My Last Best Year: A Strange Thankfulness

I have a strange thankfulness recently as I connect with other women that experience infertility.

Before I lodge that gratefulness though, let me remind us that not all infertility is alike.  Bearing life is a fragile, miraculous, delicate process; the "reasons" can be countless, and many are mysterious.  And even if some of us are alike in technical terms, each of us has our own story with this.  In such a place of vulnerability, honoring each person is key.

There are strings that lace us together though, and one is commonly this: feeling like our bodies have betrayed us.  For many women, this is the first experience of their body not doing what it is supposed to do.  Yes, what it was designed to do.

And here is where a strange thankfulness arises in me, quiet and sure.   The battle of body betrayal was fought in my 20s.  Deep within me, even as I walk steps each day, I am acutely aware that this body's function is a fragile, precious gift.  I can steward it, I can honor it, but I cannot control it.

And so, even with our own brand of infertility, I have at least this: a knowledge that this life, literally - this body's life, is not my own.  And neither would be one that I am to mother.  Freedom.

My Last Best Year: Deeply Personal Very Public Information

Today I turn 34.  Ever since my health went haywire at 25, I have welcomed each birthday as a gift; thankful for more time to be with people and live more fully.  More time to give, love, and heal.  I have truly celebrated aging.

That is, until sometime in the last year or so.

Although I have not made a public announcement of our desire to have children, some things are apparent: we are in our mid-30s, happily married for 5+ years, financially stable, in good health, we welcome children in our home and lives…so…”Do you have kids?”  Family building is such a deeply personal affair, yet so very public.  The answer, plain-as-day, is no.  So maybe this isn’t an announcement after all. 

We have a deeply personal story here.  Complete with joy, pain, sex, surgery, giving, receiving, herbal teas, financial worries, love growing, sobbing, chromosomal testing, medical specialists, anger, you-name-it analysis, prayer, hope, travel, drama, applications, helplessness, empowerment, fixing, waiting, castor oil, dreaming, needles, resting, discipline, licentiousness, counseling, tinctures, test kits, and God, God, God.

Any western woman knows the line the medical community draws in the sand: 35.  Frankly, I think its BS for a jazillion reasons. Nonetheless, this damn statistical line is hovering in my peripheral vision…and this is me giving it the finger.  (See that?  That’s my middle finger).  And, mysteriously, less loudly, I want to give it a warm embrace all at the same time.

Happy 34^th Birthday to me!

Here’s to being unashamedly, (but appropriately?), open in my 34^th year. 

My Last Best Year. 

7 Years Later: Exposed

I felt naked walking around.  Sometimes I would freak out hours into my work day and grab my shoulder to find the strap: "Oh good, I put on a bra today."  One day I forgot to put on a bra; thankfully I realized it on the way to work.  That is how out of it I was.  If you know Lizzy, you know, this is like really, really out of it.

"Free to be" day was easy to recover from, though, compared to how exposed I felt in other ways.  I felt like someone had turned me inside out and my internal mess was out there for all to see.  Perhaps it was all the processing I was doing; perhaps the therapy.  But mostly, it was that I could not hide behind anything I had anymore: not my productivity, not my good nature, not my Christianese, etc, etc...

I walked around feeling like everyone could see "my junk," (double meaning intended - go ahead and laugh).  It felt terrible for a time...and a time again.  To not be able to hide behind your normal defense mechanisms is a terrible and wonderful thing.  Terrible and wonderful are a great team - especially 7 years later.  In the moment it totally sucked!, yet I am grateful.  Especially since I have been assured in retrospect, "No, Lizzy, I really could not see that you were afraid all the time; that you really felt you were dying most moments of the day even though it was totally irrational.  Or that a close secondary concern was how your ass looked in those jeans. (Every thing is relative?).  Or who you have a massive, embarrassing crush on."  But the point is I started to be honest with people; being honest is a lot easier when you think "they" have seen it anyways.

To be seen is a wonderful thing.  Now people saw in part what God saw in whole.  Only I don't think God requires modesty.  But, don't worry, people like me do: occasionally I still check my shoulder for a strap.

7 Years Later: 90/10

I briefly entertained the idea of becoming a statistics minor is college.  It was really only because my professor suggested it and said he would mentor me; ...oh, what could have been... (smirk).

Silly me!  I thought I could put those darned interpreted numbers behind me.  But enter the world of medical patient and you can not.  In fact, in emotion, in reality, you can not.  In diagnostics, in treatment, in prevention, you can not.

So, what does a 25 year old girl with a 90/10 chance of cancer do with herself in the meantime? Surprisingly, she gains a bit of a bounce in her step.  After all, something could actually be wrong!, like treatably wrong.  And her sense of humor rebounds a bit.  At some point ridiculous is funny. She makes jokes with the doctor that is sticking a huge biopsy needle in her neck about ruining her new shirt from Anthropologie.  (They even wager a bet and the tech wins a soda).  She laughs out loud when she finds out the biopsy is inconclusive and the chance of the matter still remains: 90/10.

Next up? Surgery: knife to neck.   But not until after Thanksgiving; load me up with some stuffing and pecan pie.  And, yes, I will have another glass of wine.  Doesn't it have anti-oxidants?

50/50

Dan suggested it.  He really did.  It wasn't me.  "Do you want to go see that movie 50/50?"

I won't review the movie, because I don't really know how to do that.  But, will say this: while it was too Hollywood for words at some points, dirt-ball at some points, and I was bored at some points (only a few), I laughed, I cried, and I think I finally have a compelling dissertation idea: Acute Illness Incidents During Young Adulthood and Its Impact on Lifelong Human Development.  You know you want to read it.  (And to those that actually would, I know I need to be more specific).

But here are some less academic take aways:
1.  Everyone in their 20s that is very sick, very suddenly should have a friend like the Seth Rogan character.  He is crass and raunchy, but faithful.  He saw his friend and the sickness, not denying either the sickness or especially his friend.  And he used the F-word a lot.  (I personally thanked my dear girlfriend that said, "for "f***'s sake" a lot during those years of my illness over a glass of wine Thursday night.  Invaluable).
2.  The relational dynamics are exaggerated, but real.  The girlfriend/boyfriend really does freak out, but is not honest about it with themselves and, as Seth puts it, basically, "suck as a person;" ... at least in that way.
3.  The scene with Joseph Gordon-Levitt getting ready and then going to the hospital is pretty true to life: feed the dog, get in the car, watch your neighbors go to work, drive to the hospital, hug your friend, and walk freely into the building that will change your life either way.
4.  I love the play with chance in the movie, albeit narrowly themed through out, and that real, raw, imperfect relationship comes out of moving through the odds of life.

7 Years Later: Permission to Go Inside

My injury and illness gifted me permission.  Permission to go inside and find healing.  The messages around me and in me all my life had been the opposite, despite some of my various attempts to challenge them.  But my body was such a wreck anyhow, what choice did I have?

Interesting, because I'm a professional counselor.  My career values people going inside, to the "hidden things" to find healing.  I entered this profession before this critical permission entered in; I believe that many of us in the ministry, helping, and healing professions are trying to find a way to heal without having to go inside for ourselves.  I get that, on so many levels.  I also believe we need to.

Thankfully and gratefully, I did not have a choice.   I don't think I would have willfully took such a journey: I was so young and embroiled in my own patterns and afraid.  Yes, yes: I was involved in a small group, and therapy group, and etc, etc.  Yes - I desired to.  But my circumstances found my need all the more better; God did.

I was so undone, that suddenly I had some boldness that I had not had before.  Boldness to be brutally honest with my family, my friends, myself, and my God.  And it was there and within that I began to find some healing that I did not imagine was available to people like me.  Especially with a body that was going through the wringer.

7 Years Later: Chances

I've said it before and I will say it again (for the umpteenth time): If someone had said to me, "Lizzy, we would like to try a surgery where we cut off your head and reorganize some things in there.  It is an experimental procedure, with a 50% chance that it will reduce your dizziness and a 50% chance you will die," I would have said, "Sign me up."  The chance was worth the risk, in my little fantasy world created to describe the level of misery of my invisible injury.

So, I was actually happy to be back in the MRI machine that cold October day.  My symptoms were worsening and doing nothing was not an option.  I waited anxiously for the results from my neurologist.

The call came quickly, (in medical exam results sort of quickly), but strangely.  I expected the easy, monotone, Russian accented voice of my neurologist and instead I had heard the chipper, familiar, Minnesota-esk voice of my primary care doctor.

"Lizzy, it's John.  So - I got the results of the MRI.  The good news is that the lesion in your brain is healing quite nicely...  The other part, though, is that there seems to be a mass on your thyroid..."  The next day at John's office, "So, most masses in the thyroid are benign nodules, but some are cancerous.  There is roughly a 10% chance that it is the latter.  But who wants to walk around with a 10% chance of having cancer when we can know if it is or not..."

Good point.  Is this the point where he suggests that they cut off my head?, she thinks sarcastically.  (Your thyroid is in your neck, by the way).

7 Years Later: Carried to Light

I haven't written since July.  And how fitting that my last reflection reads with such heaviness and stuckness.  The Day of Darkness were long.  Waiting, miserably; therapizing, endlessly; suffering.  I would grieve one thing to lose another.  The biggest black holes were the losses left nameless.  Physically, spiritually, emotionally I felt as a vapor.  I spoke to people through an invisible triple pane window.  Even now I realize just how sick and traumatized I was.

During this time, I wrote a devotional entry for the seminary student handbook at the request of a colleague and friend.  It is the story of a paraplegic man whose friends carry him on a mat to Jesus.  (Does a hole in a roof ring a bell?).  Because of their, (as in the friends'), belief, the man was healed.

And, during the Days of Darkness, it was my friends, (including my family who are the dearest of friends), bold belief that, I think quite literally, kept me alive.  I was carried to Light.

If I started to name the ways, I would be typing until morning.  How appropriate.

"...and you will know them by their love..." 
 

7 Years Later: The Days of Darkness

I am not sure when I labeled this season of my life that I am writing about "The Days of Darkness," but the word picture stuck for its succinctness and fullness.  Thank goodness for Mexico, that Pocket of Hope in the black hole of the coming days and months.

Shall we bullet point through September into October?  That will make it a little more bearable:
- Return from Mexico and begin injectable medication.  Mistake liver failure for the "flu-like" symptoms that said injectable medications have as normal side-effects.  Stop injecting myself to let my liver heal.  Catastrophic liver failure averted.
- Right foot drops.  Meaning, my right lower leg stops working; Lizzy limping around.  Motor functioning lost.  (Let us rejoice when we tell our bodies to do something and it does it).  Crazy dizziness sets in; crazy.  "This is not right.  This would be a crazy fast progression of MS..."  Crazy: with great speed and recklessness.
- Lots of tests: peripheral nerve test (featuring electricity shots directly in the nerve), spinal tap (starring a needle the size of a pencil being stuck into the bodies nerve center), MRI, MRI, draw blood x20, brain wave test, shiney-lights-in-eye test (when you are upside down, left, right, and inside out).  You name the test, I had it.
- Lots of therapy: physical therapy (to learn to walk with a brace), vestibular therapy (to learn to walk a straight line), pruden-myo therapy (what the?), cranial sacral therapy, massage therapy, psychotherapy (for the creeping and crushing complication: depression).  There was more, but you get the picture.

The picture: The Days of Darkness.  The absence or deficiency of light during the interval of (what should be) light between two successive nights.