I’ve been feeling pretty darned sorry for myself.
And then I get a call from a friend. Her niece has a lump on the back of her head. She can’t move her right arm. They have to do surgery. She’s seven years old--the same age as my middle daughter.
My fingers immediately move to the scar tissue on my neck. Four years ago, after an inconclusive MRI, a surgeon cut me open from the front of my ear to the back, lifted my ear out of the way, and continued about half-way down my neck. He dissected the nerves in my face to find the lump behind them, which turned out to be a benign growth resulting from scar tissue that probably built up when I had some sort of infection on my salivary gland as a child.
I’m fine, but there’s still a lump under my skin. It’s sensitive to the touch and will always make me wonder if there’s something suspicious in there that they missed.
When I spoke to my friend a few days later, they told me that the operation had been successful. They’d removed the lump, and her niece had regained movement in her arm. That’s all she knew.
That’s when I got scared. I remember from my own experience that they’d had an oncologist in the operating room. His job was to take the tissue and examine it right then and there. If he saw anything suspicious, the surgeon would go back in, excising all the tissue around where the lump had been in an effort to get all the malignant cells out.
It had been two days since her niece’s operation and my friend hadn’t heard yet whether or not the lump they removed was cancerous.
I spent the next 24 hours thinking about this little girl. Not all the time, but when I picked up the Barnacle in the middle of the night to soothe her. When I watched my middle daughter dance salsa with Elmo. As I saw my son hit a line drive down the middle of the field.
I don’t know my friend’s niece. I’ve never met her. All I can do is hope for her, and pray, if I knew how to do that. And when I meet her one day, I will tell her what she made me remember: That we experience miracles every day—no matter how trying, no matter how long, no matter how much we have to do. There are miracles all around us. And she is one of them.
http://www.caringbridge.org/visit/savannahgraceevans
