I think I’m dying.

I now knew what it felt like to be a vampire being pursued by Buffy the Vampire Slayer.  I could feel her jabbing a wooden stake into my heart.  Or maybe I felt like a fire eater, the burning sensation so intense.  Or perhaps someone being run over by a steamroller…I’m sure that pain would suffice.  Since 7^th grade, I’d been having chest pains.  At points, they had gotten so bad that I couldn’t stand, let alone to go school.  Moving even my pinky hurt like hell.  But I kept it to myself, constantly making up excuses because I didn’t want my parents to worry.  What if I had a heart murmur?  Or a defect in one of my valves?  What if I kept having mini heart attacks?

            Because of all the school I was missing, my U.S. History teacher almost failed me and my geometry teacher called me into the hallway to discuss my home life.  Nothing was wrong at home.  I wanted to scream! “It’s my heart! My heart is broken! Leave me the hell alone!”  But then they would think I was a sad, heartbroken teenager and perhaps that my 12-year-old boyfriend had just broken up with me because he didn’t want to hold hands anymore.  But no, that was not the case.  I had actually dumped him because I wanted to be single on my Bat Mitzvah so I could slow dance with other guys. But, that’s really beside the point.

            Eventually, with all my sick days used up, I had to tell my mom the truth.  She immediately made me an appointment with the doctor and the doctor insisted on an EKG.  When the EKG revealed that I had an irregular heart beat, they ordered an ultrasound of my heart, which I had to miss school for, yet again.  As if having a strange woman feeling me up on a metal table in a freezing room wasn’t awkward enough, the sound of my heart beat echoed in the room like a tiny voice just begging to be heard.  The look on the woman’s face was gut wrenching.  She wouldn’t look me in the eye and kept repeating the only noise she seemed capable of uttering. “Hm. Hmmmm…Well, hmm…Mmmmmhmmmm.”

            For the love of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, what the FUCK does “hmmm” mean!?

            A few days after I had the test, I got a phone call from my doctor saying that everything looked fine and that she believed I was having stress pains.  Her suggestion was that I try to limit my stress as much as possible.  But, that was, and still is, impossible.  I still have chest pains to this day.

            Several years later, when I was a freshman in college, I was putting my earrings back in after cleaning them when I felt a little lump behind my ear.  It was like someone decided to put a pea in my ear and it settled to the bottom, just chillin.  I figured at first that it was irritated tissue from struggling to get my earrings in and out.  But after a week went by and the pea was still there, I became a bit concerned.  I’d lie in bed at night pinching it tightly between my fingernails hoping that if I squeezed hard enough, it would just pop and go away.  But it didn’t.  So I did the stupidest thing possible – I googled it.

            When I typed “tiny lump behind ear” in the search engine, thousands of search results turned up.  I checked out the first few pages and decided to read a bunch of different sites in case they had different information.  But the diagnosis was basically the same throughout – “If you have a tiny lump behind your ear, go to the hospital, it’s cancer.” And “Ear lump = lymphoma.” Etc.

            This wasn’t even a “what if?” situation.   So that was it, then.  I was through, done with, kaput…dying…SHIT.  I had so much unfinished business to attend to.  I was so young, I hadn’t graduated college, gotten married, had any kids. This sucked.  I was no longer able to sleep.  When I wasn’t clammy, crying, hyperventilating, and convulsing, I was trying to wrap up loose ends.  I kept under my bed a list of names and next to each one, what I needed to tell each person before my time came.

Erin – I’m sorry we lost touch.  I do apologize for how our friendship ended. I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.  But…you have to respect the fact that I’m into guys.  The certain feelings that you expressed simply weren’t reciprocated.

            Natalie – I’m sorry that you went off to college, joined a sorority, and became the world’s biggest bitch.

            Krista – you’re a whore.

Mmmmkay, so perhaps what I wanted to say wasn’t really the important thing.  Maybe less people would be emotionally scarred if I just left those friendships as they had ended.

            After two weeks of practically mourning my own death, I lie awake in the middle of the night, stared up at my bedroom ceiling and breathed in the stale air of the night.  I could feel the disease spreading from my lymph nodes into my lungs as I gasped for air. 

            And at that point, I made a decision.  I wasn’t going to let this musty breath be my last.  The next day, I discreetly asked my roommate for the name of her doctor.  I called to make sure they accepted my insurance and made an appointment for the following Friday. 

            As I sat in the waiting room staring into the fish tank, I wondered…is that fish going to out-live me? Must be nice to be a fish…such few worries. My fishy fantasy was interrupted by the nurse beckoning me to come to the back and settle into a room to wait for the doctor.  Like a dog being yelled at by its master, I obeyed.  As I sat in the tiny, white, stale room, I twiddled my thumbs as my leg shook impulsively.  This was as good a time as any, so I became acquainted with all the bones in my body via the poster on the wall.  Yep, I had a tibia, a fibula, and metatarsals.  I also had a lump behind my ear.  When the doctor came in and asked me what the problem was, I took her hand and put her finger on the lump behind my ear.

            “Well, it’s not cancer! Ha!”  She laughed.  I was not as amused. In just 10 seconds of “examining” me she was able to inform me that I had a small, innocent cyst, nothing to worry about.  But she insisted that if it started to become painful, I could have it removed with no problem at all.

            It’s still there today.  I think back on that dreaded month during which I practically planned my own funeral and I realize that instead of mapping out what I would say to my estranged prior friends upon my passing, I could have been out making new friends and enjoying life.  That’s certainly a month I’ll never get back.

            Just last year, I was driving down the freeway and my finger got pinched on the side of the steering wheel.  Looking down at my aching hand, there was a tiny pin sized sore, which I quickly attributed to the recent pinch.  But the next morning when I woke up, the sores had spread across my left hand and onto my right as well. I let them be for a few weeks, thinking that perhaps I was allergic to something, but when I couldn’t stand it any longer, I went to the doctor and my mom insisted upon coming along.  What if I had some weird disease that first presented itself by way of a skin rash?

            Immediately, I got the sex talk.  “Are you having sex? Safe sex? What kind of sex? Where have your hands been?”  I answered her questions honestly, but then she made my mom leave the room and she asked me the same set of questions again.  My answers were the same, go figure.  As if she didn’t care what I had just said, she wrote me a prescription for hydrocortisone cream and sent me off to the lab to get some blood work done.  When I got to the lab, the technician seemed puzzled.  She had on her purple tweety bird scrubs, white orthopedic shoes, and red lipstick.  With her loud ass mouth, she chirped “Girl! Why is she testing you for syphilis?!”

            “My mom’s frantic voice was easily discernable as she peered her head around the corner. “SYPHILLIS? WHAT THE FU--”

            I had always been under the belief that a doctor was supposed to tell a patient what blood work was being ordered.  But apparently not.  Upon returning home, I called her and informed her that under no circumstances did I have syphilis, so she better come up with something else to test me for.  But her response was “Danielle, just wait for the results. We’ll see…”

            And sure enough, the test was negative.  That’s right, bitch. Told ya so.

            And after a few weeks of using the hydrocortisone cream, the spots went away.  An allergic reaction, maybe. 

            Around the end of March, I woke up one day with hives all over my body. Arms, legs, chest, stomach, back.  You name it; there were hives there, just trust me.  I had some leftover hydrocortisone cream, so I used it on the hives. But just as soon as one went away, 10 more appeared.  When Saturday night rolled around, I was swelling a bit and was having problems breathing, which is a sure sign of a bad allergic reaction.  So my sister called the emergency hotline at my doctor’s office and they called my doctor at home to let her know what was going on.   She called me within 30 minutes and told me to come see her the next Monday if the hives hadn’t cleared up by then.  And of course, when I got to her office, the hives had cleared up for the moment.  Good thing I had taken pictures of them and took my camera in to show her.  She pretty much told me to just sit around and wait for them to go away and if my throat swelled shut, I should to go the emergency room. What if my throat swelled up while I was sleeping I died without me even feeling a thing?  For a month, I was itchy and concerned, but the hives finally went away.

            It’s been about a year since I last thought I was dying.  Or wait, I forgot about that incident this past May…so it’s actually only been about seven months.  But this time it’s different.  So much different.  It all started in February when I vaguely remember being short of breath and having a slight pain.  The best way I can explain it is this: picture running the mile on an outdoor track in high school in 45 degree weather in shorts and a tee shirt.  The cold air being drawn into your lungs and slowly turning them into two mini refrigerators.  The slight aching pain that with each lap turns into a sharp, striking stinging feeling, right in the back of your throat and neck, and deep into your chest.  Except lately, the pain has been radiating throughout my head, like intense pinpricks.

            If you can imagine that, then you know what I feel when I take each breath.  From February through around June, the pain was somewhat frequent, a few times a week, but I wrote it off as a side effect, or yet, stress.  Because God knows the stress I’ve been under has been unbearable.  There have been times where I’ve been almost ready to crack, like a white coffee mug shattering on a ceramic tile floor, spilling black coffee all over the cream colored tile, staining it forever.  In some ways, that is how I feel, like my life has been stained, my heart blackened like that tile floor.

            I don’t remember having the pain much over the summer, but I was so busy this past summer that I don’t really remember much at all.  But not until around August, did the pain return.  At first, not so frequent, but in the past week or so, it has been unbearable, interfering with my life.  It hurts to breathe, let alone talk.  I’ve had a headache in addition to this pain for over a week now.  I wake up with it and go to sleep with it.

            Just yesterday, I went to the doctor and as she gave me a neurological exam, I broke down. I started sobbing uncontrollably because I’m just so sick and tired of feeling sick.  All I want is to be healthy. Is that so much to ask?  My doctor told me of her concerns, gave me a few prescriptions to try and asked me another slew of questions.  She said that while the idea of a brain tumor is not likely, if my symptoms haven’t improved in 10 days, it was important that I call her back so we could schedule a CAT scan.  I have another appointment next week.

            I’m not even going to lie and try to be tough.  This scares the shit out of me.  There are so many questions running through my head right now.  What if there IS something else going on? Am I going to fall asleep one night and just not wake up?  My biggest fear in life is dying and I am frankly petrified right now that there is something going on in my body that I cannot control. 

            I honestly don’t know what the fuck is going on with my health right now.  But what I do know is that after this scare passes another will follow.  While I wait for the diagnosis of my current ailment, I have no problem admitting that I am a hypochondriac.