It had to have been a miracle of years of practice in emotional health.
Somehow I stayed in a good mood even though I was more than slightly incredulous when I heard him say “cancer prone” as he scribbled those same two words on the top page on his clip board.
I’m sure my face scrunched up - it is my habit - but in that moment I let go of both worry and meaning making as I prepared to be wheeled in for my first ever colonoscopy. It was an exchange I hadn’t imagined.
His question at the end of our first meeting was simply, "Any other health problems?” brought me to respond almost as an afterthought, “Oh, I have had melanoma and basal cell carcinoma, just two skin cancers.”
I suppose because those cancers have become integrated in my life I no longer think of them as a big deal, barely worth mentioning but somehow his translation of my “no big deal” into “cancer prone” grew in my mind, heart, and spirit as the space-in-time has stretched.
I had convinced myself the colonoscopy would bring a clear of cancer result - which it did - so it was like being hit broadside with a phrase my daughter Katherine said, “That should have been said silently in his mind.”
I’ve been engaging in deep psycho-therapy recently as well. I told my therapist a week ago that if I did have cancer again, I would continue the work we have been doing. The personal work is bigger than cancer, I told him.
Whatever core “stuff” is getting tangled up with the best edition of my life adventures would be relevant whether I had decades to live or weeks to live. I’m grateful it appears I have decades to go, though I also now this moment in my hand and my heart is truly all that is.
I set aside five minutes to write about this moment in time and then begin the practice of letting it go, letting the power of the doctor’s words fizzle out, much like the way a firework fizzles out in the sky. There for a blistering moment, a loud crash and then sffffffvt… sffffvt!
I have a choice to make this memory that lingers or just a moment in time of what once was that no longer has the oomph to hold my interest.
Once I finish writing this, the words will have done their duty and I will hear the fading sffffffvt.... sffffffvt.... until it fades into the background.
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Julie Jordan Scott inspires people to experience artistic rebirth via her programs, playshops, books, performances and simply being herself out in the world. She is a writer, creative life coach, speaker, performance poet, Mommy-extraordinaire and mixed-media artist whose Writing Camps and Writing Playgrounds permanently transform people's creative lives. Watch for the announcement of new programs coming in Spring, 2015 and beyond.
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