The morning of the surgery to remove my thyroid and lymph nodes, they handed me two gowns to cover myself and we prepared for the procedure. As you may know, these gowns only cover half of your body. With everything going through my head as we prepped, I didn’t think much of it. Then they had me walk myself into the operating room, which was its own kind of surreal. I remember being so detached from my physical reality that saying goodbye to my parents was easier than when I moved out for college. And then you arrive and walk into an ice box with production level lighting. It felt like the worst kind of Friday night lights.
Game time had arrived. As I was psyching myself up (didn’t want to go into this with a bad mindset), one of the lovely nurses asked me to take the back gown off.
I froze. That gown was the only thing standing between the entire surgical team and my bare (and very pale) ass. Surely they would all go blind from the intense light reflecting off the whitest cheeks on this side of the Mississippi.
The nurses caught the hesitation and one of them, without any hesitation, told me not to worry with some laughter, mine was “a lot better than what they’re used to seeing.” The contrast caused the whole room to erupt in laughter – guess they’ve seen some ugly ass asses. And there we all were, on the verge of beginning a very serious procedure, finding a way to giggle through the intensity and make the situation easier for a very scared 23 year old.
There were real risks on the table going into the procedure, so the laughing was not because it was funny the way a joke is funny. It was funny the way things get funny when you are standing right on the edge of something that could end you. The lightness only meant something because of the fear underneath it. Sunshine is nothing without the rain. Laughing through cancer is nothing without the part where you are terrified.
A couple of other things I did in there, for the record.
I made them confirm my surgeon’s name. Then I made them confirm it again, and again one more time… He is a brilliant and capable doctor with a generic name, and I had memorized his full name (middle name included) so I could verify that the right guy was about to cut my neck open. If you have ever worked with me in a professional setting, you will be unsurprised by this detail. The instinct to triple-check the one critical detail does not switch off just because they are about to knock you the f out. My poor surgeon got a live preview of what my business partners deal with daily.
And when they asked if I had any last questions before putting me under, I asked if I could keep my thyroid after they took it out.
He looked at me like I was a complete moron. Guess it’s a good thing that my surgeon was not in a giggly mood.
I was messing with him, mostly. But also, if something went sideways in there, if I did not wake up or could never speak again, I wanted the last thing I did to be a joke. That felt more like me than my overwhelming sense of fear.
I woke up (separate story on this one coming). I kept my voice. I did not, for the record, get to keep my thyroid.
But I walked out of that hospital reminded that you can be scared for your life and still make a room full of people laugh, and doing it does not make the fear fake. It makes it survivable. It adds some meaning to the suffering and energizes the hell out of you to keep fighting.
That is a big part of what we are building. As much as we can, we want to laugh our way through the intense stuff, not because it is not serious, but because staring into the void is so impossibly serious for any individual to take on. And the void hates giggles.
If you are about to walk yourself into your own cold, bright room: crack the joke. Make the nurse smile. Be scared and be bold anyway. Both are allowed, and together they carry you further than either one alone.