I'll Be Home for Christmas

My legs are feeling much more normal after several days of unusual weakness and tingling. Actually, I am a little embarrassed about that whole trip-to-the-emergency-room thing. Over time, I have learned to expect the worst when a new symptom pops us. There was an article online about PTSD in cancer patients, and it described it as "waiting for the other shoe to drop". That's a really accurate description of me these days. Instead of my old mantra, "ignore it and maybe it will go away", I seem to have adopted a new one: "oh, no, what now?" I know the "old me" wasn't very wise, or proactive, but I am not certain that I like this current self any better. I find that I am both gun shy and yet oddly trigger happy at the same time.

Still -- you know where waiting around got me three years ago with the first round of spinal tumors (bedridden for five months!), and it happened around Christmastime. When I woke up the other morning and my legs felt hollow, the eerie similarities were terrifyingly too much to ignore. I called my home health nurses, and my doctors' offices, and they tried without success to get me an outpatient appointment for an MRI. The first available date was December 3oth! I obviously needed to have my legs checked out, so they recommended that I go by ambulance to the ER to have one done.

Strapped to the stretcher in the back of the ambulance, I peered out the rainfogged windows at miles and miles of distinctly wintergray sky, broken up only by an occasional power pole and the macabre dance of naked treetops bowing in the wind. I tried in vain to erase the memory of Zach's worried face as he asked: "Will you be home for Christmas, Mom?"

"Yes, Zach, I will be here for Christmas."

"You promise?"

"Yes, baby, I promise ..."

As a parent, I try to never make a promise that I am not certain I can keep. But this time we had a happy outcome. I AM home. And all is well here in Lemingland. The gifts are wrapped and the stockings are hung and a warm fire glows in the fireplace. Still, I feel shaken by the whole episode. Sick. Uncertain. Vulnerable. I miss the me who wholeheartedly believed I could just overlook it and it might all just go away. That "pollyanna" me is gone forever, and I really hate that.

I long for the innocence of a child like Zach again. He believes that Christmas has magic, that good guys always win, and that he can count on me to be here for him forever. And it sounds so good, doesn't it? As long as there are "promises to keep", nothing will happen to me, right? Oh, how I wish ...

But I AM still here, and that's saying a lot after a year like this one. Thanks to the mercy of God, I will be home for Christmas. I will be alive for Christmas.

Yes, Zach, I promise.

:-) Sharon