If you were to say I felt a bit fractured in 2001 during this time in my life, a married lady living in Park Slope who was entering a confusing medical moment, you would be correct. As a couple of my dear friends who have been caught up in the crazy three-ring that is a health crisis know (although also, each of our human experiences are totally individual), once things begin to move, they move very quickly—even as there’s a sense of emotional quicksand—and often on multiplple levels. The American health system in particular is a barrel of monkeys as evidenced when I had an initial appointment with a lung doc who, after looking at the X-rays taken when I was in the hospital with asthma the summer before, pointed out that a radiologist had circled a spot on my lung. Not one person during my discharge had brought that up to me nor had they given me those X-rays to take home. I had to order, pay, and pick them up to bring to this appointment. If I hadn’t been so befogged with fear around what was happening with me, I would have been much angrier. (That anger would come later when a lawyer would tell me that, Well, you could file a complaint against the hospital but since you had the best possible outcome [read: you lived], then the best we could do would be a class-action suit if you found other people who’d experienced the same negligence. I did not pursue that. Had no energy for it.)

On all of these visits to the big tent of medical mysteries, the guy accompanied me, which obviously was incredibly helpful for both practical and emotional reasons. By the time it had been established that I had a carcinoid tumor in the middle lobe on the right side of my lungs and that there would be a surgery to remove it, I had stepped through many curtains, literally (all exam rooms with their partitioned off areas, which to this day when I hear the ball bearings roll along a track to close curtains, I have a tiny flash), and figuratively (all my feelings felt like flimsy curtains I was passing through). I named the tumor Johnny Carcinoid and the oncology surgeon told me this type was nothing to write home to mom about. I’m not sure why he thought writing home to mom about any kind of lung surgery had a best-of ranking but sure, I’d take it. As it happened, this bit of surgical sorcery would be straightforward because the tumor was benign, so it had no energetic jumping quality. It was not of the invading-army type eyeing other parts of my inner landscape. It was basically just a thing that had taken root and once removed, would be forgotten by my body. In fact, in a weird bit of bodies-are-amazing reality, the lobes of the lungs are so elastic that over the years the two on either side of the missing buddy have expanded to fill in the space left by the disappeared one. Wild.

That’s not to say that the actual experience wasn’t intense but the one&done-ness of it did go a long way toward my mindset of Let’s just get this over with and move on. Of course I had no idea that your body holds the trauma of the event even after you think you’ve done what you need to do and it’s over. I would learn this fact over the next many years when a chest cold would trigger such a stone-cold terror in me that I’d feel actually insane. It wasn’t until much later, when I was investigating all sorts of inner call&response moments, that I drew the line between the Johnny Carcinoid event and my nervous system being rocked.

The procedure was straightforward and the surgeon was exactly as clichéd a man as you’d expect, meaning gruff, efficient, not a big question answerer. The nurses on the other hand, were brilliant. Marion, my favorite, explained that this procedure would not stop me from living an active life. (Sidenote: the late Pope Francis had a lobectomy at 21 on his right lung as well.) She said construction workers and truck drivers had been through the same thing and that someday I may even become a runner, to which I rolled my eyes. Me? A runner? ha. Naturally I feel she’s the reason I’ve run five marathons.

Before the surgery, my dad sent me a tiny construction worker figurine, which still sits on my desk, and my mom came and stayed at a hotel down the street from the hospital to be near me for the week I was in the hospital recovering from the procedure. The guy, who’d been sober for almost a decade, chose this time to see if he could start drinking again, just on weekends. Weird timing. He had a friend come stay with him at the Park Slope apartment. He did come daily to the upper east side to see me but a couple of times he brought along his hangover. I don’t remember feeling any which way about that. What I do remember is getting really annoyed about things that seemed strange. Like when the sound on the TV didn’t work and I wanted to watch a baseball game(?) or when, on the fourth of July, I was encouraged, almost ordered as I remember it, to get up and go see the fireworks from one of the common room windows. Funny thing about pain medicine (in this case, a morphine drip), it throws all your emotions into a big pot where things bubble in a stew so it’s hard to discern the carrots from the peas. In this case the carrots being heart-felt things like my husband is drinking again and makes me sad and anxious, and the peas being a Mets game that I really couldn’t have given a toss about.

But finally I went home. After doing all the things: walking the hallways of the hospital to get my strength and lung power back, taking all the tiny and medium-sized pills they gave me, having all the X-rays taken. On a hot day mid-July, I was released with a “boatload” (doctor’s words) of percocets and sent on my way. I was soooo happy to sleep in my own bed, cuddle with my cat, eat food from my kitchen, watch no baseball. I had a real sense of elation that I wish I’d understood better how to maintain. I didn’t take many of the percocets because even though I’d been a girl who said yes to all sorts of recreational moments back in the day, in this case, the brain fog was not in service of fun and the post-surgical pain was not terrible. So I took a few weeks off from teaching, then eased back slowly into going around to schools and making sure the kids didn’t hug me too tight.

And in late August I bought a pair of running shoes and went into Prospect Park to see what that might be like. Little by little I began to run. First from one tree to the next, then from one tree to the tenth, and so on and so on until I was doing a complete 3-mile loop. This, honestly, was joyous, freeing, a sense of understanding what I could do physically.

It was on one of these early runs, the afternoon of September 12, that posters appeared on a lot of those trees I’d used as markers. They featured snapshots, cruelly cheerful, many of them vacation photos, of people who hadn’t come home the day before. Mothers, fathers, sons, daughters, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, theys, and thems, all people who had worked at the World Trade Center or in the surrounding area. As the days went on, the posters multiplied and I’d run by them breathing deeply in between sobs.