Condoms and Tumors and a small regret- fEBruarY 23 AND 25, 2003
So, how do you forget you have a tumor in your face? Maybe you have more pressing issues, say a four-year-old kid, no more pressing would be the fact that you can’t breathe. That is pressing. So, turns out you have pneumonia and it’s bad both on the chest x-ray and for you. It is not possible for you to breathe in or out without coughing. Breathing shouldn’t be this hard, but everything seems to be hard in your 26 years of life. Imagine everyday all-day cleaning bathrooms in rest stops off 1-95. Endless shit, urine, blood, toilet paper, and just all the smells. Toxic. To forget all the toilets, you find a nice smelling man who convinces you he is clean so there is no need for condoms. But it turns out, he is also toxic.
And he gives you HIV after only one night together. You don’t know it yet but that is the gift that will keep on giving. So, you are sick and suddenly food doesn’t look good anymore. Even if you could eat and the food looked good to you, you remember that it hurts too much going down so it is not worth it. Also, your mouth is always dry. You rarely look in the mirror, but when you do you can see that your eye is bulging out more. It looks swollen. In addition to the cough you mention that headaches are an everyday occurrence now. The nurse practitioner you came to see about your cough touches the computer screen that is in front of all three of you and underlines a word with her finger. The nurse practitioner looks at the other woman in the room for a second and then takes a breath and says, did anyone ever tell you that you have a tumor? “Oh yeah, it must be the tumor in my face. I forgot”. Then you look up to see the two faces under masks nervously laughing and one says to you, “girl, how do you forget about a tumor?” You start to chuckle too, but it just comes out as a cough.
This patient was another reminder of what my mother would always tell me growing up that I hated hearing- “You do not have any real problems”. I may not have any real problems, but I do have a regret that I did not push Thomas on his decision. I hate that I have this regret because I didn’t want to be the one to ask an I surely didn’t want to be the one rejected. You have probably figured this out already but in the opinion of everyone sane and close to me, I should have never asked. Well, I don’t listen and for that I am behind square one, somewhere in the negatives, because I just messed with a positive thing, an old friendship.
I just want to take a moment to acknowledge my freedom, because I cherish it the most. Thank you. If you can believe it there was a time when I was just so envious that my friend Amanda had already met and married and had a child and she was my age and in college. She seemed so ahead of the game. I mentioned this to Thomas, and without skipping a beat but raising his voice, he said that I needed to get down on my knees right now and thank God that I was not married with a child while in college. This is the type of priceless guidance I may never get again.