For hours, we flung ourselves off the side of the fishing boat into the steeped-tea pond, laughing too hard to form words.

The eldest screamed. The fish were biting his toes!

The boat pitched like fresh walleye, skinned knees barrel-rolling to safety with an aluminum thunk, alto shrieks curdling the July sky.

My life jacket snagged on the tin frame, leaving me stranded in an apocalyptic game of limbo: half home free, half muskie bait, skinny calves like salt licks to the bloodthirsty slime curling around my toes.

They’re going to tip it. I’ll be held under. When it’s done, the fish will feast on me.

A beige and juvenile nightmare, recurring then forgotten, until the shell-shocked night only a few years later when I coveted a fear so clear-cut as drowning.

It started out a normal day. Three words that ricocheted off the sweaty windshield and back through my head like a dumfounded dementia loop all the way home that soggy May afternoon, phone pinging, relatives hovering like egg salad at a wake. The words became lodged above me, nailed to my headboard. In all my twenty blushing years, the hardest part had always been not skipping ahead.

A normal day. How dare they—whoever they were, these lurking cosmic conspirators who failed to warn me.

It sickened me now, the way carefree people brushed their teeth and callously flicked off the lamp, peeling back their cocksure covers. Irreverent to the forces working tirelessly—miraculously—to align just so they could flush away another perfectly ordinary day.

I’d been no different. Parked in my usual spot, eased the plastic lid off the paper cup, swirled the teabag by the string. Talked to coworkers about nothing, tiptoed through the fleeting space between arriving at work and getting to work, the day a freshly folded towel before me.

My boss pointed the phone receiver at me, my face as puzzled as his. It’s only a summer job, who would think to call me here?

They’d called the house first, but I was no longer a minor. They wouldn’t tell my mother a thing, leaving her to imagine the words instead.

I pulled up to the clinic like a driver on pit road, spotted her familiar silhouette loitering outside. In the span of thirty minutes, VIP had come to mean “Very Ill Patient” and I’d never brag about being waved to the front of any line again.

Dr. Ian hadn’t aged a minute in 15 years, but that sopping May day he was tumbleweed behind the check-in, unmoored by his own waiting room. The doctor touched my shoulder as he showed me to the exam room, so lightly I barely felt my sleeve move, then pulled his hand back like the slap of a wrist. It wasn’t creepy or anything, just odd. Doctor-patient boundaries and all.

A file lay closed in front of him, a Post-It stuck to the top which he did not peel away. My gaze pulled toward its yellow center like a honeybee to a flower as I strained to decode the handwritten name I couldn’t pronounce. I was sure I’d never seen it before.

Indignant relief stung my gut as I decided this was all a big misunderstanding. He had someone else’s file. Screwups happened all the time in this overburdened health care system! Boy, was my mother going to let them have it….

The doctor’s arm reached across me and I nearly swatted it, annoyed at having my view of the cheery yellow square interrupted. I tracked his limb to the ends of his fingers, found it was holding a tissue. Followed that a few more inches and remembered Mom, crammed into the corner chair normally reserved for purses and winter coats.

The shape of her body jarred me like whiplash: clenched stiff, eyes pinched, fingers white against the black plastic armrest. Wetness sliding off her face and spotting her shirt.

Dr. Post-It was a surgeon. Bay Street address, first hit on Google, a disconcerting strand of letters after his name and reviews whining about a six-month wait list when my appointment was in three interminable days.

Did I ever tell you what my father used to say? Patience is a VIRTUE, my dear!

Mamma grew up against the roaring backdrop of 11 siblings; Mom always had to hold the phone away from her ear.

I know, Ma.

My grandmother drew from her weathered repertoire of adages at every opportunity, and always as if for the first time. Sometimes, I’d mouth silent guesses to Mom as to which one she was about to say next.

Doctors BURY their mistakes!

Some people don’t know shit from Shinola!

Life passes like a turn of your ass, and then it’s GONE!

The surgeon was nice enough, but his answers only unsettled me into more questions. I yanked at every thread, trying to find one capable of holding the weight of my what-ifs, an anchor I could tie off on, but he refused to be pinned down. Sent me away with nothing—besides the extremely rare tumor in my head.

His lithe finger ground into the space between my eyeball and browbone. Oh, yes, there it is. As if it were a long-missing sock discovered in the pocket of a spare bedsheet.

A barrage of appointment cards. Lab requisitions like voodoo dolls up and down my arms. Consent forms boasting death as a possible side effect like bullets shot from an inkjet.

My childhood nightmare returned, but it was different this time. The boat paddled out to the middle. Brutish hands belonging to no one grabbed the back of my head, plunged me under the greenish-brown surface like too many kittens on a farm. I thrashed, gave it my best go, but I was so small in comparison. Below me, the feeding frenzy grew blurry and clicked over to slow motion as my lungs clawed for the surface.

Surgery day descended with the dawn like a sick and twisted Christmas morning: midnight snack, everything set out the night before, awake all night and out of bed much too early.

I walked through the hospital doors a lone soldier cresting the hill, stopped short at the infantry of loved ones jammed inside the atrium, sipping god-awful coffee and trading coins to feed the meter.

There are two kinds of friends in this world, my dear! Those who come for the party, and those who stay to help clean up the mess!

Over and over again, I love you spurted from me like toothpaste from a tube, ignoring my commands to stop. It felt so silly, speaking the words that least needed saying—especially when I said them to Mamma.

I love you too, sweetheart.

The room held its breath. My mother’s jaw unhinged. It was the first time any of us heard her say it, and I realized I’d wanted her to my whole life.

I made you soup for later. I wouldn’t hit a dog in the ass with that hospital food!

A week later, I dug my nails into my palms as my pal Dr. Post-It wiped curly, blood-encrusted suture bits onto a steel tray. Told me the scars would be barely visible. Assured me I was good as new!

What if it grows back?

Oh, no, that’s nothing to be concerned about.

So, you’re saying it won’t grow back?

I’m saying it’s highly unlikely.

But what if it does?

My stubborn attachment to hard facts made him sigh as he assured me the worst-case scenario wasn’t worth thinking about. The chances, he conceded, were less than two per cent.

And there it was at last, glistening golden before me: the shore. I rode those odds all the way back to solid land. Knelt down. Grabbed fistfuls of earth and let it pour through my fingers until I felt brave enough to stand again, trusting the ground to hold me once more.

What doesn’t kill you makes you STRONGER, my dear!

Three years passed, the MRI machine every six months like a heavy-metal coffin, bouncing my hot, shallow breaths back at me. Contrast coursing through my body like bleach, lapping my throat like acid, until the gurney wheels rolled me free again like the outward swing of the heavy gym door after finals, certain I nailed it, foolish for having agonized over nothing.

Until the fourth year.

Some people don’t know shit from Shinola!

Double the size, in a fraction of the time. Even Dr. Post-It was rattled; we’d danced long enough for me to tell. The procedure would be much different this time.

A lot more aggressive…incisions here, here, and here…remove a section of skull there—but don’t worry, we’ll put it back….

Surgical residents trailed me like imprinted ducklings, their names cropping up in medical journals like hungry newborn beaks. Those closest to me wore my darkest fears all over their faces like seaweed tentacles climbing to the ironclad surface. And somehow, I’m right back where I started. Back at the hospital admitting desk.

Back underwater.

Did I ever tell you what my mother used to say? She said people PLAN and God LAUGHS!

Hospitals are like Russian nesting dolls—the deeper inside you go, the smaller the waiting rooms, until there’s no room left for anyone but you.

I was in the second to last room, only my mother left beside me.

Am I going to die in there?

I didn’t mean to say it out loud.

We’re all going there eventually, my dear! If you find another way, let me know!

Mom didn’t answer.

I heard my name and stood immediately, denying myself a last look at my mother. Walked through the door marked “Patients Only,” the final and littlest doll.

They called a man’s name, too, but I wouldn’t remember it. His gaze was loose, his jaw wild with stubble. Mugshot hair. I tried not to engage; I have an inborn, involuntary tendency to rouse demons like Mentos to a bottle of Coke.

On the other side of that door and the world, I traveled a few steps then walked right outside of myself. Left me standing back there, knees locked, hollow gut crumpling like a paper bag.

Crazy Eyes whirled around, charged towards me, his matching blue gown twirling. Oh, God. Here we go….

Excuse me, miss. Are you…okay?

My answer wouldn’t come. He nodded, laid a feeble hand on my arm. Together with his, a stranger with a voice much gentler than I’d pictured, my feet started moving again.

When you can’t be anything else, be KIND!

I stood in the doorway of the OR, undetected at first by the swathe of masks and whimsy-patterned hats. Noticing my arm was empty, I looked up and down the deserted hallway. My walking partner had evaporated into fluorescent haze.

An untethered voice called my name, and without my glasses I struggled to pinpoint which mask it came from. She invited me to lie down like we were schoolgirls at a sleepover, directing her questions with genuine interest at me while ignoring my prima donna tumor entirely. It was only in that meat-locker metal room, enveloped by ethereal, called-to-serve eyes without faces, that everything felt as it had before.

Can I get you a heated blanket, hon?

I politely declined; it felt like far too big an extravagance. She got one anyway, tucked it around me snug as a swaddled baby, helpless but attuned to caring, capable hands.

At last, the waterlogged fist behind my head eased its grip. I stopped thrashing, let the soft current carry me along.

Sometimes, you gotta let go and let God!

Afterwards, it was the warm oak of male hands—hardly more than a boy’s back then—cupped around my palm that I registered before anything else.

Will you marry me?

Words whispered to a room erected of striped cotton, by my casual coworker-turned-friend-taken-for-granted-turned-Everything, while he thought I was still unconscious.

I opened my eyes, found him kneeling by the stretcher, his own eyes red and salt-rimmed.

Woke up next in a foreign room haunted by distant moans, bewildered by the blurry shape of him folded into the chair beside my bed, unacquainted with the rhythms of his slumber.

He held the mirror as I looked up from the blood-caked ribbons of dressing on the tray table—only I saw two mirrors. Two reflections, spinning like backfists with double the impact.

He waited while I searched the glass, failed to recover a single trace of myself. My skin was an iodine rainbow, threads poking out at random, eye a greasy eggplant pouch and cheek rounded into a shape I had no name for.

He held me gingerly to his chest while I smeared bloodied sobs and crusted antibiotic ointment onto his T-shirt. Carried me from hospital bed to the two swirling toilets, and eventually, the car. The car to the shower, the shower to my bed, where sleep could only be unlocked by his patented arrangement of pillows.

He came on his lunch break to change dressings and count out pills. Straddled me atop my duvet, his robustness across my stomach causing the gash on my face to bulge as he slid the loathed blue Bic back and forth, up and down, training my weary eyeballs to retrace their common ground, vowing louder than my tears that I was doing better than yesterday.

I hated that he saw me like this, pale and bruised and reeking of witch hazel and cucumber melon antibacterial soap. Yet all the while, forever was ceasing to be a question, all whispers of doubt dissolving like ice chips.

Pieces of me traveled to countries I still haven’t seen while pathologists debated across time zones. I filled the daylight with distraction: studied more than I needed to, worked extra shifts to save for a future I no longer believed I’d have, shuffled food around plates and kept people talking about themselves.

I managed just fine—until the sun set like a swinging axe and the stillness of nighttime teemed like a back alley, amorphous ogres leaping from the shadows and chasing me in circles until dawn.

Nine months passed like radioactive gestation between the surgery that sawed my head apart and yet another surgery that pretended to piece it back together. A graduate student by then, martyrdom was the wind-gnarled oak I chained myself to, spitting on deadline extensions and alternate assignments, writing exams in person from behind sunglasses knowing full well I’d be welcome to do them from my couch.

In those tundra months my vision was distorted, my depth perception thrown off in nauseating proportion as my gait twisted to compensate, head tilted sharply back, eyeballs groping desperately at teamwork. Assignments I could once have pulled off before lunch now demanded a week or more tethered to a screen, letters swimming, neck screaming.

Officially my boyfriend now, he’d show up unannounced like any proper intervention, armed with gummy worms, a gut-socking grin and Cheezies—the crunchy kind (so help a man who showed up with puffs). My mother probably called him when my bedroom door smashed closed again, rattling its cloud-white jambs and sending textbooks crashing to the hardwood. Behind it, her only child lay puddled on the carpet, a convulsing heap of snot and tears and rage.

Mom, I’m FINE. Go back downstairs!

And I was fine; I’d only cut the dragons loose a little while, tiring them out before stuffing them back inside their cage.

You didn’t need to leave work, I told him. You didn’t have to come.

It’s just a normal day.

For eleven years, multiple surgeries and an unprecedented three recurrences, the tumor tapped me like a maple tree. Sucked the sugar from my flesh without permission. Took from me, insatiable, stripping me dry.

And then, it started to give back.

Always darkest right before the dawn, my dear!

Two decades later, my husband’s hand still finds my elbow whenever we cross the street. Our wedding day was reflexive as blinking, natural as sunrise. Joyful certainty billowed to the ceiling, bounced like champagne corks off the moldings and shot like sparklers from the crystal chandeliers, because we had already done better and worse. Sickness and health. Our vows were not some optimistic prayer or naïve shot in the dark—because we already knew.

His chocolate-infinity eyes have seen for me every time my own has swollen shut. His burly, beautiful man-hands have tied countless tissue-paper gowns, clung to my dainty purse in overcrowded waiting rooms, held sure and firm to the wheel in Hospital Row gridlock while the crackling, smart-assed girl he fell for sank into a glassy-eyed tangle of sedation and terror beyond the passenger window.

Year after year, he walks beside me through the same dank hallway, waits with me in the same two chairs like some sort of Tim Burton-ized anniversary while they tape the IV to my arm like lethal injection.

My second-last Petrushka doll.

We live inside of the extremes, swinging low to basement imaging then touching the skies again, going big and going home. We don’t do in between, because in a way, we’re always in between.

Finally—and for the first time—curly-edged photos in a shoebox unearth a beauty I couldn’t see before in the bright, symmetrical teenage gaze, the crease-free brow that feared only drowning in a muddy backyard pond, surrounded by grown-ups, while wearing a life jacket.

And in the mirror’s staggered glare today, I see a serrated scar collection and deformity and a gun-shy smile. A proper adult who recoils cowering at the sound of power saws, crumples retching at one lousy whiff of cucumber melon hand soap.

But I see a fighter, too. Featherweight, and still scrapping eight rounds into a heavyweight bout.

I see the one per cent everybody slept on, regaining her ground with a glorious vengeance, because after setting up camp inside the unthinkable and repeatedly astounding the experts, nothing is out of reach anymore.

I see the steadfast marriage and flourishing family I wouldn’t have had time for, the unforgettable trips I wouldn’t have bothered to take. The ill-fitted job I’d never have quit. The novel I’d still be too chicken to write.

I see just enough damage to force the haters and the real ones to self-sort.

It’s a privilege now, to cradle this fibrous bomb inside of me. To love at full horsepower, be all-in with my words, act with ruthless intention. To press clean the pulp of time and opportunity like a lemon, starving tomorrow of any lingering drop that can be soaked up right now. To feel grateful all the way down to my cells, give fully and without condition—not to stack karma or stockpile goodwill, but to repay it.

To be thankful for every solitary stitch.

Rachel Stone is a writer and a ruthless hunter of rainbows. Through fiction and nonfiction, she tackles life’s best mistakes with unflinching scrutiny and crackling humor. She lives in the Greater Toronto Area, where she and her husband have been renovating behind schedule and over-budget since before HGTV was even a thing. Other hobbies include pretending to be “chill” while her seven-year-old daughter pretends to believe her. Rachel’s works have appeared in Coffee + Crumbs and The Raven’s Perch. She is currently working on her second novel. You can find Rachel on: Instagram: @racheystone, Facebook: Rachel Stone and Twitter: @rachestone.

Header Image by Marilyn Hallet Granzyk