Tuesday, December 31, 2013

New Year's Eve and Cookies

It's New Year's Eve, and I'm celebrating with my usual flair.  I have lit the candles that will take me into the new year, and everything I could be in charge of as far as cleaning (which isn't much, actually) is done.  The house hasn't been scrubbed and polished to the nth-degree as I usually do on New Year's Eve, but I did sweep today (bad luck to do it tomorrow), and I washed all the pans and bowls I used during today's manic baking spree.  They're quietly drying in the new little stainless steel drainer in my sink.

Usually at this time of the year, I'm full of introspection, full of thoughts of the past and worries about the future, but not this year.  I'm watching Criminal Minds in my comfy pajamas, and there is an absolute minimum of navel gazing.

And that, of course, is because I made oatmeal raisin cookies today.

This seems like a total non-sequitur, I know, but bear with me.  I'm going somewhere with this.  I promise.

I remember when I had my myomectomy while I was still in Indiana. There was a period after that when all things in my life sort of fell into focus.  I stopped caring about a bunch of things (and one notable person) who I'd allowed to cause me absolute woe.  I started doing things I had always wanted to do instead of smiling wistfully and saying, "Someday."  To use a phrase that is endlessly new-agey and trite, I found myself.  Rather, I found a new version of myself.  I really liked that person.  (Of course, one of the things that happened during that time was going to a meeting of the kendo club, and so the evil T came into my life and things sort of took a hard left for the worse....)

I feel that clarity of purpose again now.  I've been sick for...  God. I don't even know.  Between the migraines and the Topamax and this other, I've been sick for years and years.  I'd say that in just the past calendar year, I've had less than two weeks a month where I felt like doing anything other than surviving.  Now, though, even with the limitations currently on me with recovery, I am finding that other person I lost again.

There were so many things I'd lost along with that other me.  Many of them wouldn't mean a thing to anyone but me, but I guess that's what life is made of, the things we endow with importance for ourselves.  From the time I was in high school, I used to make a batch of sourdough bread every week.  I started it with the idea of giving a loaf (or so) to my grandparents.  That ritual got even more important to me when my Granny got sick.  She couldn't eat a lot of things, but she could eat my sourdough.  I had starter that I kept religiously fed for years.  It died when I went to Japan, clearly, but when I came back, I tried repeatedly to get my routine back again.  As my health declined, so did my resolution.  I just mixed up batch two of the bread today.  Every step of the process made me feel good.

It wasn't just the bread.  The cast iron skillets that are the legacy of both my grandmothers came to me shiny and well-conditioned.  Yesterday, I decided to make cornbread from my Granny's recipe for the first time in what I guess is probably three years, and when I took it out, even though I'd taken pains to store it properly, it was in need of care.

That was one of the moments (and I've had several lately) when how much I'd let go and how much of myself I'd lost really hit home.  My life before the surgery had become about the quickest possible solution, the easy path to finish the necessary before I fell down.  Now it doesn't have to be.  Oh, there's nothing particularly complicated about the foods I'm making.  My grandmother's cornbread is fabulous, but cornbread isn't a recipe requiring Cordon Bleu training.  The aforementioned oatmeal cookies I put together today weren't complex, either. The thing is, I CAN make them now. I don't have to run for the couch and collapse.  Pain and weakness aren't pinning me down. I have the energy and the will again to do something that I enjoy because it connects me to my past and allows me to share with my family.  Somehow, oddly, ironically, by losing something, I have managed to become more whole.

It's not just the cooking.  My house has been full of projects that I was "going to get around to" but never have.  I have been systematically fixing, changing, and moving.  I've been making things I pinned on Pinterest for someday happen now.  It's not perfect, but I'm making progress.  I have two great piles left to tackle, but as I look around my living room now, this house reflects me again.  (And maybe those two great piles are representative of me, too, heh....)  It feels like home.

So I'm back to the salad days.  Maybe it's the baking days for me.  Whichever.  I can't say that there aren't moments of difficulty and sadness, and I'm not such a sunshine-dazzled fool that I believe everything is always going to be fabulous, but right now, I have to say, things are pretty good.  That's a nice place to be as I get ready to leave 2013 and head into 2014.

And now, I'm going to have a cookie.  Happy New Year to you wherever you are.

Tuesday, December 24, 2013

A Hopeful Song

"I Heard The Bells On Christmas Day" lyrics
(Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), 1867)

I Heard the Bells on Christmas Day
Their old familiar carols play,
And wild and sweet the words repeat
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

I thought how, as the day had come,
The belfries of all Christendom
Had rolled along the unbroken song
Of peace on earth, good will to men.

And in despair I bowed my head:
"There is no peace on earth," I said,
"For hate is strong and mocks the song
Of peace on earth, good will to men."

Then pealed the bells more loud and deep:
"God is not dead, nor doth he sleep;
The wrong shall fail, the right prevail,
With peace on earth, good will to men."

Till, ringing singing, on its way,
The world revolved from night to day,
A voice, a chime, a chant sublime,
Of peace on earth, good will to men!

----
I've heard this song and played this song a million times.  It is only this year that it finally sank in.  Isn't it funny how you can suddenly encounter something for what feels like the first time even after having it underfoot for a lifetime?

The third and fourth verses are the ones that moved me.  Despair is all around.  Darkness encroaches.  Every day our news is full of violence and hate, greed and self-interest.  The song doesn't end there, though.  Even the bells know the antidote, "God is not dead nor doth he sleep."  No matter how bad things get, there is cause for joy and hope in that. Someday, "the wrong shall fail, the right prevail" and we will have that peace and goodwill we so desperately need.

Merry Christmas to you one and all.

A Christmas Carol

“I will honour Christmas in my heart, and try to keep it all the year. I will live in the Past, the Present, and the Future. The Spirits of all Three shall strive within me. I will not shut out the lessons that they teach!”
― Ebenezer Scrooge, A Christmas Carol

I haven't felt very Christmassy this year.  Music is the best of Christmas for me, but this year, the songs make me cry.  Family gatherings are also usually a great joy.  This year, nothing but anxiety fills me.  It's okay.  I'm moving through something, and it is going to take time.

Even though there's all this stuff going on, though, some parts of Christmas shine through.  I'm watching the Patrick Stewart version of Dickens's A Christmas Carol.  I watch one version or another almost every year.  Of all the Christmas movies and feel-good stories out there, this one is the ultimate for me.  This version is one of my favorites because it is so well done.

I always feel so for Scrooge.  He is a person who built walls between himself and others because...because it seemed right at the time.  Because it seemed the way to get what he thought was the most important thing in life.  Because he was hurt and knew no other way to deal with the pain.  Somewhere along the way, those walls started to grow on their own, and by the time we meet Scrooge, he's blocked off from every human feeling.  A gentle nudge won't do.  Walls only come down with the brute force of a sledgehammer.  And when those walls do start to come down, he begins to understand what is and is not worth the price of life.  What does and does not enrich and redeem the time that is given.

The Ghost of Christmas Present is an example of this.  He hides the ragged and pitiful beings he calls the children of men, ignorance and want, beneath his rich gown.  Dickens is not subtle.  He wants us to remember that Christmas has to be about more than the frills and the bows, the gifts and the decorations. Advertising bombards us on every side telling us that if we buy the right piece of jewelry or get the latest gaming system then our lives will be somehow complete, that we just need a special thing to fill the hole in our hearts.  When we live like that, when all we strive for is the top layer of Christmas and shut out the lessons that it teaches, when we forget the love, the almighty love that ought to be the best and most glorious part of Christmas, then we wind up like Scrooge, headed for that horrible end and yawning, unmourned grave.

I love to watch him change.  I love to think that no matter how poor and blind we may be, there is always a chance that our eyes can open and we can be redeemed.   When someone turns away, there is always another option, another path.  There is such tremendous hope in A Christmas Carol.  It's such a tiny work, but it has lasted because of that hope, that ability to bring an ice-axe into our hearts and break up the frozen chunks the world creates. And if my eyes are filled with tears again as I watch it, they're not tears of despair.  They are tears of remembering and gratefulness.  They are my own version of Scrooge's Christmas miracle.

Tuesday, December 17, 2013

The Tale

I've thought many times about coming back here and saying something, but to be honest, nothing I have been able to come up with has seemed to be sufficient.

I guess I need to go back and tell the tale.

I showed up at the hospital, and things moved very quickly at first.  I was shown to the little pre-surgery room, put on the dreaded paper gown, was moved to the holding area where my IV was put in and all the many people who were going to be involved in my surgery came in and talked with me, checked on me, and asked me my name and date of birth so many times that I really wish I had gone with my first instinct and put it on a dry erase board that I could have just held up.  There was a delay because my doctor was assisting with another surgery, and then it was my turn.  As with everything that relates to me or my family, once the procedure began, the situation got more complicated than my doctor anticipated.  There were more problems than they'd previously been able to detect due to the three other abdominal surgeries I've had in the past.  A general surgeon had to be called in to deal with part of it.  It took three hours to take me apart and then put me back together again.

Blessedly, I remember none of that.  The last thing I recall was the surgery team coming to collect me and asking if I was ready, to which I replied by telling the nurse anesthetist that I didn't want to know anything about any of it past that point, not the roll down the hall, not the color of the operating room (which I know for a fact was blue because they are ALWAYS BLUE and cold), nothing.  He grinned, injected something into my IV, and told me that would no problem at all.  The world spun hard to the right, my gurney moved, and the next thing I recall was a brusque nurse in recovery continually telling me that I had to breathe, BREATHE, to which I finally managed to mumble that it HURT to breathe and I wanted her to leave me alone.  I think she laughed.

I remember nothing of the rest of Monday.

The big events of Tuesday included a clean gown, staggering horrible trips to the bathroom, a couple of family visitors, and a migraine as big as the universe.  Apparently, the morphine in the pain pump triggered some kind of rebound headache.  And, since I had the morphine in my system, I couldn't have any of the medicines I would usually take for a migraine.  I decided to stop using the pain pump so they would unhook it and also so the backlash from it would hopefully stop.  I wanted to scream, but it would have hurt too much.  Early Wednesday morning, they finally came in with a solution, a combination of drugs that wouldn't react with the morphine.

They were from hell.  I'd never had one of the two, and the new one spiked my blood pressure and heart rate so high my room was a festival of flashing lights and shrieking monitors.  My body locked up and shuddered, my teeth chattered, and I couldn't breathe.  For a short time, it was so bad that I honestly thought I was going to die right there with my mother holding my hand.  Again, I was continually told to BREATHE, which seemed to be the motto of my whole experience, and when I didn't do it deeply enough to keep them happy with the O2 level in my blood, they put me back on that horrible little oxygen tube-nose thing.  I was told later that the first attack like that lasted about twenty minutes before that effect passed.  There were two or three episodes like that before everything calmed down and all the beeping and flashing quit. So Tuesday passed into Wednesday.

After that, things got better. I got to take a shower and put on real people clothing that didn't bare my backside.  I put on my bright blue TARDIS robe, leaned on Mom and the rails around the hospital ward walls, and staggered unsteadily up and down, up and down the brightly lit hallways.  I ate some solid food.  I watched the Macy's Thanksgiving Parade and the Egg Bowl from my bed after the doctor making the rounds decided I needed one more day in the hospital.  The following day, I carefully pressed the little red PillowPet dragon my mother had decided to call Surge (short for Surgery, apparently) over my aching belly, and the nurse rolled me downstairs and out into the cold, bright world.

Since then, I've been getting better daily.  I have been able to drive a little, and Sunday I went out to eat with my family.  Tonight, I went to a Christmas party for the choir, and I tottered down the hall to the organ in the sanctuary to play for a little while because I look forward to playing Christmas music all year long.  I am a little sore and a lot tired, but each new thing I manage to do is a victory.  Based on everything I've read, I'm moving through this slow process like I'm supposed to.

Things are different now, though.

There are the physical differences.  I've lost about twenty pounds, and weight continues to slip off me.  I don't hurt inside all the time.  Even though I don't have tons of energy, I still feel better than I did before the surgery.  I have had a couple of headaches, but they've been negligible.

Then there are the other differences.  It seems dramatic to say it, but the version of me who rolled into that operating room died there.  This version of me who rolled out is someone else.  I'd been living in silent and growing fear of this surgery for over ten years.  I hadn't realized how much it had accumulated or how heavy a burden it was until it lifted.  Certain dreams I have had, certain hopes for what my future holds are also gone now.  Other things are going to have to take the place of those dreams, and I'm not exactly sure what those will be.  On the other hand, certain restrictions my condition has caused for me are also gone now, and despite the uncertainty, I can't help but feel oddly liberated because of that.

So now I'm on the other side of this milestone I've been running from for so very, very long.  I'm tottering around and regaining my strength.  I'm re-evaluating, re-organizing, removing, even redecorating.  I'm making plans....slowly.  It's enough.  I have to believe that the worst is past, and now it's time to move on to whatever is next.