December 21st 2009
Somewhere in between planning festivities and ticking the gifts that are done and the gifts that are yet to be done came this tiny little voice telling me that my heart feels like it’s going to burst.
No… I don’t mean a clichéd version of joytotheeffenworld aww look aint that liddleangel so cute that my heart-feels-full-type-burst… I mean ma-baby-girl is telling me that she is feeling that her heart is going to pop.
Splurt out, evict itself through bone and tissue and skin.
And my first inclination is just to ignore it because she is otherwise fine, but, hangonasec there is no school to wag from and… look at that, she’s just sitting on the couch not exerting more than an ion of eye-ball-to-tv energy and waitasec did she just say that this has happened before… often?
And now she’s lying on a thin bed that’s covered in a utilitarian width roll of paper towel with nine little probes on her chest, no I think it’s ten, or more…no I can’t count them anymore. And I’m trying to focus on her perfect pinched face but this fucking noise is distracting me.
I think I’ll tell the nurse or the pathologist or whatever the heck she is to turn the radio off, I mean forgawdssake who puts the radio on that loud when you’re doing this stuff anyway… but the woman looks at me as though she’s seen me have this kinda reaction before, even though we have never met, and says politely,
“Love, there’s no radio playing, it’s okay… you know this isn’t gonna hurt.”
And I know it isn’t going to hurt, this blip machine that plots spikes and falls. It’s the reason for doing it that hurts.
And the noise dies down the minute I realise that it wasn’t the radio at all, not some techno, repetitive gunge blasting from anywhere external.
It was an internal noise.
A mantra repeating over and over, rising from shaky knees up into the perdition of my stomach, stuck like broken vinyl…
please let it be nothing please let it be nothing please let it be nothing don’t worry just a routine test please let it be nothing please let it be nothing please let it be nothing just to check everything’s okay please let it be nothing please let it be nothing please let it be nothing please let it be nothing please let it be nothing please let it be nothing please let it be nothing routine test please let it be nothing please let it be nothing just to check everything’s okay please let it be nothing please let it be nothing please let it be nothing please let it be nothing please let it be nothing…
Please let it be nothing.
And then I wonder if maybe I should pray to someone.
All the usual suspects flit through my mind. But they have no fucking clout anymore in a world that is contemptuous and derisive about faith. Spirit of cynicism thriving on wrappings and baubles and mine is bigger than yours… and my mind clouds over darkly…
I will kiss the back of your ages old scaly hand and give you the only shard of my soul that is worth anything and I will worship you forever and I will go down on my knees for you till the end of days if you just make these spikes and falls mean nothing.
Nothing at all.
And then she smiles and I smile back, toothpaste-ad-cheerful, and say,
“See honey, it didn’t hurt…”
“Yeah you’re right Mummy,” she says, “I felt nothing. Nothing at all.”
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February 11th 2010
Our girl is fine. The Specialist told us so.
Happy, happy…happy Valentine’s Day
to me.