Listen to Your Dreams by Amy Newmark

Author:Amy Newmark
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Chicken Soup for the Soul
Published: 2020-07-01T16:00:00+00:00

The Purple Gingham Shirt

Always laugh when you can. It is cheap medicine.

~Lord Byron

My husband, seated in the hard, plastic chair reserved for the patient’s companion, watched as I paced the small exam room. We waited for the oncologist to enter and tell us what we already knew. It was cancer.

When the doctor came in, I recognized him immediately from a dream a few months before. All my life, I’ve had premonition dreams. I know they’re premonitions when the future part of the dreams doesn’t fit with my current reality.

In the dream, I was in a hospital bed. Chip and I were talking when that doctor walked into the hospital room wearing a purple gingham shirt. The dream stuck out because I thought that the shirt looked odd on him. That was the entire dream.

Chip had been with me long enough to see many of my premonitions come to fruition. He no longer questioned their validity. He tried to reassure me when I told him about that dream, though, telling me not to worry. “For right now, let’s just believe that everything will be okay.”

Now that dream was our reality — leukemia. The doctor said he’d do the bone-marrow biopsy that day in the office. In a few days, he would have the results and see how far the disease had progressed. I would start taking an oral chemotherapy pill daily. I would take the medication for the rest of my life, but my quality of life should remain the same. “It’s not curable, but it is very treatable,” he reassured us.

After he performed the biopsy, Chip cautiously helped my aching body into the car and proceeded to drive home. On the way, he was upbeat and positive, relieved by the doctor’s report. I was sore from the procedure and lay on my side in the reclined front seat. My mind was back on what now seemed to be a troubling dream. I said, a bit irritated, “I know what he said sounded great, but I am not going to be okay.”

I started the chemotherapy pills the next week, and the side effects hit me hard. My body was wasted by exhaustion, bone pain, and raging headaches. I was freezing all the time. It was the end of August in Florida, and I was walking around in jeans, a long-sleeve shirt, and a hoodie but still shivering.

I wondered why the doctor told me that nothing in my life would change. After three weeks of treatment, I developed a fever. I had been warned that if I developed a fever over 100 degrees, I was to call the office. I did and was instructed to go to the emergency room.

When I arrived, I learned that by telling the triage nurse that I had leukemia and a fever, things would become very serious. I was whisked to an enclosed room, and the medical staff took multiple blood samples. My fever was rising, but I was still freezing, and my pulse was extremely low. They ran several tests, but nothing other than the cancer was immediately obvious.

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