Mirror, Mirror On the Wall

Well, hells bells, the time has come to stop avoiding a personal evaluation. How is my physical health, mental health, spiritual health etc... As I said on my Life Coach page, https://www.facebook.com/CoachLorelei , I am giving myself a B- because that sounds better than C+

It has been 10 weeks since my abdominal hernia repair surgery, so I am about as outwardly healed as I am going to get. I have to get back on track with both Weight Watchers, group exercise and especially weight-bearing exercises. It takes little to nothing to make my weight creep back up. My blood pressure is running a little higher. Pain and stiffness are not staying at manageable levels, and my moods are all over the map. I need the daily exercise as a stress-buster. All these physical and physiological symptoms tie directly into mental health. Without a new, fall and winter brand of workout schedule, I will procrastinate and achieve very little, only leading to further depression. 

Spiritually I am an ever-evolving creature, whose relationship to God and the earth will never be set in stone. That part of me is tied to servant leadership. I have done very little as far as taking new initiative at the church where I have been for the last couple of years. I have gone from the person who has been everything from an infant in the nursery, senior warden, to the janitor, in the church I had belonged to for the 50 years prior, and was called to fill in some duty about every sunday. I didn't complain much at the time, but when the atmosphere began to change for me, I went to another church where I was sitting in the back as nothing but a practicing member. Recently I signed up to participate in nursing home and hospital visitations. The point I was trying to make is that it is about the servant part, and I am trying to wake that up again. I have to once again move outside of a comfort zone, and push myself to stay in balance with what the world needs from me. Or I need from the world. Hell I don't know, I just do better all over when I am trying to feed the sheep. I got that handed down from Mom, Dad didn't care a whole lot about anyone's sheep but his, until he was older, and the losses with aging helped level the playing field. I am also going to seek some continuing education as a minister.

So, I just dropped in to see what condition my condition was in. (Thanks Kenny Rogers and The first Edition) It is somewhere in the B- range. I had a legitimate reason to back off and reevaluate where I was, and where I was headed, when I was blind-sided by yet another surgery, but that time is past. I am asking the WOman in the mirror to put her money where her mouth is. Cowgirl Up!

Lonely Is As Lonely Does

If you knew what I'd been through,
You'd know why I ask you:
Have you ever been lonely?
Have you ever been blue?

~Billy Hill

Lonely is the night when you find yourself alone

Your demons come to light and your mind is not your own

Lonely is the night when there's no one left to call

You feel the time is right--(say) the writin's on the wall

~Billy Squier

Hear the lonesome whiperwill
He sounds too blue to fly
The midnight train is whining low
I'm so lonesome I could cry
~Hank Williams

Only the lonely
Know the heartaches Ive been through
Only the lonely
Know I cried and cried for you

~Roy Orbison

     How many songs have been written about being lonely? I probably could have spent a week digging them up, but the truth is that it comes up as a song, poem, play or movie so regularly, because it is such a common human condition. 

     Recently my husband and I went to see the movie, Hope Springs. In the film, Meryl Streep's character admits to her therapist that being in the house with someone you cannot connect with, is a worse kind of lonely than being completely alone. Raise your hand if you know exactly what she means!

     This type of loneliness is about anger and resentment. It can build to a point of extreme unhappiness, and couples may talk around it all the time, but let anger manifest itself disguised as another topic altogether. In other words, saying "I hate the way you buy me household appliances as gifts for me" may actually translate as "I wish you would touch me and actually see me standing here lonely, than ply me with gifts to bring me comfort." It just doesn't do the same thing. Women can be equally unavailable for intimacy, and this creates a fireball of shared anger that can consume a relationship with no shots fired. A bloodless coup that neither side totally understands. 

     Communication is key, and is also difficult if you have not allowed those lines to remain open. Whichever partner starts the no intimacy wars, the other will usually eventually retaliate, and it spreads like cancer through all aspects of the relationship. Now I hate the way you eat your food, I resent your underwear in my bathroom floor, and I'm checking your cellphone and Facebook history, because if I am not getting any, who is?

    Of course not all loneliness is about sexual vs non-sexual relationships. Someone can belong to a church, club or other organization that they can't really crack into, or a work situation where you feel invisible, even though you do your part for the team. You most certainly can be lonely in a room full of people. Is it your fault? I'm a fan of taking responsibility for your part in it. Have you really tried, been friendly to everyone, made yourself accessible? You project the negative vibes you are feeling, and it makes a cyclical problem, that will lead to a break down in the environment. As you can be too involved in work, you can also be too unengaged. Your shyness can be read as snobbery. Again, these are mostly communication, or lack of it's, fallout and away from the camaraderie  situation that you had hoped for. You have to look at situations as where you are, how you got there, and does it lead where you want or need it to be?

     As for the loneliness that comes after a separation, through divorce or death, that is one that can take plenty of time to heal. You will know when it is time to move on, if you are caring for yourself, and listening to your whole body. If you cannot get past that point without help, there are many qualified counselors and ministers, and have a medical doctor rule out organic causes of depression. 

     Reach out when you have those deep feelings of loneliness and isolation. Even if you begin by venting your feelings with a pet, start talking and allowing others access to you, in whatever increments keep you comfortable. Man is not an island, not ideally anyway.

     

Make The World Go Away

Make the world go away
Get it off my shoulder
Say the things we used to say
And make the world, make it go away

You may hear that in Eddy Arnold's voice, but I hear it sung in pure Elvis. No matter, everyone wants to make the world go away at some point. In certain situations this is to be expected, but wanting to withdraw for days, weeks, months, even years for some people, is a common symptom of real depression. There are many causes of depression, some organic, caused by hormonal changes, brain chemicals not doing what they were meant to do, etc... I don't have the expertise to explain all about brain chemistry, but that isn't the type of depression I necessarily want to talk about, although like the rug in the Dude's room, it ties it all together. 

The kind of depression I know the most about, personally, comes from dealing with chronic pain. Everyone that I know that deals with pain on a daily basis, experiences depression at some point, and for others it is a constant presence. Much of it is about grieving the loss of your old life. The death of your old life, the hopes and dreams that defined your life before the pain can be as hurtful as the chronic type you wake up to every day. I only speak for myself, but it has helped me to track the trajectory of that pain.

After my first car accident, my primary pain sites were neck, shoulder, arm, hand, right side, and lower back. It was so severe at times, I would curl up in a fetal position and moan, and it was all I was able to do. My treatment on many levels was substandard. My GP didn't want the responsibility of dispensing narcotics, so he sent me to this young sports medicine "pain expert" He was about the worst choice for me possible. He would write an rx for 30 hydrocodone at a time, no refills, and then be completely unavailable when I ran out of meds. I was using as prescribed, for the most part, but if you wake at 3 am, in agony, I don't think the first thing you think of was when was the last pill, you just take one. Or two. Point is this young guy, who may have been a hero to his young athletes in sports medicine, didn't have a damn clue, as to how to treat my pain. He fell insanely short of treating me. Not only that, but I was treated very rudely by a local pharmacist, like I was a street junkie, wandering into his store in search of a dime bag of heroin. I had no clue that I couldn't use two pharmacies. Mom used to have several, and went with who was cheapest on what rx. Everyone knows that pharmacies are linked by computers, to keep people from getting multiple scripts from multiple doctors. When it got back to my regular Dr's office, his crazy bitch office manager, that I didn't even like when we were in Jr High together, had the nerve to fire me as a patient, no questions asked. 

 So now I am really screwed. I went for my next chiropractic visit, and knowing that he knew my doc; I just broke down and told him everything. He was the good guy in that part of the story, and he offered to call the doc and straighten things out, which he did, God bless him, and he also gave me the name of another friend, a very popular pain doctor. He is another hero in my story. He took my pain seriously, and he gave me steroid injections, which helped a lot in the beginning, later less so, so I stopped them. He still reviews my medications and treats me like a regular human being, not a drug seeking pathetic one. 

So in the category of life ain't fair, another moron runs into me with his truck. That is twice in 4 years that someone that shouldn't be driving carelessly runs into another car, that happens to have been me. In this case a mighty sideswipe that pinned me in the car. He never even got out seeing if I was okay. I had the good sense to call an ambulance this time and go to Hendricks for x-rays. I had just learned to live with my current chronic pain, and now I had newer, worse symptoms. In the interim between the wrecks, I also was diagnosed with ovarian cancer, and underwent a full hysterectomy. Shortly after the second wreck, I was diagnosed with degenerative disk disease in my lower back. So after acupuncture, traction therapy, too many pills, and so many other accompanying issues, I am literally again in a world of hurt.

How do you cope with pain so severe? How do you keep it from owning you and ruining your life, when everything you do revolves around whether you can get out of bed that day, and if so for how long, and how much mobility will you have? I don't presume to know how you will cope, but I can share how I have, even though it is piss poorly sometimes. First I will own up to having flirted pretty heavily with the idea of suicide at one point. This was mostly after seeing the surgeon who diagnosed my degenerative disk disease, thus ushering in a two year period of waiting for my disability claim to come through, where my attorney told me even if I could work, I shouldn't, because it would jeopardize my claim. I couldn't. No way no how. Anyway, I decided that if I was unable to cope any longer, I would use the Hemingway method, putting a shotgun in my mouth and pulling the trigger with my toe. I figured it was a sure thing, unlike swallowing a bunch of pain killers that might leave me in a vegetative state, in need of new kidneys. This was unbelievably comforting to me. Not because I would ever do it, for many reasons, but the idea that there was always a choice was comforting.

I also talked to my new nurse practitioner, same doc, new nurse, and she suggested that I do another round of physical therapy. Not as done previously, but as a new evaluation of what was physically possible to me. I had always loved certain exercise, especially weight training. All the surgeon thought I would ever be able to do is walk in chest high water. I did that, but it wasn't near as much stress busting as what I required. I was assigned this traveling PT, who was very thorough and very motivational. He helped establish some parameters, so that I got back into the gym, and slowly made my way back to group exercise classes. How do I force myself up and out to the pool or the gym? I want to go. I am motivated to go because it helps me stay mobile. And I am a social person at heart. I have spent a great deal of time self-quarantined in my Goddess Cavern, and I know when I have to break that cycle and get up and out. 

I exercise. I pray and I meditate. I hang out by the HSU pool and read, and then maybe jog some laps in the pool. I try to manage my medication. Perhaps that is one advantage of having earned my master's degree in counseling and child development, I know a lot about addiction.  Also having been married to an alcoholic for 7 years, I knew the progression of the disease. So I don't always take the maximum medication. It would not kill the pain anyway. The closest I have ever been to being pain-free, was when taking my regular meds and wearing a Fentanyl patch. I was also drooling on myself. I knew that if I got dependent on something at the strongest level, that breakthrough pain was eventually going to happen, and there would be no place to go for relief. So I try to deal with what I have. I do all these things and I try to participate in the world, and realize that whatever I do is my choice.  There is damn little I can control in my life anymore. Seems like even less day by day. But I always get to choose how I respond to any stimuli. I can be bitter and petty, or I can choose to try and be compassionate, because we all have crosses to bear. I still throw my little hissy fits and pity parties, also coping skills, but eventually I pull my head out and try again to lead as normal of a life as possible. I use logotherapy on myself. If you are interested in how that relates to your choices in life, read Man's Search For Meaning, by Dr Viktor Frankl. It is a short paperback read, but very helpful to people stuck in circumstances that they cannot change, whether that be in a prison cell or in a body that is wracked by pain. Find someone to talk to, someone that would listen to you. There are numerous online communities if there are no live compassionate people nearby. It may help to keep a journal or blog, if for no other reason, than to have a place to spill your guts.

You Can't Always Eat What You Want...

You Can’t Always Eat What You Want…
Or can you, and at what price? This blog should not have been so difficult to write. I can listen to clients speak of their food issues all day and it isn’t especially painful to hear. I have also been to a few OA meetings with a friend, years ago, but I just didn’t get it. In other 12 step programs the person just stops doing the behavior. Alcoholics try not to drink, gamblers stay out of casinos and private parties, and sex addicts don’t solicit sex acts. But people who have food issues cannot choose to just not eat. If your issue is anorexia, you will die faster by not eating. If your issue is overeating, starving will backfire on you. The body will slow down and conserve what fat you have, so weight loss is not the result, not for a while anyway.
What’s the big deal about food anyway? We all have to eat, so why not eat what makes you happy and just go on about your business? You may well get away with that behavior into your twenties, or if you are male and have always been a thin person with a quick metabolism, that may work well into your fifties. If you are happy eating healthy foods in healthy amounts then you probably don’t have food issues, unless you develop some sort of allergy or intolerance to foods. That isn’t what I want to discuss here. I well know that undereating, binging, purging, starving are the other side of the coin of eating too much of the wrong foods, and are more similar than different, but I need for this topic to be about overeating and making unhealthy choices.
There is nothing fair about having the type of body that likes to hold onto weight and gains it easily. Genetics are usually a factor in that, as well as the nurturing we receive in the form of food. How family meals were treated when you were growing up is very important in helping us form our own concepts about the value of food. Some children always had to clean the plate at every meal, regardless of whether they liked every food choice on it or not. We were encouraged to eat, but not bullied about food. My Mother, God bless her, would let me have a peanut butter sandwich if the family dinner was liver and onions, meatloaf or any number of other meals that I didn’t like. I was a finicky eater then, and that is still true today, although I choose from a wider spectrum now than then. I was a skinny kid until puberty. Puberty was ready for me long before I was ready for it. I was in no way prepared for all that fleshing out, softening and other bodily changes that at the time I would have been much happier to skip altogether. I resented the ways in which my male friends began to treat me differently, in the same way that I resented my body turning against me and morphing into something strange and even monstrous to me. I spent those years from grades 5-10 always wishing I could drop those 5-10 unwanted pounds.
Somewhere at about fifteen or sixteen I leveled out for awhile. I still wanted to drop a few ponds, but I could deal with it. At eighteen, newly married and moved to Waco, I started what would be my 2nd flirtation with physical fitness. I got to a weight and level of fitness that pleased me. I still liked way too many fatty foods, fast food, salt, soft drinks, but I stopped eating meat. We didn’t eat meat for about 3 years. I did eat eggs and dairy, and a whole lot of beans. At 20 I got pregnant with Dana, and stayed on the ovo-lacto diet lifestyle throughout pregnancy. I was an Avon lady in Waco, and I walked my territory every week, into the 4th month of pregnancy. Then Frank graduated from technical college and we moved back to Abilene. It was the heart of summer in NW Texas, and I stopped moving around, did very little walking or anything else, but try and keep cool in front of the old swamp cooler we had in our tiny house. I wound up gaining 50 lbs. during the pregnancy. It was in no hurry to come off either. I had some post-partum depression which my husband was clueless about. He didn’t want anything to be different, still wanted to party with his friends and be a kid. I enjoyed our friends too, and as I had never had much to do with nutrition, the weight wasn’t about to budge.
Dana was born in November, and the following January we moved to Burnet, TX. Looking back I see that he was restless, even with his education and skills, he was just a kid in the eyes of most employers and he never got enough hours to do much more than subsist. His parents arranged for a job interview near where they lived, and he got the job. I stayed in Abilene as long as I could, just Dana and I. I didn’t want to move. My best friend was here, and pregnant also, and my Daddy lived here and we had a little house and I just did not want to move again. The seeds of discontent had been sowed after the 1st year of marriage and going into year 3, I actually would have stayed alone in that little house, but I desperately wanted Dana to have a two parent home, so I moved to a bigger house and a bigger salary to live on in the small town of Burnet, TX.
I didn’t know anyone there, except for my in-laws, who lived 15 miles away on Lake Buchanan, and Frank’s first cousin Kevin, who worked near where we lived. We lived in that house until Dana was around two years old. I managed to lose the weight sometime in her second year. I think it happened chasing a toddler around all day. Plus I went back to work. I worked at a small private day care where Dana also attended, so we were in the same place monday through friday. I also realized a lifelong dream. I started taking classes at the Austin Community Movie Company, a grassroots organization where classes were taught in everything from screen acting to screenplay writing. I immersed myself into that world, and it became my life. I worked m-f, took care of my precious baby girl and started my first beginning screen actor’s classes on saturdays.
I loved that lifestyle with all my heart. I think it made up for my unsatisfying marriage. I still wasn’t eating nutritious foods. I was an uninspired cook, and we had gone back to eating meat, smoking, and really only exercising when we would go to his parent’s house and waterski on Sundays. And then the unthinkable happened, a family doc discovered a disparity in Dana’s lungs. It wasn’t anything he was familiar with, or prepared to probe, so he sent us to a pediatric lung specialist in Austin, Dr Allen Frank. He was a gift from God. He bonded with Dana, she trusted him and he loved her. She was diagnosed with a lung issue, a birth defect is what he believed at the time, so a few months later, a lobectomy was performed. They removed the lobe off her lung and told us all would be fine. Of course it was not. Another 3 months down the line and she was diagnosed with a rare form of lung cancer, and 2 years of chemotherapy was the treatment protocol.
That was a difficult period, to say the least. My husband coped with alcohol, and became a full-blown alcoholic. I left my day job, as Dana could no longer be around children and their germs, and took a night job as a bartender/cocktail waitress, in the private club attached to the Highlander Inn Hotel. Drinking and eating the restaurant food became a regular routine. So did eating diet pills to maintain weight. I moderated my drinking, because I could, and my husband obviously did not, so somebody had to be a responsible adult parent. That is not to say that I presented model behavior, by any stretch of the imagination. I started and stopped smoking numerous times during those years. Mostly I didn’t smoke, had quit right after Dana’s diagnoses of cancer.
During this insanely turbulent time, remember that I was only 22 years old myself, I continued to take acting classes, and at one point took voice lessons from the awesome Kimmie Rhodes. One of my few regrets in life is that I didn’t stay with those lessons longer, but I was so emotionally ill during that period that many of my decisions were questionable. One of the things I did right was to also drift into amateur body building. I was still so desperately trying to fill the hole that my failed marriage had left me with, and most of those efforts were not healthy, but bodybuilding was a Godsend of sorts. I had returned to that old pattern of always needing to lose those 5-10 lbs. and yo-yoing accordingly with my weight. 
Fast forwarding to years later, divorced, remarried and pregnant with my second child, my son, Mason, and it was déjà vu. I gained 50-60 lbs. with him also and have never made it down to pre pregnancy weight. Many fad diets, flirtations with different eating styles, and the weight increased to needing to lose 45-50 lbs. instead of that measly 5-10. I know much more about nutrition, spurred to learn by high blood pressure, high cholesterol, chronic pain from the degenerative disc disease, and other nagging health issues. I got on the Weight Watchers band wagon, and have experienced some of the first healthy weight loss ever. I have a long ways to go, and I still have problems on the weekends staying with my number of points. I still want to eat what I want to eat, and struggle with portion control. Eating to live and not living to eat is still a challenge. This is so not the end of the story for me. I still use food as comfort, as love, as emotional rescue, for so many things that aren’t really about food. I have belonged to a health club for years, and I stay active with water aerobics and a group exercise class. I try to stay motivated and dodge between the cracks left by depression episodes. I try, being the key phrase. I try.

Pain Changes Everything

Anger and agony

Are better than misery

Trust me I've got a plan

When the lights go off you will understand

Pain, without love

Pain, I can't get enough

Pain, I like it rough

'Cause I'd rather feel pain than nothing at all

~3 Days Grace

    

Pain changes everything. I am talking about chronic physical pain, but it colors every aspect of your life. Physical, mental, spiritual, it affects all of you. It changes the very chemistry of your brain. How can you bear up under the constant nagging pain that never really leaves your body? Even in moments of great joy, ecstasy even, it waits in the background, baring its teeth.

I have a large group of friends, via social networking, who share the difficulties of living with pain on a daily basis. It limits their mobility, some to the point that they rarely leave their homes. I have met a couple of them, and I have a couple more that I know right here in town with me.  We have anxieties over pain levels, and sometimes we are afraid that we cannot bear the load of living, on top of coping. Coping is not really living. It is like the commercial for migraine relief, that talks about living a maybe life, and that is exactly what it becomes. Maybe I’ll join you for lunch or meet you for a drink next week. It depends upon how I feel when I wake up that day. Some of us even look quite well, and others do not understand how someone can not look sick at all, yet be unable to retain a “normal” life. This frustrates us even more, because we know that you don’t understand, and there are never adequate words to describe what it feels like with parts of your life gone forever. I used to love to waterski. I used to enjoy motorcycle riding and nice long hikes. I used to…

Sometimes I don’t even like the person that I have become. I don’t complain all the time, because I know that people get tired of hearing it, but sometimes, my focus narrows to the point that all I can feel, all I can see, is that fucking pain that will not leave me alone! So we hibernate. We withdraw into our own little worlds, curl up in a fetal position and wait for the pain to level off, so that we can at least cope with it. My coping skills are actually pretty good for someone who has dealt with pain every day for 11 years. It was bad enough at times that I would fantasize how to make it go away forever. It calmed me tremendously to know that I always had that choice to say I can’t handle it anymore, I’m outta here! I’m not suicidal by nature. I know that it would be the last of the last resorts, and I have spoken with several counselors over the years about this technique. It actually has some mental health benefits, but thankfully I have not needed it for a number of years.

For the most part, I have lived with it long enough to build a life in spite of it. I have my family to sustain me. When they are not around, my animals give me a reason to get out of bed. There are feelings, moods, activities that I miss so much that it creates pain on top of pain. I try not to dwell on it. I am able to put all that out of reach when I am working. It is not about me then, and the focus shifts to the client. That is one of the coping skills, to busy at least the mind on someone else’s issues. There a many different coping skills, none of which work all the time.

I would be very interested to hear about how other people cope with the fear, the anger, disappointments, frustrations and physical aspects of pain. Please weigh in if you feel so inclined. I’m sure this is not my last blog about pain. Sometimes it is all I can think about. The eyes always tells out the soul.

All My Exes Live In Texas

As I have mentioned before, I tried this blogging thing a few years ago. I kept one at the old Yahoo site, and a few over at the mostly defunct Myspace. They weren't bad, they just lacked direction. The same could probably be said for me at the time, but adjusting to not being able to work was a long and difficult process. Anyway, for those of you who didn't read those, no biggie, not much to explain to put you on my page.

Sirens on the Catclaw is a bad pun of sorts. Lorelei was the Siren of the Rheine. The beautiful mermaid, who sat on a rock, in some pretty treacherous waters, sang and brushed her long hair, luring sailors onto the rocks, and to their deaths. There is a Lorelei rock in Germany, and it comes from this very old legend. In Abilene, Texas, where I was born, there are no running rivers. There are a series of creeks, sometimes flowing, sometimes not, and a few small lakes, nothing to write home about. The one closest to my house is Cat Claw Creek, which one also may pass on the way to nursing home row. Old Anson Road has several nursing homes along its length, and the sound of sirens is a daily occurrence.

I had my share of “starting over” opportunities in Abilene. My brother Steve joined the Army and went to Vietnam as a medic. He was killed in action in 1968. My family of origin began to unravel. The threads were already loose and that was the beginning of the end. My parents got an opportunity to trade our small home for a larger home, only a few blocks away. By the spring of 1970 my parents had dropped all pretenses, and were getting divorced. I dealt with the loss of my brother, my sister moving in and out, parents changing houses, and dating other people. My world was blown apart. I was 10 years old. Both parents remarried, Dad for 5 turbulent years, and Mom stayed with my Stepdad for nearly 20. My Mom and Edd moved to Plains, Texas for a couple of years. That’s a whole blog or 12 on its own, but the lesson that ties with this blog was that I fell in love for the first time. If you think puppy love isn’t the real thing, doesn’t rip your heart out and make you want to die, you have never been a broken hearted 14 year old girl. That same broken, extremely vulnerable woman child returned home to Abilene, and moved into Dad’s house, old bedroom, and tried to fit in. Dad’s marriage was in the process of major meltdown. I had built some majorly serious walls around me, but my self-esteem had taken some near mortal blows, and I ended up in a situation where I was raped by a “date” the autumn after my 15^th birthday. I found comfort in my many male friends, but did not date much after that. My walls were like entire castle fortresses by then. I had a male friend that I became very close to. His parents moved to their retirement home the summer before our senior year. Their attempts to get us to give it time, to explore other options, only made us more determined, and at the end of that year, two weeks after high school graduation, we got married. I was 17. We moved to Waco, Texas, and began to play house, future exes in the making.

Waco Texas 1978

The Road To Healing

     The road to healing is an ongoing process. At least the road to emotional and spiritual healing is that way. The day after surgery I had a vision, an experience, hell I don't know what it was, but it was extremely real to me. I felt myself moving further and further away from where I knew myself to be; as in my own bed, sore as all get out, resting as much as possible. I began to hear voices whispering, telling me to come and be with them. The voices became more distinct. I could identify my Dad, my Grandmother, and other relatives and friends directing me with their voices. What I actually saw was a cat. A black cat, but not just any cat. It was Linda's cat, TC, whom we had and loved for many years. I wanted to go and pick him up. I wanted nothing more than to hold TC, and go into those voices that I could hear distinctly by then. I became aware of the smell of watermelon, as if it was just under my nose. I began to go backwards into my own body, to this realm, and I thrashed and wailed and tried to fight my way back to the voices. Dana came rushing in from the kitchen to see what was wrong. I was so hysterical that I could not even voice what had happened to me. I wont speculate about what actually happened, only that I had no doubt that it was a wonderful special place, and that it was not my time to be there.
     Time marches on, as it does, and the wounds began to heal. The incision was massive, and left a long scar that bisected my navel, and is devoid of feeling, on both sides, the entire length of it. I never questioned that it was a God thing. I wont ask you to believe it, you will or you wont, but I felt that there was still a purpose for me here, I just had to find what it was. I had my share of pity parties. I hibernated back here in my cavern, with the computer, tv, mini fridge and master bathroom. I had little desire to do much of anything. I was already crippled from two car wrecks, whatever it was that I needed to do, it could damn well come to me. 
     I had been doing bits and pieces of life coaching in the 3 years since I had earned my masters in counseling and human development. Mostly for no fee. I knew that I had something new to offer to clients. Life had thrown yet another hard curve ball, aimed directly at my head, and I had narrowly dodged it once again. I needed to build a proper website, put myself out there for more business, and just get better organized in general. I bucked it. Hard. I did not want anymore responsibilities. I did not want to have to care about   what anyone else was trying to muddle through, or where they needed or wanted to go. Until I fixed me, I was incapable of guiding anyone anywhere, for any reason.

The Cancer Story, Pt I

 Sirens On The Catclaw

 Starting over on starting over. May 5, 2012

The Cancer Story, Pt I

I first began this particular project, The Life Coach’s Blog, a couple of years ago, but quickly ran out of gas. The reasons were many, but basically I didn’t really know where to start, or what direction I wanted it to go. I got bogged down in details, and then basically said, screw it, and let it languish while I just tried to maintain living, day to day. Then I decided that the overall topic would be starting over, and that would be broken into subtopics. How many I still don’t know. I have started over several times, and in several different ways, from divorce, to losing almost everything, to injury and illness. I am going to dive right in, hopefully a beautiful swan dive, into starting over after having been diagnosed with a deadly disease, in my case ovarian cancer.

I knew something was wrong; my body had been giving signs, from whispers to shrill screams, that something was most certainly not alright. I mentioned symptoms to a few people, who assured me that they had had similar symptoms with menopause, and it would all even out eventually. I was only 47 years old, but had been having perimenopausal symptoms since I was around 35. My periods had slowed and then stopped, in the preceding couple of years. I was getting regular mammograms, had no reason to worry about birth control for years, since J’s vasectomy, and was not a fan of the last gynecologist I had visited, so I let it slide. Every once in a while I had a nagging thought about needing to get a pap smear and an exam, but the attendant discomfort made me dismiss it as not a priority.

The symptoms became more nagging. My abdomen was very bloated, my back hurt like it would with a kidney infection, and I just didn’t feel well. So I set up an appointment with my family doc. When I got to the office, my doc was running late, business as usual, but I was offered a chance to get out faster by seeing his nurse practitioner. I agreed, and was taken back to a room pretty quickly. That decision probably saved my life, but it didn’t feel like a revelation, only a matter of convenience. The NP, her name was Jean, was very thorough in her exam, and obviously very concerned about what she was feeling. She told me that she wanted me to see her gyn, and she left the room and made the appointment on the spot. Within a week I was headed to the appointment, after he had me give blood in a lab a few days earlier.

What he told me was that I needed to make plans for surgery in the next few days. I didn’t have a lot of time to fret about it; I was in for a pre-surgical consult at the hospital within days. I made out a will, packed a bag, and headed for the final consult with the doctor before surgery. He told me that it could be anything from benign cysts to cancer all over my body. That I might wake up with a small incision, or with no breasts and a colostomy bag, but that he would do a thorough internal exploration no matter what he found. He was partnering with a gynecological oncologist, so they would be ready for anything. I prayed a great deal, and let myself mentally explore some worst case scenarios.

The actual day of the surgery I remember very little of. Both docs were there when I came out of recovery and was taken to my room. They both said that I was actually a best case scenario, and that surgery had resolved the issues, no further treatment, like chemo or radiation was going to be necessary. There were tumors on both ovaries, so a total hysterectomy and exploration from the top of my torso to the bottom, was the worst I would endure, besides the healing process. I was hooked up to a morphine pump, so I was not really with it enough to do much deep thinking.

After a few days I was able to come home to my own bed. That night, J hand fed me watermelon and kissed my incision. To this day I find that to be the most romantic thing anyone had ever done. I felt very lucky and much loved.

(Next: The out of body experience and the road to healing)

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