F OR F- Christa

Every once in a while a thunderbolt seems to course through my body and I know I need to call her. This time, I called and got her husband. We played phone tag. Her message said that she'd been really sick, she had something to tell me. I immediately called her back, again getting her husband. This time her grandfather had died and I called on the day of his wake. She was obviously busy, and something was going on, but I'd have to let it be for now, she'd call me when she got the chance.
So I moved on in my daily routines, keeping the nagging fear that something was dreadfully wrong with one of my nearest and dearest old friends at bay. Some two week later, she calls me at my office. She had a tumor in her throat, attached to her thyroid. It was the size of a baseball. The friend who had always been equal to me in size, the friend whom shared my clothes and I hers all through high school, had gained over eigty pounds. Doctors at first told her it was stress. Stress. Then they did a scan and they found the mass, and her failing health made more sense. They felt they could operate, but they didn't know if it was cancerous. After a series of tests beginning the day after her grandpa died, she was sleighted for one more scan before surgery. They took it twice, fearing there was a malfunction of some sort, with the machine, with the procedure... anything. Because the tumor was gone.