Featuring Adding Bliss guest blogger and one of my personal heroes: Beth Ann Caputo
The night before my bronchoscopy, I sat alone on the black leather couch I shared with my ex-boyfriend and tried with every fiber of my being not to cry.
Choking back tears always proved to be a serious feat for me and this time around was no different. I grew up in a household where talking about our feelings was as therapeutic as prayer is for an Orthodox Catholic. As an adolescent, I would have melt downs over an array of trivial issues several times per week. No matter how absurd, my parents always encouraged me to let it all out. At the time of my bronchoscopy, I had spent the past year living in a small seaside town in Ireland. Similar to where I live now, it provided a warm, inviting place to live but walk into any pub on the Main Street and you'd find people drinking away divorces, affairs and business deals gone wrong. Faking it became a new way of life. I judged these people; I considered them broken. Yet, there I was that night, wondering when my boyfriend was going to come home from the pub to tell me it would all be okay.
If I had a crystal ball that year, things around 7 Aubrey Court would have been a lot different. I would have known that eleven months after setting foot on the Emerald Isle I'd be faced with my own mortality. I'd be bald, over weight from steroids and poisoned. I'd see myself alone in a hospital room, struggling to move from the bed to the bathroom due to the tube that stretched from my left side into a device that was used to drain excess fluid from my lung and prevent it from collapsing after surgery. The sphere's reflection would show my body lit with tumours, the cancer in its earliest stage. Knowing this, I would have given up the fight for approval that I would never win. I would have found the strength to stand up for myself, buy a one way ticket to John F. Kennedy Airport and never look back. If I knew that my 23rd year was potentially my last, I would have stopped making choices that made me unhappy.
Instead, I lost her.