Lightning and Lotteries: My First Love Lessons

 At 5, I learned about the birds and the bees. This lesson was partly credit to the superb drafting skills of my best friend’s older sister… she was one of eight children… it isn’t a science or anything but for some reason kids with a lot of siblings learn about Santa and sex far earlier than the rest of us. The remainder of my “miracle of life” savvy was credit to my dad’s profession. The same year I was horrified by birds and bees sketches, my dad moved to Las Vegas to work as a urologist. To clarify, he was an urologist before moving to Vegas. In fact, during his residency, when he was still in Utah, he operated on a gorilla at the Zoo; the Zoologists were concerned about his mating patterns (the gorilla’s not my dad’s.) Though the gorilla anecdote was among my favorites at this age, I digress only to illustrate that my dad was in fact a urologist before moving to Vegas and that being a urologist in Vegas isn’t code for something else. It isn’t like Sigfried and Roy were his patients…though Jay-Z was on his schedule once during a show in Vegas... but my dad didn’t recognize his real name…

At 12, I fell painfully and co-dependently in love. Initially it started as most junior high infatuations do. He and I rode the same bus to school each morning… he gelled his hair into the perfect spike when I told him his flat, pageboy haircut was ugly… he invited me to his football games…  he tutored me in math… I listened to a lot of Jessica Simpson and Nick Lachey duets… I started covering every square inch of my visible skin in body glitter… he would stare at me throughout our entire Sunday worship services (probably because I was so doused in glitter that I looked liked fish bait and tackle)… Like I said, textbook first love. However, it quickly slipped into my analyzing his family dynamics and trying to forge better relationships with his sisters and mother. It led to my watching an inordinate amount of golf and crying copious amounts of tears when he neither acknowledged me on the bus nor appropriately spiked his hair...

Though I don’t exactly remember how it all shook out, essentially my first love ditched me for a pixie with a mom bob, she differed from me starkly in everything from appearance to demeanor.  I took some comfort in the fact that at least, like me, she was studious…though I wasn’t really studious at the time… I guess a better way of saying it is that I took comfort in the fact that perhaps, like me, she would maybe go to college… 

At 17, I finally figured it out. I fell for the perfect boy. Tall, dark, evasive, and somewhat duplicitous, he made up for every one of my junior high failures. We had spent years exchanging emails, which I thought was a perfect romantic homage to the lost art of the letter writing. It also happened to be the era of the beloved cinematic wonder, You’ve Got Mail. I figured if an email relationship was good enough for Meg, it was good enough for me. I spent years in this exchange and accepted that he seldom acknowledged me in the hallways.

My junior year, something magical happened. His virtual sweet nothings became actual words… and we had the perfect first date. Almost a decade later, I am not sure I have experienced the same level of nauseating, gumdrop, sugar plum whimsy as I did on this immaculate night. It was legit, chick-flick, rom-com at its finest. It was the kind of night you could only believe belonged to the star-crossed, perfectly matched, fated to meet.

He told me that night he wanted to spend more time together outside the virtual world. I was elated.

A week later I went to a routine eye appointment to get reading glasses (by this point I had actually become studious.) The appointment revealed I needed much more than reading glasses, it revealed I had a brain tumor behind my right eye. After the appointment I sat in the parking garage with my mother in stunned silence. In those terrifying, surreal moments I had the strong sense that although I had accidently become star-crossed and fated to meet cancer, I would survive.

It was not the gorilla, or my best friend’s older sister, or my first love, or my perfect date that taught me about love, it was this.

After the surgery, I was temporarily blind. Because they had to saw through my skull to remove the tumor I was in inordinate amounts of pain and on significant amounts of painkillers. I puked for days aimlessly into the dark. On the plus side, it was the only time in my life I reached my ideal weight, which I believed would seal the deal with my perfect date. Every time the phone rang I would hope it would be my perfect date, though I probably should have been more anxious for it to be my doctor with the biopsy results.

The boy never called. The doctor finally did.

Though my prognosis was initially incorrect (a story for another day) I was told that someone is more likely to win the lottery or be struck by lightning twice than be diagnosed with my type of cancer. I am one of 22 cases ever documented in medical literature. I was the only case of my cancer type in the United States.

Though I probably would have preferred winning the lottery, I am eternally grateful for being a freak statistic. I have felt prayers in tangible ways, I have learned love in exquisite moments and people, I have WITNESSED miracles. I am here, alive, in remission, and writing, to tell you about my past decade and current lessons in Coupon Cutting Courtship.