Go to Your Room

by Donna Poole

“Go to your room. Stay there. Don’t let anyone in. Don’t come out. Don’t walk in your yard. Don’t go to parks.”

I’m under house arrest without the ankle tether!

Mom often sent me to my room but never without a spanking first. Back in the day there was no cut off age for spankings. Moms didn’t seem to realize that if spankings hadn’t worked by a certain age, they weren’t likely to work at all. So, if you were a member of my family, you got spanked right up to high school graduation.

I knew a man who was engaged when his dad ordered him to lie over the hood of the car. He did as he was told; the dad took off his belt and gave his son what he thought he deserved.

We may shudder now, but that was not all that uncommon back in the day.

I never told Mom how much I loved being sent to my room. Blessed peace and quietness, not to mention I always had a book somewhere in my room, often under my pillow. And even if Mom ordered me not to read, I did anyway. I had a conscience as a child; it just wasn’t terribly active.

Alone in my room I could lose myself in The Five Little Peppers, a world where the mom struggled to provide for her five beloved children and never used a belt on any of them.

Or, I could be Jo in Little Women, the outspoken tomboy who loved to write. Her mother didn’t spank her or her three sisters. They called her Marmee. I thought my three sisters and I could use a mother more like that. I managed to ignore the fact that the children in my book world behaved much better than I did in my real world and weren’t driving their Marmee crazy.

Despite the frequent spankings, I loved my real world every bit as much as my book world. We had many wonderful adventures growing up, and not all of them were against the rules!

I still love retreating to my room to read, write, or watch a movie. “Go to your room!” isn’t a punishment for me, but it has been a few years since I’ve heard it, like maybe fifty-five? So, I chuckled when I read it in my patient portal.

“Go to your room. Stay there. Don’t let anyone in. Don’t come out. Tell someone to slide food under your door. Don’t walk in your yard. Don’t go to parks.” That may be a loose translation.

After yesterday’s bone marrow biopsy and Covid test, the doctors want me to isolate so I’m healthy for tomorrow’s bronchoscopy when they will go into my lungs and grab pieces of Morticia for study purposes. They can only take a few small pieces of her for this biopsy, but who knows? Maybe they’ll get her heart, and it will be a fatal wound. Won’t miss you a bit, MorTish!

Immediately after the lung biopsy I’ll have a PET scan. They scheduled a brain CT for Friday. As you may have guessed, I’m in the process of qualifying for the clinical trial! The trial will involve 130 people in the United States and Europe including five from University of Michigan Hospital.

You want the big medical terms for the clinical trial? No? Skip this paragraph. It’s arm five of an “open-label trial to assess the safety and preliminary efficacy of Epcoritamab in combination with other agents in subjects with B cell non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma.”

Epcoritamab has two strong arms; it grabs a T-cell and a cancer cell and hauls them close together.

Then the T-cell says, “Ah ha! I see you now, oh my enemy, you lurking no-good scoundrel! So your name is Morticia? Prepare to die!” And the fight is on.

The trial lasts a year, and I will need to visit the hospital so many times that I’m going to love going to my room at home. John says he loves driving Miss Daisy, but he’s going to appreciate crashing in our room too!

Do you wonder what the rooms in heaven are like? John 14:2 says, “In my Father’s house there are many mansions.” Other translations say, “many rooms.”

Will we each have our own room? I doubt we’ll feel the need to retreat from each other the way we do here, but there is something special about a place of one’s own to reflect, to read, to create.

I think we’ll each have our own rooms and be free to go there whenever we want. Perhaps we’ll visit each other’s rooms, unless the “No Visitors, Please,” sign is out.

I’ll find Mom’s room and tell her how much I love her and how grateful I am for all the times she said, “Go to your room!”