A little schtick

"You'll feel a little stick," says the nurse, but it's not just a little stick--it's a little stick from a needle that will draw the blood that will tell me whether my body has thoroughly rebounded from chemotherapy and maybe whether I'll be needing more.

I can't begin to count the number of times I've been stuck with needles since last June, so this one little stick shouldn't bother me. But of course it does. I spent the morning trying not to think about that little stick and I tensed up as soon as I got to the cancer center, and then the nurse couldn't get any blood from my port so she had to stick me again in the back of the hand so it was actually two little sticks followed by two little bandaids and a not-so-little wait until I met first with the oncology nurse and then with the social worker (to once again go over that eternal question: how are we going to pay all these bills?) and then, finally, with my cheerful oncologist, who burst into the examining room to stick me with the following little joke: "Bad news! I'm afraid the scans show that you don't have a uterus!"

"I'll bet you say that to all the girls," I said, but by that time I knew that there was no bad news, that my CT scans are perfect and my blood tests produced perfectly normal numbers (except for the white cells, which remains just a little wimpy).

And normal sounds really nice to me.