If Everything Took 15 Minutes: Considering Time

I always thought about time —How long until we get there, Mommy and Daddy? . . .Fifteen minutes, Benjamin . . .no matter the destination, my parents always proclaimed the car ride would take 15 minutes —but time assumed new significance when I was 16.I remember, then, scanning the ceiling and thinking about time. Unlike my bedroom nowadays, in which even my computer ’s LED light is covered with a blackout sticker, my hospital room dazzled with light streaming in through the door’s small window and from the IV machine’s red digits telling me fluid was entering my bloodstream at 150 milliliters an hour. The light pollution may have prevented me from falling asleep, but it also allowed me to see all those rectangles on the ceiling which I then counted like sheep in hopes that the repetition would overcome the light’s former-named effect.My counting eventually did lead to my slumber, once my mind settled and stopped wandering on the number of cycles of chemo remaining and the days I ’d be hospitalized and the months until treatment ended and the pretty girls at school whom I crushed on but was too timid to speak to and the time I would lose to cancer and how it would be cool if cancer’s finality took just 15 minutes to reach.Now 15.5 years free from bone cancer and nearly 14 years free from cancer of the bone marrow, time means everything to me, though, I still sometimes think of it in the same way as I thought of it as a kid. I can ’t help it; after all, I am s...
Source: cancerslayerblog - Category: Cancer & Oncology Tags: life lessons MFA Source Type: blogs