" There was a long silence." There was a long silence. An old thought came unbidden, and I said, "You know, I thought I was going to die once." "You did? What happened?" she asked, almost perfunctorily; there was no curiosity in her voice. "I thought I had a disease, and the test results would take two weeks. All the symptoms pointed to cancer, engwurth, you know?" She nodded. "You know what I found? I was very jealous of the living. "I thought I was already dead; that even if I had one, two, maybe three years to go, that it didn't matter. I was already dead. Nobody ever survives throat cancer, ever... It's just a long, drowning painful descent into death. "I was jealous of the living. I hated them, their long lives, their families, their friends. I had almost nothing and nobody, and I was waiting to be told I was going to die. I was sure I had it; I was sure I was on my way. "I wanted to live. More than anything, I wanted the problem to be something else, I didn't want to be told 'you have cancer,' yet I knew I had cancer. It was a hellish two weeks, the problem got worse every day. I hated it, every last minute of it. "And the scariest thing was that when they told me I was going to live, I took the information very calmly. I almost didn't want to believe it. All the energy I had invested in being angry, in being jealous, was wasted, and I resented wasting it. It took a few days for me to get around to celebrating. "It turned out it was something minor, a pulled muscle combining with stress to give me a very psychosomatic pain. |