I Burst Into Tears

This is why someone would keep a surgery secret

“Your white blood cell count is through the roof,” my neurosurgeon said to my partner, in a Panera following an ENT scope to confirm if it was safe to cut in through my neck based on scar tissue…

“I can’t operate until we treat whatever is infected and the labs improve.”

I absentmindedly had been watching my husband’s face after he took the call… and then realized something was wrong.

Since everything with this much-need operation had been ‘perfectly lined up’ to not mess up the momentum I’d been fighting to find again or, even, future operations:

I burst into tears.

I tend to only cry if I’m watching dancers I love, or reading something to someone I love ‘out loud’… so crying in public is not a personal resume skill.

“We aren’t breaking up,” my husband whispered with his ‘loud-face’ on, as he looked around worried as I sobbed in an incredibly noticeable way looking 100% like we were breaking up… but I couldn’t stop crying.

Sometimes, you just need your Lucked Out timing to actually luck out.

That’s the thing about trying to “schedule” being sick: You can’t.

I couldn’t even control when my white blood cell counts would go “through the roof” or how awful I’d secretly feel in the following days (I would make a great spy, save for the fact I’d have to tell you I’m a great spy), or how unfair it sometimes feels to be faulted for a hand you never dealt.

This is why someone would keep a surgery secret (though, more on that another time): Because we don’t want our own pain to impact those we love, so in the rare instances they don’t have to… We keep our poker face as an act of love.

Wanting to LIVE with health that’s never going to fully get better is an oxymoronic riddle that none of us will ever be able to answer…. but most of us can’t stop trying.

We hope that, to a rare few, we will still be worth the patience and understanding if plans set forth get changed, and that we won’t be blamed for the change though we most often are.

For me, I’d rather choose pain with a capital-P Pain at the risk of sounding like a back-washed martyr, then blow up another thing. It’s like I was born holding a grenade, but I can never find the pin. And in the rubble of continual explosions, the only person to point a finger at is the person with the dynamite. (I can’t blame anyone for the blame because… There is no one else in the dust, you know?)

How does someone continue to work “around” a body that doesn’t want to work? It sounds dramatic to say, “I’d suffer through almost anything if it means that family, dancers, and 80-year-old mommas aren’t impacted by that-with-which I still can’t fully control”… But it’s true.

It’s hope with lower case.

The truth is: none of this is “normal”.

Waking up everyday and thinking, “How do I keep going when I hurt like this? What does my future hold?” is not what everyone thinks when they open their eyes each day… And it is not normal for me either.

It’s only been in the last year or two that I’ve had to question every single day with eyes open, and call to mind the faces I love as the answer for why it has to still be worth pushing through it.

It’s an illusion that we have to keep to keep people in our lives and keep ourself alive.

My Mom’s face being surprised by her many children was as Worth It with a capital W as life can be…

But listing things like “starting dance again and keeping the dates I’ve set forth so people still sometimes like me” or “watching my daughter laugh hysterically with her cousins” or “story telling” or “being there for my sisters more than in years past” isn’t necessarily what others would list to make this suffering less insufferable… But it is for me.

It has to be.

Watching my sisters’ hard work come to “surprise!” was worth it, and so was seeing my Dad cry the day after because the song that I played [“I Waited For You” by Daniel Norgren] makes him think of how many lifetimes he’d wait again for another lifetime with my Mom.

I’d do anything in this lifetime just to live these lists again.

So yes, it makes me weep in Paneras to know that plans have been messed up, and I have to deal with the pain and worry I want to pretend to push to the side… but, since I already know there are more operations down the road, ‘the side of the road’ is really straight ahead most of the time.

I make lists of what risk will hurt the most if I don’t deal with it now, and put it in uncontrollable orders.

“I can push the-surgery-after-this-one off,” I said to my partner, doing the Pain math and the Worth It equations as quickly as possible, “I’ll just make sure no one touches my stomach between now and then, and I’ll slot it in winter break so it doesn’t mess with dance dates.”

This lifetime will always have pain in it…

So I have to figure out how to control what can’t be controlled, and hope that others will pretend I’m Worth the pretend along the way.

I have pushed through a lot in my own little lifetime to prove I will do a LOT to be as reliable, decent, and driven as I can be… But am I?

Does the Pain and Worth It math add up for those around me?

The latter is not in my hands to decide.

I can never control that part of the equation…

I can only hope.

Part Two.

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