My Inner Struggle

By Neil Schlosser
Contributing Writer

“Then I need to grab three towels and bucket of water to wash my car,” I thought as I climbed the stairs to my apartment. I neared the top step and felt it. It was a memory and a symptom occurring simultaneously across time. It existed in the middle of my thought and back in the past when I was sick with cancer. For a moment it was everywhere.

“It can’t be. It can’t be. Not again. Please, not again,” I thought.  All the illnesses I’ve had, all the fear I’ve fought, all the hope I’ve struggled to generate flashed through my head like a wall of memories that I passed through in an instant, years of experiences being absorbed in a single breath. 

“It was so quick. What are the chances it was real?” I asked myself.
   
“You were in the middle of a thought and everything stopped dead in their tracks. That pain is familiar. That’s why you stopped. It was exactly the way you remember it from last year and five years before that when the cancer ate your blood and caused your legs to burn in pre-mature fatigue,” I replied.

It was momentary. It was gone before the next step but it was there. I felt it. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was something else. Or maybe it was back. Maybe I’m sick again.

I entered my apartment and tried to put it out of my mind but there is no escaping it. To escape it is to die. It must be confronted. It must be dealt with. If it is indeed back then I’m in for another fight.

I sat down at my kitchen table with a glass of apple juice to cool off from the heat. The thought of another fight overwhelmed me. “I don’t think I can do this again. I don’t think I’m that strong,” I said to myself. Even as those words escaped my conscious brain to a windswept past, a flower made of steely resolve blossomed and said, “You are strong enough if you need to be.”  I genuinely wondered if I am. I felt panicked and as if I might cry.

“Crying is only for when it comes back, not before, and even then only for a few minutes. Save the tears until they are really needed. Save them for when you are certain,” I think. 

I imagine giving up the fight before it begins and I find the thought to be peaceful. There would be no more struggles. No more surviving. No more living. No more expenses. I find myself ready to accept my own death before I’m certain it’s returned. I have never been so calm about my own death. Maybe it’s because of the certainty it offered or because I don’t have any fight left in me, or because life really is a struggle and the thought of uninterrupted sleep comforts me.   

Either way I continue on my day, never quite pushing it from my head. All I could do was hope that it’s nothing because it’s probably nothing.

“But what if it’s something?” I wonder. And then I curse because I know I will have no comfort until I see a doctor.

Neil’s doctors have since told him that he is fine. 

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