My Latest Wrinkle

When I was young I wondered.....

• What if I had never married?
• What if I had married someone else?
• What if I remained free?

Now that I am older I wonder.....

• What if he was gone?

The joy I feel when he smiles at me transcends all that is mortal. It feeds my soul. Honestly if he was gone, I don't think that the sun would ever shine so brightly. I am not certain that I could breathe.

So, when I received the call that his cystology test had shown signs of cancer......disbelief! After all, we had just gone through the yearly cystoscopy. Doc said that everything looked great....See ya next year.

When you have experienced cancer you put it in a little box.....a little box that need only be opened when necessary. For us after these twenty some years, it has become an annual event. We have become quite good at it over the years. The anguish invested in opening and closing the box has grown shorter with each year of benign results. But, this time the box was opened off schedule, without warning and couldn't be closed at our will.

We had to leave it open for the paperwork, the admit exam, the admit tests and the bladder mapping.....and then the wait for the results. Seven weeks of jabs and stabs at our hearts... Seven weeks of wondering will he see his grandchild grow... Seven weeks of wondering how this could change our lives.

I waited alone in the hospital filling my mind with positive thoughts, breathing, praying that all would end well. Then Doc came out. She said that we would have to wait for the results, but everything looked good. She hadn't been able to detect any cancerous tissue visually. The original test could have been skewed. Hooray! A week later the results returned benign!......So, back in the box it went.

I sealed that box as tightly as I could and placed it as far back on the shelf as I could reach. I say to myself, no worries........not to worry unless there is something to worry about.

But, somewhere deep down in the pit of my stomach I feel the haunting emptiness of the question.....What if???