The Unwinding of the Miracle - Julie Yip-Williams Page 0,96

everything I want to write for my girls if the cancer was in my brain? And on and on the thoughts came, and overran my mind, playing on repeat like some agonizing broken record. Torture that threatened to destroy me. Insanity.

I could feel the animal panic rising in me; I was being forced by the gargoyles atop the towering stone walls to walk ever faster toward my execution, their arrows ever more primed, their stone bodies ready any second to spring into life. The pain generated by the enlarged ovary grew worse and worse, to the point where for the first time I was truly afraid of the pain that will come as I die! What if the doctors cannot control the pain? What if the narcotics cause hallucinations, making me try to rip off my skin like a patient in a psychiatric ward? I cannot allow my children to see me like that. More torture that threatened to destroy me. More insanity.

I saw my parents and brother while I was in L.A. My father drove me back to their house in Monterey Park, the house where I had lain in ignorant agony as the tumor grew to completely obstruct my colon, where the abdominal pain had been so severe that I asked my father to take me to the local ER at 4:00 in the morning the day of my cousin’s wedding. I will forever associate that house with my cancer diagnosis. That was why I hadn’t been back in nearly three years. I just couldn’t reenter that traumatic place. So I sat in my father’s car in the garage long after my parents had gone up, amid myriad dusty, old, long-forgotten boxes that held my high school yearbooks, my speech competition trophies, my childhood and adolescent memories.

I called Josh then and sobbed to him for a long, long time in perhaps the most crazed and hysterical crying fit I’ve had since I first got sick. Gone was the persona of my philosophical and sagely self who likes to talk about the evolution of the soul and putting one little life in the context of human history. In those moments and in the many moments since, I’ve been completely absorbed in my own life and my own pain. I told Josh, as I have often told him, that if it weren’t for the girls, him, and my promise to him to try to stay alive for as long as possible, I would stop all treatments and let the cancer run its course, living out my days in some other country doing what I have most loved to do all my life, learn a new language. And then when the pain became too much to bear, I would jump off a bridge to put myself out of my misery in much the same way that we euthanize beloved suffering pets; I would do myself that kindness. But I have a husband and children I love, and so I can’t do that; I’m not supposed to do that.

In those moments of utter and complete emotional pain, I wanted the irrational and the impossible; I wanted to travel back in time to warn the little girl and the teenager I once was of her fate so she could change it. I wanted the unknowable; I wanted time to be circular rather than linear; I wanted the afterlife to hold the promise of second and third and fourth chances, the opportunity to live this life again and again and again until I could get it just right, until Josh and I could live out all our dreams together. But most of all, I wanted to simply live out this life, also an impossibility, it seems. I never pray for myself, because I think to do so is supremely arrogant and selfish. Why would God—if there is indeed a God and if he does in fact intervene in our lives—spare my life and not the life of an innocent child who deserves to live more than I? I would never dare to suggest to an almighty being that I am somehow more special than others. But in those desperately painful moments, I prayed to a God I’m not sure even exists that I be spared from this cancer. The pictures don’t portray this part of the story, either.

I saw Dr. B. in mid-April. After a physical exam, she concluded that my ovary is not cystic and that whatever is growing is doing