A Wee Bit of Wisdom

I started working out daily again this week.  I got too poor there for awhile and had to put the gym membership on hold and, I guess, got bummed out in general about that.  I came up with excuses not to go for outdoor runs (which is really stupid because I prefer them anyway) and ended up taking too long of a break.  See, the problem is, every time I take a break from running I have to begin again - at least to a certain extent.  That might end up being short runs, but usually I try to go for longer run/walks until I can run the whole way.  Nowadays, however, it ain't that simple.  My stupid foot doesn't like walking long distances and my left knee has decided to turn on me on stairs (or squats).  I suppose it's all part of aging?  (Though my podiatrist claims it's part of running most all of my adult life, but what does he know?)  The funny thing is that nothing hurts when I run.  Not my foot, not my knee.  While I'm running, I'm pain free.  Even afterwards, my foot may bark in the wrong pair of shoes but my knee actually stays happy.  So a break from running actually makes me feel worse.  Now, finally, my brain kicked in (a rare thing) and I decided I had to get the running back on. 

Dia and I have this thing where I write out our 'to do' list for the day and draw little pictures of what we have to do next to the words.  She loves to cross off when we've done them - and she knows which ones to cross off from the pictures.  So everything from chores to playing Hungry-Hungry Hippo go on there.  For the past few days "work-out" has been on the list with a little drawing of a TV and me (sort of) on a mat (sort of) in front of the TV.  It's totally cool because she's all on board with this whole thing and so, every day, we're in front of the TV doing some work out video thanks to On Demand's Fitness TV.  I explained to Dia that I needed to get back in shape generally, but mostly so I could run again.

So today she said something about me being a runner.  I don't remember exactly what elicited it.  I think I went down the stairs faster than her or something and she attributed it to that.  Anyway, my response was "Well, I'm not really a runner right now."

Know what she said to that?  She said:

"You can stop doing what you are for awhile, but you can never stop being what you are."

Wow, child.  Just wow.

I'm Alive!

On January 21, 2002 I died.  It was Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday – or at least the day we celebrated it that year.  It’s a day I will never, ever forget.

In fairness, I was only all the way dead for 18 seconds.  I was undergoing a tilt test prior to a catheter ablation of my heart and it didn’t go so well.  The test began and I remember telling the nurse that I actually felt OK.  A millisecond went by and, then … no, no, actually I was going out.  The next thing I remember was experiencing freezing cold.  I was chattering and shaking and asked the nurse why I was so cold.  She said I had coded and they had to give me epinephrine when they restarted my heart.  “It makes you feel cold” she said.  “Oh, OK.” was my response.  As if that happened every day.

My dear doctor was quite shaken, actually, and went out to report my condition to my mom who was in the waiting room.  “Would she want to continue with the surgery?” he asked her.  Thank God Mom answered quite correctly:  “Yes.”

After a day in the ICU and a few more days in the hospital than originally planned, I came home very much alive and very much intending to stay that way.  Every year since, on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday I celebrate my “I’m Alive Day.”  It means more to me than my birthday and Christmas combined.  It is the fourth most important day of my life.

But let me back up a second. 

Way back when I still lived in Indianapolis the left side of my left side went completely numb.  After a horrifying and not recommended-for-anyone test called the EMG, which stands for ExcruciatinglyMegapainfulGram (no, that’s not it – I believe it’s actually called an electromyogram), the docs all decided that I truly had gone numb on the left side of my left side and took me very seriously which meant I went through a barrage of tests and fast.  Each one came back more or less normal and each normal result sent me to another test.  As I was undergoing an ultrasound of my carotid artery, the technician suddenly looked up and asked, quite urgently, if I felt alright.  I did.  Although there was that fluttery feeling I often felt that I thought must be some inefficient form of gas.  While that never ‘resulted’ in anything, I still didn’t really want to share with this perfect stranger that I was having a bout of gas but, since the point was to find out what my body was doing, I did fess up.  He just looked at me like I was out of my gourd and then asked me to wait a moment.  Next thing I know I was being seen by a cardiologist and eventually was referred to Dr. Corey.

You see, I really didn’t have bouts of gas.  I had bouts of my heart racing at about 280 beats per minute.  Dr. Corey couldn’t fix it.  He knew of doctors that could, but felt the risk was too high.  He said there’d be too much scar tissue afterwards even if I made it through the surgery.  The worse news was that my heart could tolerate no more than 5 years more of this activity it was enduring.  If I didn’t die of eventual heart failure, a couple irregular beats would be all it took.  If I died that way, he said, it would be extremely sudden.  The good news was that it wouldn’t hurt at all. 

I never did wrap my brain around that news.  I can’t say that it ever sunk in all the way.  Every time I went back to Dr. Corey for a check-in, it seemed the old ticker was doing great.  I was a runner for God’s sake.  Of course it was doing great.  But that fluttery feeling never ceased.  Now I knew… it wasn’t gas.  It was bad, bad news.
 
Yet inside this bad, bad news was a very strange gift.  Quite literally every day when I woke up, I thought “Cool.  One more.”  It made me treasure all the little things that went unnoticed before.  It made me love the people in my life just that much more.  It also unfortunately honed the bitch in me as I had no tolerance for petty complaints and whining over trivial things.  I wanted to change my career and do something important or dear to me, but I didn’t have the luxury of leaving a good paying position for something more heart-worthy (so to speak).  The thing is, when you are given 5 years you can’t just bail out on life, cash out your life savings and go to Australia on extended holiday.  Not when you are a mom anyway.  I had to keep keeping on and pray for a cure or a miracle.  Yet each day was, quite literally, a gift.  Even on my grumpy days, I knew it and appreciated it.

Life went on.  I moved to California and met Art.  He was an insurance claims adjuster at the time.  When we got serious, I told him about my condition and he felt, quite appropriately, pretty freaked out about it.  He shared my story with a colleague of his and, in a wonderful moment of serendipity, that colleague just so happened to have a daughter with the same condition that just had a surgery by a Cardiac Electrophysiologist and was all better now.  The woman gave Art the name of the doctor up in Oregon who referred us to Dr. Bhandari in L.A.  He saw me Friday January 18th and, after an evaluation, said “I can fix this” with tremendous confidence, described the surgery and planned to schedule it for Monday.  Wow!  It was all so sudden.  I said I’d like the weekend to do some research on it and he said I could do the research, but waiting wasn’t advised because “You are going to die.”  Without missing a beat, I said “Sure, let’s go ahead and schedule that.”  And that’s what we did.

So here I am.  Alive.   And now it’s been 9 years since the surgery.  Nine years.   In those years I haven’t done anything important for society – I haven’t won a prize or been lauded for anything.  Shoot, I even failed at a pretty significant relationship, huh?  I suppose, in the Grand Scheme, I haven’t made a mark.  My living doesn’t really matter.

But it DOES matter.  And so very, very much.

In nine years I would have missed SO much.  The biggest thing obviously is that I wouldn’t have Dia.  No Dia in this world at all?  That would just be tragic.  After that?  Man, I would never have even met so many of my dearest friends.  I would never have gone to Scotland, England and France.  I wouldn’t have seen my daughter walk across the stage for her UCSC graduation.  I wouldn’t have seen Tim make it in his world so successfully. 

I wouldn’t have met the wonderful people my kids are dating.  I wouldn’t have seen the first African-American President of the United States.    And there are a million other moments – parties, holidays, weddings, births, moments of joy or uncontrollable laughter.  I would have missed them all.

The most amazing part of my whole journey is that there was a time in my life that if it hadn’t been for Tim and Cheyanne, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have ended it.   I can’t say for sure, but I know I had places in my life where the mire was deep and some void in me was almost desperate.   In a million years, I could have never done that to my kids, but I know I felt that kind of despair.  I can’t be so dramatic as to say that I was standing on the ledge and Dr. Corey came up to give me a push, but it wasn’t that far off of that.  By the time I saw Dr. Corey I was pretty far from ever feeling like I wanted to leave this earth, but at the same time the news he gave me changed my living.  He gave me my life back.  He gave me the perspective I needed to appreciate this moment, this day – whether it was an ordinary one or even a bad one … well, it was still a day.  That, I learned, was much better than the alternative. 


I share all this, not only as a Thanks Be To God, but also as a message.  I know life brings challenges and sometimes more than any one person should have to endure.  Right now I can think of friends that really have way too much on their plates.  Certainly I wouldn’t try to sell those friends on my Pollyanna Happiness Prescription.  It would be both disrespectful and presumptuous of me.  I know that sometimes it’s just too hard to appreciate what we’ve got, you know – to count our blessings.  When it doesn’t feel like there are blessings to count, what’s the use? 

What I want is for those friends and for anyone who might just be going through a bad couple of days or who haven’t seen their dreams come to fruition yet or who feel this life is just a meandering path leading to nothing much… to all of us humans just trying to catch a break… Well, I’d like to let you in on a little insider info.  Here’s the worst part of knowing you are going to die:  It doesn’t feel like you are dying.  It feels like everyone in your world is dying.  You are losing your parents, your children, your friends, even the people you didn’t much like.  Every single thing in your world is going to be gone. 

At least that’s what it felt like to me. 

When you think about life that way, it changes it.  How would you live today if you knew it was the last day you’d ever see your spouse, or your child, or even your dog?  Well, I found that changed things more than anything else.

So, to all my dear readers and all my dear friends – pick a day.  Any day!  And celebrate it.  Declare it your “I’m Alive Day.”  And if you can't find it in you to celebrate your life, celebrate the people in your life.  Let us be happy just to be alive and spread joy and love!  This, I’m quite certain, is the purpose of life.