Muchness and Light

When your mama heard the way that you'd been talkin', I tried to tell you that all she'd wanna do is cry.

So it has been a rough couple of months. Honestly, I don’t even know the last time I checked in, the last time I wrote something that wasn’t schoolwork or workwork or some ranting, raving text or email that I hoped would perfectly and pointedly enunciate whatever the hell has been trying to claw its way out of me. Heart, brain, mind, soul… all a big confusing blob of Idon’tevenknowwhat right now.

Radiation was a downer, but I got through it. All of this activity with my thyroid has sent my hormones into overdrive. Concerns about my health have sent my head spinning, and three days in isolation, binge watching Game of Thrones, sure as heck didn’t help.

But I have, at times, been a raging bitch. It’s not that I am imagining things to get upset about; it has just been far too easy for me to explode about anything and then find myself curled into a sobbing ball of inconsolable self-recrimination.

In the middle of a tense discussion about it a couple of weeks ago, Rango told me that he doesn’t understand why I am so drawn to chaos.

“It’s like you need the tension.”

He doesn’t get it. He says he prefers to be in the middle, at even keel and as balanced as possible.

“I don’t trust extremes,” he continued. “I don’t like euphoria any more than I like chaos.”

But me? I thrive in chaos. Euphoria is my drug.

“I need the tension to know I’m alive,” I replied. “It’s the only way I know I’m not numb, and I don’t ever want to be numb to my life again.”

I challenged that I abhor the happy medium he espouses.  But he has a point: I am drawn to extremes.

Lately, though, there seem to have only been extremes of bad, of anger and disappointment and outrage, over the slightest things. I can blow a gasket if the towels aren’t folded right or if the boys didn’t clean the table.

Last night, I was adamant that I’ll be kicking Max out of the house when he’s 22, because he can’t hold down a job or finish school or take care of himself—all because the kitchen was a torn apart by a ravenous, irresponsible, 15-year-old boy.

For the last week, I’ve been hearing other people say things, often random things that aren’t directed at me, that seem like messages the cosmos intends for me to hear. There was a gathering of the Castration Committee at my house over the weekend, and all three of the present girls said something very specific about themselves that I also needed to take to heart.

Yesterday, I was driving to work, in a total funk, listening to my favorite podcast, Death, Sex & Money (with Anna Sale). The latest episode was an interview with author and Buzzfeed senior editor Katie Heaney. Anna had interviewed her a couple of years ago after she published Never Have I Ever, her memoir of then-lifelong singledom. Now dating and now openly gay, Heaney talked about what it was like to let go of much of her apprehension about dating when she realized she really might want to date women instead of men.

No, I didn’t need to get the message that I’m really a lesbian, no matter how often the Castration Committee and I plan to swear off men and just be together forever. There was actually a lot in her story and in her words that jumped through the car speakers toward me. (That happens a lot when I listen to Death, Sex & Money. That’s why it’s my favorite.)

Sale asked Heaney if there’s anything she feels like she needed to be taught in her new relationship, having never been in a relationship herself.

“Not really, no…. Not taught. I think that I… and I am still learning this… I have to learn how to not catastrophize every disagreement or every feeling that comes to me that isn’t a one-hundred-percent joyous one. You know, I always thought that I was above the sort of ‘white knight’ narrative and thinking that a relationship was going to improve my life. I don’t think I thought it was going to improve my life, but I thought that I had struggled so long to find it that once I did it would just be perfect or easy…. I was naïve about what it really means to spend that much time with someone and still be happy but still have days where you’re just like, ‘Ugh, I don’t feel good, I don’t feel good today, this is not my favorite thing that’s going on today,” and I think early on I would get very nervous about that, because I was putting a lot of pressure on both of us.”

Dude.

Is Katie Hearney living in my head?? (I’m sorry if you are, Katie. It’s a cacophonous place.)

Sale did the same thing I did, questioned whether or not “catastrophize” was a real word, or whether Hearney’s mom had coined it in reference to her daughter.

Turns out, it is a real word. It’s an irrational thought that something is much worse than it actually is. According to psychologist John M. Grohol, catastrophizing can take two forms. The first takes a current situation and turns it into catastrophe—a small mistake at work will result in your firing. The second form takes thoughts of future happenings and creates a reality around the anticipated catastrophe.

Guilty as charged, on both counts.

In the very beginning of my break-up with Bounder, when I saw the potential of so much going badly because of something he felt I had blown out of proportion, he called me on it.

“You’re always looking for the worst thing to happen, waiting for it to blow up, because you just know it’s going to. Things aren’t always that bad, Sass.”

Well, he was right and not, of course. So was I.

I am incredibly analytical by nature—I am a good Virgo, after all. And my job requires me to be hyper-analytical, looking not only at what is wrong, but also at what might be wrong, to anticipate a response and a rebuttal and a reply to the rebuttal, all with the end goal of being right. I am very good at my job, but the cacophony in my head is often just the buzz of this computation of possibility and plausibility in a way that is extreme, even for me.

So while I’m analyzing the minutiae of every relationship I have, often to my own detriment, I don’t know if I’ve ever been able to give this one with Rango (or any one) a fair and healthy shot. He noted that I am constantly scrutinizing everything, waiting for it to break down and fall apart.

And with another year of hormonal chaos ahead of me—so says my doctor—I don’t know if either of us has the energy to try to keep up with my thoughts.

My crazy train can be gloriously and devastatingly exhausting. I am always on the go, and the next year will be no exception. There is not time to slow down, between work and school and the kids. But somehow I have to find a way not to expect the worst, even though I have planned for it so carefully.

I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to just stop being me. And I am afraid of taking away the glorious if I abandon the devastation. I am afraid of being numb again.

I don’t have an answer. I have a recommendation for a book, The Mayo Clinic Guide to Stress-Free Living, and I have ordered a copy. I am not one to turn to self-help books, unless someone very special recommends the book. This time is no exception, and it feels like the cosmos wants me to read something.

So for now, I am waiting patiently for Amazon to deliver my copy. I will not expect it to get lost in the mail—I can always go to the book store for another one if that one never shows.

But I will try to take those thoughts when they come and let them be that, just thoughts. They are not action, they are not reality, unless I make them so.

 

Enough to make my systems blow.

Almost three years ago, I underwent a total thyroidectomy to remove the second half of my thyroid gland, the first half having come out in 2006. During the intervening years, I was on a replacement hormone to help prevent the growth of benign nodules and to curtail the symptoms of Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis. But when a nodule expanded to almost 6 centimeters in diameter within about 6 weeks, it was time for the invader to go.

But Invader Zim has returned.

For more than a year, I have felt like crap. My GP said he thought it was the stresses of school and work and kids and divorce. My bloodwork looked normal. In reality, part of my thyroid was growing back, and I was experiencing all of the symptoms of hypothyroidism—fatigue, anxiety, insomnia, weight gain, dry skin and hair—that come with Hashimoto’s.

Although my bloodwork looks normal still, my endocrinologist and I made the call to rid Glamazon Island of this invader force yet again. After a five-needle-stick biopsy, there’s still no definitive answer, though he thinks it’s benign, giving it only a 5-7% chance of being malignant. Either way, I’m not a surgical candidate—one cell left behind would likely regrow new tissue again—and thus I go today for radioactive iodine treatment.

The 2+ weeks of a low iodine diet have been difficult but manageable. No dairy, no soy, no iodized salt, no se salt or seafood or sea products, no chocolate, no egg yolks, no potato skins, no red dye #5, no rhubarb, only certain beans, and only 6 ounces per day of meat. A lot of fruits and vegetables, and a lot less coffee thanks to no cream, and I’ve lost almost 10 pounds.

I’ve also been a gripey, exhausted freak.

In the midst of that was recovery from last month’s wrist surgery and a cervical epidural injection and work and kids and school, though I dropped back my class load dramatically.

Rango has been incredibly supportive, even when I’ve been a raging lunatic. The fluctuating hormone levels have made me agitated and fatigued. But I get up every day and do what I have to do.

I’ve mostly made light of it, joking with Max about whether or not I will turn into She Hulk after this is over. In all fairness, if anyone would be excited to get some new superpower after radiation exposure, it would be me. But I’m getting the lowest possible dose for this procedure.

It still scares the hell out of me.

Talking to Queen Frostine yesterday, I finally came unglued.

“I’m scared,” I admitted through welling tears. “I know it will be okay, but I’m still scared.”

She, like everyone else, has offered to do anything to help, but there’s really nothing anyone can do. Rango is here to prepare food and make sure the cats are taken care of while I spend 72 hours in isolation. I’ll be locked in my bedroom for three days, and then I have to carefully clean everything I came in contact with, to make sure I wipe off any radiation-tainted sweat and skin oil. All I can do is hang out and watch TV and sleep.

I sent the boys for some summer visitation with their grandparents in Alabama, and I miss them already. The cats will freak out and bang on the bedroom door for the entire three days, I’m sure. And Rango and I will only see each other from at least three feet apart.

Maybe that’s what’s most frightening for me, really, the shutting down my life. I can’t do anything during isolation. I can’t clean the house or paint the bedroom or work on my computer, since I’ll just leave radiation everywhere. I can sleep and eat and watch TV.

I hate being still, but that not being still is exactly what contributed to my getting sick. The constant drive for the last three years to always be moving forward and being productive has left me exhausted and not well. Even after my wrist surgery, when the doctor recommended I take two weeks off from work to recover, I refused and demanded to be allowed back within a week, even though it meant doing everything with one hand.

But this is where I have to admit that doing everything one-handed is far easier than doing everything single-handed. I am forced to rely on other people at times, and I absolutely hate it. My parents and Rango and some friends who will help cover the boys over the next couple of weeks while I have doctor’s appointments. The boys themselves, who have to be prodded and pushed to do their chores, but who also seem to get that Mom will get sicker if she keeps doing everything herself.

I’m going to take a shower and go swallow a pill of radioactive iodine and come home and hole myself away like I’m supposed to. I will let the world go on about its business while I go one about my business of resting and letting the I-131 do its job so I can get back to doing mine.

So please send me good thoughts. Send me updates of what’s happening in the real world.

And in two weeks when I can go back on a regular diet, send chocolate. Please. For God’s sake, CHOCOLATE!

 

Yes, I promise, you are loved so don't give up.

A couple of months ago, I met a guy online.  We hit it off and agreed to a first date, which turned out to be fantastic.  Schedules were a little tough to sync at first, but we did manage to eek in a couple more great dates.  He was cute and smart and funny.  We had long, engaged conversations and fantastic chemistry.  Even though he was clearly into me, I knew pretty quickly that I didn't have substantial romantic interest in him.  (I never even got around to giving him a nickname.)

I was mulling how best to go about ending it when the court date came up for my divorce.  I was so caught up in that week that I didn't think much about it when I didn't hear from him. 

Eventually I did get a text, though, asking how court had gone, how I was, etc.  I caught him up quickly, while I was in the middle of working one of my three part-time jobs, and then asked how he was.  He finally admitted that he hadn't checked on me because he'd gone on a week-long bender. 

Red flags flapped ominously in my breeze.  He knew my history of falling for alcoholics, and I knew his history—what he'd been very adamant was an ancient history of non-alcoholic addiction that had been long-ago dealt with.  I knew I was ready to end the romantic relationship, but I liked the guy and wanted to be able to be his friend through the hard time he was having.  I offered to be a sounding board.

Another week went by with no word from him.  I was both busy and not unhappy about having a little distance from it.  Then came the voicemail, telling me he had gone on another black-out binge and was hospitalized in a detox unit.  He asked me to call him.  He texted me the next day, asking if I'd gotten his voicemail. 

I replied that I had but that I had to distance myself from the situation and from him. 

"You know my history," I texted.  "I am clearly an enabler.  This is more than I'm willing to deal with right now.  It's unhealthy for me and unhealthy for my children, given the energy shift it will create in me.  I feel like a cad for not being your friend through this, but I just can't be around this right now.  I wish you well."

Alcoholics aren't always, or even usually, the people who drink all day, every day and can't hold down a job.  I've never dated a man who sat on the street corner, sipping anything out of a bag.  (At least not more than a couple of social times.)  My history, however, is peppered with functional alcoholics—those who lead productive lives filled with work and family and friends, who seem perfectly normal to anyone outside the closest inner circle.  It wasn't just that they were alcoholic abusers, they were alcohol dependent. 

When an addict of any kind begins the process of recovery, there are several paths they can take.  Going it alone, private counseling, community-based therapy and support groups.  Each has to find their own path. 

In my personal experience and through my research for Persona Non Grata, there are two main thoughts about recovery.  On one side, the addict needs to give all of their time and energy to recovery, at least initially and for some indeterminate amount of time, in order to stabilize and come to terms with themselves and the immediate consequences of ceasing substance.  Different substances—whether alcoholic, heroin, cocaine, food, etc.—will have different effects on biochemistry, and withdrawal can be a bitch no matter your poison.  Some addicts choose to immerse themselves in the process of recovery, sometimes to the point that the unavailability they showed their loved ones is just as prevalent even though it's in the name of meetings and sessions and getting better.

There's a second line of thinking, in which the addict has been a selfish bastard for so long that they need to immediately begin rectifying that damage to the people who've paid the highest price for it thus far.  It's time to step up and show those people that you really do love them; it's time to start making amends for your asshole behavior of the previous weeks and months and years, balancing them with your own needs and therapy. 

Often on the other side of an addiction is an enabler, someone who excuses and justifies and cleans-up and forgives the selfish, destructive behavior in the name of loving the addict.  Someone like me.  I've been known to give so deeply of myself to maintain the status quo that I would find myself frazzled and exhausted, a shell of who I was supposed to be. 

If recovery for the addict includes stopping being a selfish asshole, recovery for the enabler is the time when they have to learn to be a little bit selfish, to take care of themselves before they care for the addict. 

It feels completely unnatural.

When you are structured around this idea that "care" means self-sacrifice, you'll do anything for the people you love.  Every detail of your life becomes about how you can help this person you adore, how you can make things easier so that they can accomplish their goals, even after recovery begins in earnest.  It's all too easy to find yourself still in that pattern of compensating for the addict who has floundered for years. 

But isn't that what you do for the people that you love?

If they're young children, absolutely.  But even adults who were badly parented or never learned the life-skill of self-care are still adults; they have to be responsible for themselves. 

It is hard as hell to turn away from someone you care about, leaving them to deal with the process of recovery without you.  You, who has taken care of everything for so long, who has loved them like no other and for reasons and in ways maybe no one else would ever understand... you are abandoning them in their greatest moment of need. 

You're a fucking heartless bitch. 

As the enabler, you have to heal from this process of addiction, as well.  You have to learn to care for yourself and how to devote time and energy to those who really need it, not just those who refuse to do it for themselves. 

Given my history, my telling Bender (okay, so I named him just now) that I couldn't be a part of his process not only took my support away and forced him to stand with one less crutch, it allowed me to drop that fucking crutch, too.  My hands are free to hold something else.  Something more important—myself. 

Even though that romantic relationship wasn't hugely impactful on my life, it came at just the right time to remind me that I am important in a relationship.  My needs, my care, my wants are just as important as the other side's, even and especially when that other side is addicted. 

Being cognizant of this, being fully aware of how necessary it is for me to make those healthy decisions means I have to follow through.  To continue the behaviors and patterns when I absolutely know better makes me no better, but also no worse, than the addicts I have loved. 

Even after Bender, there is another friend who is maybe in that process of sobriety and recovery.  It's likely, though I don't know for sure because I had to make the decision to cut this person out of my life.  And it is hard.  Every single day, I want to know how they are, to hold them and listen while they talk through what I know is coming.  Some days that connection still feels as strong as it did when we met so many moons ago. 

I want desperately to reach out, to ask how they're doing.  I can't, and it sucks.  Some days, it hurts like hell. 

They're no more irredeemable than I am.  We've both always known that change would have to come from within them, no matter how much support I offered or shoved or emotionally blackmailed them into taking.  But taking is not accepting, and I had to stop bashing my head against that beautiful brick wall.

As much as I hope they are taking the time to really face this and heal, I hope I am able to turn and face my own role in my life, my own choices to excuse and justify and encourage—all in the name of love.  This time, I have to love me, in the same active way I have tried so fucking hard to love them. 

Keeping them out of my life is supposedly the best thing for me.  Supposedly it's also the best thing for them, but it smacks of abandonment and dismissal in the ways that feel most brutal to me.  I hope to God, every day, that there's a healthy way forward for us, together or not, in each other's lives or not.  I hope to hear that they're okay, that they're doing their work and dealing with what has been so long neglected.  I hope I do the same. 

Above all else, I hope we both can one day see that we are loved, not because of our roles in that dysfunction—not in spite of them—but for the people we are on the other side of the addiction and the history and the hurt.

 

May all your troubles soon be gone.

I'm having a hard time looking forward to Christmas this year.

I had the flu in the days leading up to Thanksgiving, which culminated in an urgent care visit Thanksgiving Day.  (I'm feeling much better, though still not quite 100%.)  The boys left that evening for their weekend visitation with their father, and I spent most of those days on the couch with my favorite blanket, watching Netflix. 

Normally, I would start getting the Christmas tree up while the leftovers were heating, but I didn't really feel up to it.  It would've been nice for the boys to come home to a blank tree, ready for them to decorate. 

I seriously debated skipping it altogether. 

Physically, I've been exhausted, and dragging the trees (We normally have two.) up the stairs was more than I wanted to manage.  But the thought of unwrapping each of the ornaments, of reliving twenty years' worth of memories was really more than I could handle.  Seeing each year's picture ornaments, or the ones bought for the boys in the years they were born, made me want to puke. 

Last year was my first Christmas without DH since 1992.  The separation was fresh and contentious.  I cleaned out the ornaments, setting aside the ones that were his or had been gifts from his mother.  They did eventually make it out of the house with him. 

I clearly remember wrapping the boys' presents in the den floor by the tree, crying my eyes out because I was doing it by myself for the first time ever.  He wasn't there to help choose their gifts or argue whether we had spent too much.  He just wasn't there anymore.

This year, I couldn't stand the thought of doing it all again.

Of course I didn't tell the boys any of this.  They knew I was sick, but they were gone for a second weekend with their dad, so I had time.  Tricky, 9, suddenly suggested we have nothing but homemade ornaments this year.  Max, 12, readily agreed. 

So we have spent the last few days making paper garland and covering cardstock candy canes in glitter glue.  We wrapped their few, comparatively meager gifts and put them under the tree.  Through it all, they are happy and laughing and hugging each other and me. 

I generally wait until they go to bed to cry about how I wish it were different, for me and for them, about how I hate that their lives have been so thoroughly skewed in the last year.  The guilt and lament can be overwhelming at times, though the tears make the white lights of the tree sparkle even more. 

I know what's important is that we are together and generally happy and generally healthy.  But this is not what we promised them.  This is not the life they, or I, were expecting. 

Somewhere in this, we are finding the beauty in all of the ugly.  We are finding ways to enjoy small moments, fully and together, because that is all we can afford.  We are finding the joy in each other and in this smaller, modified unit we have created over the last year. 

There is miraculous wonder, in that we have survived and in some ways thrived.  This year, just to get through the holidays in one, emotionally-healthy piece will be the true miracle. 

I can't stand myself. I'm being held up by invisible men.

Sassafras O'Malley has double-blind confirmation of a new superpower: the unmitigated ability to attract alcoholic men. 

She's not especially thrilled to have this talent, though I suppose it's an equal and opposite reaction to her ability to dazzle small animals and children (and stupid people) into submission with her disco ballness. 

All joking aside, it's shocking to my system, just how well I can not see the addiction sometimes, how I can have come so far toward self-awareness and integration and still be so willing to ignore the flashing red signs when my heart is on the line. 

The thing about addicts is that they are selfish: self-centered, self-aggrandizing, self-deprecating, self-loathing, self-mutilating, and self-destructive.  As Bounder said to me recently, quite ironically, it's not that they don't want good things in their lives—they aren't trying not to love or feel or be available to those that seem to matter most to them—it's that they can't; they are so selfish in their addiction that they are unable to see past themselves to the secondary and tertiary damage they inflict on those around them. 

It's one of the hallmarks of addicts, to deny themselves the things and people who are truly good for them, to push out anyone and everyone who might be able to serve as a lifeline to reality and healthfulness.  They will instinctively surround themselves with people who support and facilitate their patterns of addictive behavior, who tolerate and even sometimes encourage their excuses and their inconsideration and their lies—enablers.

My refusal to enable the addiction of men I loved was, in part, responsible for the demise of previous relationships.  It's always more complicated than that, but addiction has played an important and sometimes torturous role in more than the last twenty years of my life.  When I wrote at the end of the year about what I didn't want going forward in my life or a new relationship, addiction was part of that list—mine or anyone else's. 

And yet, here I went again. 

I don't get it, either.  In my head I can understand how the addiction, especially alcoholism, works and impacts the addict's entire life, including the people closest to them.  But deep in my soul, I cannot fathom how a person could be in such desperate need for something, or someone, and flatly refuse it when it's presented to them on a shiny, silver platter.  When you most need it, you're given a gift from the universe of exactly what you both need and want, and you are openly thankful for that—until you realize it won't follow you to the bottom of a bottle.  Then you turn your back on the good in exchange for the bad, like an ungrateful, petulant bastard?

I don't fucking get it. 

What I do understand is the other side of it—the heartbreak and the rejection and the feelings of being worth less than a fucking bottle to that person who says they care about you.  The dismissal and the isolation that come when they start drinking.  And it's dramatically juxtaposed to the attention and the connection that's there when they're sober, when you let yourself think for just a moment that just maybe this time you will be enough, be special enough, to help them see the light and to give them the goal and the strength to break out of those patterns.  But those moments become more and more fleeting as time goes on with the addict, until it's a constant daze of distance and excuses and emotional neglect that borders on malice. 

Hot Pocket says it's not that I'm worth less than that bottle; it's that he feels he deserves the bottle more than he deserves me. 

Growler says she understands why it feels like I will never find another person to love, who loves me back in a healthy way, but that it's just not true, no matter how hard that may be to see right now.  (I'm not looking, but I wasn't looking this time, either.)

Queen Frostine listens patiently while I rage about how I'm done with men, about how I hate the catch-22 of being myself and attracting damaged men or going back into my own box just to make a man comfortable in the hopes he loves what is ultimately a shadow of Stephanie. 

And I'm pretty positive I don't want a romantic relationship with a woman.  Women are crazy.

Yet again I find myself spinning, trying desperately to touch solid ground and calm the nausea, to stop the sickness that is surrounding me and invading every fiber of my being.  I'm trying again to catch my breath, the wind knocked out of me simultaneously by love and heartache.  As much as I may want to fix this, to use my incredibly unrelenting resourcefulness to make this okay, I can't.  This is not my battle, no matter how hard I fight.

Maybe it's not about me, but it sure as hell still feels like it's me that's taking the brunt of the damage.

So I'm pulling back again, shunning men and shunning that sector of my heart.  I was pretty sure I was ready this time, pretty sure I was healthy, but I feel like I missed something.  My trusting, naive, hopelessly-romantic nature let me, encouraged me, to believe the unintentional whispers of another alcoholic.  I can't do this again.  I really would rather be alone that to go through this another time.

 

A couple more for breakfast, a little more tea, just to take the edge off.

I'm hurting right now.  A lot.

A couple of weeks ago, I had to get ready for a visit from Hammer.  I hadn't seen him in well over a year, and we were gearing up for a couple of days in Atlanta, then a couple of days in Mobile for Mardi Gras, then another day in Atlanta before he flew home.  The boys and I spent that Sunday cleaning up the rec (wreck) room, making space for our friend to sleep and be comfortable in our home. 

The next day, I went to the gym for the first time in a couple of months.  With everything happening with the divorce and kid illnesses, I hadn't been making the time for working out, and I could feel it.  I knew better than to push too hard, so I was (I thought) very careful about using less weight, adding a few more reps, and not overdoing my cardio. 

I felt pretty good.  For a day. 

By Wednesday morning, I knew my neck was a little out of whack.  My left shoulder was hurting, and there were spasms in the left rhomboid muscle.  I'd been through this before—as recently as July 2012—and knew it was one of the damaged discs in my neck.  I hit an anti-inflammatory and a muscle relaxer and went on about my day, as carefully as I could.  The boys and I picked up Hammer and brought him home.  I hoped everything would be better the next day. 

When things didn't feel better on Thursday, I called my orthopedist.  She's the non-invasive spine specialist who's treated me through two bouts of cervical disc problems beginning in 2008, as well as the horrendous lumbar disc debacle of 2010.  She shot me in the neck with five shots of steroid and scheduled my seventh epidural injection for the following Wednesday.

I felt pretty good.  For that day. 

Hammer and I went out with Growler and Big Cexy, cavorting through Atlanta until the wee hours of the morning.  I was smiling and laughing and mostly behaving myself, though at times I knew it was obvious that I didn't feel well.  By the time Hammer and I got to Mobile the next evening, I was miserable.  But it didn't matter what I did or didn't do, within reason; I was going to hurt no matter what, so I kept pushing forward.  When we went to see Galactic at Soul Kitchen, I alternated between sitting and standing.  I didn't dance.  But I still went and enjoyed it as best I could.  Same for the Mystics of Time parade the next night.  I had research to do for the next Junkture book, and it could only be done at Mardi Gras in Mobile.  I stayed sober and found what I needed to find. 

Jump ahead a few days, and I'm waiting patiently for epidural number eight, scheduled for next week.  The seventh one a week ago helped, though not nearly as much as I would have hoped.  She'll go in at a slightly different position this time in the hope that it will provide better relief.  I'm living on muscle relaxers and pain killers and anti-inflammatories, and it sucks. 

The pain never stops.  It never quite goes away.  There's muscular pain from the spasms, which is what will generally wake me after no more than four hours of sleep.  But there's also constant, nagging nerve pain that runs constantly from the bottom of my neck into my left shoulder, through my elbow and into my thumb, which is almost always numb.  Pain killers don't really touch that.  The best to hope for is that they take the edge off, but that ends as soon as the drugs wear off, which starts a whole new cycle of wanting or needing medication. 

After spending half an hour finding the most comfortable position in bed, which is on my back right now, I'll tumble into foggy sleep.  Usually my left arm is over my head, to take some of the pressure off the nerve, but then I wake a few hours later because the entire arm is throbbing in process of falling asleep.  I move it, which is excruciating to both my arm and my neck, and then shift again in my sleep—which usually triggers another spasm.  I try to turn on my side (how I usually sleep), but I can't take the pressure on the right or the left as my spine curves to adjust.  For the thousandth time, I think I'll try it on my stomach, but that means turning my head one way or the other, starting a whole new sting of torture.  So I go back to my back. 

It's a horrid little dance that goes on all damn night.

What scares me the most is that this is exactly how I was in the summer of 2010, when my lower back was so screwed up that I couldn't feel my left leg most of the time.  I was in constant agony for three months.  I'm only two weeks into this now.  I can't imagine having to do this for many more weeks.

I try to keep going.  I still hang with my friends or go to the grocery store or cook dinner.  I have to; I don't have a choice.  But being Mom right now usually involves some irritability and constant discomfort.  I'm also hypersensitive to the steroids, which screw with my hormones and make me angry and sad and sometimes feeling a little psychotic.  For more than a couple of nights, I've found myself stuffing all of my emotions into my mouth. 

All of this feels so damn familiar, just like it did two-and-a-half years ago, right before I hit my breaking point and shifted my entire life so dramatically.  Except now there's no DH roaming the house to help take care of me.  I'm mostly on my own with this. 

Cue the cycle of self-recrimination and fear. 

Maybe it's my body's way of telling me to dial it back a little bit, to take a break from living my hard-fought lessons and just be still again.  My body's memory of everything that came before is screaming at me, though, reminding me that I have to fight against this pain, to keep the damage at bay so it doesn't run amuck again.  My body is afraid of going back. 

The middle-of-the-night panic is the worst, when I wake in a cold sweat, momentarily paralyzed from the pain.  Instinctively, I feel for DH on the other side of the bed, and I remember he's just not there anymore.  So the crying starts again, and I find myself roaming the dark house, circling in a slow, awkward dance with all of these ghosts.  Waiting impatiently for the pain to abate. 

"That's what you promised to do," one whispers in his voice, "to be there for the other one when you couldn't take care of yourselves."

"You could've had him here if you hadn't made those choices," I hear in my own ephemeral voice. 

I rage at the voices, and at myself, until the medicine kicks in and slows the spasms, dulling the pre-dawn pain for just a few more hours. 

They're right.  And they're wrong. 

Yes, that was part of our contract.  Yes, it could've been different.  But my own choices would not have changed his, no matter how hard I tried.  He won't be there when I'm 80 and frail, but in a lot of ways he wasn't there when I was 38 and frail.  Should I have been willing to trade 40 years of ignorance and discomfort for the promise of elder care?  To keep myself from feeling afraid of dying alone? 

There was never going to be a win-win, no matter how hard we wanted it. 

So I'll stick to my doctor's plan of action, aggressively but pragmatically treating this latest bout of damage.  It will get better eventually, though it's frustrating not to know when that may be.  And no matter how hard it was, or how hard it will be, I still know I made the right choice.  Even if it still makes me cry. 

Tonsillectomy Update

It's been a really rough week in our house.

My youngest son had a tonsillectomy on Wednesday morning.  Tonsils out, pain meds in. 

He started vomiting a little while after we got home that afternoon. 

By six o'clock that night, the ENT was advising me to take him to the emergency room for IV Zofran.

"Overreact much?" I replied unexpectedly.

I called because I knew the vomiting was keeping him from absorbing both fluids and pain medicine.  I didn't want him to get dehydrated or to be in pain.  I figured the ENT would call in a suppository or something.

He explained that there wasn't much wiggle room with his size and weight, that he would get dehydrated quickly.  He needed a second IV for the day.  "You're not overreacting.  I can't do this over the phone," the doctor said.

By 8:30, my son was whimpering, his teeth clattering as his whole body shook in pain and fear and utter discomfort.  He cried out and squeezed my hand as the nurses deftly slid a new IV catheter into his small, artificially-numbed hand. 

All I could do was watch and grit my teeth. 

He was discharged a few hours later but started to vomit again before we'd even gotten to the parking lot of the hospital.  IV number three came a little while later, after more vomiting and an abdominal x-ray.  This time there was no numbing cream.  I am grateful to the pediatric ER nurses for knowing how to do this quickly. 

He was eventually admitted to the hospital for two nights and was happily at home playing Minecraft by Friday afternoon. 

But it was horrible watching my young son in so much pain.  I can't imagine how vomiting felt after a tonsillectomy, especially when he'd effectively had no pain medicine for about eight hours.  The terror of not knowing when it would end, of not knowing if he would ever feel better... it was wretched.  All I could do was sing to him and let him squeeze my strong, warm hand with his tiny, trembling one, while I stroked his hair and whispered that it would be okay very soon. 

I was thankful to have the outlet of friends by text and Facebook to vent quietly away from him.  They knew I was all but paralyzed with terror, though I don't think he had any clue. 

I wrote on Tuesday night about how I was worried about this procedure.  I'm not a worrier usually, and I'm convinced it was my psycho senses prepping me for what was to come.  I didn't know then what it would be, but I could sense that something wouldn't go right. 

Thankfully we were able to come home on Friday, still on oral Zofran and pain meds.  He slept for eleven hours last night, in his own, safe bed.  He'd originally said he wanted to sleep with me but then changed his mind at the last minute.  I was still close enough that I could hear him if he needed me.  He was quiet until he woke this morning, whining in throat pain.  This was the part I'd expected.  This was the recovery I'd planned for.  This part sucks but is easier than the other. 

Thank you to everyone who said a prayer and a wish and a good thought for my baby.  Thank you to Children's Hospital of Atlanta at Scottish Rite for having an amazing, caring, anticipating staff.    This week has sucked but is already better, and I couldn't have gotten through this mentally and emotionally intact were it not for so much support. 

Sometimes it's hard to breathe at the bottom of the sea.

I hate to be sick.  Really.  It's a huge inconvenience.

It's not fun like it was when I was a kid, when I could stay piled up on the couch for a couple of days and be attended to.  I could spend my day watching game shows while my mom did her Mom stuff around the house.  The best days were the ones when my mom was in school or working, and I would get to stay with my grandmother.  She would bring me chicken soup and crackers and ice cream sandwiches and sit and watch General Hospital with me.  There were no dishes or laundry to be done—only Stephanie who needed to be coddled because she was sick. 

 

I remember once when I was about nine.  I got a really nasty case of bronchitis.  The water heater was on the other side of the wall in my bedroom closet, and it had sprung a leak.  Water was seeping very slowly under the carpet in my room, though no one knew it for a while.  It was finally discovered and fixed, though the seeds of illness were already airborne.    

It seemed like I told my parents for days that I was feeling bad.  They would tell me (like I tell my boys now) to brush it off, it was probably just a cold.  They finally realized I was really sick when I popped a 103 fever and couldn't breathe.  I remember being allowed to be sick on the couch in the middle of the living room, instead of being relegated to my bed.  I remember thinking even then that my dad felt bad that he'd thought I was making it up. 

But now when I get sick, I just have to suck it up and go on.  Once my children were born, I had no choice but to carry on.  Kids don't really understand or care that Mommy feels like crawling in a hole and dying—they just want a snack. 

A few years ago, my then-two-year-old got an ear infection.  He was on his second set of tubes, but these bacteria were just that strong.  Unfortunately he sneezed on me, and on DH, on a Sunday.  By Monday we both had pneumonia.  DH was traveling, which meant I had no help with the kids and that he was just out of town and horribly ill.  The only saving grace was that my then-six-year-old didn't get sick, which was probably only because he'd had his tonsils out just a couple of months before.

Thankfully, a couple of great neighbors came through and helped with the boys when I needed it most.  It took a solid couple of weeks to get over it completely. 

Walking pneumonia two summers ago sucked but was tolerable.  The kids were in day camps, and I was working part-time.  I didn't even miss any work, but it still took a few days to feel a hundred percent.

Two Thursdays ago, I started feeling bad at a swim meet.  My throat was a little scratchy, and my head felt suddenly heavy.  I thought I was probably coming down with a cold.  The next day, I was feeling worse and very, very tired.  I hadn't had much sleep, though, and I'd had a huge workout at the gym on Thursday morning.  I still really didn't think much about it.

I piled up on the couch that night with the boys, watching some movie, and I fell asleep around 8 p.m.  I remember being chilled and that DH moved me to bed sometime that night. 

I slept for twenty-six hours.  Almost straight.

I was chilled and feverish, and I ached like I have never felt before in my life.  I would wake up long enough to haul my crying ass up from the bed to take some ibuprofen.  I was better on Sunday and got some things done.  But the chills started again that night, and then I realized my chest hurt.  I knew it was pneumonia again. 

A chest x-ray on Monday confirmed my fear, and a shot in the ass helped (supposedly) to speed the healing process.  I was given more antibiotics and some cough syrup and an inhaler, all of which I needed.  Almost a week into it, and I still need them.  The fever and chills were gone pretty quickly, and they took the body aches with them, but the fatigue and the labored breathing are taking longer to combat.

The worst part is the combination of meds.  The narcotic in the cough syrup makes me a little loopy (read: high) as it does its job.  The Albuterol in the inhaler opens up my lungs but makes me agitated and restless.  And it's not like they really cancel each other out; each one still has its effect that I'm feeling fully.  It's an unpleasantly necessary combination. 

But the real pain in the ass is that I can't do anything.  I've managed to make sure the dishes and laundry were caught up, in part because the boys have to help with those anyway.  But I can't cut the grass or clean the house or play with the boys in the pool.  And I can't go to the &*^%ing gym!  Either I'm feeling bad and can't breathe well, or I'm so amped up from the medicine that I can't do anything very well. 

Being sick like this makes me ineffectual, and I hate it. 

A friend emailed me today about a project we're working on.  I told him I hoped to get it finished this coming week after I'm feeling better.  He said, "In order to get better - you've got to THINK and SAY that you'll be better.  So do."

I know it's that whole positive thinking, visualization thing--and I know he's right--but it's easier said than done when I feel like hell.  So today I'm telling people that I'm better but not yet good.  I'll be good this week, I'm sure.  It's a waiting game of slow healing. 

I have some not-so-little boys who are old and capable enough now to get their own snacks while Mom's resting on the couch.  I even let them choose the afternoon movie, because daytime television sucks.  And every morning they ask me how I'm feeling and give me a hug and a kiss—seconds before they tell me that they're hungry and look at me expectantly with their beautiful blue eyes. 

Suck it up, Cupcake.  Mom Duty never ends.