Disbelief rolled over me like a frigid kiss from an artic wave. I stared, held captive by amazement. It's always "maybe someday " or " Oh, I'll deal with it if it happens. " Somehow you feel you are secure in the arms of good health. Deep inside, you don't believe that it could ever be you.

I weep for myself. I scold myself for indulging in self-pity. But I am fair, even to me, and I speak softly of the last year of my life. It's like AD on the calendar but it's really ATD. After Terminal Diagnosis. What I have won't kill me. My dad had leukemia. That's terminal. My grandma had Alzhiemer's. That's not technically terminal. The same way that arthritis is not terminal. One day she became a vegetable. One day, I may wish I was one.

If the pain doesn't make me one.

I fell from a horse when I was fifteen. Two weeks later I told my dad that I thought I should see a Doctor. My back still hurt. Dad said, yes, then you should.

I was sentanced to six months of physiotherapy. In the dark green basement I was put through my paces.

After six months they pronounced me cured. I said it still hurt. The young lady shrugged and said she could do no more.

I went back to my Doctor. Did I mention that he was a quack? With the furrowed brow of Boris Karloff and the trim beard of a military man. He had always scared the beejeebers out of me. I said my back still hurt. My Dr., the quack, frowned most impressively. He had run some test three years before and said that my headaches were not migraines. He deemed them stress and suggested a child psychiatrist. No one could be more offended than a twelve year old at the suggestion that they were a child. Since that time, he had pegged me as nervous and dismissed me from his mind. So he frowned and contemplated me from beneath his furrowed brow and sighed.

" Some people get nervous headaches. You're getting nervous backaches. Ignore it, relax. You're looking for attention. Your parents have enough to deal with. "

My brother was going to rehab for a drinking problem. Judy fretted trying to find where the error had happened to bring this child to ruin. It showed it her movements. Grandma was already sick, too. Judy was terrified that Alzhiemer's was only lurking in the shadows for her 55th birthday.

Dad had examined his performance as a parent and rightly found himself blameless. Blame was not Judy's either. Some are born to mischief and who knows why one may drink but another not?

So the Doctor dismissed me and yet I returned. Again and again, let the record show, I returned to my quack, the Doctor, to plead for X-Rays, something, to stop the pain.

On my sixteenth birthday I stumbled to the cottage table. I blinked blearily at the sun upon the bay.

" How are you feeling now that you're 16? " My dad asked chipperly.

" My back hurts. " I groaned.

Dad grinned, then laughed. "I don't think it happens that fast."

Smile and nod. Of course, it's all in my head. The Doctor said so.

I had belly aches that were dismissed as hysteria. Seven years later, medicine teaches us about endometreosis.

Stop it! You just want attention!

Yes, damn it, I do. It hurts. It's not in my head. It's my body. Stop telling me I'm nuts or you'll drive me nuts!

But it hurts and I can't sleep, oh wise Doctor of Quack.

You'll sleep before you die from the lack of it.

Oh, thank you. Thank you very much.

I sit staring at my Doctor. He's tall, bald and clean shaven. The quack retired. I'm sure many patients are relieved.

We had prepared ourselves for a fracture. Months in a cast, perhaps. All from a little slip on a hill in the rain.

Arthritis.

Quite advanced. About what I'd expect in a 60 year old. If you had been X-Rayed for this slipped disc and vertebrae when you were 15, they would have seen it then. The two new slipped discs are just added fun. Oh, and you have a spur. A growth of bone on the vertebrae that's shifted.

No, not me. It had, sort of, finally only stopped hurting only two years ago. Not yet! I thought I'd have another ten years!

I tell my "husband". He holds me as I cry and scream against his legs that it's not fair.

But fair has nothing to do with this. In faith, you might say that God has a plan. He bloody well could have asked me. Where's my free will in this?

Oh, yes. God's got a lot of explaining to do.

It's forever. It's always been there.

My mind staggers over this realization. I had been right. Not that I'm ever likely to hear them say it. Dad is gone and it would never occur to Judy that it would matter. And Judy is never wrong, anyway.

Her telling me to stop making it up. The Doctor said there's nothing wrong so you just better tell the shrink about that!

Like the time I told her to be careful of the stitches in my head. She informed me that they were on the other side of my head. Then set the comb right into the stitches and pulled.

Oops.

Right.

The Doctor said that children can't get migraines.

Doctors I have met since greet this statement with an amazed stare.

Yes, they can. I get migraines.

The Doctor said there's nothing wrong with your back.

I heard Dad whisper in a roaring wind.

" What would it do for me to apologise? I'm sorry I didn't believe you, but I didn't know. Neither did you. "

I know. You can't blame the parents for being misinformed. It doesn't make the pain go away to say "I told you so".

Can I blame them for being angry when they didn't know it wasn't pretend?

So many times I felt that my mind must be out of my control. How else should I conceive of such a torture for myself? If medicine said there is no physical cause, although it's because it was never sought, then it can only be the mind that causes the pain.

What were the mere instincts of a child compared to that?

I need to forgive them for acting in ignorance. If I can't do that, I wouldn't be able to accept the apology. Not that I'm holding my breath for it.

I have to remember to thank my "husband" for the last year of my life. My old life. The one when I could hike all day or jump a fence for a midnight dip in the pool. It was a busy year. We loved and we fought as I sought to reassure. Never able to make him understand that I was willing to give myself completely to one who would be honest with me. My student. A man who showed me why a little nymphomania never hurt a gal. We weren't called the Bunnies for nothing.

I think of the careful lovemaking we now adopt. Always fretting over my back. To make it so that tomorrow's pain won't outweigh tonight's pleasure.

I have suffered willingly. To become one with my "husband" ends the pain. If it only lasts for a moment or two, then those moments are all the more precious. There is a quiet contentment in its wake. Safe within his arms, I wait for the pain to return.

I think of the years ahead and I cringe. I'm not strong enough for this.

I must be. I'm no quitter.

What will I become in order to survive?

Mom, I'm going to ask God to make your back not hurt all the time.

Oh, honey, you can ask but he's not going to do it.

Today my son asked if it happened because I was bad. The question confused him, I'm glad to say. He had trouble putting mom and bad together.

He knows that mom is human and has feelings. He knows that everyone does bad things sometimes but most aren't bad people.

I said I hadn't been bad.

My son said it wasn't fair.

I agreed.

My son is seven and he's a momma's boy. Life made him that way and I certainly didn't help. I look at him and know that I can no longer have the life with him that I had planned.

No roller coasters. No horseback riding. We can't run and have water fights this year.

Or next year. Or the one after that.

I'm thirty one. How old will I become with modern medicine the way it is? How many years will I be trapped in agony?

My new Doctor said I'll just have to get used to it. I think he believes I'm a crybaby. He points out that he, too, is in pain.

He's nearing, if not passed, retirement age. Did I mention that?

It echoes to me. So close but not quite. He knows that I'm not pretending. There's just nothing he can do.

I said to Judy that in a way, it's better that we hadn't known. How careful my life would have been.

People used to complain to me of bruises and bumps. They recoiled from my smile. You don't know what pain is, honey. All in my head?

I knew better.

I lived fast and hard and saw many strange things in my prime. My legal husband saw his sexual variety as I force you to do this or I force you to be still. The Kellogg's Fun Pack, he wasn't.

I cried on Judy's shoulder through the gift from good old Bell. My whole life has been pain. Ear infections, my knees (don't ask ), my back, my first husband and now this? Two years of freedom. My first away from my husband. One year of hardship and starvation. When I ate only because of the charity of others. I went without to be certain that my son didn't. Then my first year with a common law.

Mr. Snuggle Bunny. Who came into my life full of impulsive behaviour. I was still indulging, a bit, in my second adolecence, free a full year from the tyrant I had wed.

Mr. Bunny proposed after three weeks. He did it on the anniversary of my ex moving in with me. I wanted the memory of him sliding across my office desk with a ring on his baby finger to rewrite the meaning for the day.

He said that he knew it was fast, but he knew it was right. ( Of course, I didn't know then that this was something he had already said to a many women. Five of which, he actually married. A sixth victim was procured in November 2000 )

I don't want the last year of my life to be full of sadness and pain.

I want to remember walking in the woods and laughing as my son lost his boot to the muck.

It was such a little hill and a light rain to end a life. But with the disease already there, more than I could take.

And we all used to joke that I never broke. For someone who was so clumsy, at least I had good bones.

Huh, somebody up there gets off on irony.