When life feels out of control, I start counting. I first noticed this habit/neurosis/coping mechanism when I was in labor for my oldest child. I was in too much pain to count the seconds of each contraction, but between them, I couldn’t stop counting. My mind was immersed in a world of ascending numbers, which made me realize I had been counting seconds in quiet moments throughout the pregnancy, maybe as my way to prepare for the Olympic event of birth.
It’s no wonder that many days, especially closest to the eye cancer diagnosis and surgical/radiological treatments and long recovery period, I’ve been counting. I counted (first days and eventually in hours) out how much time passed and would need to pass during those five long days between when the tiny gold bowl of radiation was implanted under my eyeball and when it would come out. Since there, it’s been how many days since the diagnosis, first surgery, and second surgery — a way to measure the immeasurable thunderbolt of initial fear, then the stretch of road unfurling around surprise bends and drops toward healing.
Today it’s 133 days since I heard those dreaded you-have-cancer words. It’s 87 days since the first surgery to initiate Operation Tumor Melt and 82 days since the second surgery to remove the bolster rockers (radiation implant). But just this morning, I found myself counting forward, not backwards: it’s only six days to the three month anniversary of beginning treatment, and by December 14, it will be six months past, by which time I see myself (so to speak) even more healed and healing, especially since the medical treatment takes a while to resolve and dissolve that tumor down to just a wispy scar of itself, inert and of no danger to me.
What I believe in is beyond the reach of numbers, but healing is like that. Eventually the physical reminders and tiny irritations, the prednisone eye drops and dilating eye drops (to blast scar tissue off the lens of my eye) will be as distant as any visceral memory of the pain of contractions. The lessons of all this will come into view over months and years in ways that name or don’t name themselves to me: what it means to be mortal, the power of love, the mystery of healing, and how vast and uncontrollable time is. What I mean by the latter is how much we all get to learn (unless we die quickly and unexpectedly) about how the future is not what it’s cracked up to be or what we get to map out in numbers or letters, although intention, prayer, and contemplation help.
As I move toward seeing myself as generally okay, out of pain and danger, and healthy, I notice I’m not counting as much. Instead, I’m sitting here watching the last few raindrop slough off the gutters and into the flower beds, so overgrown from three months of no weeding that it’s not worth even beginning to find the ground beneath it all. I’m listening to the soft and whirling waves of the crickets as well as to a jazzy version of “Jet Song” from West Side Story. I feeling the subtly moving air on my arms. I’m counting on such arrivals to where I actually am, breath by breath instead of number by number.
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