hello future, meet the past

I had a long overdue mammogram this afternoon in the dread Suburban Pavillion outpatient medical center, which is connected to the Cancer Institute by a long shiny hallway that features blocks of rainbow colors on one white wall and long open windows overlooking a parking lot on the other. The entrance to the Center for Breast Health (what a weird assemblage of words) is next to that hall, and to the diagnostic imaging area. 

How many hours did we spend waiting for PET scans and chest x-rays in that open, exposed waiting area, listening to the incessant fountain nearby and watching parents hover over their small children while they hurtled wishing pennies into it with awkward toddler gusto? And how many times did little Beatrice dance down that long inviting white hallway from the Cancer end of things? I would take her for walks to occupy her while we waited for Mike's radiation or chemo to end. She was tickled by the colors.

So was it so weird that when I walked out of the Center for Breast Health, with flattened breasts basically unharmed and hopefully healthy, I turned and headed down the rainbow hall, tugged by habit and a compulsion to visit the past? The fluorescent lights bounced off the linoleum underfoot and the moon was full and rising to my left in the pale purple sky, shining above the cars and scattered ultrasound technicians and administrative assistants and nurses that were hunched against the cold in masks and coats, walking towards them. I traveled the entire hall without thinking much about what I would do when I reached the end of it, until my toes touched a line of thick blue tape and my eyes noticed a sign that said I could not cross it unless screened by a Cancer Institute staff person. 

Well, of course. No one belongs in that space who isn't a patient, caregiver, or medical staff person. I've often thought about people going through what we did now - how much scarier it must be, going in for treatment, battling low white blood cell counts, gauging which fevers to do something about, all within the heightened anxiety cauldron of the pandemic. 

So I stopped. I peered into the Cancer Institute territory, which was calm and quiet. There were no humans to speak of in any direction. I wondered what I would have done if the blue tape hadn't stopped me. Visit the nurses at the infusion center? Check in on the green treatment team downstairs and see if anyone remembered me? Say a cheerful happy new year to everyone through my mask, patients in wheelchairs and therapy dogs and receptionists alike?

But they wouldn't know me. I wouldn't know them. It will be three years in March. And why would anyone want to revisit a chapter of life dominated by cancer treatment, anyway? A person who spent nearly all of that chapter with her husband who is no longer here, maybe. A person who still wonders what exactly happened then, and how, and why it happened too, and is visited by vivid memories of it all at least once a day.

But even though it never leaves me, I can never really go back to it. I sent a holiday card to our old doctor in New York and to the nurse team at the hospital because I'm not ready to let go of those people and places, but my time with them is complete. Bea doesn't remember dancing down that hallway. Frances is thinking about college, and Gabriel is now taller than Mike was. I've gained weight, I sleep at night, the smile lines on my face deepen. Many good and beautiful things keep happening. Time is so strange.

Our family has changed, the staff at the Cancer Institute has surely changed too. The whole world has changed! The pandemic experience in some ways feels like my own writ universal: stress, disease, confinement, isolation, uncertainty, and now, after so much worry and loss, we are all looking to an unknown future with some true hope, not really knowing where we are going or how we will be transformed but trusting nonetheless. 

I get my vaccine tomorrow. 

Happy new year, everyone. I'm taking my mask off to say it, I'm smiling, I really, really mean this: I'm grateful to be moving forward towards the unknown future with all of you.