Embracing the Change of Time

Embracing the Change of Time

Today, in the darkness of early morning, we sent Time spiraling forward. At no other point in the year do we ever so purposefully embrace its passage, and at no other point in our lives do we ever take such purposeful steps to losing Time.

Ealier this week, my best friend turned 27. To many, I know that sentence seems like no major achievement, but to me — and especially to my best friend — it is not just a birthday, but an event to be celebrated and even wept over. Four years and two months ago, after an array of biopsies and PET scans, she was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. In the beginning, we were all very scared but remained extremely optimistic. Typically, Hodgkin’s Lyphoma is considered one of the easiest cancers to cure. But my best friend’s case was not typical.

While I was in college 3 ½ hours away, unable to even hold my best friend’s hand as she rode waves of nausea which crested, receded and then crested again, we had this one conversation over the phone. “Just wait ’til spring,” she said, offering reassurance when I should’ve been the one giving it to her. “In the spring I’ll be finished with chemotherapy.” She paused, and I heard her sigh. “In the spring this will all be over.”

Spring came, and as trees burst into bloom and lawns turned velvety with moss, my best friend’s hair started coming back. Her nausea abated as her chemotherapy and radiation ceased. It seemed that the season of cancer was over. But that next year, in the starkness of winter, it returned. The doctors put her on their most intensive rounds of chemo, and although she was then declared cancer-free, they decided she should receive a bone marrow transplant to eradicate the chance of her blood ever relapsing.

My best friend spent that late spring on Vanderbilt’s 11 North: the Myelosuppression Floor. For 30 days she was not allowed to leave it, and for 30 days the only view she had from her hospital window were the buildings studding Nashville’s skyline. When she was no longer quarantined to 11 North, she still had to return to the hospital a few times each week to receive whatever elements her body was lacking. But then in the fall, right before my wedding, it was over.

Ever since her transplant, my best friend’s been cancer free, and that was a year and a half ago. And now, the week of her 27th birthday, the same week our clocks spring forward, she purposefully embraces the change of Time, for she knows how blessed she is — how blessed we are — to watch its passage.

Happy Birthday, Best Friend of my Heart. And many, many more…
H.A.M.