My Second Life Started in a Waiting Room
The diagnosis rearranged everything, starting with what I stopped postponing.
The neurology waiting room had a fish tank with exactly one fish in it, and I sat in front of that tank while a folder with my name on it decided the rest of my life in a room down the hall.
I was thirty-four. For six weeks my left hand had been sending me static instead of touch, a fizzing, pins-and-needles nothing that I explained away as typing, then as sleeping funny... then as stress, which is the word we use when we are begging a symptom to be boring. Then one morning the vision in my right eye smeared like a thumb dragged across wet ink, and my doctor stopped saying probably and started saying MRI.
The machine sounded like a techno concert happening inside a submarine. Forty minutes of it. They gave me earplugs and a rubber bulb to squeeze if I panicked, and I lay there composing grocery lists to stay calm. Eggs. Dish soap. The good bread. It is amazing what the mind reaches for when it does not want to reach for the obvious thing.
Two Thursdays later, Dr. Okafor turned her screen toward me and showed me my own brain, lit up in places like a city seen from a plane at night. She said the words relapsing-remitting multiple sclerosis slowly, the way you hand someone a heavy box, and then she said the sentence I actually heard: "This is a diagnosis, not a verdict."
I nodded like a person who was fine. I thanked her, which is a strange thing to do, and I walked out through the dim corridor with its flickering ceiling panel and its smell of hand sanitizer and canteen coffee, and I sat back down in the waiting room, because my legs had opinions about leaving.
That is where Farida found me.
The woman with the sock
She was sixty-something, wearing a cardigan the color of good mangoes, knitting at a speed that suggested the yarn had wronged her. She looked at my face, then at the pamphlets crushed in my fist, and she said, "First one?"
She said it the way people say it at concerts. Like I had joined something.
"Nineteen years for me," she said, and held up the half-made sock. "I only knit in waiting rooms. Forty-one socks so far. The trick is to bring your life in here with you, or this room will start keeping it."
I did not know then that this was the most useful medical advice I would ever receive. I thought she was just a kind stranger with aggressive yarn. But her sentence went in like a splinter, and over the next weeks, while my body and I renegotiated our lease, it worked its way to the surface.
Because here is what nobody tells you about life after a diagnosis: the disease is only half of it. The other half is the audit.
You go home and you look at your one wild kitchen table and you see, with horrible clarity, everything filed under later.
The piano keyboard under the bed, unopened for three years. The swimming lessons I kept not booking because thirty-four felt too old to be bad at something in public. The good plates, wrapped in newspaper, waiting for occasions that apparently needed to be certified in advance. My father's number, which I dialed about a third as often as I thought about dialing it.
I had been living like a woman with unlimited Thursdays.
The diagnosis did not shorten my life. It shortened my excuses.
The unpostponing
So I started what I privately called the unpostponing, and I want to be clear that it was not brave. Brave is a word healthy people hand you so the conversation can end. It was more like clearing out a cupboard that had been jammed shut, one stuck drawer at a time, with a lot of swearing.
I booked the swimming lessons. I was, as feared, spectacularly bad at it in public. A seven-year-old in the next lane offered me her spare goggles out of what I can only describe as pity, and I accepted them, and that acceptance loosened something in me that fourteen years of adulthood had screwed down tight.
I unwrapped the good plates and ate Tuesday dal off wedding china, and the sky did not fall.
I called my father on an ordinary evening, no occasion, and when he asked why I was calling I said, "No reason," and heard him go quiet... and then heard him pull up a chair.
We talked for two hours about nothing: cricket, his neighbor's ridiculous new gate, my mother's old scooter. No reason turned out to be the best reason we had ever had.
And I started writing again, which was the drawer that had been jammed the longest. In the beginning I could not write about the illness at all, so I wrote around it, and then one night I found a page of poetry prompts and one of them said, in effect, write to your body as if it were a friend who made a mistake, and I sat in my kitchen and cried and wrote the first honest thing I had written in a decade.
I kept going. I read poems by strangers about healing that did not pretend healing is a straight line, and profiles of writers nobody had heard yet, people writing from waiting rooms of their own, and I stopped feeling like the only person whose second life had started under fluorescent light.
The disease, meanwhile, did what it does. There were good months. There was one terrifying week in autumn when my right leg went distant and polite, like an acquaintance at a party... and then came back. There were injections I learned to do while watching cooking videos, because Farida was right about bringing your life into the room, even when the room is your own bathroom and the appointment is with a syringe.
I am not going to tell you the illness was a gift. People say that and I understand the impulse, but no. It is not a gift. It is a thief that happened, in my case, to break the one window I had painted shut.
Eleven Thursdays later
Here is the part I did not expect.
The waiting room became mine.
Not beloved, exactly. But known. The one fish. The flickering panel in the dim corridor that maintenance has now ignored across two calendar years. The receptionist, Sandra, who learned my name and asks about my swimming. I bring a notebook now instead of crushed pamphlets, and I write there, badly and happily, with the specific freedom of a woman whose worst Thursday already happened and was survived. Some of what I write there is about hope, which turns out to be less like a sunrise and more like a stubborn appliance: unglamorous, humming, still on.
Last month a man sat down across from me, mid-thirties, holding a referral letter like it might bite him... He had the face. I know the face now, from the inside.
I put down my notebook, and I heard my own voice say it, gently, like at a concert.
"First one?"
He nodded... The fish went by on its endless lap. And I held up my notebook the way Farida once held up a half-finished sock, proof that a life can be brought into any room whatsoever, and I told him the trick.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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