Image by Bronisław Dróżka from Pixabay (edited to blur colors)

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“It’s not what we expected.”

One’s response to that report is based on the speaker’s tone. Lighthearted, or in pleasant disbelief, signals all is well. When the dermatologist says, who ten days earlier made an incision of four cm in my arm, “It’s not what we expected,” trouble is at hand.

In a crisis or high stress situation, my default is to grab paper and pencil and take notes. When I listen well, my questions—often many—provide greater insight.

During choral practice in my high school, the door to the classroom was opened and shut hastily. In between a large snake was thrown into the room. Most of my fellow altos scurried away from the snake’s point of entry, unaware they were traveling in the same direction as the serpent. I sat in my chair on the riser and watched. Someone captured the nonvenomous creature, and altos, basses, sopranos, and tenors warily returned to their seats. I didn’t freeze. I studied the situation.

While in college a police officer showed up at my sorority house. Since I was the highest-ranking officer available, the news came to me. In a merry prank, a few members had taken pledges out of town and left them. The policeman informed me that those responsible were due at the station in the morning to enter a plea. I had no pencil or paper, but I listened and took proper mental notes. I was studying the seriousness of legal consequences. After about twenty-five minutes it was revealed that the pranked pledges had pranked their sorority sisters.

In both incidents, it is fair to say that after the crisis had passed, I allowed myself to exhale.

“It’s not what we expected” from the dermatologist was the clue to get paper and pencil. I had to ask for a few medical terms to be repeated, like pleomorphic. No definition needed for metastasized. She qualified that with, “It’s possible the tumor came from cancer somewhere else in the body.”

The call concluded with her letting me know that the two cm tumor would be biopsied again, and she would have someone in her office call the next day to set up appointments with an oncologist and surgeon. I stayed calm. Calm, that is, enough to take my notes, waiting to absorb the prognosis until the call was finished and I could exhale. For the next two weeks I expressed my anxiety through low appetite, fatigue, and somatic issues: backaches, burning of neck and shoulders.

Those symptoms lessened after the first medical appointments. Later I lingered over the cautious phrase in my notes that we were on a “curative path.” Further testing, diagnosis, and plans of attack are in flux. The uncertainty has placed me in a between state of being.

We live in medias res, in the midst of things—not in an exact sense of span of time. We live with perceptions of the past and fuzzy anticipation of the future.

We will be in situations or hear news that is not what we expected or wanted to hear. Reach for paper and pencil. You may find your notes helpful in medias res.

I read that Isaac Asimov, biochemist and prolific writer, said that if he were told he was dying he wouldn’t mourn. He would just type a little faster. Some days my neck and shoulders burn and some days I type faster. In medias res.