Admitting the problem is the first step
I finally had my follow-up ultrasound checking on my ovarian cyst this morning. Top o’ the mornin’ to ye, let me just jab your tender vittles with this probe. Turns out, the cyst is still there. If it were a functional cyst, it never should’ve been found, because it was first discovered a day or two after my period ended, and I’ve had another period since. It’s not grown larger, nor has it shrunk.
But it’s no longer lonely, because there’s one on the other ovary now, too. Peachy. The doc overseeing my ultrasound as it happened made comments like “Are you on the Pill?” and “Who’s your doc over at the office?” These are rarely things that make you think the exam is going well. My “Why do you ask?” didn’t produce a satisfactory answer. He said it may be “neoplastic” which is, as I understand it, the opposite of “functional,” and that while it is probably benign, if it grows, it could cause me some problems anyway. In any case, he is ultimately passing it off to my gynecologist to “see what she wants to do.”
I have to say, that kind of talk annoys me. It’s my fucking ovary, and my fucking body. I suggest she give me her best professional advice and we’ll see what I want to do.
Of course, I’m trying to rein in my morbid imagination, the parts where I die young of the big C and leave my dogs orphaned and E to deal with the crushing pain I know only too well but won’t be able to help him with. These imaginings get really creepy; I even think about what kind of hats I will wear when my hair falls out from the treatment. It is an unhealthy mental compulsion I would just as soon rid myself of, thinking like this, if only I knew how to stop. And in all that, I realized something a little frightening, and a lot crazy: There is some part of me that would be disappointed if it turns out to be benign.
Is it because it would be the coup de grace, the final dropped shoe of what I have feared for years, and I wouldn’t have to fear it anymore because it would be here, front and center and terrifying instead of lurking in the shadows of my mind? Is it because I miss A and want to be with him? Is it because I’m so damned curious about what the next life is about? Is it because I want to work on accepting the worst-case scenario before I have to?
Because you know what? It’s not because I want to be dead. I realize that despite these two ultrasounds, I don’t know right now what’s going on between my hipbones, nor does anyone else with any real certainty, and that regardless of the outcome, it’s largely out of my control. But I do know that I’m not in any hurry to leave this life. I’m not. I have things I want to do and people I love that I want to stick around for.
It scared me to realize I was thinking this. “This”—look at me, I can’t even say it but the once. I scare myself even writing about it here, because it’s not a healthy, positive, life-affirming thought. It’s more than a little cracked, quite frankly. But I’m a big believer in shining a light on the monsters in the dark; when you do, they usually end up being only a sweater on the back of a chair, and so I’m forcing myself to take out this previously unexamined subtext of my own mind and scrutinize it. So here it is:
There is a part of me that I didn’t realize was there that has been actively wishing to die. It wasn’t conscious. It isn’t what I want, as a whole. But it has been there, evidently. And now that I say that, I can see it.
I’ve let my hair go its gray way, to be the old woman I feel I am lately.
All those aches and pains, and my talk of how I couldn’t possibly survive another 20 years in this body, let alone another 50.
The apathy I feel so often when it comes to my appearance. I’m old—it hardly matters.
My insistence about getting my affairs in order, because you never know.
Part of me has just been waiting to die while the rest of me has been trying to live again. Part of me gave up. I am 36 years old, and I was checking out. Not all of me. But part of me. Enough of me. Too much of me.
Well.
That’s just not going to do.