The Rumblings Abdominal

Over the past couple of years, my eyes grew so heavily hooded it was as if I was peering out at the great Street of Life from under a pair of heavy canvas awnings. Thus, late last month, I had an operation to open these peepers up a bit.

Everything went swimmingly the surgeon said, and so, five hours after the initial scalpel cut, he sent me home - with an Rx for a 10 mg dose of Percocet, which, besides some acetaminophen, holds within it a small but mighty hit of Oxycodone.

These pills I took in strict moderation, choosing to take only the one-, and not the two-pill dose at a time and stopping cold turkey after just five days. I still felt pretty crummy of course, and my eyes stung. I couldn't bend over, lift anything weighing more than a few pounds, or even read or look at screens. And so my husband and I decided that, come the weekend, we would seek a change of scenery. We would drive the hour and 40 minutes north to our summer place where we could curl up with our new kitty, stream some good shows and look out at the frozen lake.

Now I had not been outside at all in the ten days since my operation, but the morning of our planned trip I felt the need to join three friends in doing an errand of mercy for a fourth, very elderly, friend. And so I slowly dressed and, glad to be out at all, drove to meet these three, one of whom called out to me as she crossed the parking lot.

“Should you really be here?” she exclaimed, knowing of my surgery. “And also, WHY are you dressed like this?!” she added, her eyes sweeping down over what turned out to be one very ill-considered getup: a silk blouse, a crepe skirt with a voluminous hemline just brushing the tops of my high-heeled boots, and the fanciest coat in our front hall closet. “I mean, are you going someplace after?”

Well, I was going someplace, of course: to the lake, later, but first home to meet up with David, there to give the kitten a small palmful of kibble before settling her in the cat carrier for her journey on my lap, and finally to visit a drive-through for burgers to go. BUT, I told my friend, the far realer truth was I had dressed up just to feel better.

And mostly I did feel better, at least for the first third of the journey. David and I talked companionably, and I nibbled at lunch, balanced over the cat carrier that held our soundly sleeping kitten.

And then it all went south.

The little cat opened her eyes just as a certain.. scent reached our nostrils. It was a mild scent, reminiscent of the meek scent of a newborn’s diaper. Alas, she then began crying out,

Something was coming.

It was coming.

It came.

We sped like Roger Rabbit in his roadster to the highway’s nearest rest area, me whispering “I’m sorry! I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” into the cat’s wee triangular skull. Because I just knew that her troubles followed from a nurturing flaw. I knew that the only other time I had given her kibble - as the vet had said I could do now and then “just as a treat” –  she had had what appeared to be a kind of painful diarrhea that caused her to cry out just like this. 

And now it had happened again.

Once we had reached the rest area, I pulled the poor creature out of her foul prison and set her on the floorboard in front of the passenger seat, there to be looked after by David, while I shot into the Ladies Room and did what I could to dab at the many stains and pawprints on my silky blouse, my fancy coat, and that gorgeously wide crepe skirt. I made a spectacle as horrifying as the raggediest of the ragged Walking Dead, and people were shrinking from me, I could see, but what else could I do? I crawled back into the passenger seat and cradled the kitten in my arms, David doing 80 because you can go that fast in New Hampshire.

Nestled up against me, she went right to sleep, tummy up and legs splayed. After a while, in despair and alarmed by this new immobility, I whispered to David in mournful tones, "I think I've killed her." “Nah,” he said back. “She’s just worn out.”

Of course, he was right. She was just worn out. And once we reached the refuge of this house up north I was able to give her a bath, hose and scrub the holy hell out of her cat carrier, bag my formerly fancy outfit for later consideration by the dry cleaner, and treat myself to the world’s longest shower.

So all of that was Story One.

Story Two commenced at the end of that peaceful weekend when I met my daughters for a fun dinner out - only to find I couldn’t eat a single morsel, or concentrate, or say much.

I was just as sick the next day, and the day after that, or for all three of the days following. Finally, 18 very long days after my eye surgery, I began to both faint and throw up, a winning combination in anyone’s annals of illness.

“For heaven’s sake get in here to the hospital!" cried my PCP when finally I called her. “You need to be evaluated!"

David came home from work and into the ER I wobbled, to do my seven hours of penance among the suffering.

There were people coughing, people in masks, people spitting up and people passed clean out. As far as I could tell, though, I was the only one with blood puddles under me legs.

Long story short, after a CT scan with contrast and various other ministrations, the docs decided to admit me to the ER's observation unit 12 stories up. I felt I had died and gone to heaven. From the rag-and-bone shop of the ER, I had ascended to the hospital's uppermost floor, with a twinkling view of the Boston skyline.

I got to stay in that room for two blessed days, and though they discharged me before I was altogether well, I have done the remainder of my healing at home – or to be utterly candid, at home for two days and then in the cozy stateroom of a Viking cruise ship whose itinerary loops all around the Caribbean.

Both David and I have treated these 8 days as a rest cure. We pad about on deck, take gentle walks on land, eat amazing meals and toddle back to our cabin for yet another nap.

This - tonight - is our last night on board. Tomorrow we fly home to that new little cat of ours who has been well cared for by not one but two sets of family members nice enough to have actually MOVED IN in order to look after her.

I can’t wait to see her, keenly aware as I now am of our connection. For are we not all meek small creatures, utterly dependent on the intricate workings of our bodies to go about in the world? We are indeed, and in this connection the famous limerick comes to mind that gives this post its title:

I sat next to the Duchess at tea.

It was just as I feared it would be:

Her rumblings abdominal 

Were simply phenomenal 

And everyone thought it was me.

Well, it was me, this time.

The upside is that I now keenly sense my commonality with all beings, and I am content. Sure, my eyes still sting a bit and yes, some bruising persists. But these eyes are OPEN! – enough to see that whatever further surgeries await me in this life I will never, ever, again take the fiendish little pill known as Percocet.

See? My eyes DO look better, don't they? ;-)

Can't Cook, or Clean, or Do Laundry

I still can't cook, or clean, or do laundry. That's what the surgeon still says, God help me.It's been some summer I've been having, as full of twists and turns as the classic Wild Mouse ride that almost yanks your head clear off the celery-stalk of your dear little neck. (Or wait, maybe it's more accurate to call those twists and turns 'ups and downs' in honor of all the Big Boy roller coasters out there.)The story is, I had one of the tendons in my shoulder repaired in mid-June and it's kind of sad, because even all this way through August I dread the nights for the pain that they bring. When you're moving around as you do during the day, see, you're sort of ok, in part because your movements pump the healing blood up into the site, a badly needed thing since, as I understand it, the shoulder doesn't have much of a blood supply on its own. Most nights, by contrast, I'm so sleep-deprived I keep thinking I'm the parent of a newborn again,Ah but the mornings! The mornings this summer have been lovely. This is the view from the guest bedroom, a view I relished every morning as I sat sling-bound in my rented recliner chair. 

So an undeniable upside has been having the time to look out the window at Nature.

A second downside, however, is I can't near do near enough walking, since walking any real distance makes the pain in my shoulder worse. (Now if I were a NUN, gliding along on the roller skates my sister Nan and I always suspected the nuns in our convent school had hidden under their robes, it probably wouldn't hurt much at all.)

But the upside there? I'm getting a LOT of reading done.

A third downside is that I can't blowdry my hair. Oh, I can wash it, sort of, using my one functioning arm. I just CANNOT lift both arms in the way you need to do to blow it dry. And without blowdrying, my hair looks like a stainless steel  scouring pad after months of use when it loses its integrity and just splays out in runaway coils. I shouldn't complain about that, I know, because now I get to go to this walk-in salon where I can get any one several operators to style and blowdry my hair FOR  me - and really only once did I get a stylist who gave me a definite Phyllis Diller look.

Fourth downside, and I'll stop here, I promise:

I can't wear the contact lenses I have relied on for nearly 30 years. I just can't get them IN, where I need both hands for that operation and I can't get my dominant hand anywhere near my eye. I've never worn glasses in my life until now and frankly I'm not doing so well with the whole progressive lens thing. But the upside here if I'm honest?  What I'm really doing this summer is getting a whole lot of binge-watching in, and God bless the invention of TV!

So here we are...

 I slept poorly last night, natch, but again this morning I woke to a matchless summer dawn.  Below, the view from my office-that-is-an-office-no-more since I've left the column-writing game but is instead just an airy upstairs room that anyone at all can relax in. In fact you guys should come by anytime! I have a fridgeful of eats from the Prepared Foods aisle and I can show you my newly mastered trick of tucking in the top sheet on even a king-size bed using just my own little toes.

(Click on the video if it looks askew. It plays right when you do.)  [wpvideo ySFtA7Ms]

The Upside of Being on the DL

I think where I last left off in this absorbing tale  I was two days out of surgery and throwing up on my new recliner 'lift' chair, an apparatus that still looks to me like a still from a Stephen King movie where somebody's long-suffering furniture comes alive and goes after its idiot owner.

Today though, I'll spare you further grisly tales and say only that there are real silver linings to recovering from an operation. I mean, where would the world be without the caregivers, whether paid or voluntary? Immediately after 'losing it' in that grab--the-towels way,  I called two RN friends, both of whom manifested like a couple of  heavenly apparitions, one bearing an analgesic far less terrifying than the oxy the surgeon had prescribed. (And THAT stuff, whoo! You take it and you still have the pain, all right. You just also have a whole lot of other weird sensations too. On oxycodone I felt like a wildly scrambled swirl of hurt wrapped up in a cotton candy cocoon.)

Besides remembering that I was the recipient of a lot of good care in those first weeks spent feebly sitting around in my ice-filled sling I now recall watching a super long, multi-episode documentary about the Roosevelts.  Visitors came and went and I would greet them with  "Look! It's the Roosevelts!" to which most would reply, in somewhat puzzled fashion, "Ah yes, the Roosevelts."

I also remember in this early time of confinement actually looking at some of the seeming thousands of catalogs that drop through my mail slot every week . It seems I am now officially, and universally, targeted as a likely customer for catalogs with names such as "A Time for Me", whose translation might as well be "Make Your Own Damn Dinner," and "As We Change," whose primary message is "Of Course WE Like Your New Mustache But Should You Ever Wish to Get Rid of it Our Newly Patented Mini-Taser Will Do the Job Nicely.)  Mostly of course such catalogs are marketing just two main items: (1) Loose-fitting clothing and (2) Vibrators. Who knew?

And look at that: Even setting down such a racy observation shows me that now, with the knife eight whole weeks in my past, I'm at last getting back my ability to smile. :-)

Call Me Eeyore

Back in the long-ago 90s I did therapy for six months (a) because I felt sort of busily jazzed up trying to save the world at all times and (b) because my husband thought I should. Maybe he detected a sadness under all my over-functioning I don’t know. I started going all right but every time I went to that therapist’s office I could tell her how everyone else in my life was but not how I was. After a few sessions she told me that as fascinating as my lively tales about other people were, she felt frustrated that I couldn’t talk about myself. If there was sadness underneath all my rushing-about what WAS that sadness? Darned if I knew.Well LIFE SURE CURED THAT and these days anyway I do know why I’ve been so sad, so off my game, at times so bereft-feeling at times that this mate of mine sometimes finds me standing outside the bathroom door waiting for him to come back out. (I know! Pathetic!)So, without further talk, here is my litany of reasons for sadness, some general, some specific to me.

• Like so many of us, I am still sad  that we lost Bobby Kennedy. Fifty years ago this coming Saturday I watched his funeral and well do I remember the quaver in the voice of his one remaining brother as he gave the eulogy,  and the sight of his children crowding around his casket, and the sight of is that widow, newly pregnant with the couple's 11th child.
• Again, like many of us, I am sad about the changing climate with its ever-more-devastating weather events. I'm very sad that we in this country are doing so little to ward off what looks to be the very dire consequences.

Less catastrophically,  I'm sad about my own small stuff:

• I’m sad about the way time is passing so fast. I can still picture the color, style and fabric of the dress I wore the day they buried Bobby, and now I am… how old? I said to my mate only last Christmas, “Just think! In 15 years I’ll be 73!” “Um,” he replied with a kind smiled, “in 15 years you’ll be 83.” Where did it all go?
• I've been very sad that I can’t seem to write much anymore. It just hurts to sit, to stand, even to lie down for any length of time with a spinal column that has come to resemble a Crazy Straw the way it veers right up by my bra-line, then veers sharply left around my hips, then ends with a flourish of two additional veerings that together deliver pain not only to my back but also clear down one leg. Sigh.
• I’m sad about my digestion-related insides since I now have “bacterial overgrowth” in there, which is diagnosed by having one blow air into a glass tube and send it off  in the mail. That part was kind of fun, to be honest, a little like capturing fireflies - only these turn out not to be fireflies at all but rather a dense civilization of little sea monkeys as I picture them. These tiny tenants  now renting space in there have apparently moved in for keeps, the doctor says, so that for the rest of my life if I wish not to suffer I can’t eat wheat, barley, dairy or really any kind of sugar including the innocent fructose that comes in apples peaches, nectarines and so on. Who wouldn’t get sad on being told this news?
• And finally, to conclude this tale of woe, I am about to have rotator cuff surgery, which sounds both so picturesquely dreadful and immobilizing that I’m actually looking forward to the adventure of it . More on THAT another day.

So there it all is and maybe that stern therapist was right: I do feel better for having told all this.  Also, there's a real upside to the thought of being unable to so much as wash a dish or fold a pair of underpants for ten whole weeks. Plus anyway come on: Who doesn't love sea monkeys?

On the Path

It's nearly three weeks since I began taking that increased dose of the thyroid-boosting drug and, if I'm honest, nearly three weeks since I began also taking an antidepressant. Who knows whence cometh my help as the Bible says? Will it have come from those loving individuals who reacted to my last post? For sure. Will it have come as well from lifting up my eyes unto those hills that the Psalmist talks about, especially now that their trees have set their petticoats to flouncing? Very likely. And it also seems that the process of paying closer attention to everything outside myself will help. For example: The other night I sat parked next to a 100-foot stretch of bike path that emerges from a wooded glade to create a small ‘stage’ before disappearing back into the foliage. This path passes through a number of towns just north and west of Boston here, so in itself it is far from rural. In fact I found myself beside it in this parking lot because I had just met my grown daughter and her two babies for an early supper. And when I returned to my car afterward, the light of the May evening was just billowing so that I had to pause and watch as an ever-freshening stream of people passed. Here zipped past a whippet-thin cyclist curved like an apostrophe over his handlebars.Now here came an identically dressed brace of young women, high-stepping like a couple of drum majors.Now I watched a man lope by at an easy trot, plugged, like almost everyone I saw, into his ear buds.As I sat I saw that for ten or 15 seconds at a stretch, the path would be empty. And the sky was so blue. And the light was so golden.I watched as an older lady in a sari appeared. She paused as if winded, settled her fists on her hips, and called out repeatedly the name of an unseen child. It was like watching a play, for now, as if on cue, came the long-awaited child, a boy of perhaps five, zooming into sight on his little scooter to describe several small circles around his exasperated companion,  I watched these folks and others for some 25 or 30 minutes. I would have gladly stayed another 30 but the light was now changing, growing both more luminous and more coppery and I knew I didn't want to see it fade.So instead I came home, tucked away the memory and remembered again that as the old Irish adage says, it is in the shelter of each other that the people live - and find freshly, every time, a sense of peace. 

Bouncy No More

I wanted to write something about Mothers Day last week but lately I have felt put off by the idea of even opening up a blank page to create a post, and now it's been over three months. What has happened to me?I had an invitation 30 minutes ago to speak before a journaling group.I turned it down.I turned down two other offers too, in the last months. I'm just so tired of talking, tired of being a person who always speaks up, who thinks it's her job to make it a 'good class' for the people around her, as if I did as a young teacher, eager to make every minute count. These days, I often sit through whole meetings without saying a word. I find I would much rather listen.'And this is OK’ I've told myself. 'It's an ebbing of ego is all, which can only be good'.But now it comes back to me that near the end of my annual visit to my primary care physician last week, she asked me something as she was listening to my heart:"So," she said.  How's the writing?"I was slow to answer. “Well… I know I told you a year ago that I stopped producing the column…”“I remember. But beyond that?”“Beyond that, I.... I.. don't write anymore." The words alone caused me a pang."Oh, that's just writer's block," she said cheerily. “It’ll pass!”I looked down at my lap and remained silent then, leaving her to her tappings and palpatings. It was during that pause in the talk that a memory came back to me of an exchange I had had with some old old friends, my college roommates and co-member of the Class of a Thousand Years Ago, when we travelled to Italy together. Midway through the trip one of them said with a laugh, “So Terr, we just have to ask: What happened to that wicked wit we all remember? You're just sort of ... kind these days,” and laughed again, to show she loved me anyway.Looking up from my lap I related this freshly remembered exchange to my doctor who took the stethoscope from her ears and looked me full in the face.“Are you sleeping?” she asked.“Sure,” I said. “In fact, most days I can hardly get up." And I told how I stay in the bed, awake and looking out the window for 60 or sometimes 90 minutes until my husband gets up.“Listen to me,” she then said. “I get what your classmates meant. For more than two decades, every time you have come in here you've been practically bouncing, in high spirits, and full of stories. These last two visits I haven't seen that. At all. I think we have to consider the possibility that you have dysthymia, a term for chronic low-grade depression.”Normally I would have laughed, the way I did back in the 90s when she told me my bloodwork revealed hypothyroidism. "Hypothyroidism?” I had said. “What are the symptoms?” We looked up the condition on her computer and she swung the monitor around so I could see. “Low energy, sadness, sleep issues,” it read, along with 40 other unhappy signposts.I was almost offended at the time. “But you know me! “ I said back then. “Does my busy life sound as if it comes with any of these symptoms? And now you’re saying I have to take a pill every day for the rest of my life? What happens if I don't?”“If you don’t, you’re facing all of this and more,” she'd replied, indicating the screen.So, these 25 years later, I take the Levoxyl, which is no big deal. Last Friday though, the bloodwork from this latest visit came back, indicating that my level of need has increased. She has upped my dosage therefore and I guess we’ll see. Either that does the trick or  I'll need additional help.In the meantime I want to aplogize to any of you out there who have been wondering if I'm still here. I'm here. And from now on I'll be taking some advice I learned from the Recovery movement and fake it til I make it, which means,  “performing actions that are known to be positive even if one is not necessarily comfortable with them.” In other words “the mind may be willing, but the emotions may not be there yet.”I’ll do that now. I'll fake it 'til I make it. I'll try just ‘showing up’ which, after all, is what most people do every day, whether they feel like it or not.         

Oh It's Cryin' Time Again They're Gonna Squeeze You

You're almost done at your doctor's office door when they drop it on you: "And of course you'll have the yearly mammogram before the end of the month?" chirped my primary care person last April, with the same merry tone as when she orders up the dread colonoscopy.Oh, I'd  go get the darn mammogram, of course I would - and I know I am lucky to be someone who can show up and fulfill this yearly obligation. Still, we all vividly remember what it's like, don't we ladies? The way the tech lifts and nudges those poor delicate tissues onto that cold glass plate? The mechanical squeeeeeze as she brings the second plate down upon them? The way she then tightens that diabolical vise to 'hammer' them flat as a couple of veal cutlets?  It's a never-changing ritual, only this time as I held my breath the way they make you do, the room started to wobble in my sight, causing me to begin my internal mantra of old,  "I will not faint, I will not faint..."I didn't faint  but this was the first time in many, many years that I had come so come close. It would be a real bummer if I had, since fainting right in the doctor's office means forever after they will label you as a 'faller' and snap a plastic bracelet on you advertising the fact to everyone in the place. This is the worst. If you have to faint you want to do so anonymously.In my childhood and teen years I got to do a lot of anonymous fainting: I fainted all the time in church, first going fish-belly white and then melting down in the pew until large male hands heaved me up by the armpits and hustled me up the aisle toward the back of the church, limp feet dragging behind me. I fainted when a doctor unfamiliar with wart removal burned two cigarette holes in my right arm, scars I bear to this day.I fainted once in the Men's Department of a fancy store and woke just in time to hear the manager say, "just drag her behind the counter" because you can't have a lot of passed-out people standing in the way of commerce.But looking back now I see that the most embarrassing lapse into near-unconsciousness occurred at my own wedding, up on the altar. Cocooned as I was in a complex wedding veil and a peau de soie gown with full-length sleeves that came to a point at the base of the finger bones, I felt my young self mist over with a sudden wash of fine perspiration. Ah, I can see it all before me even now: Here was the priest intoning away. Here were the wedding guests, a sea of blurry balloon faces out their in the congregation. My bridesmaids were there too but I was unaware of them in this moment of need.  The only help I could look to at all came in the person of my similarly young, similarly perspiring groom. We were each facing the priest and not each other so I had to whisper my SOS to him out of the side of my mouth, like a gangster."I'm going to faint! I hissed, my eyes on the priest and my face frozen into a death mask of a smile as we stood there holding hands as instructed.Fake smiling himself, he hissed right back. "You can't faint!" he said and punched the side of my leg, pretty hard too, under cover of all that silk.It worked. I didn't faint, we were officially joined in marriage seven minutes later and have remained joined, basically thigh to thigh, every day ever since.All of which leads me to wonder if I shouldn't bring HIM to my next mammogram to help keep me awake and upright. Though as I think about I'm guessing that even one quick look at this whole Inquisition-style process would have out cold and flat on the floor before the tech had time to even duck back behind her screen to start taking pictures.

How It's Done (not me however)

On the Starship Colonoscopy

Sit with any group of 50-somethings long enough and sooner or later the talk will turn to the various strategies for getting through the  colonoscopy prep.This regimen, in case there are small pockets of the population who have not heard, involves the drinking of eight 8-ounce glasses of a thick chalky cocktail, at 15-minute intervals, until the entire 64-ounce pitcher has been drained.That’s a gallon of gritty sludge, downed within the space of just two hours.As one who was recently contemplating her own date with destiny, I consulted my 900 stranger-friends on Facebook for advice on how best to approach the ordeal.“Make the drink as cold as you can!” many said. “Use a straw!” advised a second faction. “Skip the straw and just fire it down!” counseled a third group.I had used all three techniques by the time I was finished, and let me just say I wasn’t exactly yodeling out a Julia-Child-like “Bon Appetit!” with each glass.But as unpleasant as the prep is, everything turns rosy when, in your hospital gown and booties, you are escorted into the hospital’s ‘scope suite, where you all at once feel like a guest on board the Starship Enterprise, with the many uniformed crew members circling and circling as they tend and monitor.You are ushered to a gurney where, alongside 15 or 20 other pre- and post-procedure folk, you stretch out like so many limp strips of bacon.Someone comes and covers you with a warm blanket.Then a cheerful medical professional in a pirate-like headscarf comes along to take your vital signs. His hands make a sort of Sign of the Cross as they move from your left arm to your forehead to your chest and then over to your right hand. This is where the needle goes to deliver the I-love-everything drug that cancels all fears. You will then discover another cheery young crew member sitting inches away and peering into a monitor that offers a minute-by-minute account of what’s happening inside you. You feel like the coolest guest at the dinner party. Everyone finds you so interesting!At last you are wheeled into the operatory for the “periscope up” procedure that has brought you here. A neat slice of time is cut from your life, and the next thing you know you’re back in Mission Control with your fellow strips of bacon.After a woozy interval, the doctor materializes and, with a somber clergyperson’s air, tells you how things looked. He dematerializes again and you yawn.Somebody brings you a snack of juice and crackers.You yawn again and have a little snooze. It’s like being in pre-school again, but without the singing.In short, it is Heaven and you  have come through. you have been seen, and accepted for who you are. And when you depart, you depart smiling, with a strange but unmistakable sense of blessing, and bits of graham cracker crumb still clinging to your lips.  

Honey, We're ALL Dying

I’m sick. I might be dying. I think I have scabies, what with these weird little bumps on my skin all of a sudden.But really, it could be anything.Also, my stomach hurts, so I think I have appendicitis. Did I say I was sick? I might be dying.My head hurts too, so I could be having a stroke, like Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor had that morning she woke up with a killer headache. She’s a neuro-specialist and so knows a WHOLE lot about the brain, yet didn’t she crazily jump on her exercise machine anyway, stopping only when her vision swam and she started to hallucinate - which is something I just know I'd do myself. I would totally try to keep pedaling right through a stroke. Right through a heart attack.Come to think of it, I sort of did do that on the day I was working away at my keyboard and, out of the blue, got these chest pains, and every single thing I did from then on was dumb:First I opened up my browser and typed, “Am I having a heart attack?” then moseyed around several sites looking for  answers.Twenty minutes later, I finally phoned my paramedic son-in-law for advice. The advice came in a small tersely delivered sentence: “Call 911.” The person who answered old me that the ambulance was on its way and she would stay on the phone with me until it arrived. She also told me to open the front door and go sit by it.“I’m hungry though! I need to pack a lunch.”“Forget lunch,” she said.“And I have to go to the bathroom!”“No bathroom,” she said.“But I HAVE to duck in there! I’ve had like a gallon of water!””Take me with you then,“ she sighed.The next thing I knew, I had been mailed like a letter into the roomy ambulance, in which I lay flat on my back, looking up at the lovely sky, the passing trees.In the end, I spent five hours at that hospital ER until it was determined that my heart was just fine and all I had likely done was strain the place where my ribs meet my sternum by exercising with some overly heavy weights. Costochondritis they call it.All of this took place just a year ago, which, it now occurs to me is just about when I began having these health fears. It is only now, as I am setting these words down, that I see the possible reason and the reason is this: While being transported to the hospital, I was delivered straight back to the winter day when my mother was brought from my house to this same hospital, along the very same route, she too flat lying on her back.Only she couldn't see the lovely sky, the passing trees, because her own chest pains had claimed her life before the ambulance could even get here.And doesn’t that connection point to the great truth: When you finally tell a hard thing, and truly feel it again in the telling, you find that it loosens its hold on you. It just does.So chances are I’m not sick at all, really. And if I’m dying, well aren’t we all dying, carried along as we are on Time’s great conveyor belt - perhaps to glories unimagined, where pain, and even skin rash,  hold no dominion - and isn't THAT a loft thought for the start of a work week! :-)  

Here's a Fun Thing to Try

 I was closing in on 50 when, at my yearly checkup, my doctor asked that question we all understand to be key these days, about the medical history and cause of death of my two parents.“My mom: heart attack,” I said “but my dad left before I was born, so I have no clue how he died.”“Find out,” the doc said. “Do some digging if you have to.”So, I dug. It took months, but by the time I came back I had my answer. “'Intestinal cancer’ it says on his death certificate.”“OK, then. You're overdue for  a colonoscopy.”“ Hey come on,” I said, going for the joke. "I didn’t even know the guy!” He didn't laugh. "A colonoscopy is indicated for anyone past a certain age either of whose parents had cancer ‘below the bellybutton’. Here are the names of some people who do this procedure. Pick one and get it done.”So… I picked one, and in a month’s time found myself seated across from a white-haired GI doc for a little facetime. Did I have any questions? he wanted to know.I did indeed. "My sister has had this procedure and she says it's super uncomfortable and I should ask for medication, so I wondered: what do you give people?”“A muscle relaxant of course, as well as a drug called Versed  which acts an amnesiac.”“An amnesiac?! You want us to forget then, which means it MUST hurt!"But does it, really?" I asked, hoping against hope.“Oh, I won’t say I haven’t heard a few good groans over the years," he answered cheerily. "I mean think about it: You've got a five-foot probe and...three right angles."  I thought about it; pictured that flexible wand and its seeing-eye fiber-optics. Then I pictured the colon itself, an inverted letter “U” that you explore by 'driving up' a squiggly on-ramp.I went head anyway and booked the procedure.When the day came the two drugs, administered in painless I-V fashion made me feel fine. Wonderful, in fact."Let’s see that five-foot probe!” I gamely sang.“Here it is!,” the genial doc sang back.I turned then to look at the monitor – and then somehow a 90 minutes swath was cut from my life. I was lying on my side and it was 8:41; then suddenly I was sitting up and it was 10:11.I do have a vague memory of turning in protest once, but it seems more dream than memory and, as the saying goes, if a tree falls in the forest and no one hears it, does it make a noise? If a highly 'personal' but beneficial experience is visited on you and you don’t remember it, can you call it uncomfortable? Maybe not.So line up and get it done if you're at the magical age. The dread snacks you get in the Recovery Room alone are make it all worth while. 

Necessary Roughness

What can we say of the yearly mammogram? The glass plate is cold, they make you stand so close to the machine your ribs bruise, and then they force you to hold these contorted positions and stop breathing for like a million minutes while they set up the shotAnd then, of course, there's the vise.That victim of  the revenge of Joe Pesci's character in Scorsese's  Casino comes to mind.Your eyeballs don't pop out like that guy's did, but it feels like two things further down might pop for sure.Oh I know, I know, you don't really get permanently disfigured during a mammogram, and it's a crucial diagnostic.It's just that you go in with two rough approximations of this shape on your chest:And two minutes later they look like this:I think I was even leaning over like this guy by the time we got done - and though he appears to be almost smiling,  I sure know I wasn't!

Say What You Think!

So I'll get to the meaning of THIS picture in a second. I was at the office of this bone guy, whose waiting room as I walked in held just one elderly couple. The husband of the pair was filling out his wife’s health history on a clipboard. “Knee problems,” he told me cheerily, nodding toward his spouse, who within the space of 30 seconds had thrown back her head, closed her eyes and begun performing an aria of happy snores.Just as suddenly, she snapped awake and shot me an assessing look.“Nice you clothes,” she told to me in a heavy, Slavic-sounding accent.I glanced down to see what I was wearing, because you know how it is: you’re not always sure just what you’ve ended up putting on in the morning. “Well, thanks!” I said.I knew I would miss my visit to the Y that day, so instead of donning my usual crummy workout gear, I had on a forest green boot-length corduroy skirt very wide at the hem and a fur jacket that I have owned since the impenitent, over-the-top 80s when I found it for 60 bucks in an antique store down the road.“All my life I work in clothes,” she said. “I am knowing good clothes.”I would have asked more about that, but just then I was called into one of the examination rooms of this new-to-me doctor, who scrutinized my bent toy kite of a spine and asked about my daily life.I mentioned the Zumba classes I take thrice-weekly at the local Y.“Zumba?!” he repeated. “Zumba’s all wrong for you. You can’t be sending your thoracic region in one direction and your hips in the other! No more Zumba!”“No more Zumba? “ I squeaked. “It’s the only thing I do that makes my back pain stop!’“It’s CAUSING your back pain.”“I don’t think so.”“I think so.”"What happened to ‘Movement is life’?” I said.“What happened to ‘Listen to your doctor’?” he said. We looked at each other for a beat. Then, “Is this our first fight?” I said. “Listen the dancing is mostly salsa, where you keep your chest fairly still and just send your hips out to the right and the left.” He shook his head. We talked a little more, then he wrote me a prescription for physical therapy and suggested I also see a back surgeon. Fat chance I’m having back surgery, I thought to myself.“He’s a surgeon, you know, and a prominent one,” he said. “He’ll hurry into the room surrounded by younger doctors. Don’t be afraid to slow him down. Make him answer your questions. Stand your ground.”“I’m thinking that won’t be a problem for you,” he added, smiling. I smiled too, thanked him, and after we shook hands I returned to the waiting room, where the woman and her husband still sat in their chairs. The woman got right back to work examining me. “Good clothes,” she nodded as much to herself as to me. I looked down at myself more self-consciously this time, and picked up the end of the dark-green, tan and cream-colored scarf I had thrown around the neck of my jacket.“The scarf isn't right though, is it? I tried to find a better scarf but I don't seem to have one.”“No,” she said. “Scarf no good. The rest OK. Nice you clothes,” she said again. “Happy to meet you!” exclaimed her husband and with that we all bowed to one another and said our farewells - but not before I thought to myself how much I do appreciate frankness, wherever I chance to encounter it.

Racing, but to Where?

Maybe people are just stressing out and that’s why they send along nasty demeaning emails, like the ones I was talking about here on Monday.Maybe stress is also responsible for the curmudgeonly ways of that crotchety shopkeeper I told about Tuesday.A documentary dealing with stress and what stress does to our kids was screened in my town the night before last. I couldn’t go see it because I was three towns away getting sweetly peed upon by a naked baby just now learning to sit upright, which is what she was doing, on my lap , while the two of us watched the soapy fun her brother was having in the tub.Still, I honored the event in my own way yesterday morning, when I looked up the documentary on Google and watched its every trailer and clip, the coverage the New York Times gave it the interview Katie Couric did with Vicki Abeles who made it – everything I could find about it on the Internet in short.In Race to Nowhere as  director Abeles has chosen to call her film, we get a look at all the must-do's in our public schools, from the hours of assigned homework to the introduction of  the high stakes testing that came on the scene with the No Child Left Behind program inaugurated by the previous President George W Bush.A chief point made in the documentary is that the so-called “high ability” kids are so pushed to achieve that many are nearing the breaking point, even as other students, who do not do well on standardized tests, are growing discouraged by their results on these standardized tests and dropping out of school at a much higher rate than in the years before this program was implemented.Additionally most educators agree that when you merely “teach to the test,” working to prepare students for a single  exam that will be used to label the teachers and the school system AND the students, you drain all spontaneity and creative ferment out of the classroom.Maybe you'll agree with the film’s thesis and maybe you won’t but one thing is sure: with adults in this society exhibiting the levels of stress that they do the last thins we need it to be inflicting more stress on our children. As the Mayo Clinic’s website puts it, "“When the stressors of your life are always present, leaving you constantly feeling stressed, tense, nervous or on edge, that fight-or-flight reaction stays turned on. The less control you have over potentially stress-inducing events and the more uncertainty they create, the more likely you are to feel stressed. The long-term activation of the stress-response system — and the subsequent overexposure to cortisol and other stress hormones — can disrupt almost all your body's processes. This puts you at increased risk of numerous health problems, including heart disease, sleep problems, depression, obesity, memory impairment…" And that's just a partial list.Watch the clip now and see what you think.[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uem73imvn9Y]

Chapter 9,864, in which I (FINALLY) stop being such a baby

It’s hard for me to know sometimes what I’m supposed to be doing here: tell what I’ve been up to or just entertain the troops, so to speak. It’s the dilemma of all columnists-and-bloggers who write to delight a weary public.Anyway, I said the other day that I did some flying, which is how our learned about that we can no longer pack our snow globes in our carry-on bags, but I didn’t say where I was going or why.I also didn’t say that I was nervous about the trip and not really getting it about how you have to be AT the airport two hours before the flight. Old Dave was away and I kind of lost focus. Two hours before the flight was to go Wheels Up I was still watching my documentary about Annie Leibowitz and sewing the hem into a pair of drapes. I also forgot to call the cab company to GET to the airport until 10 minutes before I needed it to come fetch me.And then, trying to fix my hair, I burned my face in two places. Really burned it.I was nervous because I was unsure of my ability to fulfill my mission here in Salt Lake City and care for this girl who has been part of our extended family since the spring of 1990.Here are Annie and Susan back in high school, Annie in the Barnard T-shirt next to dark-eyed Sooz.)About six months ago, Susan lost feeling in her face and began stumbling a bit at night, on her way to the bathroom, mostly, when the house was dark. It turns out she had an acoustic neuroma, a rare growth in her auditory canal that was pressing on some key cranial nerves . It didn't look like It was going do any shrinking and it was leaning uncomfortably close to the brain stem.She had surgery to remove it on July 25^th. Her husband Kevin and her brother Gary were there in the hospital all that day and sent us all updates. (“Update: the ENT surgeon has finished making the opening in Sooz's skull and the neurosurgeon is now removing the tumor. SO far it's going well.") TWO surgeons! Six hours!)Once she was released five days post-op, a local friend came, then a college friend. Then Annie came for a week and I flew in the day Annie flew out. And another fleet of people will carry on when I leave, Susie’s dearest aunt, another college friend, Kevin’s parents… )Our work – and my work this week - has been to buy/cook the meals, play with the baby, do the laundry and help dress the surgical site. 'Sites' I should say: there are two since the surgeons needed to patch the opening they made in her head with a bit of fat from her belly. (They made in her head with some fat from her belly. (Free lipo!” she had joked on the phone, but she frankly has no fat at all in her belly or anywhere else either which is why her tummy is so sore: they had to really dig to find enough.I was nervous about how I would do all I needed to do with my problematic back and my thumbs that will no longer press down hard on the release of a carseat belt.I was nervous about being able to lift little Peter and cajole him into doing what we needed to do moment to moment. So nervous! – right up until I got here and saw what she was facing every day with swelling at the tummy and an eyelid that won’t close and a half a face that’s still not moving these three weeks later - at which point all nervousness ceased and I got down to work.It was a good lesson for me... and like all such lessons put me in my place, and reminded me that I myself am actually at the center of very few stories indeed.;

Body Talk

How 'bout we make this Frank Talk About the Body Week here at Exit Only? I figure we might as well since we began the week evoking the image of a man sleeping with one leg thrown over his bedmate. In fact let's start there:I know lots of guys like to sleep that way and if their partners like it too, fine. Still, I have trouble imagining that many women like it. I mean here you are sound asleep and suddenly boom! a 40-pound leg arrives on the delicate breadbasket of your pelvis. AND you’re lying on your side where there isn’t that much cushioning!I know I couldn’t be with a guy who liked sleeping that way. I go a million miles away when I sleep. And when I wake I’m not sure even sure who I am never mind what century it is. I'd be a terrible candidate for this kind of straddle-spooning. Lucky for me I’m 40 years with the same guy who sleeps like the very dead, even when awake. Plus he was a preemie and did time in an incubator. That means he totally gets it about the need for ‘space’ when you’re sleeping.But back to our human bodies which are let’s face it the least unique and most interchangeable things about us. Yet there’s all this talk always about the body, who’s thin, who’s thinner, who’s had breast augmentation, who’s had his back-hair dipped in hot wax and snatched off so as to look better on the beach or in bed. What must God think of us?I bet He's proud of the ones who have honored the body and told the truth about it. This is the 40^th anniversary of Our Bodies Ourselves, a book about women's health and sexuality produced by the organization then called the Boston Women's Health Book Collective back in '71.Let’s talk a little about that tomorrow, why not. I won’t make anybody blush I promise, or encourage you to speculate about your friends sleep. In fact let’s call the picture below “What are YOU lookin’ at?” Because the sleeping room as they call it in German really is the one place we  can find sweet oblivion, and our minds can rest at last as slumber knits up what Shakespeare called the 'raveled sleeve of care'. 

The Old Bait and Switch

I always got a great tan. Tanned legs like you wouldn’t believe. As a kid at summer camp I used to tell the new campers my father was black. They knew my mom was white because they saw her every day as the camp’s director, but I was safe with that fib about my dad. I knew they’d never meet him, anymore than I ever had, that guy with the map-of-Ireland-face and the blue blue eyes. Anyway it explained the tan, which I loved for how glamorous it made me feel.I guess that’s all light-skinned folks ever wanted from a tan: that “wow” moment when they entered a room.Tanned skin was once the sign of an outdoor laborer, but when most jobs moved indoors it came to signify leisure. Then they really came into fashion in the early 1920s, just after World War I and the great Spanish Influenza of 1918 -1919. Americans wanted a return to “normalcy,” as Presidential candidate Warren G. Harding called it, and so they elected him. Maybe they  just wanted to forget death and go out in the sun a while.Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, living in Paris in those years, journeyed to the South of France as often as they could for the purpose of “browning ourselves,” as Zelda wrote. Later, in the big love scene in her novel Save Me the Waltz, she describes the moon “cradling the tanned face” of her heroine. More glamour!Right on through the 60s and 70s the message remained clear: a healthy tan was a great thing. Certainly Coppertone made millions with that ad showing the waistband of a small child’s bathing-suit bottom being tugged down in back by a frisky pup, revealing how pale she was under her clothes; how burnished where the clothes didn’t cover.They called it a tanline; in Playboy centerfolds it was as erotic as anything else on the page.This is the world lots of us grew up in.The summer before college I lifeguarded at a city pool and patrolled all day under the sun. The soles of my bare feet grew as tough as horse’s hooves and my skin turned a dark mahogany brown.Then the next decade found me sunbathing on the hot tar roofs of various apartment buildings in quest of further bronzing. And of course like everyone else I wrapped tinfoil around an album cover and held it under my chin, the better to reflect the sun’s rays onto my face and chest.Eventually in the 80s, I began to hear more about sunscreen and I used it. I think. Sort of.Anyway I was using it last week when the call came from the dermatologist’s office to say “the biopsy we did on your leg? It came back positive. Basal cell carcinoma.” A surgeon will excise it next week.I asked this kind nurse practitioner if she had any advice for me as I await the scalpel.“Wear a hat. Wear sunglasses. Use sunscreens with an SPF factor of 40.” (She said an SPF any higher than that was fear-mongering.) “And for heaven's sake, steer clear of the ones with an SPF of 15. They don’t protect you at all!”“How about the Coppertone with an SPF of 4 that I’ve been using?” I asked, mostly to get the laugh.I got the laugh all right. She didn’t know I was speaking the truth.No one is laughing now, I can tell you, least of all me. Who said it first? We really are too soon old and too late smart.