Lucky to be unlucky.

Daytona Beach, Florida---Innocent enough: a simple hearing test.

Totally unexpected: the doctor ordering an MRI of my brain.

Returning from four months of driving the country, I had plans to handle a few things. For one, my health insurance cost which went up in price AGAIN, while I was gone. So my idea was to go to get current in every checkup from girl parts to hearing, and then make some changes to the policy. I felt great and every check up was coming back fine.

But I was not in the mood for what followed a simple hearing test.

One thing you always hear not to do, but do it anyway is Google your medical condition. Like not wanting to look at an accident on the side of the road you just can’t help it…you sneak a peek. And what you see is either a relief or traumatizing.  

So, rejecting the flashing lights in my head, I immediately Googled “why a doctor orders an MRI after a hearing test” and I had the same anticipation as the nanoseconds of anxiety prior to looking towards a roadside calamity: it said that I either had "a tumor or bad luck".

Hello trauma.

For the most part I consider myself a “lucky” person. Maybe it’s the glass half full thing but I tend to win a door prize or have that great parking spot open up. Suddenly for the first time, I was wishing for the “bad luck” option.

I really thought my return to Florida would look differently. Again a lesson to expect the unexpected. From the first day back when one of my renters went into full blown drama, I was inundated with a flurry of fires to put out. Everything from repairing 19 major or minor things around the house, to having to cut down my beloved hundred year old Bay Tree that covered half my back yard due to the Bay Tree decease that is sweeping the coast. For the entire first month of my return, I was in my own dodge ball game against life's throws and I've always hated dodge ball.
My plan to finish several stories from the trip and reconnect with local people had to be put on hold, which looked a lot like a disappearing act. I didn’t even change my voicemail message. Everyone that knew I was back was yelling at me to change my message.

Maybe I don’t really want to be “back” just yet. I’m certainly excited and eager for the “next chapter” in my life but it just can’t look the same: either the corporate disappointments that were the Tribune Corporation or the obsessive work culture that was the restaurant I ran. Like a boat stuck on a sand bar, as much as I wanted to plow forward…the boat must sit quietly waiting for the tide to rise and I had to wait for test results.

During those agonizing days of waiting, my thoughts went to the people I visited during my trip that shared with me their stories about getting and going through a diagnoses: a rare cancer for her, breast cancer for her, and her, and her, and her, and her, a stroke for him, skin cancer for her, throat cancer for him,  a heart condition for her… These were MY friends and those were all REAL and life threatening. How on earth did they do it?

I called one; my cousin, a breast cancer conqueror, and asked.

“You just do,” she laughed. “You really don’t have a choice you just go through it.”

Still, I am amazed and in awe of every single one of those I visited that had been through it: we sat and you shared those stories of living through the nightmare. To you I feel so humbled.

Then finally, after calling my Doctor's office four times, the results were in.  A lackadaisical medical assistant said, “Oh yes, here they are. (long pause) The results are negative. The comments say ‘unremarkable’.”

Exhale.

“I have an unremarkable brain!” I bragged to a friend that day, relieved and happy.

Happy, for the first time ever, to be “unlucky.”