can’t and don’t

Posted on April 3, 2015 by C. M. Condo

I’m not going to sugarcoat it for you. It is what everyone says it is. If you want to know how to maintain a work-life balance, I have to tell you, it’s impossible.

What I would say is you should probably dial back – you may just be doing too much too early.

Over the last couple of weeks, my pain has been steadily increasing. From what I and my physical therapist can tell, inflammation at the newly adjusted border of my scapula is the culprit, likely due to the increase in strength and range of motion exercises over the same period. However, rest, ice, and increases in pain medications have had no effect.

Well, that’s not exactly true. An increase in pain medication last weekend messed me up mentally, such that I am now, officially, done with tramadol for the foreseeable future. But it doesn’t matter anyway, because while the tramadol did slightly dull the pain, as soon as I tapered back down, the pain came back.

So after a week and a half of that, I emailed my doctor with an explicit description of the situation Monday morning.

Also this week, I’m back in the lab on campus, where my post-grad work is scheduled to begin this summer. I’m still not able to do experiments, but I’m shadowing different researchers as they go along, learning what I can. Monday afternoon, I actually managed to get one of the post-docs out of the lab for a walk outside, which is the only way to have a private conversation (the whole building has ears). I explained that I was feeling a lot of pressure, and that I was concerned both with the pace of my recovery and not knowing if I’d be up to the long hours come Fall. I asked if it were possible to perform at the expected level and still maintain some sort of work-life balance. Her response was the first paragraph of this post.

It was a hard thing to hear, but by Wednesday, I had decided to forge ahead anyway, do whatever I could possibly manage, and just see how it went. Then I got an e-mail back from my doctor, the second paragraph of the post, and was reminded of a period early on in my physical therapy, when my pain had started worsening in the days following sessions. Upon discovering this, my therapist explained that some people take more time than others. That my muscles were sensitive. That I needed to go slow.

These two pieces of information have taken the path that had seemed so clear to me just a couple of months ago and enshrouded it in uncertainty. I don’t know what the right thing to do is. I could bury my head in the sand and pretend my physical limitations won’t be a problem, but that’s what I’ve always done and it’s always ended badly. Always.

Clearly, my physical abilities and my chosen career path are incompatible. Is that always going to be the case? I don’t know. But will that be the case come September? Almost definitely. And now that I have run up against that realization, I have been swinging back and forth between heartrending despondence and paralyzing numbness. I don’t know what to do. More than anything, I want to not to have to do anything. I want to just plug my ears and keep on this path and have everything turn out ok.

I can’t face quitting now. Not after all I’ve been through. I’ve worked so damned hard for this. To get this close and then not be able to go through with it… I don’t think I can handle that right now. I don’t know when I’ll be able to handle it. Because I don’t want to have to handle it. I don’t understand why things like this keep happening to me. I thought I was doing the right thing. After all, I was just doing what was in front of me. No pushing, no manipulating, no pretending I could or couldn’t do this or that. Just taking what was presented to me. No more, no less.

Is it possible to do everything right and still have everything go wrong? It would seem so. It seems, to me, that my life will continue to feature me on the losing end of a struggle between what I need to do and what I can do. But what else can I do? What am I supposed to be doing? I don’t know. I want answers and there just aren’t any.

And there’s a little voice in my head that keeps saying What kind of life do you really want to have? And I do know the answer to that question, and I do know that spending every waking moment in a lab isn’t it. But even if it was, I don’t have a choice. If I were a healthy person, I could decide that that was a sacrifice I’d be willing to make for 5 or 6 years in order to have the career I wanted. But all the willingness in the world won’t change the fact that I am not physically healthy, that my body, this fragile, easily bruised, easily spent structure that has been abusing my soul for over a year and a half, will not permit me to follow through with that course of action.

It doesn’t help that there’s pain again. Last night, both of my shoulders hurt awfully; the bad one because that’s what it’s been doing lately, and the good one because it’s so overworked because I can’t do anything with the bad one. Coupled with a mind jammed in fifth gear, I laid awake for over an hour before getting up to take a supplemental muscle relaxant, followed by another half hour of waiting and trying to distract myself until the pain in my shoulders and spine settled to the point where I could find a comfortable sleeping position.

As I laid there, I couldn’t keep from wondering if this was how the rest of my life was going to go, if my body never would settle back down into some sort of relatively pain-free, steady state. Those couple of weeks after surgery, when I was relatively pain-free, now seem more than ever like an aberration, and I struggle to even recall what it felt like.  It was utterly foreign to me.  This, this working around constant pain to do what little I can, this is where I live.  And now, I’m reminded that pain that persists for hours and days, even the mid-level pain that I have now, is not something one can just tolerate while continuing to function normally. It’s messing with my body and it’s messing with my mind and I just wish, more than anything, that it would let me go, would let me be, would let me finally finish a race that I start instead of forcing me off the track before I’m halfway through.

It’s hard not to see that pattern reaffirmed in this. Too many prizes have been dangled in my face and then snatched away. It is easy to understand why ancient societies believed in cruel, mischievous gods. These tantalizing glimpses of what I could have, what my life could be like, hanging around just long enough for me to reach for them before they vanish like mirages, are worse than no opportunities at all.

I know that “why?” is the wrong question. I know there is no larger explanation for why things happen the way they do.  But it’s hard not to feel as though I’m missing some important message, and that as long as I keep missing it, bricks will keep getting thrown my way.  It’s hard not to sift back through everything that has happened over the last several months, and every choice I made, and wonder if I’m not still doing something wrong.

My brain is still frantically, futilely searching for a way through, a way to have the body I have and the career I want at the same time. But my heart knows better. It watches my mind spinning its wheels in the mud and knows I’m not going to get anywhere, but lets me go ahead and churn because at least it’s keeping me busy. At some point, my suspicions of the ugly reality this week has revealed will be confirmed, and then I will have to go up to the car and pull the keys from the ignition.

But not yet.  I have a plan.  And that plan is to do absolutely nothing at all, until I absolutely have to.  It may not be the greatest plan, but I just don’t have the mental energy for anything else.  And maybe that isn’t such a bad thing.

Posted in Aspect III | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

emotional

Posted on March 17, 2015 by C. M. Condo

“Bachelor of Arts or Sciences?”

“Sciences.”

“How tall are you?”

“5’3”.”

The man frowned at me. “You look taller than that.”

“Really?” My posture has improved, but it seems unlikely I’ve gotten a whole inch out of it. (Or do college women usually lie about their height?) I glanced down at my shoes; combat-type boots with a thick, inch-and-a-quarter heel. “Well, 5’4” today,” I amended, nodding to my feet.

He didn’t seem convinced, but handed me a plastic bag with graduation regalia from the 5’3” – 5’5” Sciences box anyway. “Congratulations,” he said. “Be sure to check out our announcements and rings at the next table.” He shifted his gaze behind me. “Who’s next?”

As I took the package to the register, I was surprised to find a lump in my throat; I didn’t expect to feel so emotional about picking up what amounted to a cheaply made Harry Potter costume. I’d been a little miffed on my way to the campus bookstore, actually, because the only time I could come by was an afternoon after class, and I was already exhausted and the queue was a mile long. The line moved pretty well, though, and before I knew it, I was holding a cap and gown made from recycled plastic bottles (as I’d heard earnestly explained – twice – by the girl sitting at the attendant display) along with tassel, hood, and university insignia in black, gold, and red, respectively.

It wasn’t until I thought back to how I felt this time last year that I recognized the still-tender scar the physical representation of my accomplishment had touched. Last March, it wasn’t clear if it was a good idea to even still be in school, never mind try to complete my degree. I had only a handful of courses remaining, but two of them entailed three-hour weekly lab sessions, and I was barely able to get through the couple of much shorter lecture classes I was still able to take.

Moreover, my chosen career path at the time, which was teaching science to adolescents, was proving to be too physically demanding for me in the state I was in; I could hardly manage a couple of weekly half-days of student teaching (co-teaching, my mentor teacher liked to call it; we tag-teamed her six rowdy cohorts of eighth graders) before pain and exhaustion pushed me out of the classroom. The two days I’d taught the full day by myself (as required by the program) had been orchestrated to land on Fridays so I could have the weekend to recover, and this had proven to be deal-breaker-necessary.

I remember wondering more than once if there was any point in continuing my education at all. Even if I were able to manage the labs, why put myself through them if I couldn’t pursue the career path that was supposed to follow? And now, in what still feels like a sudden about-face though the surgery was two months ago, I’m about to graduate. I’m going to put on a polyester cape and cardboard hat and walk up to the dean of my college and get a handshake and a rolled-up piece of blank paper, and this silly pantomime will mean I have completed a bachelor of sciences; with honors, no less. And I am relieved, and grateful, and even a little proud of myself.

And scared. The principal investigator of my lab, who had so heavily recruited me despite my physical limitations, stopped me on the stairs after the lab meeting this week to ask if I’d been emailed by the graduate department about my acceptance to the program.

“What? I haven’t even been interviewed yet…”

“Oh, they don’t need to interview you,” he was grinning; clearly, he was delighted to be able to break the news to me himself. (And here I’d been stressing about an interview that wasn’t even going to happen; I really have to start getting better about wasting energy on such things.)

“Oh my god.” I got in. This is really going to happen. It’s not yet official, but it’s real. Starting this Fall, I will be embarking on a Ph.D.

Which means “producing,” the lead researcher’s euphemism for churning out experimental data on a weekly basis, as well as taking two or three graduate level classes and teaching an undergraduate course – with lab – in anatomy. Good graduate teachers are in hard to come by; my teaching experience puts me on a very short list. I’d already been franchise-tagged by the anatomy professor, a stalwart mentor of mine. It was a prime appointment, but also one of the most labor-intensive.

And I don’t know if I’ll be able to handle all of that, physically or emotionally. Not that it will be difficult in the academic sense; even now, I can already tell that I’m in the right place as far as that goes, thank goodness. But my ignominious resume of running myself into the ground drags at my neck like an albatross, reminding me that I am not like other apes, that I can’t just go taking off and doing whatever I want.

I should probably need to push the anatomy commitment off by a year; explain to my mentor that I won’t be fully recovered by the Fall and must manage my obligations accordingly. Which has the advantage of being true, but I’m hung up on the feeling that I will be letting her down, yet another vestigial artifact I should probably find a way to resect from my personality like the chunk of shoulder blade from which I was divested nine weeks ago. Fortunately, the official acceptance notices haven’t gone out yet so I can leave that hurdle for another week or two; perhaps by then I will have a better acceptance of the extreme length and slow pace of my recovery.

Even with an easier TA assignment, though, I am terrified that I will founder under the grueling hours inherent in graduate-level work. This past week, pain at the surgery site ticked upward sharply enough to pull the muscles back into guarding mode, limiting my range of motion at physical therapy and forcing me to start taking pain medication during the day again. In searching for a cause, I recall that I did a bit of housework last weekend (laboring under the delusion that I could finally start doing such things for myself again) and allowed the PT intern to push me too far in last week’s sessions.

Still too much, still too soon, same old song, as always, and I’m tired of it, but at least I now know what the right response is. I refilled my prescription for tramadol, set myself back on the minimum dose (which isn’t enough, but it’s bearable and highly preferable to an increase in side effects), canceled yesterday’s PT and started using the sling again. Wait, TGA, did you stop using the sling? Why was that, exactly? Yeah, yeah, I know, save it.

It’s not that I don’t know what my limits are. I just can’t accept them. And because most of the things I do (barring something patently stupid like accidentally using my right arm to reach for the three-gallon jug in my fridge) don’t increase my pain, it is difficult to know if I’ve crossed the line until it’s too late. Whenever I feel like I’m right up against it, I have to decide whether to keep going or not. If I do keep going, I usually – but not always – go too far. But if I don’t, I wonder if I didn’t go far enough, because, of course, nothing happens.

It’s not that I’m not able to key in more closely to non-pain-related signals, like muscle weakness and fatigue. What I don’t know is why I simply refuse to do it, why after I’ve blown past that boundary and my muscles start to shake and fail, I just keep going because oh well, too late now, anyway. And then I berate myself for allowing my pride/ego/imagination to do my thinking for me.  The pattern repeats itself with disturbing regularity. I keep making this same stupid mistake followed by my hating myself for it, time after time. I’m still too attached to the person I wish I was and the state I wish I was in.

I may not be emotionally connected to my physical body, but I have a deep, and fraught, emotional connection to its recovery, such that things like looking at my cap and gown on a hanger (I couldn’t bring myself to actually try them on; I didn’t want to jinx it) nearly bring me to tears, and things like the annoying refusal of my recent uptick in pain to settle back down make me want to do something cacophonically destructive, like throwing a chair out my fourteenth story window.

And right now, that emotional connection is endangering not just my recovery, but paradoxically, the very life that hinges upon it, the life over which I’m pushing myself too far for fear of losing. I am so afraid that I won’t get well fast enough – or, the deeper, darker dread that I won’t get well enough – to take this amazing opportunity that’s been presented to me, to fulfill the expectations that [I imagine] are being laid out along my path like streetlights that will burn out if I don’t get to them in time. The fear looms so large that I can’t keep myself from acting to fight it, push it back with exercise I have no business doing or physical tasks I have no business undertaking, just to be doing something, anything, to try to cope with it, to try to keep it from overtaking me.

I suppose I should just let it come. Emotions are not permanent states of being; they blow in and out all of themselves, even at the too-infrequent times when I can keep from acting on them. I should let it sit here until it decides to leave, because I do not know what will happen come September, and everything I do to try to force what I want to happen into being is only making it less likely that it will come to pass, not more so.

Because sometimes the right thing to do is nothing at all. And I hate it, and it feels like exactly the wrong thing. But I have to learn it. I’ve come too far and I’ve been through too much not to.

Posted in Aspect III | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

come to rest

Posted on February 23, 2015 by C. M. Condo

Even before this happened, I was a reluctant inhabitant of my physical body. I railed against its inevitable (if as yet largely imperceptible) decline, the stealthy, inexorable loss of elasticity, pigment, resilience, strength. It felt like punishment, to house a thriving being inside such a fleeting encasement.

Once the pain wedged itself like a sword against the soft tissue behind my right shoulder blade, my resentment against this squishy, maddeningly innervated form developed into a full-blown hatred. Not a day passed that I didn’t wish to be quit of it and its helpless petulance, demanding more food than my nausea would allow me to eat, more hours of sleep than the unceasing agony would permit me to gather.

Long after I stopped needing it to, my body persisted in its futile efforts to guard my upper torso from a danger from without, locking down on the surrounding muscles, tendons, ligaments and bones, unwittingly aiding the torture persevering from within. Even now, the vestiges of this maladaptive response pull at my neck, my ribs, my shoulder muscles and back, and today in particular, my left shoulder, under which a familiar pebble has knotted the surrounding muscles and ratcheted up my resting pain component.

But even on a “bad” day, like today, it’s practically nothing compared to how I felt before. I have a new ease and delight in being on the inside of my body. It is now joyful to increase my spiritual entropy, to evenly distribute my consciousness throughout my physical form, no concentration localized in or gates blocking off one particular area or another. It would seem that I was in a relatively peaceful and serene state of mind, and in fact, strictly relatively speaking, that would be true.

But then, out of nowhere, surprising me as much as the clueless old bat tentatively maneuvering her Camry down the street in front of me, a slice of rage cuts through and I pound my hand down on my horn hard enough to make it hurt, perversely causing her to slam on the brakes before realizing where it came from. Even more perverse is my own reaction to this sudden display of temper, that it is pointless, that it will not make the hesitant woman in front of me suddenly become a capable driver, and that it will not make me feel any better even if it does magically elicit the desired response, which, of course, it doesn’t.

A similar flash of fury escaped in the parking lot at my physical therapist’s earlier that morning; I opened the driver’s side door and went to put my keys in my bag, only to have the door slam back shut, requiring me to unlock it, pull the latch, and kick it back open with my foot, which I did with far more force than necessary.

It feels strange to be so grounded and still strike out at the world around me with such ready anger, my smooth surface belying its permeability to the sharp knives below that shoot out to slice at anything or anyone that gets too close to me before disappearing back beneath, leaving no trace of how or where they slipped through.

Why? Why is this happening? I’m free, I keep thinking; it’s over. The nightmare, that I have been revisiting as I read back through the posts from Aspects I and II, has finally ended. I’m glad there is a record, for the visceral immediacy of the daily torture I underwent has already lost much of its bite; I need to go back and read my words and remind myself how awful it truly was, how horrific an experience I have weathered.

I was speaking with a friend a few nights ago about my temper issues, and about how I was having trouble concentrating on my studies, and he sarcastically (and accurately) pointed out that it might have a little something to do with recovering from a year and a half of constant pain followed by a drastic surgical procedure to relieve it. I admitted this was undoubtedly correct, but it wasn’t until this morning, having forced myself to stay in bed past 7 AM, curled up around my dim-witted tabby cat as she hissed softly with pleasure, that I realized how true the statement was.

Here I’ve been thinking that I’m “just” recovering from major surgery. But as he and Momma Ape and pretty much all of my fellow apes have been insisting, I am recovering from much, much more than that. I am also recovering from fifteen months of brutal, unrelenting, physical torture. It has left me in a significant sleep and nutrition deficit, not to mention the gaping psychological wounds over which scars have just barely started to form, scars that are far larger and uglier than the two-inch vertical seam over my recently reduced scapula that has already begun to fade.

No wonder I’m so tired, no matter how much sleep I get. No wonder my nerves are frayed, my temper short, my tolerance worn thin. All of these many months I could not let myself feel the enormity of what was happening to me for more than a few minutes here and there. I dared not spare the energy; it was all I could do to keep moving forward, step by shuffling step, chin down, eyes pinned only on the next few inches I planned to traverse. It was unthinkable to expend more than the briefest periods of time – most of it here on this blog – trying to get my mental arms around what was happening, never mind a open an investigation into what it might be costing me to endure it.

Now that the crisis has passed, I am acting as though the fire that ravaged my internal landscape never happened. As though the broad swath it razed through the deepest parts of my existence, my sense of purpose, my sense of self, didn’t exist. As though I could simply turn my back on all of it, close some door between me and it, and just walk away.

Now I realize that I am still in it, in fact still pretty much dead center in this blasted countryside, and that I have much, much farther to walk before it is behind me. And I don’t want to. I don’t want to deal with it. I don’t want to be here. Haven’t I been through enough? keeps reverberating inside my head. It seems cruel that as soon as I started to feel better, I was dragged back under by the psychological fallout of having labored in unmitigated agony for so long.

My physical therapist is right; I should not be working right now. It will be a long, long time before I am physically recovered, not just from having a fistful of crystallized scar tissue scraped away and having my shoulder blade subsequently fractured to prevent it from coming back, but from the physiological and mental damage resulting from the year-plus period of unremitting torture that preceded it.

And as long as it takes my system to recover, it will be even longer, I fear, before the psychological wounds have begun to close over and recede. It’s time I admitted that I can’t simply bounce back from this. It’s too much. And I can’t will myself into changing that. And as angry and frustrated and sad as that makes me, I cannot make it go away simply by wishing it, no matter how desperately.

As if I didn’t know, as if it hasn’t been hammered home time and again that the world is as it is and not as we want it to be. Of course I know, I know, already, that there’s no way around it. I need rest, both physical and spiritual, and much, much more of it than I’ve been willing to admit. It’s not going to be enough just slow down. I need to come to a stop.

No more lab work. No more commitments. No more space-filling. If I have to be confined to this apartment, so be it. It is beautiful here, a calm expanse of quiet and light, as different as it could possibly be from where I lived before, both in appearance and circumstance. And I need it; I need this physical and temporal space to heal and to rest. I may be resentful, and even less willing to have that need than I am to fulfill it, but it is right here, in front of me, both the vacancy and the means by which to occupy it.

I don’t know why that’s so hard to accept.

I don’t know why any of this is so hard to accept, as patently true as all of it is. I don’t know why I have so much trouble taking events at face value. Maybe it’s because I still heartily resent being surprised by them. I didn’t expect this part of the experience, even though I should have, and I am impotently angry about it even as I concede its inevitability.

But I just want to be well. I’ve been so unwell for so long, and I do just want to step through a threshold and shut a door behind me; lock all this away and stop having to stare it in the face every time I have a moment to myself. And maybe that’s why I’ve been resisting coming to a stop, because if I do that, if I finally allow that to happen, then there will be nothing left to do but turn and face the calamity that has occurred full-on, and let the gathering emotional winds rip through me and drag me where they will. And I’m scared, of what I will do, and think, and be, while that is going on, and I don’t want to go through it.

But again, as always, it doesn’t matter what I want.

And so, this morning, finally, I am allowing myself to come to rest. And now I must wait for whatever will happen next.

Posted in Aspect III | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

not done

Posted on February 16, 2015 by C. M. Condo

It hasn’t been a good week. The tidal surge of adrenaline borne out of the pure joy at being released from constant, immobilizing pain has receded. I have come back down to earth to find my shoulder still heavily damaged and disturbingly weak. Chastened twice by my physical therapist in as many sessions, I resentfully cut even more commitments and tasks from my activities this past week, further dampening my mood.

To make matters worse, I’m now back in my least-favorite situation, of having to deal with well-meaning but obtuse commentary from acquaintances about a physical malady that lends itself poorly to the brief exchange of pleasantries that would accompany, say, a torn rotator cuff.  I wish I hadn’t been so quick to crow about the surgery’s success, not because it wasn’t one, but because too many people now think that I’m all fixed. At fellowship tonight, one person after another kept commenting on the sling. What happened? You weren’t wearing that last week, were you? How is the healing going?

I wanted to scream at them. Leave me alone! Can we please not talk about my fucking shoulder all of the fucking time? Can we please stop pretending like you actually give a shit already? My god, church people can be so annoying, so cloying; when they’re in a house of God they’re so full of their altruistic selves, brimming with solicitude, something that rarely plagues me at, say, the research lab.

The meeting was on how important it is to let go and let God. (Before you wonder why I still go to these things, seeing as how me and God have had a parting of ways, well, these people are my friends, and I still take comfort in being with them, and am helped a lot by the discussions about how to be our better selves.) And everyone was talking about how they have to keep letting go a million times a day, because they just keep taking the wheel back in their own hands, trying to have things their own way, and everyone is laughing as people talk about the silly little ways they try to manage their lives, and I feel myself starting to fidget.

I find that I am getting a little peeved. And the more people talk, the more peeved I get. What is the matter with me? I keep wondering. By the time we take hands for the final prayer, I can’t wait to get out of there. Afterwards, I pack up as quickly as I can – which is not very quickly, unfortunately – but not before yet another friend asks about my sling. I start to explain that I overdid, and she gets this patronizing smile, and I lose it. “Don’t smile at me like that. I can’t handle it. I’ve had a challenging week.” I feel bad for snapping at her, but I don’t even have time to apologize before another friend comes up with the brilliant insight that tonight’s topic was just exactly what I needed for the “shoulder thing.”

I didn’t let him finish. “Stop. You have to stop. I don’t need to hear this right now. Please.” I’m sure he responded sympathetically, but I don’t remember what he said and I’m not sure I even heard it. My head was so loud it all but drowned out the cacophony of some fifty people chatting about their week and making plans for dinner.

I escaped as quickly as I [barely] politely could, gratefully pushing open the door to the parking lot and stepping outside. The air was bitterly cold, but I liked it; my anger had brought on a hot flash and I was sweating under my coat. I do not need to hear this right now. Why had I said that? But then it hit me, why I was so upset. Tears started to form at the outer corners of my eyes, and I stared up at the sky for a moment. The night was clear, and even this close to the city, a handful of stars shone stark and bright against a dusky violet sky. I had been right; I didn’t need to hear it, not any of it. Because what has my life been, this last year and a half, if not one, long, arduous lesson in letting go of trying to manage it? Not because I shouldn’t. But because I can’t.

Even this last couple of weeks is just another case in point. I had so little pain – and even now, I have far less than I did before – that I thought I could do much more with my right arm than I should have. I was properly lectured for it at that first session with my physical therapist and started to cut back, but it became clear in the subsequent days that cutting back was not what was called for. I had to stop using the arm for any but the smallest of tasks, and I was to rest and ice every single afternoon, no ifs, ands, or buts. The inflammation is now visible even under my clothing, a large mass under the surgery site, and swelling over a good part of the right side of my upper back.

Penalty. Severe. As always. Had I dared to think my life was going to be different now? How could I have possibly worried that I wouldn’t be able to remain in my humble, chastened state? How could I have had the audacity to assume that I could finally go back to something like normal?

And I wasn’t angry at those people in that meeting. I was jealous; insanely, paralyzingly so. I used to think, like they apparently think, that I could affect the course of my life, or at least my day. I used to think I had a choice as to whether or not to take hold of the controls, whether that was true or not. But the last fifteen months, I’ve been duck-taped to the passenger compartment. I can’t even see the controls, never mind try to put my hands on them.

I’m trying so hard to stay in that peaceful place I found last week, to remember that these things that are happening aren’t personal. No-one is punishing me for anything. There is no sadistic (or otherwise) being pulling these cards from the deck and specifically placing them in my hands. They just happen to be there. They just happen. Things just happen to me, like they do to everybody. And they’re just things.

But I’m still angry. I’m still not done grieving the loss of my autonomy. I’m still not done being jealous of people who have not had to suffer the destruction of the fantasy that they have control over their lives, their careers, the pursuit of their desires, their dreams.

I want to be OK with this. I want so badly to stop having this anger rise up, push aside rational thought, and leap out to sting the people around me, especially since it always seems to be the ones who care about me the most that wind up subject to my venom. But I feel cut down on the inside, like I’ve lost some essential part of myself. Like I was broken in two, like a wishbone, and left with the smaller piece.

Whoever got the larger piece still gets to make wishes and sometimes, some of them might even come true. But I don’t. And I still have a seemingly bottomless well of sadness about it, and I’m not anywhere near over it. And I don’t know how to get over it; I don’t know how to grieve, how to process, how to move on. And even if I did know how, I don’t know if I could do any of that right now, or strangely, if I even want to.

But I’m tired of waiting for it to happen.  I was so sure the worst of this ordeal was behind me.  I’m not so sure of that any more.  I thought it was OK to be sure of things again, little things, at least, but it seems not.  Perhaps it never will be. I wonder if that isn’t the most upsetting thing of all; that being on a well-marked path, granted a little bit of foresight, of predictability, is just one more thing that I will never have again.

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learning, fast and slow

Posted on February 9, 2015 by C. M. Condo

Well, that didn’t take long. Even though the surgery was less than a month ago, I was back in full-on, Type-A Ape mode in the lab last week, happily doing whatever was asked of me, including a generous complement of pipetting. And Tuesday afternoon, sitting in a powerpoint presentation put on by a visiting researcher, I became aware that my right shoulder was decidedly more displeased with me than it had been before I came back to work. I shifted in my chair and found I was able to lessen my discomfort somewhat by resting my elbow on the desk. Disturbingly, however, I was unable to make it go away.

As I have finally come around to accepting that I need to pack it in once the pain breaks through whatever I’m doing, I forced myself to leave the research facility as soon as the presentation was over. I suppose I should congratulate myself on having learned to attend to the information on my body’s billboards. However, I’ve also learned that if my body has resorted to billboards, it means I missed a road sign or two a few miles back.

Fortunately, before Self-Destructive Ape was able to fully assert her dominance, I was able to take a breath and set about objectively assessing my situation. I’ve just had a major surgery wherein they carved out a hand-sized chunk of tissue and bone from my back and shoulder, the equivalent to sustaining a complete bone fracture and considerable damage to the surrounding tissues.  Those types of injuries take months to heal, and here I was, not three weeks later, on campus for 8 to 10 hours a day, using my arm for anything that didn’t involve carrying weight, and more or less acting as if the last year and a half never happened. I was forced to [grudgingly] admit to myself that perhaps, maybe, it might be within the realm of possibility that I ought to slow down.

At my post-op follow-up, when the surgeon asked how I was doing and I responded with a heartfelt “awesome,” he didn’t share my enthusiasm.

“Really,” he replied. “Already? Usually people don’t recover this quickly.”

I grinned. “I feel so much better. I am so glad we did this.”

“So, physical therapy starts in a couple of weeks—”

“I can’t start right now?”

“No.” I got a more pointed look. “You haven’t been overdoing, have you?”

“Now, whatever you could you mean by that?” I joked, hiding the fact that the thought had not actually occurred to me. While it was ridiculous to assume I could go straight back to doing whatever I wanted so soon after being divested of several grams of bursitis and scapula, I’d apparently made that rather considerable leap without even realizing it.  Case in point, my physical therapist, more accustomed to my M.O., didn’t even bother to temper her displeasure at my activity.  “You’ve been going to work?  Seriously?”

“Well-”

“You should not be working right now.” She had the look.  That I know what you’re up to, sister, and it ain’t gonna fly with me look.

“Light duty.  Really.”  I backpedaled. It was sort-of-true.

“Whatever.  You can’t be doing things with that arm.  I mean it.” She went on to explain that because of my pain, my shoulder had been virtually immobilzed for over a year. As a result, the rotator cuff and back muscles that enabled my shoulder and arm to work as they were designed to were considerably atrophied.  It wasn’t that I shouldn’t be doing things; I simply was not able to do them, and it was going to be a while – months – before I was.

Once back at home with ice on my shoulder, reality started to sink in.  I know I need to be more careful.  I have known it; it’s not like it’s news.  If nothing else, the amount of pain I was in the first week after surgery should have been enough to keep that firmly in my mind.

But of course I’d been overdoing it. Anyone would be, after the fifteen months I’ve had.

Before the surgery, the total number of days my pain level dropped below a 6 did not exceed my ability to count them on my own digits. Now I hadn’t managed to clear a 2 in almost a week. It was no wonder I took off like I’d been shot from a crossbow. And who could blame me? If there wasn’t much pain, it couldn’t be that bad, right? Well…not exactly.  It’s a bit more complicated than that. (It always is, it seems.)

Pain scales are defined by our experiences; your “10” is the worst pain you’ve ever had, and since that can increase, so can it. Because of the way pain signaling works in the body, though, there’s a tradeoff for this elongated span. Over a small field, our internal signaling mechanisms are capable of making fine discriminations among stimuli. But if you keep raising the top end, you lose sensitivity in the low-to-mid ranges. As such, when your “10” has been raised as high as mine has, it takes a substantial pain increase to kick it up from “practically nothing” to “gee, I guess that hurts a bit.”

So a lot of stuff really doesn’t hurt the way it used to, and my pain level for the last several days (up until this past Tuesday, that is) was only registering at about a 1.5. There were even times when I was not consciously aware of being in any pain at all. Back when I was still bouncing from doctor to doctor, Momma Ape told me to add three to my pain level number whenever reporting it.  At this point, though, I have no idea what it means to be, say, a 5 as opposed to a 2.

I’m so far and so long removed from my pre-injury relationship with nociception that it’s impossible for me to imagine where I’d place what I have going on right now. Maybe a 4? Or should I say a 6? After all, I’ve spent the last year and a half creating as much mental distance as possible between my pain and my awareness thereof; too little pain and it’s pretty well out of reach. And to be honest, it’s been kind of nice not to register the lower levels, which are more annoyances than anything else anyway. Pain can be awfully damned inconvenient.

However, pain insensitivity is not necessarily a good thing. Physical pain didn’t evolve to give us something to complain about. It’s an important survival response that tells us to get away from or stop engaging in whatever is causing the pain. But in this new milieu of all but undetectable sequelae, I’ve been mindlessly ignoring such subtle clues as to what I should and should not be doing. There had been a slight increase in soreness after each round of pipetting, but I took that to mean that I was done pipetting for the day – not that I shouldn’t have been pipetting in the first place.

Because even after all this time and all of these damned posts, I still suspect that I “should” be able to do more than whatever it is I am currently doing, however little or much that might be. I had a little debate with myself (another activity I still engage in despite full knowledge of the futility thereof) about whether or not I should be reducing my commitments. It was with trepidation that I finally pulled up my schedule and cut my time spent on campus to no more than six hours per day, and subsequently emailed my supervisor to apprise him of the downshift.

I wasn’t happy about it. The six hour cutoff meant there was one day a week I couldn’t be in the research lab at all, because with a three-hour class and then lunch, there wasn’t enough time left to even bother humping it over there. And full disclosure, part of my displeasure was rooted in the tiny wave of relief that lapped at my legs once I decided to click “send” on the email. Why was I happy that I was going to have these big chunks of unstructured time in my week? Me and unstructured time, we shouldn’t be together too often. Not good for me, to only have the ape in my head for company.

Then again, it appears I’ve already forgotten that I had planned to leave chunks of unstructured time in my schedule if/when my condition improved. I hated, really and truly hated, being as crammed and busy as I was before. I never would have admitted it, but I was miserable; stressed out, always rushing, unable to enjoy what I was doing even if I liked it. There weren’t any opportunities to just sit down and relax for a few minutes here and there, and I suffered for it.

And for the first time in a long time, sitting down is comfortable. It no longer increases my pain. For the first time in a long time, I can thoroughly relax and let my mind wander. For the first time in a long time, I am untethered from the perpetual state of agony that hounded me for nearly a year and a half. Even though there is more pain now than a few days ago, it’s nothing like it was before. It’s a mellow sort of pain, easy on the senses. I can hang out with it and not flinch when I happen to rub up against its dull, plastic edge.

I’ve been spending more time meditating. I’ve been spending more time simply enjoying being inside my body, in a way I never did even before this happened. I like it so much, I’ve started searching out opportunities, whether stopped at a traffic light or waiting in line or whatever, to revel in the fact that I can do whatever it is I’m doing, even if that’s nothing, for as long as I want.

Because it doesn’t hurt any more. Just doing nothing actually doesn’t hurt any more. I’m still awed by the fact; everything I see and do is unfamiliar and exciting, like being dropped into an alternate reality. It’s an unexpected gift, and I’m very lucky to have received it, and I shouldn’t be so quick to take it for granted. There’s a sort freedom that emerges when I am able to just be aware of everything in and around me without interacting emotionally with any of it, without having to suppress the emotional reactions that resulted from my constant pain.

And after I sent the email, did my supervisor email me back and tell me that he was disappointed in me, or that he wasn’t going to be able to work with me, or that he was going to report me to the lead researcher who would then decide he didn’t want me in his lab after all? (Yes, I thought all of those things.) Well, big surprise, none of that happened. In fact, he didn’t seem to care at all.

So perhaps I shouldn’t care so much either. I think I’ll work on that.

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short-cut

Posted on February 2, 2015 by C. M. Condo

“Furious. In-frigging-sane. I want to punish somebody; I want to make somebody feel as bad as felt, hurt as much as I hurt.”

“Well, of course you feel that way,” my mentor replied. “You want to take it out on someone. So take it out on them, go ahead. Call up their offices. Tell them what really happened.”

She’d lost me. “Take it out on who?”

“The doctors. The massage therapists. The physical therapists. The specialists. The ones who screwed this up. Let ‘em all have it. It’ll feel good.” She grew animated. There was no love lost between her and the medical community.

“Why? I’m not angry at them,” I asked. And I actually meant it. I’m not. Perhaps it’s because I’ve read enough research to know how inexact a science clinical medicine is, or maybe it’s just a built-in, jaded outlook on life in general, but whatever the reason, I do not go in to a doctor’s office with the expectation that he or she will possess superhuman powers of diagnosis and repair. True, I’d kept hoping that the next physician might be able to fix me, but after the first one, I stopped expecting it. That I had managed to present with a rare injury that confounded doctor after doctor was not terribly surprising; I didn’t blame them for missing it. The surprise, in fact, was that one of them had been able to figure it out.

“So who are you angry at?” my mentor asked.

I had no good answer.

And there’s the problem. There’s no-one to be angry at. I can’t blame God any more, since my injury and pain have long since overwhelmed my ability to invest wholeheartedly in a belief therein. A younger, more self-centered version of me would have been happy to take my litany of medical practitioners and drag them over the coals, but right now, the idea doesn’t appeal. I could certainly rub a lot of fur the wrong way, and make a whole host of administrative staff people miserable in the process, but to what end? I’d probably only get angrier.

The only person left to punish is myself. And while I am highly skilled in that arena, and gave it some serious thought, that, too, offers little besides the consequences that would certainly outlive the short-term masochistic thrill. No, I’m stuck with this big, heaping, stinking pile of fury that I can’t even see over, never mind climb up or start shoveling through, and I don’t know what to do with it, and the fact that it’s even there is only making me madder.

Because what the hell? I mean really, what the hell? Was there no other way to get to this point B (more like point Y) from the point A where I started? Was this supposed to be some kind of twisted, personal growth shortcut? Oh, but wouldn’t that have been just like me. I’m the queen of quicker and more efficient. It’s like a drug, the satisfaction I get from figuring out the absolute fastest way to do something or get somewhere. I think nothing of inserting a workaround into a route in order to shave twenty seconds seconds off of a ten minute drive.

I can just see me hanging out in the psychic limbo showroom, browsing potential life paths, worried that they all looked so, well, ordinary, and then someone takes my elbow and leads me through a beaded curtain to small back area, and pulls this rather unusual model down from the shelf. A little rough, sure, but once you get to this spot here, you can clear years of personal growth in fifteen short months, he says. And I reply, yep, that’s the one for me, sign me up.

So what, then? Of course I’m angry. I mean, anyone would be. We apes, we know life is unfair, and it doesn’t bother us much generally speaking, but every once in a while we wind up with an extra-large helping of unfounded crap and next thing you know, we’re in full-on whine mode. We want to know why. We want to know what the purpose was. We can handle pain, sure, lots of it even, as long as there’s a good reason for it.

But life doesn’t give you good reasons for things. Of course you can retrofit them after the fact, and it pleases many of us (myself included) to do just that, but it’s an illusion, a feel-good exercise, a crutch. Studies have shown that even our clearest memories are subject to editing after filing; we streamline them into more logical versions that are a better fit for what happened afterwards.

For months, I’ve been holding at arm’s length the belief that there is no ultimate purpose. It seemed the only logical conclusion, but I couldn’t bring myself to fully embrace it. But a couple of mornings ago, I stumbled on a web page about Buddhism, and one particular thing struck me. Buddhists believe that there is no God to speak of, just life, tumbling about, happening constantly. They posit that the source of our unhappiness is the expectations we inevitably take up after each one of those happenings.

If it’s good, then we expect more good things to come, and are disappointed when they don’t. If it’s bad, we become angry, or despondent. We ascribe a human consciousness to life itself, and interact with it as such. And it drives us crazy.

And right then, everything I’d been feeling about my condition, particularly this simmering fury I keep running up against, made perfect and complete sense. I am alive. I am real. I think and feel and act. But life doesn’t. It is utterly without forethought or endeavor or hindsight. In fact, it doesn’t have any sense of itself at all.

It’s not that my anger is incompatible with the Buddhists’ insight. It’s just the opposite. It is because I have treated these events as the product of a sentient being that can thereby be accused of treating me awfully that I am so furious. I’ve been consumed by my inability to come up with a suitable explanation for all of this. It seems too consequential, too severe for there not to be one. To be honest, it hurt too damn much for there not to be one.

But I’m never going to find that explanation. It wasn’t life that did this to me, that hurt me, that yanked me around from this emotion to that, that built up this insurmountable mountain of bile and anger. Life doesn’t do that. Life doesn’t “do” anything. I do. It was me. It’s been me, all along.

When I was well, I thought there wasn’t anything I couldn’t do, and when I was abruptly disabused of that a year and a half ago, I took it hard. Slowly, after much protest, I came to accept limitations and pain as part of my existence. It was challenging, and I wasn’t anywhere near successful despite good progress, but it was a goal I could work towards. I built a new self around my disablement, and learned to shape my thoughts and behaviors in such a way as to have as much grace (however little or much that was at any given time) about it as I could.

Now, the cause of my diminishment is gone, and I’m unmoored again. The driving force behind the person I had become has disappeared, and even though I want to keep being her, I don’t know how in this utter reversal of circumstances. But asking how to be her without my pain might be the wrong question. Or perhaps not the wrong one, but the long one; as in, the long way around to figuring it out.

What if it were possible to stop assuming everything that happens to me is infused with long-term significance? What if my search for a higher power was doomed from the start because I kept looking for it in the wrong places, in the things that happened to me, the random leaves that fate blew into my spiritual yard? After all, it’s far more likely that such events are just unorchestrated collisions among an enormous, disparate set of beings, each acting on their own, only constrained by the loose set of rules that accompany this particular physical plane.

Trying to find meaning in that is like trying to find meaning in a box of crayons. You can drive yourself batty trying to understand why there is a yellow-orange but no orange-yellow, and perhaps you’ll eventually ascribe it to some great unknown, but the truth of it, and the truth that underlies much of what we see and experience, is that it just worked out that way. It’s not a touchstone of destiny, or a life-lesson clue along some spiritual scavenger hunt. Just the result of a directionless fumbling about until it worked.

That isn’t to say that there isn’t power, great power, beyond the mere fact of our being. But that power can’t be found in our trappings and settings. It is in us, in our capacity for love, for strength, for selflessness. We tap into it when we sign on to be a part of something bigger than ourselves for no other reason than we love it and believe it is worth striving for. And to some people, that something is God, and faith, and it imbues their lives with purpose, and becomes a source of strength in the face of pain and adversity.

But for me, I found that something not in a vast unknowable consciousness, but in the people who chose, time and again, to sacrifice a part of their lives to spend an hour or three helping me through mine. I look back and I am awed by how much I was so freely given, of time, of patience, of chores and favors and rides, of hugs and squeezed hands and listening to my relentlessly mordant diatribes. Applying a God construct to that is useful for some, but I don’t need it. Not any more.

I used to think I did. The idea that there is no Architect of Life used to be too terrifying for me to deal with face-on. Despite the suspicions thereof that hovered just outside my view, for a long time I personally encountered nothing that couldn’t be assimilated into a greater consciousness. But once I smacked into this injury, I had no choice but to accept that if there is some Spirit of the Universe out there, it is either unwilling or unable to exert any further influence upon the ball it kicked into motion however-so-many millennia ago.

I can’t explain why this happened to me. I can point to many good things that came out of it, but I can’t draw a straight line from here back to there. I can’t say it was all worth it because I got this or that. I don’t know what I would or wouldn’t have gotten without it. I don’t know if those things would have been better or worse or just different, or even exactly the same.

There’s still a longing to make my ordeal mean something profound, something with enough weight and significance to balance the pain and suffering I endured. But it just doesn’t, and I’m only making myself feel worse trying to force it to. All I know is that through all of it, there was some small flame deep in my soul that would not be quenched. No matter what was happening, a tiny part of me steadfastly refused to give up on the idea that I could find fulfillment and contentment in my life, however that life turned out to be.

I was headed down into a subway station yesterday afternoon (I can ride the subway again!) and I had this sudden vision of myself and all the people around me as bright, independent satellites. It may have been the first time I was aware of all of us as we are, uncharacterized by the usual mental hierarchy I unthinkingly impose, placing some above me, others below. Instead, each one seemed to be a small universe unto itself, a mass of events and contexts orbiting and swirling about, the complexity of which I couldn’t even begin to imagine. It was fascinating, even heady. It made me glad to be alive, any kind of alive, pain or no pain, busted up or whole. And for the first time in a long time – maybe forever – I thought, I’m going to be OK.

And it didn’t scare me, or anger me, or make me want to cry. It was a simple fact. I’m going to be ok. Not because I got better; not because my pain is finally subsiding, but because I’m alive and I haven’t given up. I exist, in this crazy random place. And I have been, and will no doubt continue to be knocked around. I am crooked as an old clothes hanger, bent every which way by this game of full-contact life, having had to re-straighten myself time and again, never being able to perfectly straighten those places to like they were before.

But I am not broken.

And anyone who hasn’t broken is still OK. Maybe in so much pain she wishes someone would come along and run her over with a truck because it would be a nice change, but not ready to punch her ticket just yet. And so there’s no point in messing with the rest of it, because it’s all just fumbling about, us and everything else, until we find a way that works.

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collateral damage

Posted on January 24, 2015 by C. M. Condo

I haven’t wanted to write this post. I haven’t even wanted to start this post. My head is a mess. It was so thick with pain, with foreboding, with the fear that I would sink ever deeper into the morass of my mystery injury, never to be healed, never to be well again, that to have that verdict suddenly reversed has left me completely disoriented. Even though I had accepted my condition as permanent, what equanimity I had been able to muster only smoothed the surface; channels of sadness and volcanoes of anger still lurked underneath, threatening to break through at the slightest disturbance.

Now I don’t have to accept it. The injury, and the unpalatable future that accompanied it, have disappeared. As physically damaging as the surgery was, it worked. I can turn my head all the way around and look over my right shoulder. I can sleep on my stomach. I can sit in a chair for as long as I want (as long as I don’t lean back on my still swollen and bruised scar). I have pain, but it diminishes every day, as does the swelling and discoloration. I am restricted in my movements, but that, too, improves markedly with each passing twenty-four period, such that a week ago, I could barely move my arm at all, while this morning, I easily fed the furballs, fried some eggs, and lifted a full mug of tea to my lips.

And I don’t know what to do or think or feel about any of it. A hopelessly tangled ball of emotions now resides inside me where a coil of fear was formerly ensconced. Pale threads of gratitude and relief are lost among bright, thick yarns of rage, confusion, sorrow, and bitterness. I don’t know which strings to pull to try to sort through it. I don’t want to pull any of them. I’m still fascinated by the novelty of being able to sit with a thought or a feeling and not have it crowded out by pain and dread. I fuss and fidget, not knowing what to do with myself, what with all of that extra head space so recently vacated.

At first, I wanted to go out and do as many things and see as many people as possible. But now, I just want to be left alone. I want to enjoy being alone again. My pain and I, we had reached a tenuous detente; the injury had long since made us constant companions, and we were used to each other. Now the pain has abruptly vanished, and while I can safely say I do not miss it, I am once again challenged by being brusquely dropped into an existence I am completely unfamiliar with. “Don’t go back to the way you were before,” my mentor warned. As if I could. As if that were even possible.

I don’t remember that woman. I know how she looked, and acted, and even how she thought and felt. But I don’t remember what it’s like to be her. I can’t take the newly-emerged self that awoke from this nightmare and try to clothe her in that personality. It doesn’t fit. And even if it did, the personal growth that has resulted from this ordeal is one of the few gifts I can appreciate unreservedly, and I would have to let it go if I wanted to try and go back to the way – the whom – I used to be.

But I’m staring at an empty closet. I have no idea who I am, now. Because no more than I can be myself before I was broken can I be myself before I was fixed. That person was living a completely different life, and that’s not my life any more. I’m not disabled, just hurt, and healing. I’m not going to be in pain every day, forever. I am going to be able to do nearly all the things I did before this happened, if I so choose, although surprisingly, some of them are no longer appealing, even some of the ones I thought I dearly missed.

Most of all, I’m surprised by how weak I am, not just physically, but emotionally, spiritually. It has been so long since I’ve been able to expend more than a tiny amount of energy doing, thinking, or feeling anything. The injury is gone, but for some reason, the energy burst one would have expected as a result has not occurred. Perhaps it’s all going into healing; physical, emotional, spiritual. But in the meantime, I’m in this strange place of in-between, fixed but not well, unbroken but not whole. Diminished but unspent.

My anger is the only familiarity in this unforeseen parole. I huddle inside it, clasping it to my shoulders like a security blanket, and it manifests as crankiness, intolerance, and short-temperedness. But when I look underneath, instead of rage, I find a seemingly bottomless well of tears, of sorrow, relief, bitterness, confusion. As unconvinced as I was of a higher power while I was still unwell, my skepticism has only deepened since I was rescued. Life is not less random after the latest turn of events, but more so. The hard U-turn that occurred last Thursday has left me reeling. I simply do not understand how – or why – anything happens, ever, to anyone.

Most of all, I do not understand why this happened to me. Why was I one of those few forced to carry the burden of a mysteriously worsening injury, of chronic, idiopathic pain? And even more bewildering, why was my burden suddenly spirited away? I am certainly no more deserving than any other chronic pain sufferer; in fact, when one considers time logged, it’s safe to say I am far less deserving than most, not the least of whom is Momma Ape. The sheer meaninglessness of the entire experience is frustratingly vast. It’s as though I was a prisoner of a war that was unceremoniously terminated without resolution, yielding nothing but loss of life on both sides.

I can’t even begin to sort through how I feel about it. Friends are so happy for me – some even jumped upon and down when I told them the surgery had worked – and I know I should be happy, too, but I can’t get there. And I can’t explain to them why I’m not, even as I suspect them of wondering why I’m not ecstatic, like someone who has just won the lottery. Which is not a bad analogy, when you think about it. My life has changed for the better, utterly and completely, but I wake up every morning just like I did before. I can’t really tell the difference, at least, not yet.

The only shift I have been able to undergo is that I have switched my mental origin from a point of disablement to one of convalescence, and far more easily than I would have suspected. But the patterns of thought and behavior that lead outward from there still look like the ones from before, even though they don’t feel right any more. I’m aware – I have learned from this very experience – that I have to discard them before new ones can grow in their place. But how? And what do I do while I’m waiting for those new ones to develop?

Several months ago, I likened this stage of life change to a situation where I’ve fallen out of the litter that had been carrying me and been abandoned, and I’m suddenly exposed to the vagaries of a completely unfamiliar landscape. Perhaps the elements here aren’t as harsh as the ones from before, but they are still foreign, and lash and sting unexpectedly from apparently innocuous sources. So I must go and find a place to shelter, even if I don’t wind up living there. I can’t stay out here and wait for a tornado to drop a house. I need to get up off the ground and start walking.

I just wish I knew where.

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and so

Posted on January 19, 2015 by C. M. Condo

My eyes opened.

“Hi honey, welcome back,” the anesthetist’s nurse was standing to my left. I looked at the clock; it was 11:45 AM. The last thing I remember was being wheeled towards the surgery suite at 9:35. I recall passing an open autoclave on my right, and a shelf with stacks of surgical packs wrapped in black-striped tape, a sign they had been sterilized, on my left. Then, with an almost audible snap, it was two hours later. “How are you feeling? What’s your pain level?”

“9.” It felt as though my shoulder blade had been sliced apart with a machete, bright red slashes of pain grinding across my upper back, lancing through muscle, ligament, bone.

“OK, pain medication coming in now,” she responded, injecting something into my IV.

My limbs felt like lead. I could barely speak. “Did you get the license plate on that truck?” I mumbled, my sarcasm the first trait to come back online.

“What was that?”

“The truck that just ran me over…did you get the license plate number?”

She smiled indulgently. Undoubtedly I was still incoherent; I felt half-asleep. Which was a blessing; if I’d been awake and in that much pain, I would have made quite the scene. “How’s your pain now?”

“9. At least.”

“OK, more pain medication coming in. And here’s your family.” My sister and Momma Ape circled the narrow bed, impeccably dressed and made-up, ready to go to bat at the first sign of poor pain management. They looked jarringly out of place among the scrubbed and bonneted nurses, like exclusive designer furniture accidentally shipped to a dollar store, and at the same time familiar and comforting, strong, beautiful, capable. “How are you feeling?” my sister asked, looking directly in my eyes.

“Bad. Extreme pain.” My sister glanced at the nurse, who hustled over.

“What’s your pain level?”

“8.9.”

–

I don’t remember much from the rest of the day. My family brought me home. I ate a few bites of pasta and drank a cup of coffee. But I could not find a comfortable position; I do remember that. Through my post-anesthesia haze, the pain cut a wide, crystalline path, blindingly bright, with razored edges, breathtaking, cruel. The pain from before whimpered in the presence of this new, white-hot agony that held me in an iron vise whose restraints I dared not test.

In fact, I remember little from the first handful of days after my surgery. That is merciful, no doubt, as between the pain and nausea from the pain medications, I was miserable. Friends called and sent texts, most of which were ignored; my sister had sent a few group messages the day of the surgery, to reassure them of the surgery’s completion and success, but responses to these updates went largely unanswered. Only a few of my closest friends were permitted to enter my pain-soaked cage to talk or visit.

I couldn’t handle much else. In addition to the pain, I was barely able to hold inside the bile that bubbled in response to letting my sister handle the most intimate details of my existence; bathing me, dressing me, providing food, caring for my home, my pets. She and Momma Ape became the unfortunate recipients of this bile when it frothed; I kept a lid on it for my friends, but snapped at my family like a captured animal.

My body has gone from prison to torture chamber; any attempts at movement involving my right shoulder are greeted with a stunning array of nociception: burning, slicing, shooting fireworks through a persistent, throbbing ache that remains my constant companion. Even today, four days later, having sent my sister back to her family yesterday afternoon, I still feel as though I am wandering around only half-conscious.

The stomach upset from the pain medications is now predictable but no more manageable for that. I can barely eat, a dangerous side-effect, as I am already at least ten pounds underweight. I am due a phone call to the doctor’s office, as soon as they open, to see if I can shift to a different medication.

But it’s done. I am now minus a bursitis that had covered the entire anterior face of my scapula and filled the surrounding areas, a webby, fibrous mess of tissue that fully explained my pain, my limited range of motion, and the inability of various treatment modalities to alleviate my symptoms. For good measure, the surgeon resected a four-centimeter triangle from the upper inside portion of my shoulder blade, as promised, to prevent recurrence.

It’s too soon to know what the eventual state of my shoulder will be. But despite the considerable pain that resulted from muscle and skin manhandling, tissues cut and scraped away, bone sawed off in chunks, my shoulder feels very different. The shard of corrugated metal that had been wedged seemingly permanently underneath my shoulder blade is gone.

It’s gone.

I had a real injury. They had to cut me open to find it, but it was a visible, tangible thing. And they took it away.

And so begins Aspect III.

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happening

Posted on January 12, 2015 by C. M. Condo

My surgery is scheduled for four days from now. I spent my spare post-holiday hours drilling down on the research, gathering what few common factors I could glean from the various case studies. I brought my resulting bevy of questions in for my surgeon last week.  To his credit, he answered them thoughtfully (although of course in favor of the surgery), but more important, he assured me that even if it doesn’t work, I’ll be no worse off than I am now.

I’m still not completely convinced, but I just don’t have the energy any more to engage the universe in useless scrabbles over the course my life is taking.  So I acquiesced. And despite my considerable misgivings, I’m already slipping on the dangerous rink of making plans for when I’m well again.

This past week, I have been shadowing a PhD in the graduate lab I will be applying to, and it has only increased my eagerness to get in there and get started. The lab is my new boyfriend I thought to myself as I scampered down the hallway for a package of 10 mL tubes. I feel like I have a crush on it. I woke up Friday morning at 5 AM planning to go in at 8:00, despite too little sleep all week and abominable pain.

Fortunately, I have learned to second-guess my more self-destructive impulses, so I was able to turn off the alarm clock and sleep for another couple of hours. After all, there was no point in going in early; I only had one thing to do, and no-one cared when (or quite possibly if, as everyone is wrapped up in their own business) I did it. The P.I. (Principal Investigator; i.e. rock star) himself doesn’t usually show up until 10 or 11 this time of year. And sure enough, when I entered the lab bull pen at a quarter to ten with a container of cookies (just in case), the cookies were of far greater import than the timing of my appearance.

But I was surprised that I’d gone to bed the night before automatically preparing to march right back into that lab first thing in the morning on my fifth night in a row of less than six hours sleep. I’d already stayed late three out of the previous four days (including a snow day, when there were only two of us left in the entire building). My old habit of jumping in with both feet and the attached wagon is apparently alive and well; I can practically see it straining at the tie-off, waiting for me to cut it loose again. And with my brain already intoxicated by nips from the bottle of “I’ll be better after the surgery,” no doubt a whole host of my other Type-A personality traits are already lining up, clamoring to be the next one to slip into its old groove.

As troubling as that is, though, it still feels manageable.  In fact, I’m grateful for the reminder that I will need to be on my guard if/when I start feeling better.  It’s been easy to avoid burning the candle at both ends this past year; the consequences were always immediate and dire, and even though I didn’t learn right away, I learned quickly enough.  It will be much harder to maintain my self-care regimen when those consequences once again take weeks to develop.  But now that I know how close to the surface those old patterns are, I can plan.  I can prepare.  I can know what will happen if I’m not careful, and take steps to avoid it.

But there’s no planning or arranging around the tsunami of fear that is making its way towards me as the date closes in. I’ve never had a major surgery before, but I’ve seen it enough times (granted, in animals) to know that the anesthesia is usually the most dangerous component.  I’ve never been under general anesthesia, and the different ways in which it can go wrong keep popping up in my head like fireflies, intermittent, appearing where I least expect them, fading only as another lights up a few feet away.

Then there’s the procedure itself – they will be resecting bone, for goodness’ sake – and no matter what the outcome, there will be a lot more pain before there is less.  I will be well and truly immobilized for a few weeks, and it will be at another few months after that (at least) before I will be strong enough for normal activities, if it works.

And then there’s that.

If it works.

I want to hope that it will, but I don’t dare. Because it might not. Or, worse, it might work for a little while and then the pain will come back. Or even a long while, like a few years, before reasserting itself – how cruel would that be? I know there’s nothing to be gained from thoughts like those, but there’s not much left in the bag of coping mechanisms I had before all this happened.  I need to feel I am doing something to keep the demons at bay.

So I’m trying to prepare myself for the crushing blow any one of those possibilities would entail. Experience tells me that this type of proactive effort rarely yields perceptible results, but faced with the uncertainty to end all uncertainties, I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know what will happen next. The obscurity is so thick and encompassing that I don’t even know in which direction I’m pointed.  And that is more terrifying than anything that has happened thus far.

Most of the time, we don’t have to face up to the fact that we never know what is going to happen to us from one moment to the next. This is because most of our existence is fairly reliable, like a sunset, or the feel of a door knob, or the strains of a familiar song. None of those things are going to stop being what they were yesterday. We cloak ourselves in the familiarity and our routines, and take comfort in taking them for granted, and we feel safe.

What little routine I’ve been able to cobble together is already coming apart. As the medications wear off, and the withdrawal symptoms compound the increase in pain, my ability to do even the small handful of things I can still do for myself will taper accordingly. Then comes the surgery, and with it, that giant, gaping, unknowableness.

I do not know how I will think or feel. I do not know if I will be grateful or angry, elated or despondent. I do not know if the surgery will work. I do not know if I will be able to take my last class this semester before I graduate. I do not know if I will be able to pursue the graduate program I so recently set my heart on. I do not know if I will still be handicapped or not.  I do not know – I cannot even guess – what my life will be like starting four days from now, and it’s so utterly paralyzing to even consider it that if I pull down what’s left of the barricade standing between me and that fear, I do not know if I will be strong enough to go through with the surgery at all.

Of course, none of us know what the future holds for us, beyond a few days or even a few hours. But we don’t think about it much, until we have to. And now I have nothing else to think about. And I’m so, so scared. I don’t know how I will keep the fear in check once the pain medications wear off.

Maybe the pain will take up so much room in my existence that there won’t be room for anything but getting from one moment to the next. How strange to think I might be grateful for such a thing.

How strange my life has been, and I know, one thing I do know, is that it’s not done being strange yet.  The tsunami is coming.  I hope I can be strong.  I hope I still know how to swim.

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unsettling

Posted on January 3, 2015 by C. M. Condo

I’m officially, completely unpacked. All boxes have been emptied, everything I’ve decided to keep has found a home, either here or in my storage unit, pictures are hung, and box cutters, tape, markers and tool kits are finally put away. Even though it’s still not familiar, the place feels like mine now. I’ve made it into a little oasis; clean, warm, quiet, safe. During the day, it fills with light from sun up to sundown, but at this hour darkness still enfolds; here and there a light peeks out from an adjacent building window, and every so often, a few cars will swing their headlamps through the traffic circle below, like electric toys snugly bound to curving tracks.

I like being up this early, even on weekends. My pain level is low, and I’m at my most productive in the early morning hours, and the pre-dawn has a privileged peacefulness about it, like a magical garden that only exists in the suspended slip of day before the sun comes up. I’m sure I need more sleep than I’m getting, but it’s hard to sleep late. I get uncomfortable, shoulder, upset stomach, stiff neck, soaked sheets, any of those will cling annoyingly to me as I lay in bed and try to fall back asleep. Sometimes I manage to get there, but more often I don’t. Today, I’m up early on purpose, though; my family is coming over to celebrate a belated Christmas and my birthday, which is tomorrow.

I’ve never had a place nice enough to host family, or anyone else, for that matter. But now I have actual rooms, a kitchen, a living room, and a dining room of sorts, a sunlit area by the kitchen I’ve marked off with a room divider that is already defaulting as the preferred spot to hang out and chat. One of my felines is also a fan, leaping onto the table and parking her furry butt on one of the woven placemats at every opportunity, forcing me to half-heartedly shoo her off onto the floor, an exercise I will grow tired of long before she does. She will sometimes use it to get up to the breakfast bar, and since I’m not using the breakfast bar for eating, I’ve allowed her that. She’s there now, stretched out on her side and busily licking a paw as I tap away on my laptop at the kitchen hutch nearby.

This family gathering is the last big “thing” before my surgery. Up until now, I had been able to hold off thinking about the procedure; there was some giant obstacle in front of it blocking my view, like finals, or the move, or the holidays, or unpacking. But now, there’s nothing but open road between me and it. I don’t have anything else left to gnaw at with my restless thoughts, and so the surgery and all of its possibilities and implications are getting pretty well chewed.

I had thought I was resolved, but now, doubts are starting to stir and rumble. I was expecting to undergo another MRI which would show, or at least from which could be inferred, some hard evidence that my condition is what the surgeon says it is, and that what he proposes to do, which is remove a chunk of my scapula, will have the desired effect. But a phone call with him yesterday disabused me of that; no such scan exists. From what I can gather, he’s basically going in on a hunch, avoiding laying out specific parameters of what he will do until he gets there. Since that phone call, the possibility of it not working, and my shoulder being permanently deformed for no reason (not that it isn’t already, for all practical purposes), seems very real.

I’ve never undergone a major surgery before. But even if I had, it’s unlikely to have prepared me for a procedure in which a part of my body will be destroyed rather than rebuilt. And unlike with the nerve ablations, once that part of my scapula is gone, it’s not going to grow back. A friend of mine recently had a hip replacement and raved about how his daily pain level was down to a one. He was hoping it would encourage me, but it has done no such thing. How many hundreds of thousands of hip replacements have there been? It’s one of the most frequently studied and performed bone surgeries. He’s actually the third person I know who’s had one; it’s far from uncommon. The outcome was no surprise, or not to me, anyway.

The procedure I am considering, on the other hand, has been performed so rarely that there is almost no research or data on it at all. (I looked, of course.) The surgeon who is performing it has himself only done it a handful of times. Friends have suggested a second opinion, but from whom should I get one? There isn’t another surgeon who does this kind of work anywhere in the tri-state area, and certainly, I’m in no condition to travel any farther than that just for a consultation.

I’ve asked everyone I know what they would do in my place, and the majority come down on going ahead with the surgery, albeit with trepidation. But that’s what I thought, too, when I was thinking about it in the abstract. Now that I’m about to be divested of a slice of shoulder blade, I’m suddenly possessive of every scrap of my casing, unwilling to part with any of it, no matter how dysfunctional, just like I was with my mental framework before this happened. I’m resentful all over again at my injury and subsequent loss of free will, illusory though such free will may have been. I’m furious with other people who get to choose their own paths in life, or jump from one to another seemingly without consequence.

My life has been nothing like that. It’s been nothing but swift and heavy consequence any time I stray from my predetermined course, that consequence all the more cruel for that I don’t know what the predetermined course is supposed to be, and often think I’m following it only to discover, after being knocked on my ass, that I’m not. There is a sickening familiarity to all of this. I don’t know what the right thing to do is, and what’s worse, if I don’t do the right thing, a deep penalty will undoubtedly be exacted.

On the face of it, it seems ridiculous. I’m considering allowing someone to hack off a part of my body, and a rather important one, at that. Not that I’m getting much use out of it right now, but the fact remains that it is still marginally functional. Who knows how that might change once its shape is permanently altered? I mean, if it wasn’t supposed to be shaped the way it is, shouldn’t evolution have taken care of that some time in the last 100,000 years since a branch of primates decided to try out the bipedal thing? It’s not exactly a vestigial accessory, like a few pieces of vertebrae left over from when we found tails useful. We are a heavily tool-dependent species. The upper extremities have been carefully honed over the last several millennia. Who am I to second-guess nature with such a drastic remodeling?

It certainly doesn’t help that my pain is down now that I’m not spending an hour and a half sitting in a lecture hall five days a week. Despite my frequent interaction therewith, the memory of how bad the pain gets fades quickly once I can collect a smattering of days where I can keep it under a seven. I chose to schedule this surgery a few weeks before the end of the semester, when my daily pain level often blew past an eight by mid-afternoon. I may not be up for having this done right now, but a few weeks into next semester, I could very well wish I had been.

And it does seem telling that one of the only half a dozen surgeons in the country with experience with my condition happens not only to be located here in my area, but also happens to be the one orthopedist my pain management specialist recommended to me when he wanted input on my injury presentation. I’ve learned to ignore such coincidences at my peril. But the fear… the fear is significant. What if it doesn’t work? Clearly, things are getting worse back there. The last nerve ablation barely made a dent. Considering that trajectory, I’m not sure I’m prepared to deal with an outcome of no effect.

And what if it does work? I’m used to being disabled, now. If I get surgery and it fixes it, what happens to all of the trappings of my life as a disabled person? It took me over a year to grow accustomed to my permanent state of disrepair; true acceptance was fairly recent. I don’t know if I’m ready to undergo another sea change so soon after the last one. Not to mention that my other shoulder is proving more resistant than I had hoped to trigger point injections and physical therapy; those work for a week or so, and then the pain comes back, a stubborn knot of muscle radiating its heated discontent from my deltoid to my ear. How do I negotiate the jump from one injury to the other? Yes, my right shoulder has been fixed, but…

So I fix the left one, then, I suppose. So what part of my body will break down after that? While there’s no reason to think I’m starting down an ice-slicked slope, there’s also no reason not to think that, particularly considering my family history. Some people have single injuries, recover, and that’s that, but that’s not how Momma Ape and I do things. There’s always the danger of setting off an avalanche. Once I decide to start down this road of surgical interventions, where does it end?

I don’t want the gray in-between that is the likely outcome of this procedure. I either want to be well, or not well. Not a little better. Not a lot better but still not-quite-right. Not better but now this other part of my body is screwed up because of what I did. Just one or the other, like a binary switch; on or off; a one or a zero. That’s what I want. And life just doesn’t work out that way. (Well, unless you get a hip replacement, apparently.)

I’ve only recently grown accustomed to the range of gray my life has come to inhabit. It’s not great, but it’s mine and I’m used to it, and I’ve learned how to work within its scope. I don’t want to trade it for a different one and have to start over from scratch. I feel like I never get to settle in to anything; as soon as I’ve figured out how to handle something, it gets yanked away and I’m saddled with something else. With regards to the surgery, at least, I have some modicum of apparent choice in the timing, if nothing else. I can choose to put it off, although, that, too, may have untoward consequences.

No doubt there’s some crucial information missing here; I need more puzzle pieces to become available before I can get an idea of what the eventual picture should look like. But we’re closing in on the mile marker; the surgery is twelve days away. Whatever other information there is to be had, it had better come along pretty soon. Because with what I’ve got right now, I can’t see which way the signs are pointing.

Or maybe it’s that I don’t want to; that happens a lot. How many of my missteps occurred as a result of my willfully ignoring the signs I didn’t like? Either way, I hope something comes along to burn off this fog before I have to jump from the cliff. Isn’t it better to know how far down the chasm goes? I always think I’d rather know how many seconds I’ll be in free fall before I hit the ground.

But maybe, this time, I’m not supposed to. Something else I’m being forced to learn against my will; another narrowing I’m forced to endure, another road blocked, another comfort ripped away. Other people get to lean on their coping mechanisms, rather than being punished for them, but not me. As soon as I put down roots somewhere, I get dug up and tossed somewhere else. Like it or not, and usually, like now, not.

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