I am waiting around for Tumor Tuesday. I would much prefer Taco Tuesday, but it’s not on the menu. Tumor Tuesday is when the surgeons, oncologists and everyone involved in your care get together to discuss you. And your tumors. On a Tuesday. I have never had so much attention since my wedding day. But enough about me, let’s get back to the 13th floor. Wait, that is about me.
It was drilled into my head as a child… and later as an adult making my own observations… that I had no right to whine. There is always someone somewhere that has it way worse than me.
Okay, got it. But mere days after moving to the 13th floor of a new building in Nashville, I got slammed with so much stuff, (I’d like to say shit here instead of stuff, but I’m a lady) anyway, I got slammed with so much stuff day after day, month after month, that I decided to see a therapist. Just so I could whine to somebody.
I saw the therapist exactly one time. Only because I had to cancel the next appointment because of more shit, I mean stuff. I had to leave town to arrange hospice for my mother, (she survived, amazingly)* then I broke my leg, then I was diagnosed with cancer. Did I mention my dog also died? We are moving off the 13th floor.
But maybe I’m being too hard here. 2 years before moving, my parent’s house burned down. Shortly followed by my father having a terrible accident. I dropped everything to rebuild the house and take care of my father. The house was nothing compared to getting my father back to health maneuvering a too-big-for-their-britches teaching hospital. I finally got all several hundred of his doctors (maybe I’m exaggerating here) to talk to each other so they didn’t kill him. They should take a lesson from Tumor Tuesday where I am being treated.
Next on the agenda, it was time to get everyone ready for my eldest son’s wedding. I actually lived several states away from parents and eldest son at the time. I was so distracted that I accidentally put diesel fuel in my parent’s brand new car. Which wasn’t made for diesel fuel. And had replaced the one that burned in the house fire. Oops. Not good.
Okay, I’ll stop whining. Now we come to the good part. Out of exhaustion, I took the first “it will do” dress off the rack to wear as my big mother-of-the-groom moment. Well, maybe that’s not the good part. It was so god awful that my refreshingly honest soon-to-be daughter-in-law said “No way.” In my mind she said, “No fucking way.” Maybe she did, maybe she didn’t, the point is the next day she took me shopping and made me buy a princess dress instead. Or a dress that made me feel like a princess. My husband snapped a picture of me wearing it, sitting serenely by a window, waiting for my son’s wedding to start. I use it as my profile picture on this blog.
That was a good day.
And then a very dear friend… a man with whom my husband and I shared so many years of laughter and love… passed away suddenly. Then another dear friend lost her young, beautiful and oh so wonderfully unique daughter.
So I apologize for cursing you, 13th floor. It’s not your fault.
It is just what comes with being brave enough to exist on this planet.
*My mother suffered a brain aneurysm only 5 days after I moved to the 13th floor in Nashville. She has to live out the rest of her life on a feeding tube in a nursing home. See… someone always has it worse than you.
Photo of my mother and father taken at my wedding in 1982.