"Lydia!" Dr. Adab called from the double doors. "Wait. Your PET scan results came in."
Immediately the scales began tipping back and forth in my mind. Fast results, could be good or bad, he's not walking fast, so I guess that's good, but Dr. Adab always loped that way in his ever so composed stroll, like he didn't have a care in the world. He had a summer lovin', ne'er a care in the world, boyish smile that you see on children when they wake up excited for a new day of adventure. My mom was absolutely enamored with his smile. It was surrounded by dark, coarse stubble, and topped with brown eyes that twinkled, just the way one might describe in a work of fiction. I never understood what it meant to have twinkling eyes until I met Dr. Adab, and I never understood how he could smile as if he were having an ice cream with you on the beach when he spent every day delivering life shattering, soul crushing, drown yourself in an avalanche of uncontrollable terror kind of news to patient after patient. Even when he was telling me I had a rare form of cancer that would kill me in the next few months without treatment, he had a closed lipped smile that kind of just barely turned up at the edges to show me that even though my life was about to forever change, he was in my corner. I was familiar with that smile, as it had graced my face while standing next to a doctor delivering bad news. It's the condolence "I'm sorry, but this isn't quite the end so hang in there" smile. But just now, as he called for me, standing in slacks and leather shoes and a button down shirt, with a tie, half windsor and a little off center (it was always a little off center like he didn't quite have enough time in the morning to look in the mirror), and a stethoscope strung over his neck, he wasn't smiling. He was gazing out the windows with a purposely distant look on his face as he stepped to the side, off an empty corridor.
'Oh my God, that's the bad news face. No, if it was the bad news face he'd be making eye contact. If it was good news, why doesn't he just say so?' my mind hissed. 'Because HIPAA, stupid. He can't shout it in the halls even if it is good news. Shut up, shut up, everybody shut up!'
"Oh my God," I wanted to yell. "Don't do that doctor silence thing. Just tell me!"
All of this in the 4 seconds it took me to reach him.
"That was fast," I said, tightly, as if controlling my voice could brace me for the impact that was surely coming in a emotional Mack Truck T-bone wrapped delivery.
"Yes, the doctor found the results and interpreted them..."
I could feel the spot between my eyebrows furrowing as he stepped closer and bent his head down, speaking quietly within a foot from my face.
"... They were negative." Then, a full grin, with raised shoulders as he reached for me, and then laughter.
I blinked. 'What? WHAT? YAS!' And I fist pumped, elbow to my hip, and then hugged my doctor. Over his shoulder I could see an entire waiting room full of pale, sickly patients looking through the entryway at us, longing and desperation and apathy etched onto their faces.
"Happy Holidays," he said into the fuzzy new hair on my head.
"Happy Holidays," I said breathlessly.
It wasn't until I was in my garage reaching into my car trunk to pick up the grocery bags five hours later, having gone grocery shopping and cooked soup for my cousin who had had 14 of his teeth pulled preemptively for his 10 rounds of chemo and radiation for nasopharyngeal carcinoma, that I suddenly began to shake, the little quiet laugh that comes as small puffs of air out of your nose, when something from hours ago strikes you as funny. To my surprise tears began to fill my eyes. It wasn't until then I was finally able to comprehend the feeling I had inside. It was relief, of course, that there was "no evidence of disease" (the technical, legal way of saying "we don't see any cancer anymore, but it could still be there, but we're pretty sure it's not, please don't sue us if we're wrong"), but there was relief of a different flavor, too.
I was relieved I would not have to decide today whether or not I was going to go through with killing myself.
You see, while everyone in my family was looking forward to today to see if I would have to keep undergoing treatment, I knew that today I had to stop living in denial. For the past three weeks, I've been training myself to walk, taking farther and farther agonizing trips under the guise of "exercise," because I had to make sure I could make it to Lehigh and Touhy on the tracks where the rush hour express blasted through at 60 miles an hour just under 3 miles from my house between the Shell, and the Starbucks where I had spent almost every weekend in the last two years studying to become a nurse. I would stand there, looking at the lone headlight in the distance growing in size, feeling the low growling of the car engines around me, listening to the clanging of the crossing signal, feeling the vibrations of the train as it grew nearer, listen for the horn, listening to the pebbles begin to clatter in their beds, until the roar, too painful to listen to so that I would have to stick my fingers in my ears as the train thundered by, whipping wet leaves up in its wake, training myself to not be afraid, training myself to stay still, because one day, perhaps today, I would have to lay down and will myself not to give in to flight.
This is the truth I couldn't speak out loud for fear someone would tell someone and I would end up on suicide watch on a locked ward until the cancer killed me because people wouldn't understand that for me, for once in my life I didn't have a lack of norepinephrine, serotonin, dopamine, or GABA. For once in my life, it wasn't about stopping the pain, rather it was about the decision to control the one thing I could control: the time, place, and method of my death--which, by the way, was designed so that no one but me would ever be blamed for killing me.
The truth of the matter is, I would never be able to say goodbye if that were the case, because someone would start crying, and my love for the people in my life would be greater than my love for myself, and I would break. I would buckle under that guilt, and I would not be able to lay down, and I would keep fighting a battle I know my body could not win, and I would die slowly, in agony, wasting away, because I am too weak to stand my ground against love. (And yes, I know that even though there's this reprieve today, there's also the nagging fact that today really marks the first day of an arbitrary 5 year mark where 80% of my kind of cancer survivor have a recurrence and I may have to revisit this scenario again. I swear to God, do NOT call the boys with the straightjackets!)
So today, when I found out that I don't have cancer anymore, it wasn't joy that overwhelmed me at first--it was relief that I don't have to make that choice yet. It was relief that I didn't have to see if I had the willpower to stick with my choice--that for at least right now I don't have to see whether or not I'm strong enough to lay down and stop fighting.
And that, for however many days I stay in remission, is the biggest relief of all.
