It’s never a good thing when your doctor starts off a conversation with, “I don’t know why we didn’t see this before.”

But it’s even worse when the next words out of his mouth are, “There’s a mass on your spine, and it appears to be compressing your spinal cord at C5.”

Those are the words that cause time to stop. Those are the words that echo over and over in my head, swirling around and passing through again and again, bending and distorting, but never changing.

Part of me wants to ask him to repeat himself, hoping I’ve misheard. But another part is afraid to hear the words again, as if that would somehow make them even more true.

Somehow, I manage to digest what he’s telling me -- that based on the imaging, he suspects it’s a tumor, and the only way to know if it’s cancerous or not is surgery. Either a biopsy or a removal, depending on how things look when he actually gets in there. But the bottom line is that the only advisable course of action is to operate, and it’s best that we do it soon, if I’m to have any hope of getting full function back in my hand and arm. Otherwise, it will continue to grow, and my symptoms will keep getting worse, likely until I find myself becoming a quadriplegic. And ultimately, if it’s malignant, it will kill me.

My brain is having a hard time wrapping itself around those words -- that concept. I feel like I’ve been completely blindsided, and I don’t know what to think or say. I’m just sitting there in disbelief, staring at the images on the screen -- at the small, white blob that shouldn’t be there, wedged between my vertebrae and bleeding over ever-so-slightly into the space where my spinal cord lies. Wondering why it wasn’t there before. What I could have done to cause it.

Wondering why this is happening to me.

Of course, the surgery is not without risk, he explains, and the process of removing the growth could damage my spinal cord as well. So either way, I could end up a quad.

Suddenly, I have an overwhelming sense of deja vu, as my brain recalls the memory of being told I’d broken my back and I was probably never going to walk again. How devastating that was. How I felt like some cosmic force had taken my entire life -- the one I’d carefully laid out and planned for and worked so hard on -- and stomped it beneath its enormous boot. But I found a way to recover, and I found myself and I moved on, even though it was hard. Now, I have this beautiful life -- my husband, our kids, and our collective existence -- and that boot is once again poised to smash everything I’ve ever known and turn it into something unrecognizable.

He asks me if I have any questions, and I know that I do, but I can’t seem to organize my thoughts into anything coherent. So I just sit there, and I close my eyes for a moment, then shake my head. When I open my eyes, his hand is on my knee -- a gesture of comfort that’s wasted on me -- and I can see in his face how sorry he is to have to deliver this news to me, his patient of nearly twenty years, who has already lost so much and now stands to lose even more. He knows how devastating it is. But that’s not really a comfort either. I’m not sure what would be at this point. We schedule the surgery for next week, and it feels too soon, and at the same time, not soon enough.

I leave the office feeling like the last half hour or so must have been some sort of bizarre dream -- a nightmare. I stop on the sidewalk just outside the door and feel like I have to catch my breath, because I’m suffocating under the weight of what I’ve just been told. I’m supposed to go back to work, but I don’t know how I can. I need to talk to someone.

I know I should talk to Adam, but I don’t want to say any of this over the phone. Actually I don’t want to say it at all. How do you tell your partner that you’ve got a possibly cancerous growth that’s probably going to lead to even more permanent disability than you already have? This news has the potential to change everything for me, and for us. And I have no fucking idea how to tell him.

Finally, after what was probably far too long to linger outside the door to the high-rise building that houses my neurologist’s office, I manage to get myself moving and get to the subway so I can go back to my own office. I still don’t know how I’m going to continue with my workday, but I have to try. Maybe I can at least lock myself in my office for an hour or two and try to digest this. Try to figure out what the hell I’m going to say to Adam -- my love, my partner, my soulmate, the man who’s always been there for me.

Once I’m on the train, I grip one of the poles tightly with my left hand to keep my balance as the train lurches forward, and I can’t help but wonder what it would be like to ride the subway if I couldn’t do that. I already have no use of my core, so my balance is pretty shitty outside of my chair, where my custom-molded backrest and my seat cushion work together to support me and help keep me upright. But what will it be like without the use of my arms and my hands? Without the ability to catch myself or hold onto something to keep from falling over?

I know a lot of people who are quads through my work with spinal cord injury related organizations and groups, so it’s not like it’s totally foreign to me -- and the quads I know are amazing, capable, intelligent people who lead normal lives and have jobs and families just like I do -- but I’ve never had to imagine myself in their position before. I’ve seen how they’re treated even more differently than paras are -- sometimes with disdain, even, as disgusting as that is. It’s horribly unjust and I know it and it makes me angry, and it’s part of the perception that I’ve spent a good portion of my life trying to help change through my activism. But how would I deal with being in their situation? To be honest, I’m not sure.

I’ve always had the advantage, as wrong as that word sounds in this instance, of assuming that would never be me. I was lucky; I’d broken my back and not my neck, purely because I’d hit the water at just the right angle. But now I’m faced with the knowledge that it very well could be me someday, and that notion is scarier than anything I’ve ever faced before.

I’ve been a paraplegic for 25 years -- I’ve rolled for longer than I walked -- and at this point, so much of my life and the way that I move feels like second nature. My memories of what it felt like to stand under my own power and walk are foggy and distant at best. And I know that when I was lying in that hospital bed in Chicago all those years ago, I felt much the same way I’m feeling right now -- devastated, like I couldn’t imagine what my life was going to be like. But that doesn’t make this any easier to accept.

Quite frankly, I don’t want to imagine my life as a quadriplegic, because I don’t want to be one, and that makes me feel like a hypocrite, after spending so many years trying to help others come to terms with their injury -- trying to show them they can still lead a full life. But the fact of the matter is, I may not have a choice. And that’s what’s truly devastating.

I get off the train at my stop -- lifting my front casters to get over the threshold in a move that I’m all too aware might not be so easy someday soon. When I emerge from the elevator at street level, I see the building that I know houses Kinnetik NYC about halfway down the block to my left, and three blocks from the building that houses my own office, which is in the other direction. Before I can question what I’m doing, I turn left and push myself down the sidewalk, trying to ignore how much effort it takes this morning because my arm already feels tired and weak, and I don’t want to think about what’s causing it. Then, I go through the automatic doors into the lobby, tell the receptionist that I’m there to see Brian Kinney at Kinnetik, and she nods, gesturing toward the elevator and telling me kindly that Mr. Kinney’s office is on the eighth floor, which I already know, but she sees so many people every day that it’s no wonder she doesn’t recognize me with the mere handful of times I’ve been here before.

Brian and I usually meet up for lunch at a nearby cafe once a week, but lately, I’ve had to cancel more than I’ve been able to make it, and for some reason I feel more terrible about that now than I ever have before. Maybe because somewhere in my subconscious mind, I know what I’m about to do -- what I’m about to lay on my friend, and what a heavy load I’ll be asking him to shoulder. But I need to get this out. I need to hear myself say it out loud -- an admission of truth, I suppose -- before I can even begin to wrap my brain around it.

I close my eyes in the elevator as it glides quietly toward the eighth floor, and I can feel the moisture pricking at the corners of my eyelids from the mixture of emotions that are swirling within me -- sadness, anger, frustration, uncertainty… and most of all, fear. But I can’t go in there crying. I need to get ahold of myself. I need to try to stay calm.

In spite of my best efforts, I know I’m shaking when I come out of the elevator and start pushing my way toward Brian’s office, and I’m starting to lose my battle for control when I reach the door, but I take a deep breath and tell myself to keep it together.

Brian is sitting at his computer, tapping his pen on the table, deep in thought as he studies something on the screen. The door is open, but I knock anyway, and he looks up at me. The expression on face is surprise for a split second, before it morphs into concern with a definite note of unease, which tells me a whole hell of a lot about how I look right now. He puts down his pen and comes out from behind his desk, his brow furrowed as he comes closer to me, gesturing for me to come inside. He closes the door and turns to face me.

“What is it?” he asks, and even his voice is laden with worry.

I want to answer him but I don’t know where the fuck to start. I open my mouth to speak, but nothing comes out.

“Rob, what?” I can hear the urgency starting to edge into his tone. “Is it Adam? The girls? Did something happen?”

“No,” I manage to choke out. “They’re okay. They’re all okay.” I’m shaking harder now, and I can feel myself getting closer to losing control, but I still can't say it.

“Your mom, then? Is it your mom? Or your dad?”

I shake my head, and Brian gets as close to me as he can. His voice changes to this soft, understanding timbre that I’ve heard him use before with Justin, when Justin gets really frustrated or upset about something, but I haven’t heard it in a long time, and he’s never used it with me. He’s never had to.

“Rob, you can tell me,” he says, his hand reaching out for mine, just like it would have with Justin -- to make contact, to let me know he’s here. “Whatever it is, you can tell me.”

“It’s a tumor,” I whisper, after a few beats and a series of shaky breaths, and it’s no easier to hear that word come out of my own mouth than it was to hear it come out of the doctor’s mouth an hour ago.

“What? Where?”

I hold up my hand, which is trembling, but not from the strain and muscle weakness that it has been for the last two months -- this time, it’s from sheer terror. Brian looks at it, then back at me.

“It’s on my spine,” I say softly, still not wanting to believe that any of this is reality. “Pressing on my spinal cord. That’s what’s wrong with my hand.”

I see a myriad of different feelings and reactions cross Brian’s face -- shock, worry, fear, sympathy, helplessness -- before he reaches out to me and pulls me into a hug. A hug that I practically collapse into as the flood of emotion I’ve been holding back finally breaks through, and the man that I met purely by chance more than a decade ago ends up holding me while I cry.