ACCESSING THE HEART
It was Yo-Yo Ma playing. I’m a sentimental girl and so when the nurse asked me what I wanted to hear I told him something with strings [this is your cue to find the Yo-Yo Ma channel on Pandora and listen as you read].
The day before getting on a plane to start my chemotherapy in an unfamiliar place, I was ushered into the surgery suite and asked to climb up on the table—chest laid bare, head pulled to the left as far as my neck would stretch, music soothing, and a symphony of caring hands attending to my needs.
Lie very still. Surgical instruments present—piano, cello, and Violin. Gabriel’s Oboe from the Mission. I tell myself, do not weep into the sterile field.
[A port-a-cath, also referred to as a port, is an implanted device which allows easy access to a patient’s veins. A port-a-cath is surgically-inserted completely beneath the skin and consists of two parts – the portal and the catheter]
If you’ve even wondered the way to my heart, follow my neck down to my clavicle, turn right and sharp right again. There is no hiding in cancer, the tells are sometimes tiny but if you pay attention, they are always on display.
The really important things don’t happen outside of US. Like a tender love song, they work their way in and become a part of who WE are.
[The portal is typically made from a silicone bubble and appears as a small bump under the skin. The portal, made of special self-sealing silicone, can be punctured by a needle repeatedly before the strength of the material is compromised]
“Punctured repeatedly” makes me wonder just how many times we must endure a certain suffering before the lesson becomes clear.
If I calculate correctly my port has been accessed more than fifty times. Today, I thought all that would end. I walked into the surgeon’s office expecting to have this temporary extension of me removed. Instead, he pulled up the chair, looked me in the eye and began a conversation I was not ready to hear.
Not all of life’s most important moments are orchestrated, in fact the ones that stop time rarely are.
“Statistically,” my “situation” may require “access” in a future possibly nearer than I am ready or willing to admit. “You have finished a chapter,” he continued. “But you have not read the entire book.”
We sit across from one another, this bold bald surgeon and me, and we talk about beginnings and endings, and the life lived in between.
I understand why the Cello is reverenced as a language absent of words. What is said without speaking transcends any construct of communication that we as humans can fully take in.
Our conversation is eclipsed by this overwhelming emotion that even I could not predict. I fell the agitation rise in me like a distant wind.
His words, more than I am ready to hear.
Mine, wrapped in the gentleness of my own attempt at ministering to myself…an echo from someplace far away, or more accurately from deep within.
Can I tell you that prior to this meeting I was so audacious as to believe I had been healed?
As Patient, my primary job is to hold out hope.
As Surgeon, his is to investigate the data, evaluate and apply—
To leave this tiny little port inside me is representative of a continuation, a status quo.
To untether from it is the resolute example of a living, breathing faith.
Despite my pleas for evidence, Healing refuses to be ostentatious, never ordinary or every day.
Healing is profound and elusive, a kind of quiet grace—subtle and bendy like a catheter squeezing through my tiny veins.
[The slender, plastic catheter attached to the portal is threaded into a central vein, usually the jugular vein, subclavian vein, or the superior vena cava]
In the dark hours, I feel the discord from an unexpected day—As if holding a violin, my left-hand instinctively crosses over to feel the three raised dots. And this little lifeblood and I make our peace. No words. Just steady rhythms, soothing signs of life. My heart-song, so like a lullaby, a mother’s voice sustaining, on and on.