New lessons

I’ve never known the pain and terror that accompany receiving a really bad diagnosis. I’ve only felt the way it rips up the insides of the people who love the person who’s been diagnosed. Standing in our kitchen, the day after I graduated from college, I got into a fight with my mother about how out-of-it she had been the day before. Frankly, I had been dreading my graduation day. Not because I was one of those scared, sedentary, perpetual student-types who didn’t want to leave college and enter the real world, but because I would have to endure a weekend of attempting to manage my divorced parents, more specifically, my mother. The bitter pill of my parents’ divorce permeated my mother’s every interaction with and every conversation about my father. The previous nine months had been particularly difficult for her as she battled numerous health problems without an end in sight. So when she was acting like she was on another planet during my graduation, I thought she had taken too many pain meds. And I let her know it the next day in our kitchen. The argument climaxed with her blurting out her diagnosis. She said she was dying. Cancer, stage 4. My stomach and jaw clenched, I screamed something childish at her - that she was lying or something along those lines - and I ran upstairs as my stomach pushed into my throat and I dry heaved over my sink.

A few days ago I found out I probably won’t be able to run the marathon. The stress fracture I was diagnosed with at the beginning of November is larger than first thought. After my doctor told me I would be running marathons again in “4-6 months,” I blurted out in a pathetic, whiny, sort of way “but what about the Boston Marathon?!” The four weeks after my initial diagnosis had been restive to say the least. But the hope of getting back out along the river again made the weeks tolerable. This news was like a prison sentence. Four weeks on the stationary bike. Four weeks on the elliptical. Then I could consider walking on the treadmill. Push me off the nearest bridge while you’re at it.

In regards to the marathon, my doctor told me anything is possible. I called him “an optimist” like it was a dirty, insulting word. He was acting like he had just delivered good news. I looked away from him and at the wall so I wouldn’t cry. Like clockwork the paradigm shift fell hard onto my shoulders: for my doctor, the last few days had been filled with delivering news on career-ending injuries and unexpected cancer diagnoses. Today was a good day for him because I would run again. A metaphorical slap in the face and I left his office with my air cast intact and my tail between my legs.

The sting of the diagnosis doesn’t last forever. Although day after day, our Mom had been getting more and more sick, I didn’t experience the reality of what it meant. I wonder what it was like for her to open her eyes every morning. I wonder what her first thoughts were at the start of each day knowing that there were only so many of those days left. What more can you do than acknowledge the reality in front of you, maybe allow yourself to be angry for a moment, but then move on to acceptance, and then of course, get out of bed?

So, another test. Last year’s marathon demonstrated to me a mastery of self-motivation. I feared no challenge except exactly what I’m experiencing right now. Loss of control, power, health, and movement. This challenge in restraint and patience has been more difficult than the longest run on the coldest day.

Beyond the new lessons restraint will force upon me is the loss of an event that served as a lighthouse for my distress. Now it aimlessly circles me, waiting, drifting. But so many things have changed over the last year. The last six years. And I begin to see why this stillness will be important. I will learn to stop racing the pain and angst, and instead sit with it, breath it in, and let it go.