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Chapter 10

The following Wednesday, when I showed up for my appointment, I felt quietly excited, a little scared, and innocently hopeful. Skip was right—I had to wait over two hours as the waiting room seemed in constant flux with expectant mothers and mothers with babies. I tried to interest my racing mind with the various magazines around, but found I was too restless with anticipation.

Finally, a nurse came and called my name, and I was ushered past several open doors through which I could see all kinds of complex-looking equipment. The nurse asked me to change, as she proudly explained the various pieces of equipment in the room I was waiting in. “It’s the latest technology—with it the doctor can quite accurately see inside your organs. If you want she’ll turn the monitor screen toward you so you can watch what she is doing. You’ll find the doctor very helpful—she’ll explain everything to you as she takes the pictures. If you want, we’ve got the latest thing—pregnant mothers just love it—it’s a machine which can develop the pictures within moments of the times they are taken. It’s like a Polaroid—pregnant mothers like to take them home to show off the baby in utero. If you want, just ask the doctor—she’ll give you yours.”

I thought how technical it all seemed, but I warmed to the nurse’s obvious friendliness, and when she left my heart began to pound as I sat there in the cold equipment-filled room, waiting for the doctor to arrive.

Five minutes later she breezily walked through the door, not wearing the standard doctor’s coat. Immediately I liked her. We chatted together about what a nice couple Skip and his wife Jill were, and finally got around to the purpose of my visit.

I had already made the decision that I would not tell my whole story to this doctor. I wanted a fresh unbiased opinion based on technical results, not on the diagnosis of my previous doctor. So I got around it by saying, “I’m thirty-nine years old, and my gynecologist thought it would be a good idea to get a complete ultrasound examination—she was concerned I might have a small growth, and as I’m the age for such things to occur . . .”

She interrupted me to ask, “In the uterus, the ovaries—where?”

“She didn’t actually say,” trying to remain vague and non- committal.

“Well, why don’t we do a comprehensive exam? We’ll get the whole picture that way. There is a new piece of equipment that we recently acquired that makes it so much more accurate and easy to see. It may not be as comfortable, because it means I’m going to have to put a probe up inside you, but I promise I’ll be gentle. This way we’ll go at it from all angles.”

I answered I was actually quite eager to be as clear and thorough as possible, and would willingly cooperate with whatever she thought was necessary. The examination went much as the nurse had said it would. The doctor was very chatty, and clearly did her utmost to put me at ease while dealing with a very clinical, graphic subject.

Sweetly, she turned the monitor for me to watch as she probed about examining the organs. After the first five minutes she said in a delighted tone, “Well, first off I’m not finding anything. We need to be more thorough, and take a look at your ovaries as well as above your uterus, but it’s a good start.”

She explained that in order to get a more accurate picture, she would need to use the new machine they’d acquired, and tried to make me laugh through the uncomfortable parts, constantly directing my attention away from my body and toward the screen.

“See—this is your left ovary . . . everything looks clean there. Why don’t we take a snapshot of it so we can examine it more clearly when you’re done?” And so we continued for the next twenty minutes, checking it from every angle—or at least so it seemed.

When she finished she exclaimed, “Well, you’re not only clean—you’re textbook perfect clean! Your organs couldn’t be in better condition.” She took out some of the pictures and got out a medical textbook to show me the comparison.

“See, this is a perfect uterus. Now look at your pictures. Your organs are exactly as they should be—perfect in size, position, proportion—perfect in every way . . . remarkable for someone your age . . . I’m going to write you a clean bill of health. We’d be happy to send your diagnosis and pictures on to your doctor—just let my nurse know the details and she’ll call your doctor and send them wherever you like.”

When I came back to the reception room to write my check for the examination, I was blown away by how expensive it was for that half-hour diagnostic. And yet, I’ve never had such a huge smile on my face when writing a check for an amount that large. I couldn’t write it quickly enough. I wanted to skip out of that office!

When I walked down the hallway to the elevator, I checked to see if anyone was looking—and when the coast was clear, skipped three paces and skidded to a stop in front of the elevator door. When I stepped outside into the sunshine, I was struck once again by how beautiful L.A. seemed. Again, I was aware of how precious life seemed, and how grateful I was to be alive. And I felt a sense of awe and wonder at what an amazing miracle is stored inside the human body—how the infinite wisdom that knows how to make our hearts beat, our hair grow, that awesome perfection of inner knowledge that secretes exactly the right amount of hormones at the right time, had worked its magic. This amazing inner power that is awake, working while we are asleep at night—what an amazing grace it is. What an awe-inspiring mystery.

It had happened just as my inner knowing had told me it would—the same part of me responsible for creating the tumor had un-created it, and I had been given the amazing gift of being allowed to participate in that process, learning what it was the tumor had to teach me.

I felt myself to be the luckiest person alive.