#SOL15: Being Present - The Value of the Moment

I.

The first chemo treatment. 10.30.15

It's been nearly 90 days since my husband was first diagnosed with late stage lung cancer. During that time he has spent one-third of those days in the hospital. Most of that time has been spent not treating the cancer, but rather diagnosing and fighting staph infections caused by the insertion of a contaminated port into my husband's chest on the early morning of September 14. 

As I write this, Rob is 30 miles away on the fourth floor of Morristown Medical Center recovering from surgery to remove and clean an abscess that formed in his chest. More staph. He's been there for 12 days. Yesterday he waited for the technicians to whisk him to the imaging center to have an MRI of his brain made. No one arrived. We have been trying to get the MRI done since September--to see if his inability to walk unassisted is due to the cancer spreading to his brain.

Waiting gives rise to counting. 

Out the window of the hospital room we have been living in these last days, a murder of crows lifts from a field, winging sharply in an odd synchronization that forms and breaks. Against uncertainty, quantifying the bits and pieces of life offsets some of what we cannot know.

Early today, the MRI was done and now we wait for the results.

II.

Your body, like mine, has trillions of cells. If cells could be counted like coins, it would take more than 31,000 years to count just 1 trillion and you have far more than that in your body. Cancer is the uncontrolled growth of abnormal cells in the body. In Rob's body, old cells don't die like they do in healthy bodies. In his body, cells grow out of control, forming new, abnormal cells. Some time ago these cells amassed and formed a mucinous cystadenocarcinoma in the apex of his right lung. While the cells amassed, we continued to walk through the days, ignorant, until this August when time folded in on itself like a poor house of cards. 

All around us, life as we knew it began to slowly collapse and we were none the wiser, nor were we able to wake ourselves from this trauma.  

III. 

It was 8:16 a.m. on August 20th when the doctor phoned. I remember later thinking how odd that such news arrived before the morning papers, before the first sip of coffee.  It was a day we had planned to sleep in. Work was over until September and we were planning a quick end-of-the-summer trip to Maine. What makes lung cancer so deadly is that the patient is often asymptomatic until the cancer metastasizes elsewhere in the body. For Rob it was acute chest pain that sent him to his doctor who said, "Let's be safe and get a picture of your chest." That picture led to a CAT scan and then an MRI and finally to a VAT procedure of the lung and a needle biopsy of the lesions that were found on his spine. And that morning, as I paced in our bedroom listening to Rob's voice, i tried not to piece together a possible story of cancer.

It's always a matter of life and death. I had forgotten that.

IV.

Last Friday in Paris, 129 people were murdered and another 352 were injured by terrorists. Ordinary people going about the business of living.

I think of those killed and wonder what each might have done differently that Friday the 13th knowing that in a few hours their lives would end.  It's tricky to live with knowledge of your mortality not as some distant, unformed end, but rather as that which is potentially more imminent, more present. Living deliberately is best expressed in the small, innocuous acts that typify an average day. For example, earlier I bought some tissue paper that I intend to use to wrap the few gifts I've gotten Rob for his birthday. I took time selecting what I wanted, imagining a small pile of gifts wrapped in this rainbow of colour. In the past, such acts were more like tasks to be checked off rather than opportunities to be dwelled in. This deliberateness, this odd gift of being present in the moment, gives definition to the mundane.

Some days it is easier to forget the mortality that signals our impermanence, dogs our steps.  Others less so.

It's how we live in the moment, in the here and now, that matters most.