More on the Same Theme

I used to think life sucked as a thirteen year old. Granted, my family was dysfunctional and I was an awkward very young teen..but I had no idea how good I had it. I had a Guidance Counselor (Mr. Dave Holleren) who spent a lot of time with me, mainly because he knew if he could just get me past this dark cloud that I'd have a very good life. 
I spent most of 8th grade hanging out in his office, or around it working with the secretaries and not attending classes. I still did well enough with my grades just half-assing the work and taking the tests after the fact. Teachers gave me grace to not attend classes for the most part. Dave (the counselor) may have had a hand in that, too. 

You know the expression: "Youth is wasted on the young?" Seems like folk over 60+ years of age are the ones who express this thought more often then a 46 year old...but I'm genuinely frustrated.

Let's recap:
I've been told (years ago) I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. Not sure about that one, but I can believe it lately. It includes symptoms like joint pain (having that - esp. right hip and knee and it's verified by MRI on the knee. Plus easy breaking bones...yep, tell that to my tibia) and confusion and memory problems. I have some serious memory issues.

I have Sleep Apnea. That one was legit easy to diagnose. I was stopping breathing like 30+ times an hour, sometimes up to 22 seconds in duration. I'm lucky I didn't cause brain damage. (Okay, the jury is out on that one. The family might tell you I have!)

I have Chronic Kidney disease, Stage III. I'm not going to need dialysis for a while it seems, as long as we keep a close eye on it and I keep my high blood pressure under control. I'm on like 4 different blood pressure medications. It's crazy.
However, this condition comes with it's own set of side effects that include feeling tired, too. 

I have Bipolar II which comes with its own set of medications and two of them, yep count that TWO of them cause aversion to exercise and weight gain. Weight gain in turn exacerbates the rest of my health conditions (and makes me generally feel shitty because I miss being a size 4 - 6).

Now I fall asleep sitting up - in the car, in church, at my desk - against my best efforts not to. Is it narcolepsy or just exhaustion and meds that are causing this? Who the hell knows?! There isn't a clear test to rule anything out and I'm running out of levers to adjust.

We got the phenomenal sleep number bed, I wear the CPAP mask to sleep..if it weren't for the meds would I be waking up every morning feeling refreshed? God, I wish I knew.

I have intermittent cancerous spots on my body--and that's just handled by a diligent dermatologist.  

I have a young colleague, in her twenties, who recently resigned due to her health. I don't know exactly what's going on...could be a terminal brain tumor or could be a chronic condition, but she got to the point where she wasn't sure how much longer she could work so she switched to a job with kickass benefits.
(And here I thought my company had good bennies.. apparently not good enough!)

And I think to myself: How long will I be able to work? When will these symptoms increase to the point where they impact my career so much that I have to scale back or quit? 

Or, conversely, how can I fight to get back in better condition so that I can continue to work and support my family. How much of this is within my control? How much can be fixed with big efforts on my part? 

I'm not sure..but I need to try hard to find out where the limits are and how long I can keep going. 

When I Became a Mom (again)

I consider Erik my first "kid" because I became part of his life at about 14 months old. He was our guinea pig kid--sometimes we were too worried about him hitting milestones, we worried, we prodded, we experimented with sleeping techniques (a big ol' FAIL because he never needed more than 5 or 6 hours of sleep a night) -- and we had a co-parenting triangle with his biological mom which made things more complex.

But when Lucy was born, just about a month and 18 years ago.. here are additional things I learned:

• To have a baby is to have your heart walking around outside of your body.
• The smell of a newborn - especially their head - is intoxicating.
• Even if the labor is three days long, breaks your tail bone and completely rips every bit of supportive fascia in your lower abdomen, it will be worth it.
• You lose a certain amount of modesty after a room full of people have stared at your crotch for hours. (Or days, in my case.)
• You become paranoid and worried at somewhat irrational things like a car veering off the road to hit your stroller. This doesn't go away much once they start driving.
• You may start off pointing out which bits of the baby that resemble you or your husband or personality traits... but you better knock that shit off before s/he hits puberty and wants to be their own person with no comparison to either parent.
• There is a level of exhaustion as a new parent that is unparalleled in your later life. You will wonder, after the fact, how you ever survived it.
• You will marvel over the fact that your body DID THIS. For a short while you will have no body shame or hate, you will just respect your body for making this human being.
• Unreasonable bouts of pride, worry or frustration will become normal for you.
• Your baby will initially be helpless and only comforted by you. S/he will make your heart swell with love and then... a decade or so later break at times when they reject you as part of the process of growing independent. You may know this is normal -- but it will still hurt.

Happy Mother's Day to moms at every stage of the journey.

When Spouses Outlive Spouses

Jeff does this very morose thing every time he goes on a trip. He leaves me as equipped as I can be for his not returning.
He vacuums, cleans the house as much as possible, tells me about upcoming money things (that he probably should have already mentioned, but that wouldn't have been on my radar anyhow) and we both, if we travel by air, send pictures of the location of where our cars are parked in case the other should need to retrieve it from the airport parking lot.

Jeff is genuinely morose about it - I'm more practical in my mindset. I'm thinking: "Hey, I took this picture of where I parked the car so I could find it when I get back. I'll share it with Jeff in case he needs the car for any reason between now and when I get back."

Also, the other thing Jeff says constantly is that I'm going to outlive him. He points out that most of the retired people are women living alone who have outlived their spouses. What he fails to realize is that these women are from a generation that didn't work outside the home. Many of the ones I've met never handled their finances -- it was just something that their husband always did. Now they've either had to take a crash course in their retirement investments and monthly income or leave their financial affairs to one of their adult children, usually the oldest son.

My grandmother out-lived my grandfather by decades. But the greatest stressors in her life were feeding a bunch of hungry teenage boys whatever they wanted like a short order cook. That was a fleeting point of time in her life and the rest of it was spent at Bible studies where she nourished her spiritual well-being and being surrounded by loving family. She traveled, tried all sorts of diets (mostly healthy and vitamin based...some hokey things like magnets in her shoes, too) and followed her passions and was a caretaker.

Compared to my corporate life, which she genuinely can not have imagined, she had a life with limited stress. I don't have to outline how being a working mom, with a husband who travels, in a male dominated corporate world where I need to do every twice or three times as better as my male counterparts to keep my job and climb. (Because climb, adapt, move or find a new job. You're like a shark, you need to keep moving and proving your worth.)

Travel, overtime, toxic and even abusive bosses, challenging work (which is both good and bad) have been just as (more?) stressful then my husband's career. It's not a contest, but he's had white male privilege and stability within a non-toxic work environment for nearly all of his career.

Not to say his life has been without stress. His reaction to stress included losing chunks of his hair. So, again, not a contest.

But my health is for shit these days. I was trying to figure out how old I am last night (yeah, your mid-to-late forties just kinda all blend together) and my helpful daughter who first shamed me for not just doing the math said: "You're not like a 46 year old. Your body is like...beyond 60 years old."

She's right. I have more medical conditions and medications than I could have ever imagined, even 5 years ago. I've already posted about how I take more than 20 pills a day. I don't want to and I'm sorely tempted to skip many of them...but I have physicians who would be very angry with me if I did.

I have a freakin' CPAP machine now. I can't sleep without a device on my face. (Or, I'm not supposed to, and as I just found out in a very creepy way, there are strangers tracking that I am wearing it and how many hours I'm wearing it and how many times I still stopping breathing each hour when a nurse called me up and talked to me about my data--which they can SEE.)

So my theory is this: Jeff's assumption that I'm going to outlive him and all his preparations as such ("Here's how you do this.. if I wasn't around you'd need to X, Y, Z) are unnecessary. Of the two of us I'm the one with the shitty body and looking like I won't make it to 55.

I've had doctors chastising me that I'm going to have a stroke any moment and devastate my family since I was in my late 30s. (Gee, thanks Doc!)

I'm still sorely tempted to stop taking every pill I'm taking every day. To just walk every day and eat as healthy as possible and leave life to its whims.
I'm having a hard time just letting age ravage me and leave me with age spots, fat around my middle and gray hair.

Part of me wants to "Rage, rage against the dying light" and the other part of me just wants to say F*CK it, let nature run its course.

The stressful job isn't going anywhere. Life changes aren't possible on the horizon. All I can do is take care of me to the best of my ability, with the limited time in my schedule and limited budget available to me to take care of minor things like age spots.

Sun screen, like everyone says after the fact, is what I should have worn.
Screw it. Maybe I like the sun on my face. Just not right now while I'm vainly paying a few hundred dollars to wipe out some age spots.