Call me Superstitious

Shortly after I was diagnosed with breast cancer, my mother loaned me her gold four-leaf clover necklace. She said the necklace, a family heirloom that she’d worn every day for as long as I can remember, would bring me luck. When she slipped it off her neck and clasped it around mine, I felt safe for the first time in weeks.

Through my recovery from surgery, PET scans and months of grueling treatment, the necklace hung with me. It became my talisman, much like the rancid armband my son donned on game day for three years, afraid that some Shout and a whirl in the washer would scrub his soccer team’s winning streak.

Tampering with the necklace equaled bad kismet; removing it for my 15-minute
daily radiation treatments gave me such angina the technologists eventually
allowed me to keep it on (“There, there, Sharon. Breathe. Breathe.”). Imagine
the palpitations I’d experience if I were to unfasten the chain and return the
clover to its rightful owner, now that I’m post treatment. No. Can. Do.

So I began hiding the necklace under my clothing to prevent my mother from reclaiming it. And I draped another necklace over my shirt to serve as a decoy. These sad acts of desperation made me wonder: Is cancer bad luck, and can it be foiled with an amulet?  

After a recent morning at Miracle Walk, a fundraising event to benefit my local
hospital’s neonatal intensive care unit, I recalled a time when I thought luck
was on my side.

My husband Pete and I had just brought our third child home from that very unit,
where he’d spent 16 weeks fighting to be. We felt blessed. He’d been born at
week 24 of my pregnancy, weighing one pound three ounces. If you can picture Pete’s wedding band encircling our baby’s upper arm, you can almost fathom his size. His eyes were still fused shut. He had a 50 percent chance of survival, the
doctors said.

The first time I saw him in his incubator through a window in the hallway, my
knees buckled. I wailed. Not before or since that day have I ever wept so
violently – not even when we left the hospital and went home to our other
children, then ages 4 and 2, without their brother.

Yet, somehow, for minute one I believed he’d be OK.

Why? It’s silly, really. I’d been in the hospital for eight days trying to hold on until the 26^th week, the point where outcomes for micropreemies are much better, when labor had to be induced.  The names we’d chosen - Jack or Sam - suddenly seemed completely wrong. Between contractions, we searched the alphabet to find a fitting name for a baby boy who may not live.  By ‘L’ we still had no picks.

Then we remembered: Our oldest child Joseph had begged us a month earlier to call the baby Luke Skywalker.

“What if it’s a girl?” we’d asked.

“Luke Skywalker,” He’d replied. “For the greatest Jedi warrior of all time.”

There, in the delivery room, we decided our baby would be Lucas, also known as Lucky. We figured he’d need all the good fortune he could get and all the strength of a Jedi.

We were lucky. Our Lucky thrived. 

In my heart I suppose I know the circumstances of his birth 11 years ago were
random, same as I know my dad’s death and my cancer are also arbitrary. It’s
life, not luck.

Even so, I phoned my mother last week and said, “I’ve grown VERY attached to your necklace. It’ll feel strange to give it back.” Hint, hint.

Lucky for me, my mother takes care of me. She said, “I want you to keep it.”