Interdependence Day

Today is the 4th of July. It is a great day because I woke up healthy. Three years ago, I feared that I might not. I was in the emergency room, listening intently to the young doctor who had just examined my CT scan. “You have five masses in your abdomen,” she stated perfunctorily. “It looks like cancer. I’m going to send you to Riverside for the operation. We can’t do it here.”

Panic washed over me in wave from head to toe. What would happen to my two-year-old son? Was this really “The Big C”? 

“Couldn’t it be something else? An infection?” I asked, grasping at straws. She looked at me doubtfully, “I don’t think so.”

I was crying, hard and unabashedly, before she left the room. I wanted to see my son grow up. Three days before that, I had been healthy and had gone running. The next day, a pain hit in my left side that was so strong I was unable to stand up. I developed a fever.

But I didn’t want to go to the ER, especially not on a holiday weekend. We were less than 4 months into the Covid-19 pandemic and there had been only three diagnosed cases of Covid in my little county. 

One of them had ended in death. One out of three.

At that point, so little was known. Would a third of people who caught Covid die?

No way was I going to the hospital and risking exposure to sick people. 

I struggled through those two days, walking hunched over until the third morning when my son tossed a small, soft ball toward my abdomen. I crumpled and couldn’t hold back the tears. I called my dad and woke him and asked him to pick up my son.

I laugh now to imagine the scene when my dad arrived. I had struggled outside to our concrete steps. I sat watching Scott toddle around. I tried not to move my body at all. 

My dad put Scott in the carseat and asked what I planned to do. 

“The urgent care is going to open in only”—pause to check my iPhone—”it opens in just another four hours.” I patted the concrete next to me, “I’ll just sit right here until then.” That was actually my entire plan. Sit perfectly still on concrete for four hours and then hope that the urgent care would be able to deal with the problem.

My dad asked nonchalantly, “Do you think you can drive?” 

That gave me some pause.

“Why don’t you get in my car and I’ll drop you off at the ER?” he asked. 

I reluctantly agreed. Every bump on the way to the hospital was excruciating. It turns out that when you have a necrotic organ, any motion is stunningly painful. 

I knew there was something wrong but I hadn’t prepared myself for what the young doctor said. After she left, I sat crying behind my partition. A surgeon abruptly opened the curtain, holding an image. “These look too round to be cancer,” she announced. Ah, a glimmer of hope…

“I would like to open you up and see if I can do the surgery here. If it really is cancer, I’ll close you up and send you to Riverside.”

She assembled a surgical team on Sunday of a holiday weekend and an hour later, I was headed into the operating room. 

I made a short video to “reassure” my son. It was me in a pandemic hospital getup that was a cross between a gown and Hazmat suit. I was on sedatives, fighting back tears and attempting to be cheerful. I hope that my parents had the good judgment not to show him that video. I never had the courage to ask. But when my son wakes up from a nightmare of a masked monster, I have to wonder…

A few hours later I awoke and was elated to find that the masses she removed were benign, grown from cells left over from a previous surgery. A flipped ovary was the cause of all of that pain. The next morning I got to hug my son. I held him as tight as I could without popping stitches. I promised myself that I would never be grouchy again and would never take him for granted. Have I kept that promise? No. I’m still human. Fortunately and unfortunately. But I am grateful for each day we have together.

So I didn’t celebrate Independence Day after all. I depended on my dad who got me to the hospital and my mom who came up to help him with my son. I depended on the surgeon and the anesthesiologist and surgical nurses who all came in on a holiday weekend. I depended on the friends and family who helped in the following weeks. And I became more keenly aware of being interdependent with this planet and every being on it, whether or not I meet them directly.

We are all interwoven. Happy Interdependence Day!

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