One Moment

From the Author

This isn’t a usual from the author post, but then the last several days (or months really) haven’t been usual for me. To start, I’d like to present a quick bit of flash fiction. After which will be my update.

The small, thin pad was unbearably heavy in Eve’s hands. She stared at the thing, but her eyes refused to comprehend, and her hands would neither grasp the pad firmly nor let it go.

Air. Had she forgotten to breathe? Eve parted her lips, but breathing wasn’t any easier. Weight from emotions she couldn’t name compressed her lungs. Air being pushed into and suck from the room was loud in the silence, a signed of the ships steadily working, steadily keeping them alive.

More reliable than her own body.

Air surged into her lungs as her body recalled how. She glanced up, and Dr. Avil was still seated across from her. Elbows on his knees. Eve didn’t know what he said or even if he spoke or waited in silence. She wouldn’t have heard either way over the blood thrumming in her ears.

She blinked. In the moment of darkness, her mind spun under a torrent of images traversing her path here. Here systems from family, friends, and faced with an unescapable point.

Eve roamed through each conceivable variation. Ones where she was home. They all ended the same: with her in this chair, a similar space, or ignorantly doomed.

That was all before though. Here was now. Next, was disconnected from both.

She roamed the murky tangle of her future. The paths multiplied out. Some short. Some long. But she lost thread of each in incomprehensible complexities drowning in reason.

Too much!

Eve fled from all the questions of tomorrows, but to the moment. There was a question here, simple and pure. She grasped to the question a line forward from drowning as her eyes opened. Swallowing, Eve shifted in her chair and locked eyes with the doctor. “What’s the first step?”

Exactly one month after my surgery at the end of December I found myself in yet another doctor’s office. I’ve lost track of how many specialists I’ve seen since September. Some found things. Some found nothing, but even nothing is another puzzle piece.

The surgery in December had major impact. They removed a growth larger than a softball from my abdomen. This proved to be an excellent step. The cognitive issues I’ve been struggling through began improving, as did other issues and I was healing well from being cut up. Things looked good. But life has an ironic way of being surprising and gave me one.

The growth they removed in December, which had every sign of being benign beforehand, was not as benign as hoped. So, last Friday I got to meet with an oncologist where the word cancer was bandied about and where I was informed that my best option is more surgery and quickly. As a result, I am scheduled for another surgery this week.

The upshot, my unlamented creature was caught extremely early. Right now, I have every reason to believe that the surgery (and whatever else the doctor recommends) should leave me in good shape once I’m done healing. I try to keep this in mind, but that was definitely a moment tangled in emotion. So, I’m doing what I can and taking the next step forward.


5 thoughts on “One Moment

  1. My best wishes and ongoing thoughts are with you as you deal with this whole “unlamented creature.”

  2. I am very sorry for your health trials, Jenna. May your surgery and treatment get you to a better place. Much love, Wulf Moon

  3. Sending you all of my love and thoughts for healing. Let me know if I can do anything for you from Wyoming. <3

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