It was the kind of dream that wakes you up. It was the kind that won’t let you go back to sleep either.
I was washing my hands when the palm of my left hand began to bleed. Not thinking I’d cut it, I turned my hand palm up. Sure enough, as if I’d done it with a scalpel, there was a three-inch slash through the skin.
I’ve had some bloody accidents before, including almost losing a finger, watching it dangle by the thinnest thread of flesh after it had been slammed in a door. I turned off the water and used a towel to stop the bleeding – which happened dream-state quickly.
As if I were a practiced surgeon, I pulled back the skin and found what looked like a large tumor. I’d not noticed any kind of bulge beforehand, so this puzzled me. Pulling back the skin completely, I could see not only that the tumor was large, but that it was oddly misshapen to the point of being grotesque.
This is when I woke up. The sight of that gruesome tumor nauseated me, and I ran to the bathroom to throw up.
When I recovered, I sat down on the toilet to examine my hand. Sure enough, there was a lump that I’d not noticed before. Certainly not as huge as the one I’d seen in my dream, it was nevertheless noticeable.
I have a doctor who specializes in hands. He’d helped me to prevent the onset of carpel tunnel syndrome. When it was time for his office to open, I phoned them.
There were no openings that day, but they could see me first thing the next morning. All day long I’d stop at moments to feel the lump, and I couldn’t get that awful image of it out of my mind. My blood pressure was up. That night I could barely sleep.
The first thing he did was x-ray my hand. Sure enough, there was a lump.
“Rather than do a biopsy, Lanning, I think you should let me remove it now. I can send it for the biopsy afterward.”
I told him to go ahead. His nurse prepped me with a screen so I couldn’t watch the procedure. This was good because there was a lot of pressure and prodding that the anesthetic couldn’t mask. I didn’t want to be able to see that.
“Do you want to see what I removed?” he asked.
I didn’t.
Two days later he called to say that the lump was benign.
“It’s good we got it now,” he said. “It would have kept growing and could have caused damage to the nerves.”
I could finally relax. That had been some dream.
Lanning Lee 