The Flowers Always Bloom by Barbara Carvallo

I have had a number of serious health scares recently.  Yesterday I concluded a round of tests, and pending some biopsies – which my doctor tells me she took as merely precautionary measures – I have a diagnosis of a treatable problem that is simply the result of years of living under great stress.

 

As I lay yesterday in a holding area waiting to be heavily sedated, a thing people with serious control issues dread worse than death, I had an intense anxiety reaction which brought on a near hallucinogenic state.  Focusing on my dear husband who was sitting beside me, my rock and sanity, I fought through; because fighting is what I do. 

Images from years gone by surfaced in my mind, like sands below river water shifting into shapes.  Old regrets mingled with old guilt and old battles won and lost.  Faces of friends and enemies and those about which I was never sure became first one then the other with lighting speed.  My long dead and never lamented parents followed me down a cold and narrow hallway into the procedure room.  I heard the nurse from somewhere off behind me talking, trying to divert me from what she took to be nervousness.  I would not be diverted.  I focused first on my father, then on my mother.  I realized that they made me brave, not because I don’t fear, but because I face my fear without hesitation.  They made me strong, because one had to be strong to live with two such monsters and survive.  They taught me when to fish and when to cut bait, when to hold on and when to let go; and that has saved my life more than once.  Through the horror of my childhood they circuitously gave me all they had to give – personal power, perspicacity, finely tuned instincts and a refusal to stay down whether fallen or knocked to the ground.

I must have been shivering because the nurse gave me another warm blanket, just as the doctor came into the spacious room facing the Great Rocky Mountain Front Range standing in stark relief against snow covered peaks.  She had a red flower in her hair.  Just as I drifted off to sleep the nurse mentioned that for some reason a lot of people had come to work with flowered smocks that day, and did I notice that doctor had a flower in her hair.  I knew that this must be a message from the Goddess that through all the terror, tragedy, torment and tawdriness of life – the flowers always bloom one way or another.