It was just a freckle. Not the kind on your skin that you might have your dermatologist check. It was in my right eye and so tiny that only an ophthalmologist could spot it.
He continued speaking softly and slowly and leaned toward me with a pained expression. But nothing else he said registered. I’d slipped into some blurry state of shock, unable to absorb the absurdity of it all. I’d dodged COVID countless times. I beat the run on toilet paper and secured N-95 masks before any of my friends knew what they were. And now a freckle in my eye might take me down?
I followed orders, vacillating between numbness and terror, afraid to ask the terrible questions. But before dawn on the morning of my cat scans, I called my close friend Ruth, an ophthalmologist, from a dark hospital parking garage.“I think your prognosis is good,” she said. “The tumor is small and has grown slowly. You’ll probably just lose some vision in that eye.”That’s how I learned there’s no cure for ocular melanoma if it spreads.
In the days following my diagnosis, I ricocheted between a free fall of despair and a struggle to hold onto hope. I catch glimpses of God most Sundays when I join Christians all over the world in the retelling of the mystery we believe by faith: Christ has died, Christ has risen, Christ will come again.
The whole scene made me a little jittery, but something inexplicable in me wanted the veil between me and death pulled back a little. I wanted to shrink the buffer I’ve cultivated between me and my mortality; to see how my faith held up in the face of total helplessness.