Shambala

Wash away my trouble, wash away my pain
With the rain of Shambala

- Toby Keith

I am staring at the photos of my parents' house fire, photos I have seen dozens of times over the last 25 years, and for the first time ever I burst into tears.  My mother had them arranged in an old photo album, the kind with the static-cling pages.  The album cover had become tattered over the years and it sported a piece of masking tape that bore my mother's handwriting with two simple words: The Fire. 

As a teacher, I always used storytelling in my classroom to bring content alive for my students.  These photos, that showed the windows shattered by the fire department to let the smoke out, the burned and blackened walls, the melted tile and plaster, helped my students understand why fire drills were serious business.  My brother, the only one home at the time of the fire, got out safely.  But almost everything else was lost.  I would ask my students what their most prized possessions were...and after several answers were given, explain that all the things that I'd grown up with were gone.  That would really hit home with them.

The photos also showed the remains of the house being leveled and the new house that was built in its place - a new design, spacious rooms, and a deck that had never existed before.  This new house was the first house my daughters knew as Grandma and Grandpa's house.  And for that reason I decided to take the pictures out of the tattered photo album and chronicle the fire as one of my many scrapbook projects.

That was in March.  The same month I went to the doctor with a cough and temperature and asked them to take a chest x-ray to make sure the cough hadn't turned into pneumonia.  My lungs were clear, they said, but there was a mass that needed further examination.  Within four weeks' time I had a CT scan, a PET scan, and a lung biopsy, all inconclusive.  But all the doctors were in agreement: lung cancer is aggressive.  We've discovered this so early, it hasn't spread.  Six months from now, we might have problems.  And now I'm scheduled for thoracic surgery - opening the chest cavity from the back to remove the lobe of my lung where the tumor lies.  And I am a wreck.  Not because I have a tumor, but because I went through this surgery eighteen years ago.

Thoracic surgery is considered one of the most painful surgeries a person can endure.   In 1994 we discovered I had a tumor growing next to my aorta.  The only way to safely reach it was to open me up from the back.  My shoulder muscles were cut, ribs broken, and lung deflated.  I remember pain so severe I would slip in and out of consciousness, clogged chest tubes, and months of painful recovery.  After going through it once, I vowed that I would kill myself rather than ever go through that ordeal again, never imagining I would really be faced with another one.  Who has two of these surgeries?

Eighteen years ago, even though I had three very young daughters, it was very much about me.  The tumor, being on a nerve, was causing me pain.  I wanted the doctors to fix it, not thinking ahead to what I was in for.  I made routine arrangements for someone to take care of the girls, and was more worried about who was going to be at the hospital with me.  This time around, my husband asked me the day before the surgery if I was sure this is what I wanted to do?  Did I want to wait six months and repeat the scans and biopsies?  I knew exactly what I was in for this time and I was more sure than anything I have ever done.  It was about ensuring that I absolutely will not have cancer - for the sake of my three daughters.  Three amazing young women who I adore, who were now old enough to understand the seriousness of what their mom was facing, and I needed to reassure them I would be fine.  I would be there for them.  Period.

So at the end of April, having made arrangements to be gone from work, I  underwent the surgery. Although that surgery went well, I had to have emergency abdominal surgery while in the hospital, totally unrelated to the lung tumor, and there were complications with that.  Recovery took longer than planned.

There are days when all my best childbirth visualization techniques, coupled with the pain medication, is not enough, but I am determined to keep myself busy and distracted from it and stay positive.  There are days when I look in the mirror, at scars 12 and 16 inches long that criss-cross my body, and I am thankful I don't wrestle with body image issues.  There are days when my stamina is low and fatigue is high, and I tell myself that these are good days for projects like writing and scrapbooking.

And so I pull out the project I am working on, the scrapbook about the fire, and I thumb through the pages I have sorted out, colored papers in the plastic sleeves along with the photos to go on each page.  I look at the destruction that left my childhood home in ruins and somehow it suddenly seems intertwined with the destruction that has been wreaked upon my body.  And the tears come.

My mother could have chosen not to chronicle the fire.  Or just to have included pictures of the fire without the rebuilding.  But she chose to chronicle both.  The destruction and the regrowth.  The surgery and the healing.  It takes time to rebuild.  It takes time to heal.  It isn't always easy.  If it was just me, I might have waited six months to repeat the tests.  But I wouldn't risk doing that to my daughters.  My mother called these things "a labor of love".