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I’d Be So Incredibly Dead

I’d be so incredibly dead if it wasn’t for modern medicine and a few physicians that seemed part magicians as well as excellent doctors. My gratitude is an understatement, to say the least! 

And yet, from the tenuousness of intermittent chronic health conditions to the fragility of human relationships, as I traverse through the narrowing of life, it all seems ever more fragile. Why? It is inevitable that a sense of security can evaporate in a heartbeat given a crisis. After a number of GI surgeries over the years, scarring has caught up with me, both the literal and metaphoric. 

While I don’t have any sort of actual timeline or expiration date (that I’m aware of at least) I may have used up all the good luck I’ve had to this point. For previous good luck (karma) I am grateful. And in a weird way, knowing there’s a more significant limit lets me see what time remains available can be viewed differently. What do I want to do with it? How do I want to live? Where? In what other circumstances? By what day-part-by-day part calculation? Perennial questions, all.

A Different Kind of Creature

Now I have always been the least conventional personality in my crowded family of origin. Having said that, I have also learned convention and stability don’t have to be dirty words either. When I was just five years old, we had a trapeze in our basement. I loved to swing and stand on it, pumping my little legs for momentum. I’d fantasize about being a famous trapeze artist in a circus with crowds of people cheering me on. It’s as if I’d never gotten completely acclimatized to being in a body. I envisioned myself flying through the air. Wasn’t I supposed to fly?

One such day I was doing this very act, with my mother in the basement loading the washing machine over in the corner. As (bad) luck would have it, I let go of my arms and promptly fell flat on my back with only the thinnest of raggedy rugs on the concrete for a cushion below. Splat!

The fall must have hit a nerve to my lungs because I couldn’t breathe, gasping for air was I! Thank God my mother was close by but as more (bad) luck would have it, she scooped me up and carried me upstairs. (This was before the days ordinary people would have been told not to move a person with certain kinds of falls.) Once there, she laid me flat on her bed. I think the bed was soft!

Perpetually Gasping

Next, she called my dad asking,  “what should I do, Nelson?” He must have told her to take me to the hospital, seven miles into town as we lived on an acreage. Again, she scoops me up, carries me to the car, my younger sister in our wake, and lays me out on the backseat, ultimately driving fast! (I’m still gasping for air, terrified and sobbing between breaths!) How we arrived unscathed is a wonder but once there, ER staff rushed me inside, X-rayed me only to discover I had five small vertebral fractures.

Ultimately, my treatment was to lay flat on my back, as still as possible, (basically rigid) in the bed, in a room with other patients, to let it heal. (They said it should be quick because I’m a child.) I had an excellent view of the ceiling but little else. I was able to see snatches of beds and people out of the corners of my eyes. For some reason, the Docs didn’t want to cast me. BUT, the threat was I had to lay perfectly still otherwise they would. I complied.

A Bit of History

This was my second significant patient do-what-the-doctors-say experience, having eye surgery at two and a half for a small growth pressing on my optic nerve a few years earlier. Bizarrely, I remember shards of the event, particularly being in the OR right before they put me out. I also remember waking up alone, screaming afterwards because I had both eyes covered in gauze, unable to see. I thought they had removed my eyes!! Terrifying for such a small child.

I had other health or moderate accidents along the childhood and young adulthood stages of my life—a few car accidents, illnesses, female issues, anorexia, travel dysentery, blah, blah, blah, recovering from all with minor or no lingering consequences to speak of. Remarkably, or maybe not, I also had years of health and vigor! Still, now that I’m at the narrowing of my life, with the body continuing to slowly break down, it’s impossible to not reflect on some of the incredible gifts though peppered with sorrows that dot my thinking at this time. 

History, Oh History

Unexpectedly, my earlier examples of relative endurance and toughness don’t compare to the “digging deep” throughout bowel resections to remove tumor growth, as well as several hernia repairs, that began in earnest several years ago. I guess you could say that ‘what came before’ prepared me for the now! It almost seems natural, a forgone conclusion, that I would survive it all since that’s my history. And while I had other health and accident issues, none of them compare to the GI surgeries in these more recent years. (And I’ll be honest, after one of them about three surgeries ago, I really wasn’t sure I’d make it!)

Yet, clearly I have made it this far. After eight surgical interventions beginning 20 years ago with a routine colonoscopy, I take it from my surgeon’s “you’re a survivor” comment, I may have surprised even him. And when I review my own history, it seems I can surprise myself. Years ago after a different but serious medical event, as I was recovering a doctor at the time asked me “what is your secret?” I was flummoxed, having no answer to tell him. I thought to myself, ‘I don’t know; aren’t I supposed to just keep going?’

The Slowness of a Sunset 

Clearly, my DNA, while an apparent curse in some respects, is also a blessing and is no small amount of salvation in others. And I have come to know that besides having some amazing doctors over the years, and an exceptional surgeon now, I do have a secret ingredient, I guess, a secret sauce, so to speak. For it has become inescapable to not see what an incredibly strong Will I’ve always had, propelling me forward. Plus, I can also endure discomfort and pain, remarkably well. After all, I’ve had practice! What’s more, I’m slightly fierce on occasion which, in combination, can add up to a lot of grit that is catalyzing.

And there you have it! A tidy little package of me: a bit of grit and a bit of swagger…and aren’t I supposed to just keep going anyway as my history and nature proscribe? Still, I suppose I can’t last forever, though I’m unable to really imagine no “me” at all not walking around the planet. So off I tromp, ever forward.

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My Last Surgery Will Be a Lobotomy

I’m slated to have surgery soon on a particularly nasty fistula/hernia in a particularly unpleasant place (pelvis,butt). There’s a chance it won’t happen as I have an unusually nervous-about-lawsuits-PCP. She’s already expressed concern (liability risk) about my possible death on the table if she clears me. Sigh. While it’s frustrating (anger-producing) to have that possible decision in her hands not mine, a small part of me doesn’t actually care.

The irony here of course is the six-plus centimeters of bowel I sit on could blow open and kill me anyway even if I don’t have the surgery, but hey, I guess she’d feel vindicated! While I have spent several weeks fretting-and-stewing a good head of steam about it all, I’m beginning to be at peace either way. At least part of me is.

A New Medical Model

A few weeks ago I saw Dr Ezekiel Emanuel interviewed on a news show about a decision he’s personally made: to decline a good number of medical treatments and/or tests after hitting age 75. It sounded initially quite shocking to hear a world renowned oncologist and medical ethicist go public with his decision. But the more I think about it, the more understandable it might be, highly rational even!

Keeping people alive and doing whatever it takes, from carving up body parts to pharmaceuticals laced with life prolonging drugs is starting to feel crazier and crazier to me. I’ve had eight surgeries for a tumor that began in the rectum and traveled south to the anus, the body parts no one likes to mention. The whole problem began twenty-plus years ago though with far less invasive procedures. At some point however, and after two trans-anal surgeries, a zillion colonoscopies to scrape out double digit polyp growth, it had finally graduated to ever-greater proportions and invasions which, as night follows day, resulted in a permanent colostomy. The bag!!

After five years (which isn’t really all that long I suppose) of dealing with hernias and several complications such as a kinked colon, a skin separation that ended up with exposed flesh that then became necrotic (dead) and infected, etc. and now the worst complication of all in terms of discomfort and fright, there is a decision to make if not by my primary care doc, potentially by me. 

Expiration Dates

The lengths we go to in modern medicine to keep people alive is extraordinary and often wondrous. But it’s impressive and valiant efforts looking back seem more worthy of younger bodies sometimes. I’ll be 71 years old very soon and a part of me (if the decision is mine alone to make even) is inclined to let this ole’ animal let nature take its course. Dr Emmanuel’s cutoff is 75, I’ll be 71, both still arbitrary numbers.

I like to think in practical terms sometimes which can be disconcerting to many in the medical community. Most professionals are hard-wired to keep people alive. At whatever cost. While I too want to make prudent decisions to preserve life, including my own, at what point do we consider surrendering to the inevitable? And the inevitable for me does not include hastening death but does not include avoiding it either. I heard one doctor say that Medicare “requires keeping the patient alive.” I don’t know how it’s worded in the manual (do they have a manual?) but suffice it to say, we’re all caught between a perpetual rock-and-a-hard place loop of sorts.

(I told one of my doctors that I’ve had a “do not resuscitate” document signed for the past 10 years. He literally told me that in the OR, they’ll ignore it and try to resuscitate me anyway!)

Different Strokes for Different Folks 

My elderly friend Magie used to occasionally say to me “won’t this ever end?” She lived to be 96! My other elderly friend, Bennet, lived to be 94, which is nothing short of a miracle since he survived the holocaust which included several years of malnutrition (to put it mildly) while in the camps. But I think his drive to survive those years turned into an insistence on living well and long afterwards, a fierceness to go on with purpose and passion as an example of a different sort.

My role on the planet may be more nuanced. It may not require such heroic measures at all. Maybe, just maybe, letting the body run a natural decaying falling-apart course (which mine is clearly doing!) can also be an ethical example of not just choice or protocol but rather surrendering to the inevitable. I mean, come on!

Don’t misunderstand me: I don’t want to die at all, ever!! And actually because I believe in the eternal—of life before life as well as after death—my preference is to stay in this, oh-how-shall-I-put-this, “incarnation”. It’s all I know of me. But that does not mean there isn’t a “knowable me” in a different context, a different state of being. Just because I have no memory of existence other than the one I currently inhabit, doesn’t mean there isn’t one. How arrogant to think otherwise.

So I’m in a state at the moment that seems uncertain, to have this next abdominal surgery or not; to have doctors decide based on their best interests or mine. However it plays out, if the surgery does occur, I know one thing for sure it’ll likely be my last, or at least second to last. Unless of course there’s a lobotomy in the offing! I’d consider that!

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Learning Is As Learning Does

Good God! What a year, what a lifetime. In so many ways I’ve been incredibly blessed throughout. Trouble in the Middle East and what feels at times like a narrow escape out of it. Surviving my dysfunctional family of origin with reasonable wit, occasional depression, and believe-it-or-not optimism (which at times seems like a friggin curse!) A dozen moves in childhood that left me feeling nestless!

Fast Forward To Now

So here we are, here I am, entering 2023 with a bang or a whimper. I can’t decide what mood to settle on, instead lurching uncontrollably back and forth between the two states.

I won’t lie; I could but what would be the point?! I’ve always been too transparent even to myself. I’ve had a hard road these last few years with health issues, surgeries, occasional “ah ha” moments followed by self-doubt and dare-I-say again, optimism! At heart, I am a forager for the puzzle. And the lesson!

Why won’t it leave me alone; that pesky perverted instinct or drive to unmortify things, look for the lessons regardless of emotional states I inhabit, contained within an insatiable hunger to learn? I insist on looking for what I need to know. If I can’t find it initially, I wait (sometimes patiently, sometimes not.) Occasionally, I make it up, inventing a lesson, however small, until a greater insight arrives. I’m just that restless, driven.

What on earth do other people do with their heads if not trying to figure out what things are for, from personal and world events to good and bad people, triumphs or tragedies alike? What their meaning is to them subjectively or not, that deeper meaning? Growth is everything, why else would we be here?

Everybody Loves Raymond

I’ve been mainlining Everybody Loves Raymond recently for comic relief; you know, that sitcom of years ago that replays on one of the streaming channels. There’s so much wisdom besides insatiable humor, in most of the episodes. One I recently saw had the little girl Ally asking her dad (Raymond) why does God send us to earth? Why do we come here? Let that hang in the air for a second.

Of course Raymond, being the perpetually struggling simpleton that he is, actually has the most amazing and uncanny ways of learning himself, whether it’s through his wife, Deborah, or flat out events that demand he address issues in some way by their very existence, all by himself like a big boy. It seems he’s helpless on his own, but with the help of others (ding, ding, ding) including his family, which is dysfunctional as any in America, serves as the grist for helping him along to new insights, one way or the other.

When he goes to Deborah, the insight seems simple but profound. She tells him God just wants us to be with other people, to not be alone. Implied in that of course is the very earth school that is serving Raymond through Deborah in the whole crazy clan of his family. The metaphor is apt in the comedy and also apt for everyone’s individual life contained therein, subtle and obvious both.

All In This Together

Everything I see in the world around me is about growth, death, regeneration, and furthering more growth (evolution perhaps??) but all from learning some nugget, a component atom in the larger molecular structure of the small and big Self and the community it lives in. From a plant as a simple expression to holocaust survivors or the war in Ukraine; from the bottom of the food chain to the top. But always, always within the context of others.

My Own Classroom

Having been blessed to know a Survivor, and write about his life, Bennet mirrored that from his experience. One of my favorite speakers is Esther Perel. Both of her parents survived the Holocaust, which, of course was only but brilliantly the ginormous earth curriculum that they “grew up out of.” 

Perel describes other survivor friends of her parents, after creating new lives post-liberation, chatting about their concentration camp experience minus the drama of the tragedy but within its milieu. Instead, their intuition was to glean their own sustenance from it to forge new individual selves, transcending it, knowing somehow, some way they are greater than the sum of its parts, as a tribe which by definition includes “together.”

An Uncanny Therapy

In the very act of asking one another things like ‘whatever happened to so-and-so’ from camp ‘such-and-such’, their experiences become unmortified from the larger tragedy itself. While their experiences were gigantically large, I have my own Rosalie lessons as paltry as they seem in comparison, but included in an environment of people parts (as well as body parts.)

Fast Forward the Physical

My body challenges have surely demanded I pay attention to and learn what I need to know to grow emotionally, psychologically, but especially spiritually. It is my curriculum if you will, but too often have resisted. How many times have I spouted this little mantra while actually living from that belief and heavy identification of mySelf as “the body,” and therefore separate from others. My belief in “others as teachers” is heavily challenged.

For whatever reason, I am faced with more bodily breakdown, decay and surgeries, and cannot help but intuit this remains an opportunity for learning something I need to see but have heretofore denied.

The Excitement of the Drama 

It doesn’t need to be so hard, but we—I— insist on having tragedy even in the face of incredible gifts, because we—I—misunderstand the purpose and value of things including tragedy. Tragedy as well as comedy is a learning device. Just ask Ukraine’s President Zelenskyy can surely attest to. It (the war) may be couched in an oversized drama, but his drive to transcend it is clear, palpable. It is preceded by comedy, his earlier life’s work, but for whatever reason, a different “energy field” of tragedy has been required for him.

And so in an odd way, like Ally, Raymond, Zelenskyy, Holocaust survivors—pick a category—my seeming tragedy of yet more body breakdown is no tragedy at all. Nor is it a comedy either. It simply serves as a learning device, a vehicle for communication. Instead, it strikes me as I am greater than the sum of any of my individualized body parts. If I believe I am spirit as the real me—I must view “me” through the whole of those folks I know and love…and sometimes even those I don’t. Whenever I ultimately do leave the planet, I’m not hauling this body thing along with me. Rather, I will be in a field of spirit—not woo woo, mind you—but from that field of love which is the only true “me” there can be.

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Hope Comes As a Prayer

To be tired, truly tired is an awful and overwhelming feeling. It swamps you leaving a feeling of disorientation and rudderlessness, at least for a time. While I believe one can recover from the state, the shock of its very occurrence has a lingering effect much like a bad odor impossible to completely eradicate. Ultimately, there becomes a gnawing feeling your life has made a turn, one impossible to deny, a sobering acknowledgement of no going backness.

I have had such a feeling of late, brought on by yet another health crisis. And while it is still possible the ship could yet be righted once again, it has begun to feel less likely. What’s worse, the effort of righting the ship feels hardly worth it. After all, how does one recover directional functionality when one has lost the very tool itself used to navigate.

ON THE WINGS

At one of my darkest moments, a woman recently told me her husband had been diagnosed with Stage Four stomach cancer months ago, leaving little to no hope for survival. In her voice was the unmistakable whisper of the very life he was threatened to be losing being carried aloft by a possibility fueled by the hope of living.

She told me this while I was in tears, tired beyond comprehension of taking one more step towards hope myself, zapped beyond anything I ever experienced before. My will seemed gone, eliminated. And yet she arrived in my hospital room exuding an authentic energy of, my God, could it be a ray of sunshine, of hope? A sliver? I was clearly skeptical. And yet…

OF A PRAYER

She spoke of a pray-to-God moment that was oddly palpable. How is it she came then, at the very time of my unmooring if not for that? She was not a seminar, not a mantra, not a meditation group, she had none of the trappings of an organized delivery system of fortitude. She was not programmed. And yet here I sit writing this itty bitty story of a moment, offering the exact breath I need to breathe differently going forward by a nurse’s aide from a foreign country.

So many things in my life—activities, events, practices—have spoken to my soul that have truly propelled my spirit. But this woman was a quieter and simpler delivery system, a compass load star spoken with an accent from another place. A universal place.  She related, no, transferred the baton she offered in her simple message of “pray to God.” That may not even have been her exact wording. But it was her specific intention and energy, delivered with authenticity from her experience and a learned awareness.

It was not to gain anything. Rather it was to trust that all would be righted somehow. To understand I was not to gut it out by doing it all myself but instead to believe in a faith all would be well, would carry me forward and be righted no matter the outcome. She spoke of hope not by using the word but by demonstration for she was the prayer.

THE ENERGY OF LOVE

There are times in life when a message comes unbidden, from God knows where by who knows what but it comes just the same. At times like these I think of Christopher Reeves after his accident, lying motionless, trapped in a nobody that won’t move without another’s assistance. I heard he cried everyday which was likely cathartic even if only temporarily so. I image his tears also might have made room for hope. Not of some miraculous physical healing but of a more transcendent psycho-emotional-spiritual one.

I think of all the thousands and millions of people who have died of Covid, and not just that but other diseases, alone and feeling unspeakable loss and hopelessness. My loss, my hopelessness is not that large but I can still identify with their presumed sense of tiredness, of giving up. Were there moments of inspiration, of comfort from some unknown force whether human conveyed or from an energy of Divine origin even if only for a split second?

There are times for suffering and unspeakable loss and there are times for recovery’s wings and a belief in something greater than one’s self. There are times for hopelessness and times for endurance that all will be well no matter the outcome. My recent gift of hope — and dare I say, faith — was delivered recently by an unsuspecting hospital aide. She shared a universal gift. She shared a gift of compassion, hope and love, and from the trenches of her own experience. A gift so subtle and seemingly ordinary I could have missed it had I insisted on only relying on analytical mind. Hers was a gift so pervasive it was not to be ignored, rather to be immersed in and lifted up. To hope in things unseen.

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The Bag Lady

It’s come down to this. There is a body part that needs removing due to a large, hideously unattractive tumor that has just, well, gotta go! Years ago (more than a decade, less than a century) it made its presence known similar to now. With a couple surgeries and double-digit colonoscopies to remove said growth and/or tiny polyps over the years, it has come back, the little bugger!! Excuse me: the big bugger!! Read more

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