“Miss Lizz, do you want to come watch me get my chemo?”
My next door neighbor, ten-year-old Ellen tugged on my hand as the white van in her driveway ground to a stop and a middle-aged blonde in khakis and a sweater climbed out, only the stethoscope around her neck betraying her as a medical visitor. She gathered her supplies and set up in the living room, belying a regular routine.
“Come on! Please?” Ellen yanked down her pink t-shirt to show me the medi-port installed in her skinny chest. She’d shown it to me three years before when it was first inserted, proudly, the same way she’d shown up on my doorstep and pulled off her stocking cap to display her bald head during her first round of chemo and radiation, around the same time. “Just like Carly!” she’d said, grinning ear to ear. She met another little girl during one of her trips to Roswell who had lost her hair, and Ellen had wanted to be just like her friend, and had convinced her mom to shave her head in advance of the inevitable.
Carly died just as Ellen’s hair began to grow back. It was past her shoulders now, and would remain so, until the tumor pressing on her brain began to grow more aggressively, and the dosage was increased. If. When.
“You just stick it in there, and I stand really still, and then we’re done! It doesn’t even hurt!”
Oh sweetheart, yes it does.
I agreed, of course. I’d never been able to say no to that kid. Ever since Ellen was born and looked up at me with those big brown eyes, before she started running into things and her parents took her in to be tested, before she became one of the bravest people I’ve ever met at the ripe old age of three, before she became my little friend, my inspiration.
And it was Ellen's face I saw in my mind’s eye when I got the phone call from the receptionist that my MRI had come back “abnormal.” Not my father’s father’s, who died of brain cancer when I was three. Not my mother’s father’s, who died of brain cancer before she graduated from high school. These faces are an abstraction, photographs in a dusty album on a shelf. These faces don’t appear between the hedge that divides our houses, to tell me about her newest dance routine, a trick her dog learned, a fact she learned in school. These faces don’t wave goodbye from the driveway as I leave for work every morning, ecstatically excited just to be there.
Even now, I struggle to find the words to describe the barrage of emotion that assaulted me that afternoon. I still can’t muster a description, six months later. Except that my body became an echo chamber for her words until the follow-up appointment a week later, until six rounds of bloodwork over the next month and three visits to the neurologist confirmed that it wasn’t the Big C, that it didn’t need to be removed, that it wasn’t the direct cause of anything other than a cloud of panic. Yet.
And that word, that “yet” follows me around like a shadow. A chalk outline I fall into at night, after logic has melted into the darkness and I wonder: when does “yet” expire?
“We’ll watch it,” the doctor said to her laptop that replaced manila charts several years ago. “Every six months or so, we’ll want to take another look. Just so we can catch it, if it does anything funky.”
Funky. Funky is an adjective my grandmother applied to my hair when I dyed it pink the summer after high school. Funky is a character in a comic strip my mom and I discussed over a bottle of sangria on the back porch one sultry summer evening two months ago. Funky is exciting, avante garde, offbeat. Funky does not describe the fact that I suddenly felt like a ticking time bomb. Funky is not even close to the word I would have chosen.
None of this is anything I’d have chosen.
Ellen showed up at my house last Monday on Halloween with her two sisters. She towers over them now that she grew almost six inches over the summer. She was dressed all in black, her face smeared with black paint beginning to drip down her neck in the rain. “I’m a dementor!” she said giggling, the whites of her eyes that don’t quite look at you glowing from her darkened face, a black stocking cap pulled low over her forehead, pointed at the top where she’d stuffed her long ponytail.
“You’re a very realistic dementor,” I told her, giving each girl an extra piece of candy because they’re my favorites. Careful not to bend over too far when I dropped it into their waiting pillowcases, careful not to throw myself off balance. “You scared me!”
“My mom said the same thing!” she shrieked gleefully. “She said I always scare her! She’s so silly.”
I’m sure you do, sweet girl. And I’m thankful, as are all the adults around her, that she doesn’t fear the specter hovering over her head the same way her parents do whenever she goes in for her six-month check ups. That she doesn’t cower in the shadow of what could happen, because she’s never lived without the possibility.
“I didn’t get my hug today, girls,” I told them as they pushed open the screen door and fell, giggling, into my arms. The youngest, a five-year-old strawberry shortcake, grabbed me around the knees, her sister, an eight-year-old Greek goddess catching my waist and Ellen, the dementor, burying her face into my chest, each of them counterbalancing the other, their little arms tight enough to take my breath away. “Have fun, ladies!” I said, sending them on their way, and off they went, waving and smiling as they skipped off amidst the leaves.
Hers is the smile I think of when a fist closes around my heart, when I can’t breathe past the panic that illogically overtakes me when I let my guard fall after midnight. When I can’t rely on myself, she’s my strength. My inspiration.
My next door neighbor, ten-year-old Ellen tugged on my hand as the white van in her driveway ground to a stop and a middle-aged blonde in khakis and a sweater climbed out, only the stethoscope around her neck betraying her as a medical visitor. She gathered her supplies and set up in the living room, belying a regular routine.
“Come on! Please?” Ellen yanked down her pink t-shirt to show me the medi-port installed in her skinny chest. She’d shown it to me three years before when it was first inserted, proudly, the same way she’d shown up on my doorstep and pulled off her stocking cap to display her bald head during her first round of chemo and radiation, around the same time. “Just like Carly!” she’d said, grinning ear to ear. She met another little girl during one of her trips to Roswell who had lost her hair, and Ellen had wanted to be just like her friend, and had convinced her mom to shave her head in advance of the inevitable.
Carly died just as Ellen’s hair began to grow back. It was past her shoulders now, and would remain so, until the tumor pressing on her brain began to grow more aggressively, and the dosage was increased. If. When.
“You just stick it in there, and I stand really still, and then we’re done! It doesn’t even hurt!”
Oh sweetheart, yes it does.
I agreed, of course. I’d never been able to say no to that kid. Ever since Ellen was born and looked up at me with those big brown eyes, before she started running into things and her parents took her in to be tested, before she became one of the bravest people I’ve ever met at the ripe old age of three, before she became my little friend, my inspiration.
And it was Ellen's face I saw in my mind’s eye when I got the phone call from the receptionist that my MRI had come back “abnormal.” Not my father’s father’s, who died of brain cancer when I was three. Not my mother’s father’s, who died of brain cancer before she graduated from high school. These faces are an abstraction, photographs in a dusty album on a shelf. These faces don’t appear between the hedge that divides our houses, to tell me about her newest dance routine, a trick her dog learned, a fact she learned in school. These faces don’t wave goodbye from the driveway as I leave for work every morning, ecstatically excited just to be there.
Even now, I struggle to find the words to describe the barrage of emotion that assaulted me that afternoon. I still can’t muster a description, six months later. Except that my body became an echo chamber for her words until the follow-up appointment a week later, until six rounds of bloodwork over the next month and three visits to the neurologist confirmed that it wasn’t the Big C, that it didn’t need to be removed, that it wasn’t the direct cause of anything other than a cloud of panic. Yet.
And that word, that “yet” follows me around like a shadow. A chalk outline I fall into at night, after logic has melted into the darkness and I wonder: when does “yet” expire?
“We’ll watch it,” the doctor said to her laptop that replaced manila charts several years ago. “Every six months or so, we’ll want to take another look. Just so we can catch it, if it does anything funky.”
Funky. Funky is an adjective my grandmother applied to my hair when I dyed it pink the summer after high school. Funky is a character in a comic strip my mom and I discussed over a bottle of sangria on the back porch one sultry summer evening two months ago. Funky is exciting, avante garde, offbeat. Funky does not describe the fact that I suddenly felt like a ticking time bomb. Funky is not even close to the word I would have chosen.
None of this is anything I’d have chosen.
Ellen showed up at my house last Monday on Halloween with her two sisters. She towers over them now that she grew almost six inches over the summer. She was dressed all in black, her face smeared with black paint beginning to drip down her neck in the rain. “I’m a dementor!” she said giggling, the whites of her eyes that don’t quite look at you glowing from her darkened face, a black stocking cap pulled low over her forehead, pointed at the top where she’d stuffed her long ponytail.
“You’re a very realistic dementor,” I told her, giving each girl an extra piece of candy because they’re my favorites. Careful not to bend over too far when I dropped it into their waiting pillowcases, careful not to throw myself off balance. “You scared me!”
“My mom said the same thing!” she shrieked gleefully. “She said I always scare her! She’s so silly.”
I’m sure you do, sweet girl. And I’m thankful, as are all the adults around her, that she doesn’t fear the specter hovering over her head the same way her parents do whenever she goes in for her six-month check ups. That she doesn’t cower in the shadow of what could happen, because she’s never lived without the possibility.
“I didn’t get my hug today, girls,” I told them as they pushed open the screen door and fell, giggling, into my arms. The youngest, a five-year-old strawberry shortcake, grabbed me around the knees, her sister, an eight-year-old Greek goddess catching my waist and Ellen, the dementor, burying her face into my chest, each of them counterbalancing the other, their little arms tight enough to take my breath away. “Have fun, ladies!” I said, sending them on their way, and off they went, waving and smiling as they skipped off amidst the leaves.
Hers is the smile I think of when a fist closes around my heart, when I can’t breathe past the panic that illogically overtakes me when I let my guard fall after midnight. When I can’t rely on myself, she’s my strength. My inspiration.
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Wren Dancer
Caitlin Kelly
Tiffany Brubeck
Pat MacEnulty
Diary of a Hopeful Starving Student
fingerlakeswanderer
Salon.com
Comments
Julie: You're right, rhythmic exercises are definitely helpful. Even after prayer had long since stopped doing the trick, the poetry of the psalms still do. Thanks!
divorcedpauline: She's an amazing little girl, who's turning into an amazing young woman faster than I can believe.
Wren: Thanks for stopping by!
Mary: That was the idea! Always good to hear it was successful, even just for one person.
ccdarling: Ellen's courage, not mine. I'm just the scribe.