Surviving Cancer

He said to her, ‘Daughter, your faith has healed you.
Go in peace and be freed from your suffering.

Mark 5:34

In an instant, in what is otherwise a “normal” moment in time, I am brought back to every hospital room I had ever stayed in during Leukemia treatment. I am plunged into the faraway places of my memory, where I store the memories that I’d rather not keep, but they seem to stick around anyway. I was just going about my day, on the phone, trying to reschedule a doctor appointment. It wasn’t the clinic name or even the doctor’s appointment itself that triggered my memory. The culprit turned out to be the hold music. The seemingly cheery ballad is what sent me to the hidden places in time that I’d rather not revisit.

I’m on the phone; it’s attached to the wall. I’m surrounded by stale, colorless furniture. It’s gloomy, and I am attached to a pole. I dial the room service number. I’m far past hungry; I basically have to be starving before I’ll eat hospital food. That stuff is vile. I’m calling at a regular mealtime, so of course, I end up on hold, typical. The tune never changed. It was the exact same thing every single time. The food arrives 20 minutes later than expected and is now cold.

What makes these journeys down memory lane particularly hard isn’t that the food is terrible or that the furniture sucks. What makes it painful to think back to is that I was alone. If I had a visitor, we weren’t ordering hospital food. My treatment hospital was an hour away, one way, without traffic, and this was during COVID. I was also extremely immunocompromised. When I was alone, minutes felt like days, and days felt like weeks. It felt as though time had stopped, yet through social media and pictures from my family back home, I could easily see that it had not. I wasn’t always alone. Just to clarify, I had a very faithful mom and husband who visited quite often, considering.

Hearing that hold music sent me back into that very moment, but the effects of letting those memories surface could last the rest of the day. When I am back in time, my brain thinks it’s cool to just bring a bunch of similarly awful memories back with it. It brings up that memory, but countless more, too. Not diagnosed, but I definitely have some PTSD related to that time in my life. Rightfully so, I think.

Sometimes I am back in time, envisioning every detail before me, like with the hold music. Other times, I simply start feeling strong, unfavorable emotions related to my time in the hospital. Every clinic and hospital I go to for my cancer appointments has the same bathroom soap. Getting a whiff of that smell gives me instant feelings of uneasiness and anxiety. I still have a lot of appointments, so this happens quite frequently. It can be the simplest, most mundane thing that can trigger my “time-travel”. 😉

Just so we are clear, I don’t actually time-travel.