By Kathie Giorgio
While waiting for surgery to remove a malignant tumor from my right breast, a wait that lasted for 28 days from diagnosis to knife, I listened to healing meditation recordings. In one that I favored, I was told to place my hand where I was hurting and I was to picture what needed to be healed.
I wasn’t hurting. There was no pain. Yet I was still being told I was sick. With my eyes closed, headphones on, sitting in my recliner, I placed my hand over my right breast. I placed it at the 10:00 position, as I was told that was where the tumor was. I couldn’t feel it, I never did feel it. But I pictured my breast as if I was looking straight at the face of a clock and I put my hand over the ten.
I collect clocks. Thinking now of my breast as a clock, I meditated on how much I wanted to keep this particular piece in my collection.
Following the melodious voice’s gentle orders, I pictured what needed to be healed. The skin on my breast opened and peeled back, like the videos I’ve seen of buds bursting to flower, I looked through layer after layer of undulating pink, satin pink, and then suddenly, there was the startle of bright blue, round and smooth, like a marble. A gem. I don’t know why I pictured the tumor as blue. But it was. And not an ugly blue, but a sky blue, a robin’s egg, tucked into the pink nest of my breast.
And then the robin’s egg sprouted legs. It was actually an insect of some sort, with six hairy blue legs reaching out and digging into the pink.
Of course, my imagination took off and I braided it quickly with reality. I decided this wasn’t a tumor at all. It was a tick, maybe, or some sort of spider, that managed to get so deeply under my skin that my skin closed over it. It had been living there, inside of me, for who knows how long, until it became engorged enough to show up as a tumor on my mammogram. Why did it test positive for cancer in the biopsy? I had no idea. Maybe insect cellular make-up is the same as cancer. But it was a bug. A parasite. Not a tumor at all.
As the meditation went on, day after day, I no longer listened to the voice, but pictured what would happen in the operating room. The surprise of my surgeon and her attendants as they peeled back my skin like a flower in bloom, went to excise the tumor lost in layers of pink, and discovered wiggling hairy blue legs! My surgeon would shriek, then reach in with a gigantic set of tweezers, the size of salad tongs, unplugging the bug from my depths and throwing it across the room, while everyone around her shrieked and tap-danced in horror. And then a brave attendant would raise his blue surgical-slippered foot and stomp on the bug, and my blood, my blood stolen from me for who knows how many years, would splatter around the room in a way they weren’t prepared to see. Some attendants would throw up in their masks. Some would faint. My surgeon’s hair would turn gray.
All while I lay dreaming non-dreams on the operating table.
I decided that when I woke, my surgeon would be waiting for me and she’d tell me this story and, through our shock, we’d laugh. Laugh over everything I’d been through, a gone-south mammogram, ultrasounds, biopsies, an MRI, a radioactive seed planting to mark the tumor who was actually a bug, fear for my life, fear of my death, everything…all because of a bug that buried itself in me. A bug that could be squelched with one stomping foot. And then I could go on with my life.
What a nice story.
Every day, when I meditated, I came out of it smiling, my hand on ten o’clock, because I didn’t have cancer at all. I had a bug.
Just like every day, in that month leading up to the surgery, I thought every phone call was going to be the doctor telling me there’d been a classic mistake, files got mixed up, and they gave me someone else’s results, not mine. That was a nice story too.
Of course, that’s not what happened.
On the day of surgery, I thought about golf balls. I don’t golf, but when I was a kid, I lived next to a golf course and at night, I wandered the woods and the roughs, looking for abandoned golf balls and whole tees. I collected these and then I set up a stand on the ninth hole, where I sold all that I found, along with yellow and pink lemonade. Some of the balls, I kept. Titleist. Bridgestone. Callaway. Srixon. Rumor had it that if you peeled away all the layers of a golf ball, you would come to a liquid center that was so poisonous, your whole hand would disintegrate from touching even a drop of it. So of course, I had to peel away the golf balls. Back then, I flirted with potential disaster. I didn’t run from it. I didn’t imagine it away.
As I was wheeled on a gurney through the hospital hallways on July 25, 2017, I pictured my breast, no longer like a clock, but like those dimpled golf balls. I peeled and peeled so many, cutting through the skin, then slicing through what seemed like thick tendons of rubber bands, digging and digging and digging. Every single time, I was disappointed to find, not a liquid poisonous center, but a small pink rubber ball. Dimpled, like the white skin.
How strange, I thought, as I was rolled through the operating room doors and I saw the bright lights and my smiling surgeon, the joking anesthesiologist, the tap-dancing eager attendants, how strange that after all these years, I was finally going to find that caustic poison.
How strange, that it was inside of me all along.
Not a nice story at all. But reality without imagination.