The First Thing I Wrote

Diana Cejas, MD, MPH

I couldn't talk about things for a while. Even after my voice returned, even after my mouth straightened, even after the meat of my tongue stopped getting caught between the blades of my teeth. The words were there. I thought of them. But the moment that I started to speak they fled from me, wrapped themselves around the scar across my throat and held on tight. I swallowed them down. It was some kind of defense mechanism, I suppose. I got my diagnoses - first the cancer, then the stroke - and my fight or flight button got mashed down and stuck. I thought about things too much for a while. I thought that talking about things would put me back in that bed for a while. Sometimes I still worry that it will. You can worry yourself sick, my grandmother says, you can speak things into existence. I always believed. You write the things that you want down on paper and say a prayer and if they are meant to be yours then the Lord will give them to you. And the things that you don't want? You'll get those too. It was easy for me to tell stories before. I have been doing it since I was a child. But then illness stole things from me. Time. The feeling in my left hand. Security. I didn't trust myself, trust the universe enough to talk about it. I choked on things that I could not say. I went about my business in silence. 

“I remembered how my body felt before illness and during and after.”

I had this feeling one morning as I was walking in to work. Sometimes the flesh down deep beneath my scar itches so much but I cannot scratch it. Sometimes my hand tingles so much that it hurts. I cannot soothe it. I just wait for it to pass. It felt like that but in my head and in my heart. I don't know what it was. The feel of the concrete beneath my feet. The air that my lungs took in without assistance. I remembered how my body felt before illness and during and after. I remembered every word that I ever wanted to say. Every poem that I ever wanted to write. Something had broken within me. Some tiny trick of DNA that grew the tumor that caused the stroke that changed but did not kill me. Something else had mended. All those words bubbled up and out of me. It was all I could do to catch them. A sluice composed of ink on paper. I wrote one sentence and then a paragraph. Wrote five pages all at once. The prose was messy. The words, the voice, were mine. 

Diana Cejas, MD, MPH is a pediatric neurologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her clinical and research interests center on neurodevelopmental disabilities, transitioning from pediatric to adult healthcare systems, and improving communication and collaboration between patients, families, and healthcare providers. Her essays, opinion pieces, and other works of nonfiction have appeared in health-centered websites and blogs including Op-Med: Voices from the Doximity Network and KevinMD.com, medical journals including The Journal of the American Medical Association and Neurology, literary magazines including Catapult, Passages North, and The Intima among others. She is on Twitter @DianaCejasMD and blogs at DianaCejasMD.com.