Monday, April 24, 2017

At the Bottom of the Box

My dear Boys and Girls knew my favorite flowers
How am I doing?

I've been asked that question dozens of times in the past two weeks, and it fills my heart every time someone looks at me with concern and checks my well-being. I always answer truthfully, and depending on how deeply you want me to answer I will tell you just the first few or all of the following--

I'm better every day. I'm figuring out my new physical boundaries. I'm sitting more, and moving slowly and pacing activities. I know now that if I try to do too much on one day that I will spend the next day feeling terrible.

What I probably won't tell you is that the hardest thing I've had to deal with hasn't been physical. In fact, I don't know exactly how to categorize this tough thing. Is it mental? Psychological? Spiritual?

What is fear?

My recovery from this episode has been a reverse Pandora's box, filled with wonderful people and encouragement. It has been love and hope and messages and cards, hugs and cookies baked with dark chocolate. It has been flowers whose scent follows me through the house and reminds me how very many people are pulling for me. But every once in a while at the bottom of the box I suddenly sense a cold tremor that all of that goodness can't quite squelch.

Sometimes it's mental, when I don't know how to respond to what my body is telling me. I know all the classic symptoms of a heart attack (chest pain, sweating, nausea, feeling of doom) but as I was told over and over again when I was having none of these symptoms but was by every clinical measure having a heart attack, women's heart attacks present differently. So when my heart unexpectedly beats hard and fast, and no amount of calm thoughts or steady breathing stops the disruption, should I be heading for the emergency room?

Sometimes it's psychological, when a chance remark by one of my medical caretakers that "Yeah, you really had a lot of embolisms" gives me information I didn't have before and even though nothing has changed, suddenly I'm aware of how close to the cliff I had been standing and fear washes over me.

Sometimes it's spiritual, when my deeply-held belief that God is in control of my life seems to be buried under appointments and prescriptions.

A dear friend was at her husband's side in the emergency room when, with no prior indication of heart problems, he was found to be having a heart attack. I had sat with her after his multiple-bypass surgery, and took a meal when they got home. So I asked her--am I crazy?

She looked at me sadly.

"We were in the emergency room several times after the surgery," she said. "You just don't know."

And that's where the fear originates, I think. You just don't know this body, this schedule, this life.

How am I doing? I'm doing very well, better every day, and I expect to be looking back years from now and marveling at how modern medicine (science!) helped a fearfully and wonderfully made body cope with a glitch in the works.

But it can be scary.

2 comments:

  1. You're not a would-be writer. You're a writer, period.

    Sorry to hear about your travails, but I love the way you told the story.

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    Replies
    1. Thank you, Jana. Husband told me in the emergency room that this was a terrible way to get blog fodder, but I'm glad to be here to tell it.

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