I am scheduled to see a myeloma expert at the Mayo Clinic on the first Tuesday in June.

These past several days, I have been busy gathering the requested med­i­cal records, sending the required insurance information, and arrang­ing for the glass slides of my last bone marrow biopsy to be shipped to Min­ne­sota.

As I pull together the various pieces of the trip (including making sure the home front is covered), I am reminded of a line from a wry review of a chil­dren’s book by E. B. White. The book contained “the priceless sen­tence: ‘The Safe-Way Club had two weeks to get ready for the [PTA meet­ing], and what busy weeks they were!’”

Busy indeed. I just booked a hotel room.

Thanks to modern technology and the medical world’s conversion from paper to electronic media, I was able to download two and a half years of lab reports and clinic notes onto a stick drive, which I will carry with me to Minnesota. My diagnosis predates the widespread use of computerized medical records and the advent (long overdue, in my opinion) of patient portals for easy access to records.

I still have a large file of many of my older medical records (all paper). I skimmed it a few days ago to make sure I did not have some old record tucked away that Mayo might want. I did not, but I did come across an email exchange that I had printed out a decade ago and tucked away with the medical papers.

The email is dated April 22, 2005, which means I was only a few weeks away from heading to the Cleveland Clinic for the first of two stem cell transplants that summer. I wrote my friend Linda that I was struggling with exhaustion, then added:

There is also this feeling that despite all the love and support of friends and family, after weeks of preparation, we are finally at the departure gate, and I am the only one getting on the plane—the only one allowed on the plane – and that is hard to take!

Linda was a close friend, so close that when I met my oncologist for the first time, she sat in the examining room with me, holding my hand. Linda also was a nurse when she was younger. She replied:

Oh my dear, in the end, we all get on that plane alone. That came to light early in my other life as I held hands and did the silent vigil with so many souls. Some had round trip tickets, some did not. [My therapist] said that learning to comfort ourselves is an invaluable lesson we learn over and over again as we deal with the difficulties in our lives. The coping skills you have developed from the years you have already put in will be fine tuned in the next few weeks. While we aren’t in the plane, we are watching your progress from the tower and we [will be] in contact with you as much as you will let us.

For the most part, I am not someone who spends time dwelling on “what was” or “what might have been” or that energy-sapping “what if?” Don’t misunderstand: I love history, including personal history. But I tend to keep my focus on the here and now, not on the then and was. So I found it interesting that I kept this email all these years, only to have it resurface while I prepare for another venture into the unknown.

In recent months, I have had the strong sense of time running through my fingers. As many of us, columnists and readers alike, know, the treatment for myeloma extracts a toll on the body even when the myeloma is quiet. For me, the lesson is to stop clutching my fist so tightly. I can no more hold onto time by grasping it harder than a child can hold water in her fist as she runs from the water’s edge back to her blanket.

This email resurfacing this month reminds me to open my fist. I am at the terminal and the plane will be taxiing up the gate shortly.