Tag Archives: waiting

Season of the New Year

07 Saturday Jan 2017

Posted by in Blog

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , , , ,

The day before New Year’s Eve, I got up from an indulgent post-breakfast nap with my throat on swollen fire. I had a column of nasty pain running up from about where the esophagus hits the stomach, all the way up to my jaw, and it was even going into my left arm a tad.

“GERD,” thought I. But it seemed unfair. It had been a small breakfast. And sitting up wasn’t relieving the pressure in my neck. It had never made it to my jaw before. Tried TUMS, tried milk, and sent the kid to the store for Mylanta. By the time he got home, I was feeling some better, but it was still bad. Mylanta did jack. That was when I . . .

. . . started Googling. Heaven forfend I act on impulse and call 911 or something. For GERD? It was most assuredly bad GERD. I’d had most of those symptoms before. But . . .

. . . women and chest pain, we’re weird. Both in the way it hits us, and in the way we handle it. That is to say, our cardiac symptoms are not classic, and ever since menarche, we are conditioned to shrug off pain. Tell you a secret, guys? We think you’re big, wussy babies; we tell jokes behind your backs about how tough you’d be with period cramps. Having a baby, ma’am? Walk it off!

SO there I was, fully dressed and ready to go–and not ready to go. My son, however, snarled at me, which is unlike him, so we . . . called a cab. No fuss here, just GERD.

They let us sit for ten minutes in the ER, which told me the admissions clerk must be just as impressed as I was with my chest pain, especially since I only got about a C+ on the little test she gave me, consisting of male-normed symptoms of The Big One. But they took me in, gave me an EKG–which I aced–and took some blood. I didn’t even ask them why, because that’s what they do: collect samples just-in-case, and send in some brave soul to put in an IV.

Welp, I failed the blood test. The resident was freakin’ perky as he told me that one of my heart enzymes was 50 times normal: My heart muscle had been damaged, and I had had a heart attack. Small, but undeniable.

“Oh, shit,” I said, and started to giggle. I mean, a heart attack? I’m 54. True, I have every other major risk factor except being a smoker (let’s not be excessive here), but it just seemed so surreal.

Because it was a three-day New Year’s weekend, I spent it in the hospital, waiting for the slightly fancier hospital’s center for angioplasty to open on Tuesday. I had many sticky things placed under my left boob and a heparin drip in my inevitably screechy IV. As holidays, despite visits and a good view of the fireworks, it sort of sucked.

Tuesday came, however, and I started off with an echocardiogram, which is a sonogram of the heart. I was a little appalled to learn that the heart doesn’t politely and sedately tap out a simple one-two; it dances sort of gelatinously, and the Doppler picked up several different rhythms, including “du-wacky-du-wacky-du.” What was this thing in my chest, anyway?  Then I had the angiogram.

I thought I’d known what it was and what it was up to.Wrong. Right coronary artery was 95% blocked. In the words of the OR nurse, I was “one cheeseburger away.”

This is having your guardian angel scruff you seconds before you go over a precipice, only it’s THE Precipice, and why not have gone there in the Sooner rather than Later?

Kinda leaves you with a question that wants answering, that does.

Advertisement

Like Me! Please Like Me!

16 Monday Feb 2015

Posted by in Blog

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , , , ,

I’m hunting for a writing group. I’ve been advised to do this by many people, and now I’ve been semi-forced into it by WHAM (Whole Health Action Management). For those who didn’t click the link, this is a group I help run which meets for two months and has you choose a goal in the middle which you then pursue with peer support. It works pretty well–you’d be surprised what having to report on your new good habit will do for keeping it going. In the past, I joined a gym, made some progress on the meditation issue (which we’ll address here some other time), and now it’s time to enlarge my social circle. Aieeee!

So I went to Meetup, found a likely group that didn’t sound too scary, admitted my desire to commune with other sufferers and confessed my fetish for Victorian and genre novels. And now the moderator has to see. Oh dear. As if sending out query letters wasn’t bad enough.

That’s not going too well, either. One of the few people decent enough to get back to me at least cared enough to have his form letter say that he found my query interesting, but was overwhelmed with work at the time. SO much nicer than the standard refusal, which intimates that surely somebody somewhere will like your piece of dreck, but not them, no sirree Bob!

Well, we shall see on both counts. Meanwhile, I have been triggered into the dilemma of Wanting People to Like Me. I thought I was over that. In my salad days, I was a sex & drugs bimbo, seeking approval through suitable application of my ample cleavage. Bless the few people who saw past my people-pleasing facade and realized I was smart and funny too. Nowadays the whole mechanics have changed, and smart and funny’s all I’ve got: My cleavage is still ample, but even if I could tuck in selfies with my QLs, it would rather count against me.

“Smart and funny” is an almost infinitely harder job than “high and easy.” Smart requires treating my brain well, and being careful what I program it with. Funny chiefly requires NOT saying half the stuff that comes into my head, and this I owe to the beautiful Angie M. back in high school.

She was a senior, I was a freshman, and I had a massive schoolgirl crush on her, which she was kind about. And one day in Drama Club, after I’d called out something that the recipient took in the wrong way (which, hindsight admits, was the only way possible), Angie hauled me aside, sat me at her feet and said, “Look, Honey.” (I was in my mid-twenties before ditching this nickname, although some of my best friends are grandfathered in.) “You and I are Scorpios, and a lot of the time we think something is funny–but it’s not funny at all to other people.” Ah, puppy love. If only this 17-year-old mentress could have kept re-programming my brain for years: I heard her, and I never forgot it. I apologized to the girl I offended (who got over it in, oh, about two years) and have tried to watch my mouth ever since.

I can’t tell you how much of Max I’ve deleted because my beta reader pointed out that I would possibly offend somebody. Sigh. And this is important, because I want people to like my book. To like . . . me.

Part of me sheeping HATES THAT, but it is how it is.

 

Unmoved

01 Tuesday Oct 2013

Posted by in Blog

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , ,

I’m caught at work with nothing to do. Well, comparatively. I could be researching new groups; I could be working on my quilt block; I could even slip back to my office where I can do my tiny data-crunch of the people who visited the center in September. But I can’t concentrate on the first two and the third is awkward: I’m sort of invisibly babysitting a recovery group from the receptionist’s area.

I’m not part of the group officially for two reasons. For the first, it’s 90 minutes long, and that’s too long, even with coloring. (A perk of being a peer specialist is that people understand my need to focus on doing something like abstract artwork during meetings to hold down the wiggles and help me pay attention.) For the second, I’m not the official facilitator, but being Frau Direktor, it can sometimes be funky with group dynamics, and this group is new and a little wobbly.

But I’m here because earlier it looked like a peer would be present who’s been having a hard time recently. Last week, she threw a tantrum during a group–and that one was being run by an honest-to-john psychiatrist–and stormed out. The facilitator made it clear that it needed to be Handled somehow, if at all possible. So when I popped my head into the program to see how it was running and saw her here today mumbling to herself . . . uh-oh. So basically I stayed behind this afternoon in the role of possible official bouncer–but she’s not here after all. Just as well.

You may be thinking that it’s politically incorrect of us to have standards of behavior–after all, we’re all mad here–but I assure you, it’s necessary: People acting out can be frightening and triggering to other peers as well. Getting screamed at was one of the things they left off my job description during the hire (possibly because it was also done by the guy hiring me, who is thankfully no longer with the firm) but it is my job. As is calling security. Sigh. But not today. Today I try not to eavesdrop and sit here blogging to you. (Not a total loss. I’m able to touch base with building maintenance about the rock somebody threw through our window this morning. Sigh again.)

Meanwhile, back at my life: We still haven’t moved–but November 1 is now the ticket. It’s reached a level of unreality by now–the stress coating my soul has coagulated like the cheesy mold that coats a long-forgotten cup of coffee. I know on a purely intellectual level that it will be violently dug into by the cleaning brush of packing in two weeks, because by then I’ll be attending two 40-hour weeks of intensive training. In other words, I’ll be exhausted and cranky. I still haven’t finished the prop paintings I’m doing. Moving then would be a cruel joke, but we know the universe loves to laugh.

I’ve decided to participate in the zaniness of NaNoWriMo for the first time this year, which will force some sort of writing out of my head. I’ll link some bits here. And I haven’t forgotten about Damascus! m’ not dead yet! I’m getting better! I feel happy!

Waiting

29 Wednesday May 2013

Posted by in Blog

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

, , , , ,

My 22-year-old son moves in with me tonight. As I write, he is boarding in Cincinnati and will show up at Logan in about two and a half hours. I hope. My son is a lot like me; he has adventures, and with the whole state of Ohio to have them in–whoa nelly! Anything could be happening, and since “phone” is still an exotic concept of which we speak, there’s nothing I can do but wait.

As always, there are complicating factors–maybe it will thunder, maybe it won’t, and maybe Logan will get a wild hare up its ass and throw down some dramatic security measures for Mrs. Obama, here today to talk to the Marathon Bombing survivors.  But as of now Delta assures me things are A-OK, and I refuse to hear any threatening music in the background. Instead, I wait here at the office until it’s a reasonable time to go wait at the airport.

I won’t bore you with the details, but I’ve been waiting for eleven years. After a court battle, custody of my two children was split between the parents, and through an unusual combination of power, spite, and the judge’s overlooking the concept “visitation order,” I’ve seen my son four times in the last decade. I can never forget burying my face in his curls that one last time before getting behind the wheel to take his silent and gray-faced older sister back to what used to home, and would be spun into a two-person home again, but for a while was just the place where we lived with an empty room.

That was eleven years ago, and after adventures, my daughter and I now have a happy (if too-tiny) home which we share with a cat and two ferrets. The adjustments will now have to go the other way: buying more food and toilet paper rather than less, having to house him on the couch instead of letting odds and ends fill a room without an occupant.  No more slouching around our bachelorette pad semi-clad. Our family is bigger now, with all the excitement and stress that entails.

My own adjustment has to go the other way too. In order to keep it together at least for a few months, I sat as hard on all that horrible ugly pain as I could. I’ve survived many nightmares, but this was the worst.  I couldn’t dissociate away from it, and nothing helped–nothing except focusing on my daughter, who was dealing with her own trauma over a judge who hadn’t believed her and had taken her little brother away. Shutting myself down was all I had, and it wasn’t healthy.

I have to open the cupboard, now that it’s safe, now that it’s over. As I write this, my Pandora is playing the title music from Star Wars–which seems only appropriate. I’m one of those annoying people whom John Candy apostrophized at the end of Planes, Trains and Automobiles: “What? Was your mother a key grip?”–I have to sit through all the titles or It Doesn’t Count. The resolving chord, that weird little MPAA symbol. (My tribe has no apologies now that movies have occasionally started rewarding us with extra scenes as Easter eggs. Bwah ha, oh daughter pacing in the lobby!)

I waited. Am waiting. They’re running the list of post-post-production assistants, and my son’s plane has left Ohio (with him on it oh please) and is in fact running twenty minutes early. Tomorrow I will have the nuisance of tiptoeing through a morning routine that doesn’t involve lolling on the couch, and in the days after that, so many little annoyances involved in getting my country mouse installed in the Big City. Many annoyances. Sibling opera. Crowded house. Can’t wait.