Ugly Deja Vu

I keep telling myself I’m OK, and I’m just not. It’s not that I think my child is in anywhere near the danger he was in 10 years ago. It’s that I don’t want him in any danger at all. I don’t like that the neurosurgeons are interested in talking to us. You never want a neurosurgeon to want to talk to you. I don’t like that we have a meeting next week with a neurosurgeon and an oncologist. We haven't been to the neurosurgery department since like 2012, maybe 2013, and oncology had become the place we go to hear that our child does not have cancer anymore. Now it’s the place where they don’t know if he has cancer. I don’t think that whatever this thing is in Teague’s brain is cancer. But I don’t like that the oncologist said it’s possible. I don’t like what happens when you meet with doctors who want to do procedures on your child. You end up realizing that there was a reason they wanted to meet with you and then you realize that you agree with them, and you end up handing your child to them so they can cut his head open. I don’t like that what I thought was in the past, isn’t. I liked leaving all those things I felt in 2009, in 2009. I didn’t realize how much I had forgotten about how all of that felt. Now it’s all rushing back, and it feels different than it had come to feel as a memory. This is what remembering really is because it’s no longer the memory of having felt it. It’s feeling it again, in all its ugly realness. I know it shouldn’t feel the same, but it does. If we hadn’t been through what we went through, my emotions would be a lot more in the caution camp than the sound-the-alarms camp. But that archived File of Valuable Learning Experiences has been opened. And now I'm thumbing back through it in my mind. Sometimes, like right now, my chest feels tight and my gut is in knots. Sometimes brief tears will come out of nowhere. Like earlier today when I got off the phone with the neurosurgery department after they called to schedule our consultation. It all feels the same, and I had thought I would never have to feel these things again. I thought we were done. I wanted to be done.

A breath mint, cut down to about the size of the "thing," showing how little it takes to send me into orbit.