The Lesson

We all know how busy life gets, and how days can get packed in ever tighter with work, and kids, and deadlines, and dishes, and laundry, and all the things that are so important that we do every day.  And then, sometimes, something happens – and in that moment, dishes and deadlines and laundry suddenly diminish into mere background noise.

We had one of those moments a few years ago.  We were at a particularly busy time in life, and one Friday I was organizing the upcoming weekend, trying to be sure we packed in all of the errands and critical things on the to-do list.  I had a persistent cough, and one of the items on my list was to go to the doctor where a chest X-ray was ordered.  A couple of hours later, I was working down my to-do list back at home when I received a phone call from my doctor.  Not to panic, she said, but the X-ray showed a large mass in one of my lungs that looked very suspicious.  Since it was Friday, a CT scan had been ordered at the hospital, and I was to check in within the hour.  She suggested calling my husband and bringing him with me.  And, as a precaution, surgery was being preliminarily scheduled for Monday morning, just in case, based on the results of the CT scan.  She recommended clearing my schedule completely for the upcoming weekend, and to start making plans for work, childcare, etc. in the coming weeks.  “Just in case”. 

So I called Chuck, cancelled plans for that evening, and quickly made arrangements for the children after school.  Luckily, there wasn’t much time to worry as we didn’t wait long for the CT scan.  Chuck sat in the waiting room for a very long time as they did multiple scans.

And then the doctor came out, and told Chuck the great news – what had looked exactly like a cancerous mass on the X-ray was, in fact, extremely unusual but perfectly normal overlapping blood vessels that were truly nothing to worry about.  But, I had had an allergic reaction to the injected die and was remaining in observation.  Chuck looked up at the doctor and said, “Of course she did”.  Later he said at that point so much had happened that of course I had an allergic reaction – we couldn’t just have everything be totally OK so quickly.

And then, about four hours after the call had come in that so quickly altered our lives, we got the all-clear that indeed everything was just fine, and life was exactly the same as we had thought it was that morning.  And yet it wasn’t.  Because all those things that were so important were suddenly not.  We went to the State Fair that night, for no other reason other than we wanted to.  We rode roller coasters and ate fair food and laughed.  That weekend, we played family games and slept in and went out to breakfast.  And realized we had another chance to put things into perspective.

Now, as the years have gone by, these lessons have faded, as they always do.  But sometimes it comes back to me, and I realize how buried we all get in the “stuff” of life, and how quickly life can change.  We were so blessed to have our life-changing moment be a non-starter; truly, life wasn’t changed at all.  But the mere threat was enough to make us realize how fragile life can be, and how we need to focus on what is truly important in life.  We all need to learn this lesson, and hopefully it can be done without the tragedy that so often comes with it.  Today, may we all take the extra moment to breathe deeply, to smell a flower, to reach out to a friend, to hug a loved one.  And to remember how very blessed we are.

Sara Gillam