My husband will be getting a multiple bypass a week from tomorrow.
The development of this situation happened very quickly, or took years, depending on how you look at it. The heart blockages developed over several years, exacerbated by family history. How we found out about it has been a whirlwind of tests and doctor’s appointments,
Richard is young for this — he’s only 57. But that family history made it inescapable, I think. Despite the statins he has taken religiously for years, he has some arterial blockage, and open heart surgery is the best option.
I am dealing with this rather stoically. I think the medication I’m on helps me stay on an even keel. I’m a lot more helpful to him in a stoical mood than I would be with my mother’s way of dealing with medical emergencies — she would browbeat someone for being sick. (Honestly, you would think my broken leg was something I’d deliberately done to myself.) The day of, however, I will be covering up panic.
So I’m taking thoughts and prayers that all goes well. There will be pain (my husband admits he’s a wimp about pain — we’ll see) and recovery time (from what I hear, the cracked breastbone will require more recovery time than the heart) and I will be the responsible person for a while.
What’s a lesson you’ve learned recently that shifted your perspective?
When I was growing up, I thought the United States was the best place on Earth to live. Over the years, my perspective has shifted, and recently, it has shifted rapidly.
When I was young, the country was Fourth of July celebrations and ice cream parlors. I was obviously naive back then, because it also was racism and the Vietnam War. Those things were far away from the rural childhood of a perpetual optimist.
As I grew up, I saw the downsides, but I comforted myself by saying “At least we’re trying to be our best.” It was a comforting idea, and there was plenty of evidence. Even as recently as Obama’s election, there was room to hope that America stood for true equality, at least in its ideals.
With Trump being voted into office twice, I have no illusions anymore. His very campaign promise was to take away from the people his constituents couldn’t stand. The opposite of equality. He has fulfilled this promise in a thousand petty acts on the national and international levels. His definition of freedom is predicated on it being granted to his sycophants, white nationalists and supremacists. As a country, we are bullies. We are no longer the good guys.
I think about moving to Canada, but I don’t have the independent wealth I would need. I don’t have the skills they need and I am too close to retirement. I don’t know if a blue wave would be enough to restore the country. I doubt it — the hatred is still here, still will survive. I do not live in the best country in the world
My summer is dwindling away, and what do I have to show for it?
Eleven internship visits, 4 classes basically set up, 16 chapters of PowerPoint revised, part of a novel, lots of proofreading/editing, one novel ready for release in October, another waiting on a cover before I ready it for release in January, another (a former Vella cliff-hanger story) that could be published if I get a cover made, six months worth of promotion on Loomly, a lot of rest.
I have about another month of summer, but I can see the ending. I am not sure if I’m prepared for fall semester, because I love the slower pace of summer, even when I get bored.
I’m here at Starbucks right now, trying to write or do something productive. I’m not feeling the novel right now, so I’m not quite sure what I am going to do, but it should be productive.
I ruined my 14-day writing streak yesterday, so I don’t count on doing this blogging daily. But I will do it as often as I can.
I was chronically sleep-deprived when younger, especially through college. Some of this has to do with being untreated bipolar and in hypomania; some of that has to do with being paranoid when I stayed at a boyfriend’s house because my mother would call around looking for me if I wasn’t home by 9. If I got four hours of sleep a night I’d be surprised.
When I was in graduate school, I walked in front of a car which was turning into traffic at a stop sign. If I weren’t chronically sleep-deprived, I think I would have seen the car in time and stepped back. I stepped back, but just a second too late, because I ended up with a badly broken leg.
Now, I work hard on getting enough sleep at night. I do not drink coffee after noon. I go to bed early, and spend at least a half hour before I sleep quietly with a sleep mask on. I don’t surf the internet on my phone right before I go to bed. I take my medication religiously. I have sleep meds I take when I think I am going to have a restless night.
My productivity depends on my sleep. My health depends on my sleep. My sleep depends on good habits.
I’m on a mini-retreat to Lincoln, NE, sitting in The Mill (a coffee shop) writing this. There is a farmer’s market setting up nearby and I’m thinking of wandering over there. The coffee is very good here, but I’m in danger of being overcaffeinated. Hope to get some writing done here.
I slept through the fireworks last night. Richard was watching them from the hotel room (we tend to rent from the top floors so we can watch fireworks). Apparently, there was lightning in with the fireworks. I’m sorry I missed that.
I like Lincoln. It’s quirky and cosmopolitan and laid back in the summer (I don’t go here during football season, when the stadium is the second-biggest city in the state during home games). We’re in the Haymarket neighborhood, which exudes cool.
Wish me luck — I’m going to try to do something productive!
Which languages do you speak and how did that impact your life?
People in the US do languages wrong. We don’t teach other languages until junior high or high school, when children have more difficulty in learning them. I took French for two years in high school, and I barely know enough to get to the bathroom. I don’t know verb tenses, and I don’t know many verbs in the first place. But I have the first conversation in the French textbook memorized:
Bonjour, Guy.
Bonjour, Michel. Ca va?
Oui, ca va.
(My keyboard does not do cedillas.)
I also can say “Shall we go to the beach?” In French, which will come in handy perhaps never.
It disadvantages me that I do not speak other languages. Not only in international travel, but the fact that the more languages one knows, the easier one can learn new languages. So a lifetime of facility in languages has been denied me.
I went to graduate school with people who knew five languages. In many African countries, this is apparently the norm. I envied them their ability to communicate. I still do. The American Way is not ideal.
I’ve probably talked about this before, but not in detail. The time during and around the diagnosis of my bipolar is probably what I would call “The Hard Years”.
I think it was about 17 years ago — I am not good with time, especially during that time. It was not a typical spring semester — I had just learned that my department (Family and Consumer Sciences) was being disbanded, and my future position uncertain. I had tenure, but the university didn’t have to keep me. Most people in my department were losing their jobs. The whole situation was ugly because of how it was done outside of proper procedures for a reduction in force.
Meanwhile, I was not sleeping. At all. Days in a row of two hours’ sleep a night, going from project to project. I felt strung out and enervated. Yet I couldn’t stop myself.
My department chair told me I needed to see a psychiatrist for my sleep. I think she knew what was going on, even if I didn’t. I explained to the psychiatrist what was going on, and he informed me that I didn’t have a sleep disorder, but a mood disorder. He drew the sine wave of my moods onto a piece of paper, the highs and the lows, and described what I was facing.
He tried to stabilize me, and whatever he was doing didn’t work. I lived in the twilight zone of my lack of sleep and my fading mood. We tried sleep medicines on me, and I discovered that Ambien caused me to cook in my sleep, while the others (from tramadol to benzodiazepenes to Haldol) did not work. During this time my best friend died while I was on Spring Break, and it hardly registered to me. (I still don’t feel like I mourned her to this day.)
Eventually, I broke. I didn’t realize how sick I was until the evening when I got the twitches. I woke my husband from a nap and told him we needed to go to the emergency room because I wanted to kill myself. I didn’t feel typically suicidal — I didn’t really want to kill myself; I just wanted the jitters to stop. I just wanted the sleeplessness to stop. I remember lying on the table in the room they had sequestered me in, talking nonstop about my high blood pressure and the fact that I could not sit still.
The staff did a great job of handling me. They did not make me feel crazy at all. They didn’t talk down to me; they let me know that they were going to keep me for a couple of days to stabilize my medication. I felt surprisingly taken care of, even when I had to surrender my shoes for grippy socks (anyone who has been hospitalized for mental health issues knows what ‘grippy sock vacation’ means).
Inpatient care meant sitting through programming about how to deal with moods, art therapy, and discharge plans. The people I was in with had a variety of issues, although they all seemed pretty ordinary to me. The thing about inpatient treatment is that the patient no longer has much agency. You can’t bring your computer or phone. You can’t do work. You go to group even if you don’t want to. It feels like a shock to the system.
I spent a lot of time pacing the halls because of my jitters; I later figured out that I had akathisia from the meds. Akathisia feels like having restless legs in one’s whole body, and one has to move to try to get rid of it. It doesn’t go away except with time and the removal of the medication. Luckily that was only a day or two.
The emotional fallout of being in inpatient for psychiatry was a blow. I felt like I was no longer an ordinary person. I was mentally ill. The bipolar was no longer minor; it was a disorder. I struggle with this to this day, the feeling that I have been branded as other, even though I have not been to the hospital since. I have had a couple episodes since; a few mini-depressions, a minor hypomanic episode, but they have not put me back into the hospital.
I thought I was going to go back to work after my three days in the hospital. Human resources at the university disabused me of that notion; they made it clear that I would miss the rest of the semester and would not take on interns over the summer. That was another moment of reckoning that what I was facing was not minor. They were not kind about it.
In the middle of all this, my husband and I bought a new house. I did not help much with the packing or moving because the medications I was on were knocking me out. I was a zombie for much of the summer until we figured out that the Seroquel was not agreeing with me. My new psychiatrist put me on a new medication and that made me feel more normal.
That was my ‘hard year’. It has shaped who I am; has given me a sense of insecurity that has lasted to this day. I feel I could go back there at any time, if the stressors are bad enough. I feel as though I’ve never left, because the label ‘bipolar’ still applies. I question my past decisions, because I was unmedicated when I made them. I am still steps away from the ‘hard years’.
Chaos is the opposite of order. Order means predictability, knowing what will happen next because that’s what happens next. When life is predictable, our responses to life are predictable. We are in maintenance.
Chaos is unpredictable by definition. When life is unpredictable, we need to respond to it in novel ways, or else cease to function. Growth is possible, because doing something new can be wildly successful. It can foster growth. It can take us to a new place.
What’s the best advice you’d give to someone younger than you?
When I was in high school, I participated in various extracurricular activities. I tried out for school plays and musicals, I participated in the Madrigals group, and I even spent 20 minutes in track (I quit while I was ahead). I wanted to do these things and I found a sense of belongingness while doing them. They also helped me get into the University of Illinois.
When I was in college, however, I didn’t participate in groups or clubs. At the university, I was a small fish in a big pond and the size of the pond intimidated me. University of Illinois had about 40,000 students in 1981, and the groups were full of talented people with greater drive than I had.
As a professor, I encourage my students to participate in extracurricular activities, and I envy them their participation. I really feel I should have continued my participation in something during college, anything. Even if I was a tiny fish in the ocean.
So the advise I would give to someone younger than me is “get involved.” Whatever appeals — theater or chorus, political organizations or speaking clubs, sports or role-playing — participate.
It has a cosmopolitan feel and an extensive Chinese population, so the food is good. It has a little bit of a counter-culture feel, another plus. Because of its location on the seashore, it’s in Zone 7 USDA, so the weather is nicer than here. Politically, it’s Canada, and if I got my citizenship there, I would be covered by national health insurance.
The thing that’s stopping me is money. It takes a good chunk of money (or a high-demand, high income job) to become a Canadian. Otherwise, I would be convincing my husband to retire there. I think if we won the lottery, it would be only a matter of time before we moved to Vancouver.
Words Like Me 