My love affair with the telephone began when I was in fifth grade. I would talk to my friends for at least an hour. By the next year, my phone conversations (which now included boys!) would last for a couple of hours, and going into my teenage years, I could spend as much as eight hours on the phone, talking to the same person about essentially nothing. Thank goodness for call waiting! Of course, it was more exciting when some of my friends picked up three-way calling...it was all so high-tech.
I knew a couple of friends with cell phones back in high school, the huge archaic ones, which were SUPPOSED to be used primarily for emergencies. I, of course, did not get a cell phone until my senior year in college, and by then, they were pretty prevalent (though texting wasn't). I'm not quite sure what I would do without my cell phone--being able to call anywhere is essential since I live thousands of miles from all of my friends and family.
The phone calls I remember most involve more or less the same subject. Last year, when I was spending a lot of time with doctors trying to figure out what this lump on my neck was all about, I remember sitting in the waiting room where I had my CT scan. I saw the technician giving me a worried, sad look...interesting, because he didn't seem too concerned about me BEFORE the scan. He asked me to wait until he got a hold of my doctor, and when the doctor called back, I heard the technician (though he was in the other room) say something about lymphoma. I was called in to speak to my doctor (on the phone), where I was told that I had some news--did I want to come into the office? He apologized for telling me over the phone, but the scans revealed that I had lymphoma. They weren't sure about the exact diagnosis, but decided that they needed to perform an excisional biopsy (they cut out the whole lump) to figure it out. It wasn't until three days later that I received a phone call--"You have Hodgkin's lymphoma."
Of course, my diagnosis involved other phone calls, telling my family and friends about it. I actually only called the people that knew I was going to the doctor in the first place...and my mother beat me to it in most cases. But I also wrote about it in one of my blogs...I just figured it was easier that way. And from that, I received another memorable call, from one of my best friends--the one I would speak to for eight hours at a time when we were in junior high. When she asked if it was true, and I said yes, immediately, she started crying. No one had cried about this yet. And for the first time since I heard my diagnosis, I started crying too.
