Me and my shadow

Telling secrets can be fun--except when it's a secret no one really wants to hear.

I remember that wonderful moment years ago when I knew I was carrying around a mysterious secret, and all I had to do to make people's eyes light up was to spill the beans: "I'm pregnant."

I'm a little more timid about spilling the beans since I learned last week that my womb is now nurturing a bouncing baby tumor. As tumors go, it's fairly harmless, causing a great deal of what the doctors like to call "discomfort" without being life-threatening. Everywhere I go I carry a mysterious secret, but it's unlikely to make anyone's eyes light up.

It's impossible to casually insert the word "tumor" into a conversation without introducing a note of awkwardness, an uncomfortable solemnity:

"How's your bracket looking?"

"Pretty good except for that Ohio State upset. How about yours?"

"Well, it's hard to focus on basketball when I'm distracted by this whole tumor thing...."

Pregnant people pass around ultrasound photos of their unborn children--in fact, they invite half the planet into the ultrasound room to watch the process. While I was waiting for my ultrasound last week, three different pregnant women went in for their ultrasounds trailing parades of supporters, one of them followed by seven friends and family members, all eager to see some nebulous shadows on a field of gray.

I went to my ultrasound alone. No one wants to see an ultrasound image of a tumor. Not even me.

But like Jack Gladney in White Noise I suddenly find myself carrying around a reminder of my own mortality. Jack believes computer data and graphic images will help him cope with the human condition, as if quantifying death as a series of "bracketed numbers and pulsing stars" could make death comprehensible, controllable. What I'm carrying is not death but discomfort, and no one really welcomes that sort of secret.