Hope is always the better choice

Legally stoned, mind you. I had just had an arteriogram, complete with a couple of valium and some other nice, euphoria-inducing drug they slipped into the IV later. The fog finally cleared out about the time he gave his speech (but after the John Williams' composition. Was it my drugged-out state, or did it sound more like a dirge than a celebration?) and I remember one phrase clearly.

"We choose hope over fear."

It seemed appropriate at the time. Since Thanksgiving, I've only known the fear. Chest pains put me in the hospital for observation and the EKGs showed an irregular heartbeat. My cardiologist prescribed some medicine, hoping that would do the trick, but when he took another EKG last week, he decided he needed to check for clots and blockages.

So there I was, Inauguration Day, flat on my back with a NASCAR pit crew of nurses and technicians buzzing around me, prepping, poking, prodding, checking the oil and changing the tires.

We won't talk about the buff job...

All I knew was the fear.

Two years ago, I went through this from the observer's side, when my husband was whisked from his treadmill stress test to his artiogram, then to Vanderbilt for his triple bypass. I have no great desire to be cut open and split like a chicken, no matter how nice the Doogie Howser doctors at Vandy are. Not to mention the loss of work time, the bills ...

And then there's the pain. I don't do pain.

Pain was exactly what I was facing if they found serious blockage, and I was afraid. Afraid of the pain and afraid to hope.

They never put me all the way under, so I remember quite clearly when the doctor leaned over and gave me the news.

"Your heart is perfect. No blockage anywhere."

I cried all the way back to the room. I wish I could say they were tears of joy and relief, but they weren't -- they were tears of disappointment. No, I don't have some sort of Munchausen's hypochondriac thing going. I can't think of anything more horrendous than having to spend my time in bed, hooked up to tubes and bottles and a 12-step proof soap opera addiction. But there is something wrong, both doctors say so, and we still don't know what it is. I wanted it to be a blockage, even if it hurt, because then we could fix it and I could move on.

Now, it's more testing and more waiting and more fear.

I was drifting through time and space in the tiny recovery room, feeling sorry for myself, and my new president looked at me and told me, "We choose hope over fear."

"We must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and begin again ..."

True, he was talking about America's current economic and political woes, but his words can apply to any hardship we face, even if it's a heart that thumps to the beat of its own, somewhat spastic drummer.

The key word in his speech, the one that dragged me to awareness, was not hope -- it was "choose." Where there is life, there is hope, they say, but where there is life, there is also fear. If you don't believe me, ask any parent who has just turned their 16-year-old son loose with the car for the first time. But whether we subsist on hope or allow the fear to overwhelm us is our choice.

A close friend of mine is a breast cancer survivor. For years after her diagnosis and successful treatment, fear was her closest companion. She saw every bump under the skin, every slight physical irregularity, as her death sentence. She was so afraid of dying that she was choosing not to live.

Her husband and I both told her that, not knowing the other had said the same thing to her. After our interference, I mean intervention, she realized that by choosing fear, the cancer won; years after it was gone from her body, it was still destroying her life.

So now it's time for me to follow my own advice -- and my president's advice. Sure, there may be more tests down the road, and there may be bad news, but living in fear of what hasn't happened, and may not happen, isn't living at all.

I choose hope.

Mary Reeves is a staff writer for the Times-Gazette. She can be reached at (931) 684-1200, ext. 215, or by e-mail at mreeves@t-g.com. This column is scheduled to print every Wednesday.