Life can turn on a dime
It has been a while since I posted.
Not that anyone actually reads this.
Recently, my life has been going really well. I mean, REALLY well. I am gainfully employed at one of the largest law firms in the world, have a boss that loves my work, and have risen to the level of competence where I have attorneys who are working for me. I make enough money to be able to have my wife stay at home (and still pay for her student loans) and take the occational trip to AC with my friends. Life is pretty good.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, my wife called me into the bedroom and said those four words that are still echoing in my head:
"I found a lump."
How many times have I read a story where it describes how it feels when news like this hits someone? Couldn't really say. All I know is that I felt as if the blood drained from my face and fell onto the floor.
It is moments like this in your life when you know what you are made of. For the most part, our day-to-day existence is routine repetition of activities you are accustomed to engaging in. When something like this comes along, something where you have no "script" to work off of, you are really yourself.
After taking a breath, and another one, I composed myself because, well, I guess that is what I do when my life turns upside down.
Doing an unintentional impersonation of Alec Guinness at the end of Bridge Over the River Kwai, I walked over to the bed where my wife was holding my sleeping daughter. However, being the quintessential Thomist, and an attorney, I sought to define the terms of the discussion... "What do you mean by lump?" By the light of the television, I saw the tears welling up in my wife's eyes when she said "right here, on Elizabeth's neck."
It was as if, after being shot in the stomach, I got shot in the face.
My daughter, Elizabeth Seton, is the light of my life. She is 19 months old and those two words, "da-da" could make me walk to the ends of the earth and back again. If I were a more adept writer, I could articulate the feeling I get when she runs to meet me when I come home from work and, when we reach eachother, I lift her high in the air and spin. I would also be able to explain how my heart swells when she reaches for my hand to walk down stairs or points to the sky when a bird flies above. Perhaps, no matter how effective a writer I was, I could not translate these feeling into words as they are so intertwined with my existence that they could not be reduced into static form.
Still maintaining my Alec Guinness composure, I spanned the last three feet of space separating my wife's words "I found a lump" and the reality of finding it for myself. Having still not received a real answer to my question, I spoke: "let me see." However, when the words left my mouth, they sounded like a quivering teenager whose voice was changing in the most violent, savage way while he was attempting to portray Henry V.
Then, I closed the gap between the concept of sadness and the reality of horror.
I felt Elizabeth's neck.
My wife's shaking fingers guided my hand right to the spot. My hand went cold, but, from the middle of my forearm up to my shoulder, the rest of my arm went hot. I felt a lump the size of a small jelly bean, hard, and ovaline. My mind put its feet in the racing chocks, lifted its butt in the air and prepared to race when it heard the sound of the gun, but, then, something happened...
One of the perks of being an attorney is the amount of things you learn that have nothing to do with being an attorney. By way of example, when I worked for the City of Newark, I defended all the City's civil rights cases. In this capacity, I learned more about heroin, and the effects it has on the human body, than anyone I know because addicts would go into lockup, get sick, often die, and their families would sue the City. As I left public life and began work in the private sector, the list of things I became intimately knowledgeable about got bigger and bigger, luxury helicopters, the sewer system of Jersey City, brake pads, underground power cables, scuba diving protocols, the thermodynamics of airline crashes, and, well, ALOT about cancer.
As I felt the lump on Elizabeth's neck, an image flashed in my mind, the image was from an expert report I had obtained in one of my cases when someone had contracted lymphatic cancer. I remembered the image of a man's neck with little round, green tabs placed on his neck at the sites where the lymph nodes are. Elizabeth's lump was situated along the external jugular vein, right on site of the superficial cervical lymph node.
The superficial cervical lymph nodes often swell during respitory infections.
With my left eye squinting a bit I felt the lump. Thereafter, with the clinically detached demeanor of asking a question at a deposition, I asked my wife: "hasn't Elizabeth been coughing for the past couple of days?" The sweet, sweet, answer dropped into my ears like a bead of honey...
"Yes."
Crashing back into the realm of reality like a ten-foot wave on the sand, and doing my best Marcus Welby M.D. in the process, I confidently proclaimed that it is a swollen lymph node. While I said we should still get it checked out, it was probably nothing.
After a visit to our pediatrician the next day, it was confirmed, a swollen lymph node due to a respitory infection.
Life can really turn on a dime, and, just as fast as it turned, it can turn back again.
Not that anyone actually reads this.
Recently, my life has been going really well. I mean, REALLY well. I am gainfully employed at one of the largest law firms in the world, have a boss that loves my work, and have risen to the level of competence where I have attorneys who are working for me. I make enough money to be able to have my wife stay at home (and still pay for her student loans) and take the occational trip to AC with my friends. Life is pretty good.
Then, a couple of weeks ago, my wife called me into the bedroom and said those four words that are still echoing in my head:
"I found a lump."
How many times have I read a story where it describes how it feels when news like this hits someone? Couldn't really say. All I know is that I felt as if the blood drained from my face and fell onto the floor.
It is moments like this in your life when you know what you are made of. For the most part, our day-to-day existence is routine repetition of activities you are accustomed to engaging in. When something like this comes along, something where you have no "script" to work off of, you are really yourself.
After taking a breath, and another one, I composed myself because, well, I guess that is what I do when my life turns upside down.
Doing an unintentional impersonation of Alec Guinness at the end of Bridge Over the River Kwai, I walked over to the bed where my wife was holding my sleeping daughter. However, being the quintessential Thomist, and an attorney, I sought to define the terms of the discussion... "What do you mean by lump?" By the light of the television, I saw the tears welling up in my wife's eyes when she said "right here, on Elizabeth's neck."
It was as if, after being shot in the stomach, I got shot in the face.
My daughter, Elizabeth Seton, is the light of my life. She is 19 months old and those two words, "da-da" could make me walk to the ends of the earth and back again. If I were a more adept writer, I could articulate the feeling I get when she runs to meet me when I come home from work and, when we reach eachother, I lift her high in the air and spin. I would also be able to explain how my heart swells when she reaches for my hand to walk down stairs or points to the sky when a bird flies above. Perhaps, no matter how effective a writer I was, I could not translate these feeling into words as they are so intertwined with my existence that they could not be reduced into static form.
Still maintaining my Alec Guinness composure, I spanned the last three feet of space separating my wife's words "I found a lump" and the reality of finding it for myself. Having still not received a real answer to my question, I spoke: "let me see." However, when the words left my mouth, they sounded like a quivering teenager whose voice was changing in the most violent, savage way while he was attempting to portray Henry V.
Then, I closed the gap between the concept of sadness and the reality of horror.
I felt Elizabeth's neck.
My wife's shaking fingers guided my hand right to the spot. My hand went cold, but, from the middle of my forearm up to my shoulder, the rest of my arm went hot. I felt a lump the size of a small jelly bean, hard, and ovaline. My mind put its feet in the racing chocks, lifted its butt in the air and prepared to race when it heard the sound of the gun, but, then, something happened...
One of the perks of being an attorney is the amount of things you learn that have nothing to do with being an attorney. By way of example, when I worked for the City of Newark, I defended all the City's civil rights cases. In this capacity, I learned more about heroin, and the effects it has on the human body, than anyone I know because addicts would go into lockup, get sick, often die, and their families would sue the City. As I left public life and began work in the private sector, the list of things I became intimately knowledgeable about got bigger and bigger, luxury helicopters, the sewer system of Jersey City, brake pads, underground power cables, scuba diving protocols, the thermodynamics of airline crashes, and, well, ALOT about cancer.
As I felt the lump on Elizabeth's neck, an image flashed in my mind, the image was from an expert report I had obtained in one of my cases when someone had contracted lymphatic cancer. I remembered the image of a man's neck with little round, green tabs placed on his neck at the sites where the lymph nodes are. Elizabeth's lump was situated along the external jugular vein, right on site of the superficial cervical lymph node.
The superficial cervical lymph nodes often swell during respitory infections.
With my left eye squinting a bit I felt the lump. Thereafter, with the clinically detached demeanor of asking a question at a deposition, I asked my wife: "hasn't Elizabeth been coughing for the past couple of days?" The sweet, sweet, answer dropped into my ears like a bead of honey...
"Yes."
Crashing back into the realm of reality like a ten-foot wave on the sand, and doing my best Marcus Welby M.D. in the process, I confidently proclaimed that it is a swollen lymph node. While I said we should still get it checked out, it was probably nothing.
After a visit to our pediatrician the next day, it was confirmed, a swollen lymph node due to a respitory infection.
Life can really turn on a dime, and, just as fast as it turned, it can turn back again.
posted by John S. at 9:13 AM
1 Comments:
Thank you and thank you again.
First, thank you for being glad everything turned out well. I assure you, it was a life defining moment.
Second, thank you for posting! At least I know that someone out there is reading this!
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