Heightened Vulnerability Is Balanced By Heightened Potential
Living on the edge. The view from the top of the mountain of Young Adulthood is panoramic, breathtaking. But what about the trip down? It often happens that a life accident - one of those events we cannot predict or prevent - pushes us to the precipice with no preparation. How will we behave when we first walk under the hammer of fate?
It could happen to any one of us as arbitrarily as this.
One day you are walking down the street with your life more or less in order, apparently enjoying good health, when a minor physical problem blossoms into one that requires “routine” exploratory surgery.
You walk into the hospital off the street, fully active, a busy and productive man. You are now required to surrender your watch, your wallet, your credit cards, your glasses, your rings. You are asked if you have any dentures, any contact lenses. Within 10 minutes from a fully functioning executive you have been stripped down to your essentials and are covered only by a johnny coat too short to come down to your knees, with your buttocks showing in the back, left to lounge on a bed not your own while waiting to be called. Waiting on the edge.
Your wife waits in the flat fluorescent pallor of pinched space allotted to visitors. Sitting on the edge of your life while you are in the operating room, she keeps telling herself that this is just routine, a preventive procedure. Yet she knows that you are lying, pried open like a clamshell, while morsels of your flesh are carried on a tray between floors so the pathologist can rule out the possibility of a cancerous tumor.
Night falls. Still no word. The nurse says the doctor is still in surgery, working on another patient - this one a vital young woman who chatted with you from the next gurney while awaiting her turn for an “exploratory.”
“You mean he’s been in surgery from 3 in the afternoon until 10 at night?” your wife asks the nurse. “Why?”
“We didn’t know if the spot on her throat was benign or metastatic. They’re doing a total laryngectomy and taking out the bones in the side of her face.” Your wife listens to this with a stab of fear, then a prayer; the hammer of fate could nail you just as soon as the next person.
Later your doctor comes down the hall and tells your wife, “I’m sorry. It is prostate cancer. But I -“
She freezes, deafened to the surgeon’s next words. He repeats them.
“But I didn’t have to remove the prostate. We’ll simply radiate. Don’t worry. I can assure you, he’ll die of old age before prostate cancer ever catches up with him.”
Luck of the draw. Living on the edge. Didn’t fall off, not this time. When you swim up out of the anesthesia, the surgeon assures you this is no big deal. You believe him. You will take the radiation, jog five miles before you go to work every day, and then it will all be behind you. Your wife gets to go home and tell the good news to your children and sip a glass of wine and contemplate a new day tomorrow, while knowing that someone else, a young person, who also went in that morning off the street, will wake up tomorrow missing a throat, a voice and half a face.
This first startling brush with mortality plunges us into a period of increased vulnerability, but also heightened potential. Whatever we do will have a crucial and long-lasting effect.
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The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Gail Sheehy Universal Press Syndicate