up walking, you can just call someone to come get you. We won’t take you to the hospital.”
“My husband is on his way.”
“Ok. Get your belongings out of your car. The tower is here.”
Today I am contemplative. Glad the semi didn’t actually kill me. Angry that the multitude of traumas of 2017 didn’t exonerate me from cancer. Grateful for the transformation. Awed by the pain. Challenged by the purpose.
It’s interesting to me. The whole diagnostic journey starting with the mammogram/ultrasound that following Friday was colored with medical personnel wanting to make the accident this miracle to finding the tumors. “Oh girl, just imagine if you hadn’t gotten in that accident, you wouldn’t have found your tumors…imagine what would have happened!!” But that’s not how it worked. The whole year was filled with unrelated, separate, terribly painful shitshows, none making the others make sense or justify them. None pardoning. None absolving. Just one figurative semi after another. With a literal one thrown in for good measure.
I don’t get why. But I’ve learned that I don’t need why. In my contemplation today, I seek quietness of spirit. There is much unknown ahead, 4 years later, but I’m okay being here. I’ve had LOTS of practice. . .
This Day in 2018:
Semis and Anniversaries
On this, the year anniversary of my major car accident, my 16 year old daughter passed her drivers test and got her drivers license. Isn’t that interesting…
My head has been in a strange place today. I was pretty edgy all day and I was out of patience the moment I woke up. I got home from work and melted down. I’m exhausted. Cancer is hard.
“This time last year…..” is to blame, I imagine. A year ago, my figurative semi became literal. As I was hit into the path of a semi that was going 60+ mph on I70 I couldn’t help but feel the irony. I had equated the massive emotional crisis of the beginning of 2017 to a semi blowing through my life and little did I know that 10 days later I’d be diagnosed with effing cancer. C a n c e r.
All I have is now. And now I have to trust my baby girl on the road, manning a machine while blindly trusting other drivers on the road. This is a whole new level of faith………Lord Jesus. Armies of angels…..armies of angels.
This Day in 2019:
August 15
Two years ago today…a literal semi blew through my life.
Ten days later…another one.
Today – My oldest baby embarked on her senior year, my middle survived her freshmen year and is no longer the high school newbie and my baby started middle school…and I’m grateful to be alive to send them off into another school year. Grateful we’ve made it here as a family. Grateful that our family is knit together more tightly than ever before.
This Day in 2020:
The Anniversary of the Yellow Tanker with a Heart on the Side
We are a presumptive bunch, us humans. We think we know so much (and some think they know everything). We have our whole year, or even our whole next 5 years planned out…we look at our calendars and plan our days and weeks around what colored dots show up next to words that describe how we control our time. We prescribe how we will react to the people (…by assuming much…) in the meeting we have next week because we’re not sure we can trust our in-the-moment response. We prepare for the appointment we scheduled for next month because we want to avoid the scolding of imperfection (like, flossing religiously the month before the dentist appointment so it appears as though there is a deep commitment to mouth-health all year long). We plan the details of the trip of a lifetime, the one that is on the calendar for next year, because spontaneity just doesn’t fit into the rat-race. We predict what will happen with the what-ifs of the maybes that we assume are coming.
This was me. “To a t.” And while cancer has been the thing ultimately that has shown me the error of my old ways (and gratefully has taught me how to live changed), it was the yellow semi-truck with a heart on the side totaling my car (10-days prior to diagnosis) that provides the visual of the lesson. I remember getting out of the car and thinking, “how am I not dead?” And then once the spinning stopped, thinking, “wait…what?…I’m trying to prepare my mind and heart for the possibility of a cancer diagnosis. Did a semi literally just blow through my life as I’m predicting and planning for the figurative semi of cancer?” The visual in and of itself is interesting…There I was, already trying to prescribe the fateful call, the staging, the treatment plan, the prognosis (all of which I was wrongly assuming would come with that first call anyways) …as I was spinning in THAT unplanned-for-crisis, I was flung into another. No warning. No preparing. No heads-up. I didn’t get to wake up and see “Semi totals my car” on my schedule.
It was a very palpable lesson in how presuming anything is simply a waste of the present. Instead of the minuscule margin… the one tiny free space among the 47 already-assigned ones… the inability to adapt because nothing unscheduled fits, what about the freedom in only living now? What about being content to not know because when we’re supposed to know, we will, AND we will have what we need to step next?
I can close my eyes and see the blur of a yellow tanker with a red heart on the side, the one that tore through my car 3-years ago today. The one that offers a transformative lesson. And I can fill my lungs with the air of the moment, knowing that alone is enough.