Thursday, June 21, 2012

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.






Sunday, June 10, 2012

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.