Tag Archives: health

Sep 27

I felt great! And then…

The Death card can represent major life changes, transitions, and new beginnings.

On May 31, I felt magnificent. Four weeks earlier, I’d had my fallopian tubes removed, and on this day, I was meeting my ob-gyn for a post-surgery check up. The surgery was for sterilization. I wanted to get off birth control and see what stage of the menopause cycle I might be in. But the prospect of a late-in-life baby gave me nightmares, so this was a solution. I knew that removing fallopian tubes also reduced the risk of ovarian cancer, so that made the decision easier.

I sat and watched as pregnant couples came and went through the office. When I saw the doctor, I told her I felt great. I had been intentionally (and successfully) losing weight and doing strength training. The laparoscopic incisions had healed with no issues. As we finished the brief meeting I said,  “Just so I am clear: any issues with my period going forward will be menopause related and not pregnancy related?” “Yes, that’s right,” she said. 

Reader, I could have floated out of the building. I left, passing a pregnant couple on my way out,  internally wishing them the best, but so grateful that wouldn’t be me. The sun was out, the temperature was glorious, and I was ready to move on with the next stage of life.

I should have sensed something was awry when my appetite dropped to nothing. After gaining weight earlier in the year, I had committed to being more mindful of my calorie intake. Sometimes it was difficult. My appetite has always ebbed and flowed with my menstrual cycle, so some days I would be satiated easily and other days I would be ravenous regardless of how much I had eaten. After my surgery, I was seldom hungry. I could go most of the day without eating, and then only do so because I knew I needed to. This is great, I thought to myself. For the first time in my entire life, my appetite is mild and quiet. If this is a side effect of menopause, then so be it! (Side note: Disordered eating, anyone?)

I also started having hot flushes. Not enough to disrupt my life, as some people experience, but noticeable. It only bothered me when I was in the middle of a conversation with someone and I would feel my face suddenly prickle with sweat. I wondered what it looked like to the person I was speaking with.

In early July, we were in Maine and had a glorious time. But July also holds some difficult anniversaries for me. My brother died on July 18 and his birthday is July 31. I had wanted to go to D.C. to see his headstone at Arlington, but wasn’t able to make it happen. I decided to take the 31st off to honor him in some other way.

The weekend before his birthday, I started to feel a bit blue. I was also getting hung up on existential dilemmas. Like, I’ve lost my mom, dad, grandma, brother. Part of what made life so enjoyable was sharing it with them. So now what? Of course, I know losing everyone is part of life. It’s something we meditate on in Zen. It’s connected to the First Noble Truth. It’s the basis of the Five Remembrances. But I had expected my brother to be with me for many more years. Without him, I had lost the foundational years of my life. No one to remember with me. No one to remember me. How can they all just be gone?

I cried a lot that week. I cried during a meeting with one of my Zen teachers. I cried to my friends at work. I cried to Spence nearly every day. I stood in his office after driving home from work one day, telling him how I wanted our lives to become more expansive as we aged, but with the loss of so many family members, and especially of my brother, it felt the opposite was happening.

Something else flickered up during this time, which set this apart from typical sadness/grief/mourning. I am a big fan of crying. It’s cathartic. I’m not embarrassed to cry in front of anyone. I am always in mourning, even when I am happy and feeling great. I am always filled with gratitude for all I’ve had and I am always filled with grief for losing so many wonderful people—it’s all twisted like vines around my heart. But going into August, I was also experiencing high levels of anxiety and episodes of depersonalization, and that was atypical.

I had my first experience with depersonalization when I was about 7, but was quickly able to shake my head and get out of it. At 19, I had it for a longer period of time and it was a terrible. You can find the exact definitions online, but for me, it feels like a hyper awareness of being alive. Of being in your own skin. Of knowing you’ll see out of only one pair of eyes for all your life. Everything that is normal feels strange. For me, it’s also accompanied by panic and the corresponding waves of adrenaline. I’m constantly telling myself that everything is fine, but the dread burns in my chest like a clot of lava. At 19, I pushed through it and swallowed it down, and flicked my wrist with a rubber band whenever I felt anxious to remind myself that everything was fine, that this was Normal Life, and IT WAS FINE. Eventually, I got busy with life, transferred to a new college to pursue my degree, and came out of it all. My worst episode was in 2008. It was the first time I sought help from my doctor, at the encouragement of my mom and Spence, and I’m glad I did. I won’t go into all the details because that would make this post twice as long, but it was a difficult time that eventually got better. 

And I’ve been my usual self ever since…until the start of August when the waves of panic and the feeling of depersonalization returned along with a knot of anxiety in my chest. Because I’ve experienced it before and recognized it for what it is, it was a bit less scary (much less scary than when I was 19 or 33), but it still felt indescribably awful.

Imagine:

Everything feels foggy and dreamy.

You feel like a boulder is sitting on your chest.

It seems your Third Eye has grit in it.

It feels like you’re squinting all the time.

It feels like your eyes are burning and you have to stretch them wide open all the time.

Surges of adrenaline rush over you at unexpected times and frequently.

Everything feels unusual and strange and surreal.

You feel outside of yourself.

You feel hyper aware of yourself moving through the day.

When these symptoms flared for the first time in many, many years, I wondered: is it related to menopause? I quickly turned to Reddit where I found a group dedicated to questions and conversation around menopause. I learned that drops in estrogen can cause panic, anxiety and other issues. It’s often the culprit for postpartum depression. Some women described feeling like they wanted to crawl out of their skin and go running down the street…similar to how I was feeling. I read about how well people felt after starting hormone replacement therapy. I text messaged friends who are also at this stage of life and quizzed them on their anxiety levels. I started listening to audiobooks on menopause. Finally, I reached out to my ob-gyn and—thankfully—she saw me within a day of my call.

When I entered her office, I started my story the way I started it in this post. When I last saw you in May, I was feeling great, I said. “But,” she said, sensing that my next sentence would start with that word. “I take it that’s changed.” I told her everything. She was funny and insightful and empathetic and prescribed me low-dose HRT with no issues. And reader. The change was noticeable within two days. Slowly the anxiety loosened, the panic became less frequent, less powerful. Eventually, over weeks, everything went back to my version of normal. Today, I feel perfectly well again. (And my appetite has come back to life.) 

It was a good reminder that our bodies are not static. They are magnificent machines with hormones swirling and organs beating, breathing, filtering. It’s humbling (and a bit scary) to realize how much is outside of your control when it comes to emotional regulation. During those difficult weeks, I could meditate and breathe deeply, but it didn’t alleviate the panic/adrenaline surges or the crying jags. It helped that I have a good sense of what is “normal” for me and I could tell that things were not right, and that I wanted to get to the bottom of it asap.

The message the people in the Reddit group kept communicating to each other was: you don’t have to suffer. I never thought this would be my menopausal experience, but I’m glad to live in a time when others are sharing their experiences and giving advice. I can’t imagine all the ways people have suffered in silence (and many still do).

Jul 20

The lead up to good news

SangriaMy mom was given a break from chemo three months ago. Her tumor markers were low–single digits–and had been for sometime. Her oncologist finally said, You know what, we’re going to give you a break from chemo. The numbers aren’t moving, so we may as well give your body a break. She was wary; she thought the moment she stopped chemo, the cancer would start growing again.

However, once the break started, and once she was reminded that this is the point of chemo–to get rid of cancer as much as possible so that you can stop taking chemo–she embraced it.

She gardened, she cleaned, she shopped, and she rode with me to Massachusetts and stayed with me for two weeks. (And we shopped and ate and shopped. It was great.)

When she left, I knew my brother would be visiting her within a week after getting back to Ohio, so I knew she would be entertained and not too sad about not being with me anymore (though we were both sad to be by ourselves after being together for so long).

My brother texted me this morning to say they were getting ready to go see mom’s oncologist for her three month update. I had totally forgotten that appointment was today.

I know loss and fear are are integral parts of the human experience, along with, of course, joy, happiness, love, anger. There is no way to avoid loss and fear, and there is no way to only experience joy, happiness, love. Being alive means constantly navigating the waves of these emotions, and knowing, as Buddha says, that none of them lasts forever.

So, I received my brother’s text and replied, then immediately felt like I had to put something out to the universe. Something to help mom as she approached this appointment. I am not a particularly religious person; my prayer tends to be one of gratitude directed out towards the universe, in general. But whenever I get to this kind of point in my path, my first instinct is to pray for things to be okay.

I remember, distinctly, lying in bed and saying prayers as a child, and repeating over and over “please let my mom be okay.please let my dad be okay; please let me grandma be okay. please let them live a long time; please let them know I love them.” I would say this over and over as if the number of times I said it increased the chances of it happening. (Side note: I also think, as I look back on my life and early adulthood, there is evidence of very mild obsessive/compulsive behavior, and eventually I’d like to write a post considering what it means to grow up at a time/in an environment where that behavior was viewed as voluntary and not compulsory. There was no diagnosing it; there was only the instruction to stop it. But I digress.)

Even as an adult in my late 20s, when my dad was living and dying with cancer and I was hundreds and hundreds of miles away, I would pray at night, “please let him have one more day. please please please.” And he did, and I got to spend the last 30 days of his life right next to him. But that had nothing to do with my prayer. The prayer was to make me feel like I was doing something.

And today, I received the text, and I thought I need to pray that the cancer didn’t come back. I need to ask god, the universe, anyone who’s listening to please let the numbers be low. But that’s not how prayer works. And I know it. You cannot ask for things to be different than how they are. Reality is reality and there is no altering it from moment to moment with entreaties to god. And when I acknowledge that, and remind myself, it is a fool’s errand to pray that something be different than it is, I come back to the wish for strength. Please let me be strong enough to handle the news. Please let my mom be strong enough to handle the news.

I changed my thoughts, my prayers, my wishes to that, and though it doesn’t satisfy the initial desire to drop to my knees and bargain with god, it helps center me nonetheless. I felt a bit sturdier. I reminded myself of the great time we just had together, a photo of her drinking a big ol’ margarita hanging on my refrigerator. I adore that woman, but we will not be here together forever. That is just a fact. I can barely think it without getting choked up, but it’s fact.

I first learned about my dad’s cancer due to call I received from my grandma. She left a message suggesting I call and talk to my dad. My stomach knotted and my skin felt prickly. I knew something weird was going on. When I called, he said, “I’ve got cancer, kid.” I started crying. And I’ll never forget one of the first things out of his mouth when I started crying was telling me we’d had 27 great years together, and to not be sad. I cried harder.

But he was right. He died when I was 30, and we had 30 great, great years together. Some kids don’t get as many. And my mom and I have had 40 great years together. And I hope to have 40 more (though I can hear mom say No Way to that many more years…she’s bit achey from all these years of chemo, and while she doesn’t want to go anytime soon, she also says she doesn’t want to be hanging around and in pain for years on end.)

I was at the office when I received the next few texts from my brother. When I saw it was him, my heart flipped. I knew they held the news I’d been waiting for yet afraid to hear. And then he said her numbers had only gone up a bit! They planned to let her stay off chemo for another three months. I was elated. That’s the complicating element in these health dramas… you’re filled with dread and nerves while waiting for the news, to the point of nausea, and when the news comes and it’s good, you feel giddy with relief.

And so three more months without chemo for madre. I am so, so happy, though I know we’ll all be going through this again three months from now. But for today, we’re all happy. I texted her how happy I was that her numbers were low. She texted back, me too, can you believe it?!!! We went to celebrate and have dinner. I had a sangria!

I told her she should have had several.

Sep 9

Bonus moments

I wept on my return drive to Illinois.

Specifically, I cried while leaving Newark, and making my way west through Columbus. I am sometimes so struck by grief at the passing moments, and the people who’ve passed; I often feel completely engulfed in mourning and joy, simultaneously. This world, this orb we walk upon is so damn extraordinary. It is weird and beautiful.

As Oliver Sacks recently wrote before leaving this world: “Above all, I have been a sentient being, a thinking animal, on this beautiful planet, and that in itself has been an enormous privilege and adventure.”

It is such a privilege, filled with elation and pain.

My mom. My mom, my mom, my mom.

She is my favorite person on this big ol’ planet. She and my father, both, but dad died nine years ago, so he lives with me in a different way.

She is a good listener and good conversationalist. The longer I live, the more I realize how rare are these traits. How often I’ve been with people who ask nary a question after I’ve asked them several. Conversations are hard to start that way. When I find people who are good listeners and good conversationalists, I hold on to them for dear life.

But mom. She’s a good listener and she remembers my stories. If I’ve mentioned a co-worker or a friend more than once, she will remember their names; she will remember my history with them; she will ask after them; if they were facing a particular dilemma that I told her about, she will ask how things worked out. She prays for us. For our guardian angels to keep us all safe.

Mom has cancer. She has been living with cancer since 2000. The first was breast cancer. A lumpectomy, followed by a partial mastectomy and a chemo called the Red Devil because it makes people so violently ill, and the cancer never returned. Four year laters, though, ovarian cancer showed up.

She found the cancer at a fairly early stage through a series of events that seem so random and arbitrary that it makes even a cynic like me wonder whether there is some divine power involved–but that story will be told another time.

For now, mom. Who has experienced chemo side effects that would have been fit punishments in Dante’s Inferno. It boggles my mind to see and hear some of the side effects she’s known in her life with cancer. It’s frightening how much the body can hurt.

But. She has been well as of late. Her tumor markers are rising slowly, but her maintenance chemo seems to be holding them within a reasonable level. And she feels okay. Even after chemo, she feels not so bad. She’s enjoying herself–in spite of her neuropathy, her constantly watering eyes, her leg cramps, her general achiness. When we get ready to go shopping, she pops some pain medication in anticipation that all the walking will make her sore. But, damn it, she is ALWAYS ready to go shopping.

And she enjoys herself. A song called “Honey, I’m Good” came on the radio when we were in the car. “This is the song I told you about!”she said while turning up the radio so I could hear it in the backseat. “Isn’t it catchy?” With its twangy country feel, I wasn’t impressed. “I think I hate it,” I said and she protested and told me to keep listening.

The next day it was just the two of us going shopping in the next city over. “You know, I can play that silly song you like whenever I want,” I said and she lit up and said she wanted to hear it.

On the way to the store we were too preoccupied with chatting, but on the way back she asked me to find the song. “Ugh,” I said while searching through Spotify, and she poo pooed my protest.

When the song came on, she started dancing in her seat. Moving her arms and head with the music, changing up her moves as necessary to fit the beat. And I laughed. Hysterically. If I had video, it would have gone viral. I laughed through the entire song. My sides ached from laughing. And she was totally earnest in her dancing, keeping it up until the song finished.

And this is my mom: so many surgical scars, numb feet, blackened fingernails, thinning chemo hair, yet still dancing. Still laughing.  Still making me laugh. Still shopping.

The Tibetan monk Thich Nhat Hanh had a stroke some months ago. His recovery has been challenging, but he accepts it with grace. A friend of his said that every moment he has with Thay now are bonus moments, and he’s just so grateful for them.

There have been many instances when I prepared for the worst regarding mom. There were scenarios that didn’t look like they’d get better. But then the did. She jokes that she has outlived her expiration date.

And I cry when I leave because I know a day will come when a bad scenario won’t get better. It will happen to us all, of course, but it feels more tangible when the person is going to the doctor regularly for news about her health. 

And I dread that day. Just the thought if it chokes me with grief.

Every time I leave her, I hope that we’ll have a chance for another fun visit where she is feeling pretty okay.

I am just so thankful for the bonus moments. They are precious and fleeting, and bring me such joy.

Aug 13

It’s been so long…

My last post is from four years ago! I’ve made some blogging efforts since then, typically with a theme in mind, but none of them stuck. Or rather I didn’t stick with any of them. Then I saw my good friend Cyd last weekend, who is still blogging on the same blog she’s had for awhile, and she told me that another friend of ours was traveling abroad and resurrected her old blog to document the travel, and I thought, perhaps I should just go back to the Puzzle Box. So, here I am.

I had been thinking of a number of topics to kick off this new start to the blog, but then I saw a post from earlier that made my breath catch. It’s about texting and friendships and how I learned my dear friend Kim had cancer. 

Kim died in February of 2012. I didn’t find out until April, when another friend called and asked me if I knew. She had learned by seeing some posts on Facebook that caught her attention. 

I have to admit I’m ashamed I didn’t know for such a long period of time. I texted her during this time and attributed her lack of response to her being out on the town, living it up. She was a gorgeous, young woman who had a big group of friends from work, and who would show up in photos out and about in South Florida, so it didn’t bother me that she didn’t text back. It seemed unusual because she was good about responding, but I tend to not get hung up on such things.

Though I feel bad about not knowing, I also feel confident that Kim knew I loved her. Her death was completley unexpected; she had texted me a photo of her ringing the bell for her last chemo treatment. Everything looked good and chemo was over. Her death was caused by an infection she caught later–I think it was a chemo related infection. The fact that she came so far and then that infection felled her breaks my heart.

As soon as I learned the news, I reached out to her twin sister through Facebook who said she had tried to find me at the time to no avail. She said she hadn’t even thought to look through Facebook; I’m sure she had more pressing matters on her mind than finding all of Kim’s friends and telling them what happened. 

She gave me her parents’ address and I sent them a card and told them what Kim meant to me. They replied kindly and sent me the beautiful program from Kim’s service. 

And I’m continuously surprised my how much I miss her, and how often that hole in my life appears out of the blue. I’m surprised because the last time I saw her in person was in 2010, when I visited Florida. We were not in each others’ lives on a daily or weekly basis any longer, but we had been for three years. One of our professors, upon hearing the news, emailed me to express her condolences. “When I think of Kim, I think of you,” she wrote, and I wept. We were two peas in a pod during our MFA program, both journalists interested in creative writing. When she had trouble with her marriage, she asked me for advice and then stayed with us for a week to figure things out. She included some of my zen-inspired Shannonisms in her fiction. When we were discussing Eat, Pray, Love, we agreed to head off to an Indian ashram at some point in our lives.

She was poised, calm, measured, soothing, funny, talented, a great listener, and a great conversationalist. She was the friend I knew I could call up and say, Hey! Let’s go hike the Appalachian Trail, and she’d say, Let’s do it. We talked seriously of the ashram. We were joking only in the sense that we couldn’t afford it right then.

I miss her.

Apr 2

on texting and friendships

I think about my friends often. I’ve lived in several places and have friends who still live in these places, or friends who have moved to new places, and though I may not call them each week, I think about them often. We send emails, text messages, and occasionally chat on the phone. However, I’m not a fan of talking on the telephone, and I think this is for a few reasons. First, I don’t want to interrupt someone’s day with an unexpected phone call because they may be reading, or on the toilet, or meditating. Second, I’m very comfortable with long silent pauses in conversation, except when they happen over the phone. On the phone, I feel obligated to fill up any dead space that starts building. If we were together at a diner talking to each other and we both fell quiet—no problem. Silence is golden, I say. But on the phone, silence is awkward. Third, I use only a cellphone and the connection is not always clear, or it gets dropped, and I end up talking into silence until the phone starts ringing in my hand. This happens with me and my mom, who is the only person I talk to on the phone on a regular basis and for long periods of time. Even with my husband, if we are apart, we keep our calls to each other very short. If we talk for five minutes on the phone, that is a very long conversation.

I’m a big fan of texting. With texting, you can send a message to friend and not worry about whether it’s interfering with something they are doing; they can answer at their leisure. You can schedule a time to talk on the phone by sending a text and saying, Hey, can we talk tonight? I find it to be a simple way to reach out.

This brings me to an experience I had last week that reminded me of why I’m thankful for texting, but also reminded me of why it’s good to talk to friends directly, too. For the past month or so, I’ve been emailing with a very dear friend of mine about some health issues she was trying to straighten out. Nothing major, but she had test results that the doctor could not explain. We shared experiences with each other, and I gave her some suggestions. I knew she was going to get some more tests done. Fast forward to last week, when I got a text from her that said, in essence, “Hey, remember that situation we thought was nothing. Well, it’s something and I’m going to the hospital now.” Her text included the specifics, and it was the kind of health related news that made me feel as if ice water has been shot through my veins when I read it. What struck me as interesting was that she wrote, “Sorry to tell you this through a text.” I was just glad she thought to tell me at all! I mean, she’s in the process of dealing with this news and making arrangements to get to the hospital, and calling her parents. Text messaging seems like the most obvious way to keep a friend informed who can’t exactly rush to be by her side. If I were in the area, perhaps it would make more sense to call me, but this was a way of keeping me posted, while also maneuvering through the chaos of what was happening to her in the moment. We texted for the next few days as her parents arrived, and she found out more information. When she told me in a text that she was going home, I texted her and told her we should talk soon. She called later that day. And this is what reminded me how good it can be to hear someone’s voice.

During all the text messaging, I felt dreadful. My heart was heavy; I felt impotent to help; I felt sad that I wasn’t closer. It was imagining the worse, feeling bad, googling medical information without knowing a lot of details. I was envisioning tears, fears, anger. But when I talked with her, it was just her, dealing with things the way she always deals with things—she’s strong. That’s not to say she doesn’t have those feelings mentioned above. But before hearing her voice, they were pervasive in my imagination. After hearing her voice, I realized that it’s not that way all the time. She told me everything that had happened, and I responded to one piece of information in a way that made her laugh and laugh (which made me laugh). It lifted my heart to hear her laughing. That’s the important stuff you miss with texting.