retracing my steps

For very many years, I didn't have health insurance. What I did have was a city full of every kind of hooky kooky new age healer types you could possibly look for, and I explored them. Physics, channelers, past life regressions, hypnotists, swamis, shamen, workshops, and just generally congregating in the local coffee house to talk about mystical things. Living in Asheville was magical, before I was jaded.

When I moved here, my then to be and now is husband made sure I had real health insurance. The kind you can walk into a doctor or dentist and they smile and I swipe my credit card, it's like magic! I never had a credit card before. Or a cell phone. In so very many ways, I upgraded when I moved to the beach to be with my husband, all but for one very particular way:

I lost my support circle.

Not just the friends I had when I lived there, some of them I am still very close with, but the gems of the healers that I had waded through to pull from the rubbish of mystical fruitcakes who weren't really psychic, just bi-polar. Oh, there's always plenty of them, making the real healers look shabby, but I found the real ones, and it was a great loss to leave them five hundred miles behind.

But, ah! Health insurance! Specialists! Wow! For real medical help, like Western medical help, I had gone to the Health Department before. Now, bless them, they have cured my sons ear infections and my strep throat, but they can only do so much. Their dental clinic (for adults) consists of cleaning teeth, I think, or pulling them. If there's a problem, they can pull it out... otherwise you'll need insurance and a dentist. And my baffling array of symptoms and pain, anxiety and seemingly unrelated but severe reactions to random things was completely out of their league. When I moved here, I got a shrink, not a family doctor who can listen for three minutes and suggest a different SSRI, but a kooky lady that I like and can chatter and feel understood by. Chalk up points for health insurance.

Health insurance led me to seek physical therapy when my neck suddenly seized up one morning, and six months of intensive and long over due physical therapy followed. Months more of exercise and pain, only to go back to the doctors, have them perform more test, and slowly come to the painful realization that I was a chart. They sent me to specialists and surgeons, and back and forth, X-rays and MRIs, but invisible is this thing that plagues me so. So the insurance accepting Western doctors do the thing they fall back on when things get weird: prescribe medication. Side effects? There's medication for that, too. Oh yes.

So I've spent a few months on that merry go round, and I think going up to Michigan and visiting my ever miserable father with his cynicism and pain, bottles of pills scattered all over the house, and his relentless prattling on about how he can't wait to die, I think that pulled the cork on the fizzy bottle that is me.

Fibromyalgia. Sure, it's real. It's not imaginary. But what the hell causes it?

Books can't tell me, doctors can't tell me, the internet can't tell me, all the info is on how to cope, how to manage your life and family, how to get up and put one foot in front of the other, and I read books about it until I wanted to fucking scream in rage. I took the books back to the library, took some time, searched in other directions.

I searched backwards.

Meaning, I looked back to those kooky new age Eastern medicine practitioners that I was familiar with, or at least, the practices they offered. I looked for people here in my town, people nearby that can give me the same healing bodywork and holistic approach that helped me before.

Armed with that goal, I seem to be walking smack into answers.

I feel rather like an idiot, honestly. Like the guy who walks into the sliding glass door but doesn't realize it's there until he's on his ass, rubbing his head and thinking, "Ooooooh.....right."

Don't get me wrong. I don't regret all the specialists and tests and all. It allows me to go forward with a clear sense safety. There's not some bizarre reason that the holistic doctors might overlook, I've been scanned and prodded down the molecule.

Details will follow, when I haven't been typing away while the fire burned down and missed the chance to roast marshmallows (drat!) Time to stoke up the fire, sit in a puddle of pain, and be content to roast marshmallows in the moment, knowing I'm heading the right direction, even while sitting still.

I've missed that feeling.

doctor shmocter

Lately I've been pursuing different avenues of health. More accurately, I've been pursuing old avenues of health, ones that worked for me in the past, the past before I had health insurance and could dive headfirst into the world of Western medicine.

I wasn't better before, exactly, but I wasn't taking piles of medicine and still barely functioning like a normal person. I have to ask myself: are these medications actually healing anything? Because it seems to me that the medications are all about treating the symptoms of things, but not the cause.

My doctors have tested for this and that. Honestly, they would test me for endless things if I let them, but each time they test for something new I always intuitively feel that they aren't on the right track. They aren't even in the right hemisphere. I feel like if I don't guide them, and aggressively so, they will play an endless game of guessing what's wrong with me by process of elimination. There's a whole lot of things I am not ill with, but what is it that's making me ill?

I think I have a clue. Or at least another lead.

More about that when I have the brain to write. Currently the docs are trying me on Prozac, and I can't tell for sure if it's making a difference or not. Things seem better, but then again, my husband and I were have some massive communication breakdown issues which were mostly resolved over the holidays. So, yes, I'm feeling happier in general, but I think that's a normal reaction to feeling as if my home is not a potential field of emotional land mines. Mostly the Prozac is making me sleepy, stupid, have headaches, and the only benefit I can really see is in my eyes. (laughs) To be quite clear: Prozac makes my eyes dilate. My pupils are big and black and dreamy looking. If only Cleopatra could have gotten her hands on some Prozac, she wouldn't have had to resort to Belladonna to make her look so hypnotizing.

But I digress.

I have an appointment with one doc this morning, and I'm going to tell him a surprising thing, surprising to us both- the latest set of shoes inserts that I bought have done miraculous things. The stabbing pains in my feet are gone. I can walk a lot easier, even without prolotherapy or even the SI belt. I'll have to link to them later when I have time, but they're really hard plastic and I thought they would never help. They basically shove my arches back up where they belong, and I had no idea how much better that could make a person feel! To hell with "gellin'", I'm cramming arches and it feels gooood.

I've also been researching kineisiologists and other alternative forms of medicine. I've had incredible results with kineisiology. Drastic and immediate, long lasting too.

I'm off. I may come home with a neck and back full of needle marks. Oiy vey...

living life

I haven't gone anywhere, just busy. Pain will often keep me from writing, since it requires time and energy that I value more when I have it less, you see. But I do have a new camera, and am putting more time and energy into those moments, trying to capture an entire tale with one snapshot, and still communicate via photographs.

Of late:








Few words, but much to say. We're working on getting a laptop up and running, and maybe then I can write more, comfy on the couch, in the sun, instead of this dark corner where the computer sits. It's nice right now, with the sunshine reaching as far back here so as to nearly blind me. The groovy solar prism window thingy is spinning about, throwing rainbows all over the room, and I can bear the corner for a little while. I didn't sleep much at all last night, so whatever I could write would be disjointed and so for now I'll stop, but perhaps more pictures may appear during the course of the day.

One never knows.

the mysteries of closure

We're back from our trip to Michigan, the holidays are over, and I'm beginning to wonder if I should ever ride in a car for more than ten minutes again. This having been the second trip up in four months, I'm wondering what in the hell I was thinking...

I know what I was thinking. I was thinking, "Family."

The last time I drove up it was... traumatic. My grandfather was having a surgery he didn't expect to live through, but he did indeed make it through. The week I was there was filled with hesitant conversations with various family members about whether or not he would make it, and as each day went by I became a little more confident he'd be ok. I wasn't ok with having to leave while he was still in ICU, but I'd been there a week and my son was starting school. Grandpa seemed stable, not in good shape but at least stable.

I still don't think I can really write about those days. Standing there holding his hand while he slipped in and out, the angelic smile on his face when he recognized me, and watching the smile slowly slide off of his face into a scowl as he kept hallucinating from the morphine, going from tears of joy to deep paranoia in a matter of minutes and back again...

(deep breath)... and then we drove home, he was finally well enough to be transferred to a physical rehabilitation care center and about a week later, he died. He went up and down in the place, I listened to my mother wringing her hands about how she felt the nurses weren't taking care of him, all the while feeling incapable of helping anyone because I was seven hundred miles away. The end... was grim. My mother's description of it was morbid, and even with my over active imagination I can't even begin to imagine how wretched it must have been for her. She was the one who called the nurses in to ask them what all the blood was. She knew then that it was bad. Very bad.

They took him back to the hospital and they told my mother that he was dying, internally hemorrhaging, and there was no way to stop it. It wasn't due to the surgery. It was because the nurses at the rehab had been giving him three different kinds of blood thinners, and no one noticed.

My mother recently got the autopsy report back. She had a few qualified people look at it, and no one could prove that it was the blood thinners that did it. That is to say, his internal organs were all very weak, the walls of everything were very thin. It could have been caused by the nurses being rough with him, as he told my mother, or it could have been anything at all that started it, but there was no way his blood could stop hemorrhaging once it started, due to the blood thinners...

Would he have lived much longer anyway? There's no way to know. My mom makes the ultimate point as she says, "It doesn't matter. He didn't HAVE to go out the way he did! He made it through the surgery! I just hated to see him go the way he did." Meaning, miserably. My mom told me she didn't think he knew he was dying, my brother told me he was positive that Grandpa knew what was going on. What breaks my heart most was the resignation in his voice the last time I talked to him, which was the day before he was taken back to the hospital. There was no optimism left. The man I knew wasn't there. And thinking back, I know that he was probably already bleeding to death while I talked to him on the phone.

*sigh*

I had told him I would come back up for Thanksgiving. I wanted him to have something big to look forward to while he was busting his ass in physical therapy. Instead he died, and my Grandmother went out west to visit some friends she hadn't seen in a long time, so we put off the trip back up until Christmas.

I know it meant a lot to my family to have us there, to provide support and even just plain distraction from the fact that Grandpa wasn't there. It felt good to be able to do that for them, although it was hard. I made it through most everything without crying, only saving my tears for late at night when my husband and I were alone.

The one time I lost it was going through my Grandfather's things, they were left out on his bed until we came to visit, to see if we wanted some mementos. Being in his room was hard, to see most of his things gone, but still see the few remaining walkers and things he used to get around. I felt like I could see the ghost of his suffering, in pain and alone in the dark, calling out for my Grandma because he just wanted her nearby. She told me about it in the months before he died; how she wasn't getting any sleep, how she felt bad for him but was trying so hard to be there for him, despite it destroying what spirit she had left. She's sad now, but still better, more like her old self. I know it was horrible for her to watch. I was only there for a week and I left feeling forty years older. And then to come back and see him gone, really and truly gone, that was rough. I knew it would be. I knew it would be Christmas for everyone else but more of a sense of closure for me personally. Going through his things, it was ok, right until I got to a hat he wore. I don't know what they're called, some sort of Army hat. And there was his name, written on it in marker so many decades ago... and I put it up to my face and smelled it, and started crying. I hurried off to the bathroom so my Grandma wouldn't notice.

When we got back to my Mom's house, she told me there was another box of things to go through in the bedroom we were sleeping in. I knew it was time to eat dinner but decided to just go through them right then. I think I kind of had to.

As Jack reached down to start pulling the cufflinks and pins and things out of my Grandpa's jewelry box, I gently touched his arm and said, "Please...don't." He looked at me, questioning, and I said, "I know it sounds silly, but when we were at my Grandma's and we were going through his things, I..." I paused. "I just didn't like you touching them first. Can I...?" I left it dangling. He just nodded and said he understood. I was glad. Because, for him they were novelties, things he hadn't seen before, but for me they were memories, and so many things I remembered him wearing, things hanging on his wall, things I used to play with and go through when I was at their house. I wasn't holding a box of cufflinks, I was holding, what felt to me, holy relics. I was glad he understood and just let it go at that.

We brought much of it home. I've spent the last few days cleaning them up, polishing his pocket watch (made in 1905), looking for frames for his Army photos, cleaning and polishing his old tie rack, jewelry box, and suit valet I loved to sit on when I was a kid. All of those precious, wonderful things, in my house, but he's gone...

One of Jack's favorites is a black wool cap. He asked me the other day if I thought he should put it on, did it go with his outfit? He put it on, jauntily, then smiled and held it out to me. I'm not sure why, but he held it right up near my face, and I took a deep breath, smelled an old wool cap, and burst into tears. His smile dropped and he said, "Oh, baby... oh, baby, I'm sorry..." and held me close.

There's a small stack of things I still haven't gotten to, and they're sitting next to the bed. I noticed them as I walked into the bedroom, still awake long after Jack went to sleep, the lights out as I carefully stepped around the edge of the dresser... I could smell them. I decided not to think about it too much and cuddled up next to my husband and go to sleep.

Sixty five years. That's how long they were married. Sixty five years. Their story is fascinating and beautiful, but I still don't feel it's mine to tell. So for now, I'll leave you with woolen caps and faded photographs and freshly polished silver and wood. Those things are mine. That's a bittersweet thing to say, and they're bittersweet to see, but he had them for years, his father had some of these things, and now we have them, too. My Grandma laughed and said she couldn't understand why anyone would want "those old things" but she doesn't see them like I do: I see them in the light of a child's eyes, feeling safe in my grandparent's house, whiling away quiet afternoons looking at lapel pins and leather coin pouches, clocks that sit at the end of a chain in your pocket and stop ticking if you don't wind them each day, chairs that are made to hold coats and keys and drawers full of tiny mysterious symbols on hats and cufflinks (those would be his Mason's stuff, I even have his strange little fez in my room now).

God, I miss him.