comfort

It was clean, but it is supposed to be. I was the youngest person there. I did not expect to drive up to a cancer center. "This can't be it, it is a cancer center. This can't be it." But, it was where I was supposed to go. The shock of it all sunk in quite quickly. Looking around, soaking in the place I could call my future home, looking at the people who could become my future clinical family was such a huge thing to take in at once.
They handed me a huge pile of papers to fill out... Full name... Birth date... Address... Allergies... Religion... "Religion? Why do they need to know my religion?" The nurse told me it was for support groups. That made everything hit me. This is real. Real. It is happening to me, not a friend, not a family member, not someone I know distantly.
I am ready, however. After sitting in the waiting room for 45 minutes and walking back and forth from the blood lab to the C-Scan room I realized that I am doing what needs to be done. If something is wrong we are going to catch it. I am not sitting in my room and thinking that these bruises and the swelling is nothing of great importance; I am at a doctors office hoping to figure things out.
Thinking about what I could have is not going to change anything. I have what I have, or I don't have what I don't have and there is nothing I can do about it while I wait for the results. "Why am I so calm about it?" I honestly do not know. "How am I so calm about it?" Again, I honestly do not know. Something hit me in the waiting room. Maybe it was the old man sitting next to me telling his wife he didn't bring her purse out of the lab because he is a man and doesn't carry a purse, maybe it was the old woman who had 'Louis Louis' as her ring tone, I don't know. But, something hit me and made me realize that I am working on it.
The past couple of months have been a series of appointments here and there and I am working on it. I am not hiding from it anymore; I am not hiding from anything. Well, I am trying not to hide from anything. I am going to take the news as it comes.
I am, honestly, okay with what is going on. Some people may not understand how I am not insanely worried or even freaking out about all of this, but somehow there is a sense of serenity here.
In a place where comfort is not always found, I found it. Who knows how... but it is here and I am going to hold onto in as long as I can.
I am in a good place, a better place... for now.