Middle-Aged Scare

It was last Saturday, a balmy hundred degrees along South Carolina's flat beach that I felt it come on -- an ache every time I tried to take a deep breath.

"It must be the massage I had," I said to my friends. "I think I had Helga's hands." I attempted to take in another breath against the thunderous sound of the ocean.

By Monday when I returned home, breathing became more difficult. That night I couldn't sleep on either side, my lungs aching. By morning, I was in the hospital. I thought it was pneumonia, but I wasn't coughing like the last time I had it. My x-rays came up normal.

I looked at my husband and gasped. If it wasn't pneumonia, then what was it?

"You need a CAT scan for a blood clot," said the emergency room doctor.

I began to weep when he closed the curtain. I could tell Henry was worried. He usually tries to be very calm, but he began to do that deep breathing when people try to brace themselves. I suddenly began to ream off where everything was, and what he needed to know about Adam.

Everything was about Adam -- what I wanted for him, who, I thought, he could trust. I discussed everything right up into Adam's adulthood. Faced with uncertainty, it was the first time I urgently articulated the general "plan" I had for Adam's future. Every parent thinks about the future. Even for all the plans and worries, life will still deliver the unexpected.

"I'll be watching," I said to Henry, half-laughing, tears streaming down my face and slightly insistent that if he screwed up, I would deliver some kind of punitive lightening bolt. He accepted it today. He accepted my over-protectiveness when it comes to Adam, faced with a new uncertainty. Behind the curtain of my emergency room niche, the lights turned off because I had a migraine, he may have even laughed a little behind the sighs and the stroking of my arm punctured with an intravenous needled put in such a painful spot that I could barely move my arm.

A few minutes later, I was able to gather myself. Blood clots can be controlled with medications. I could stop flying for a while. "Be brave" I thought to myself. "One's life can also be measured by how gracefully we leave."

I sucked in my last worried breath and laid back awaiting my CAT scan. Adam would be fine. He has a large family of four half brothers and sisters, and a whole pile of cousins. Henry would stay home for a while if anything happened to me. Life will go on.

Besides which, I began to say to Henry, "I plan on being around until I'm ninety-five." I laughed at the ridiculousness of planning my own life-span, at how everything is so out of our control.

Whatever I plan, it'll all be okay. I didn't have the blood clot, but the mystery illness zapped a week's worth of energy. Adam now has a fever as well and my weak body is helping him get through it now.

We can't help thinking about tomorrow, but we try very hard to live for today. And while we are not that well this week, maybe next we'll be mightier.