Welcome to the Twilight Zone
NOTE: this post should have been before the five day documentation of last week. I just found it in my notes.
“There is a fifth dimension, beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man’s fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call The Twilight Zone.”
It’s here. Tomorrow I enter another dimension. One that I didn’t ask for. One that I didn’t expect. A fifth dimension. Stepping out of my life into a twilight zone of doctor appointments and treatments — the middle ground between life and death.
It happened so suddenly. One day I was out and about and feeling so healthy, I would verbalize it out loud.
“I feel so healthy,” cheeks rosy from the north wind sweeping ‘cross the plains, arms pumping, tennis shoes crunching gravel on the country road.
I was walking every day, working on my small business, and loving my new grandbaby. But unbeknownst to me my body began to betray me. Perhaps a long time ago it began to betray me in a most unexpected way.
Just like that. I went from having a cold or Covid to having lung cancer. It began with a cough that wouldn’t go away. A cough that antibiotics didn’t touch. It deepened. When several weeks had passed, it was decided I needed a chest x-ray. That set in motion the events that have led me up to this point in my life. I went from being (or thinking) I was so healthy and expecting to live to be as old as my dad who just passed away at 95 to this, not sure about living one more year. I had planned on being a farmer until I could not hoe a row anymore. Now what?
Then, Rod Serling’s infamous words came to mind, “You are about to enter another dimension. A dimension not only of sight and sound but of mind. A journey into a wondrous land of imagination. Next stop—The Twilight Zone.”
I can hear the music in the background and see the black-and-white hypnotic spiral followed by the doorway. This doorway opened and I was invited to seven weeks of treatment for lung cancer. This was only the beginning.
It has taken many tests and nearly a month to arrive at this day. It seemed like an eternity, but in real time was happening as fast as humanly possible. I thank God for my doctors and their staff.
Preparations for the next couple of months had numbed my senses in some respects but sharpened them in many more. I became aware of every life-giving breath I took.
Before any of the PET scans and port placement and biopsies even began the world changed color. No, it didn’t go black and white on me like an old television series. Rather things started bouncing.
I saw the winter’s wind in the spruce trees outside the bathroom window waving to me in a manner I had never seen before.
Somehow the snow banks sculpted by that very same wind grew daily as if they would never disappear. It was March in North Dakota after all.
Surprisingly enough, I entered the Twilight Zone on the first day of Spring.
This was the dimension of imagination. I imagine what that cancer in my lung has done and what it looks like. It’s not black like I imagined, but rather an uncooked egg white-looking substance with a little blood here and there. Remember, I saw the biopsy slide.
Radiation will hopefully burn those cells to ashes and my limited breath will blow those ashes out of my body for good. I’m a bit skeptical here that the pain of the next two months will provide me with any quality of life. I’m trying very hard to put my eye on eternity.
I fear I will never be able to say, “I feel so healthy” again.
Sure, everyone says, “You are strong, you can do this.”
Sure, I can do this, but do I want to?
My mind is boggled by the number of appointments coming at me every week. The radiation, the chemo, the blood draws, and the doctor check-ins. I feel I should take up residence in the hospital rather than drive to town five days a week. I am no longer in control of my life— the cancer is.
A journey into a wondrous land of imagination — the next stop The Twilight Zone.
I wrote because I didn’t sleep at night, so forgive me if this book? Blog? Journal? Moves from outer space to earth and back again as I boldly go where no man has gone before. Okay, where I have never gone before.
And, trusting in the words of my Father in heaven and his son Jesus Christ, I need to believe that my mom, Aunt Alice and all my other relatives are waiting for me in the next life. The life of no more sorrow, no more pain.
Maybe it won’t be as terrible, painful or uncomfortable as I imagine, but it could also be worse.
A well-meaning friend sent me this verse. Romans 5:1-5, “Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand. And we boast in the hope of the glory of God. Not only so, but we also glory in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope. And hope does not put us to shame, because God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, who has been given to us.”
No offense intended, it’s easy for her to say.
INDYchildrendotme 
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