Chapter 1 - Term Life

Life isn't always fair, logical, or easy to understand. Sometimes it's just plain ridiculous.

I often said to myself, "Self, I don't know where I'm at, but I'm making great time." That pretty much summed up several decades of my life. I was moving, adjusting, thriving, reinventing, and occasionally wondering who was driving the bus.

Somewhere along the way, I learned the truth of that old saying: wherever you go, there you are. I could change houses, husbands, careers, hairstyles, and even body parts with enough surgical intervention, but I could never escape being me.

Eventually, I stopped.

Instead, I learned to laugh when I could, cry when I had to, and keep putting one foot in front of the other—even if one foot insisted on dancing while the rest of me was simply trying to stay upright.

People often see only what is visible. They notice the smile, the accomplishments, the dancing, the humor, and assume they know the story. They don't see the years of chronic pain, the surgeries, the betrayals, the losses, or the emotional bruises hidden beneath the surface. They don't see the invisible weight a person may carry every single day.

Hidden realities exist all around us.

Mine began long before I had the words to describe them.

I have no baby pictures.

One day I asked my mother why.

My older brother had half a dozen baby albums overflowing with photographs documenting every smile, every milestone, every adorable expression.

"Where are mine?" I asked.

Without hesitation she answered, "The novelty wore off."

My father was the family photographer. There were no cell phones to capture life, just a camera.

It was only one sentence.

It only had to happen once.

Children don't analyze words.

They become them.

At the time, I didn't realize that a simple answer could quietly become part of the architecture of a life. Looking back, I understand that children often accept the explanations they are given as absolute truth. If the people who are supposed to love you most tell you that you matter less, you don't question them.

• • •

You believe them.

Ironically, when I became a mother myself, I made certain each of my three children had approximately the same number of photographs. There aren't many pictures of all three together—not because the novelty wore off—but because someone usually wandered away, someone was hungry, or someone simply refused to cooperate. Life has a way of making family photographs an adventure.

The difference mattered.

Children deserve to know they are cherished.

I spent much of my life searching for answers to questions I didn't even know how to ask. As I grew older, I began to realize that many of the wounds we carry are invisible. They don't show up on X-rays or blood tests, but they leave scars just the same.

Some scars are carved into the body.

Others are carved into the soul.

Both deserve to heal.

Life is about thriving, not just surviving.

It is about tenacity, healing, humor, and discovering that life can and will knock you down, but there is still joy to be found.

Sometimes that joy comes through family. Sometimes through friends. Sometimes through ballroom dancing.

Sometimes it arrives simply because you decide to keep going.

The body remembers.

So does the heart.

Hidden realities shape us in ways the world may never see.

This is mine.

Where do I begin?

I suppose if it were up to me—and it is—I would start with the beginning with my birth.

However, it is an event I was present for but have no memory of.

Take my word for it. I was born.

My earliest memory came eighteen months later.

It was a cold and snowy night. I was running a very high fever of 104 degrees. My parents did all they knew how to do to bring my fever down, without success.

A call was made to my pediatrician, and he came flying over for a house call. Unheard of in today's world of medicine.

Someone had the bright idea of bringing in the snow that had accumulated outside and packing me in it inside the house.

It worked.

My fever dropped.

I am grateful for the doctor’s quick thinking, but from that moment on, my body developed an aversion to cold.

That should have been my first clue that my relationship with medicine was going to be unusual.

Not long afterward came my second memory.

My second memory is green.

Not grass green.

Not spring green.

Hospital green.

Everything was green.

The walls were green. The room was green. The people seemed green. Even now, decades later, I can still see it.

Within a couple of weeks, I had developed my second aversion.

Green.

I remember lying on a table looking up at four bright lights overhead.

I was eighteen months old and about to have my tonsils and adenoids removed.

Of course, I did not understand any of that at the time.

What I understood was that I was frightened.

Then someone placed a mask over my face.

Years later, I would spend much of my life removing masks.

Ironically, the first one was put on me before I was old enough to understand what a mask was.

When I woke up, I was in a recovery room with a huge interior window looking out into the hallway.

On the other side of the glass stood my mother, my brother, and my aunt — my mother's younger sister.

I do not remember seeing my father.

That does not mean he wasn't there.

It only means that if he was, he did not become part of the memory.

My throat hurt.

The nurse asked me what flavor ice cream I wanted.

The cold ice cream soothed the pain.

It was a small kindness, but more than seventy years later, I still remember it.

When I got home from the hospital, my uncle came over with a cuddly purple musical teddy bear. It had a wind-up key in the back.

He gave the key a couple of turns and put the bear in my hands.

I cuddled with it as it played a beautiful lullaby. I drifted off to sleep.

When I woke up, the bear was still in my arms.

That teddy bear stayed with me for many years, even after the wind-up key stopped working.

To this day, I can still hear the music.

I just cannot remember the name.

It amazes me what the mind chooses to keep.

Out of thousands upon thousands of moments, it preserved green walls, bright lights, cold ice cream, and a purple teddy bear.

Those memories stayed because they changed something inside me.

That was my introduction to medical school.

I enrolled at eighteen months old.

I am still enrolled.