Rapid hearts
We were a Tupperware family. Pastel and tinted. Yellow, green, blue, pink and white containers of all sizes filled our shelves and fridge. The big, square one stored the gum and candy packed for the long drive to northern Wisconsin every summer for family camp – and then held the one of a kind smell of Big Red, Coffee Nibs and Minocqua Maple Fudge inside it’s rubbery plastic walls all year, no matter what else we put in it. I would lift its lid at will to remember my summer.
There was another container that didn’t carry such happy memories. It was the Mother Bowl. It was HUGE, yellow and I could have comfortably sat in it until age 8. (Go ahead, Leslie, make the short joke…).
My brother apparently had something wrong with his heart (he’s totally fine now, as far as I know). My old and addled mind only remembers that he went to my grandpa’s cardiologist to get it checked out – and he had to run on a treadmill. They found that he had something called WPW, which apparently translated to ‘rapid heartbeat’. It would go like this: he would be playing basketball in our driveway with his friends, and then suddenly, he’d run in to the kitchen, grab the Mother Bowl, fill it with ice and water and plunge his face into it. And then he’d stand on his head.
Apparently, shock therapy was the remedy du jour.
When I was in high school, I started getting anxiety attacks. I thought I was dying and I was too scared for a while to ask anyone if I was – scared that the answer was yes. My way out of them, when they hit me, was to move. I had to bust my body out of the terrifying static that was paralyzing my limbs, eyes, ears, brain.
And it recently occurred to me that I, and maybe you?, were taught that when things really got going, when our hearts were racing and our minds were burning and our bodies were firing with energy – that the thing to do was jump off the track, get out, make it stop at all costs.
I can’t help but wonder what it would have been like to have someone grab my little scared hand, or better yet – for a magnificent voice deep inside me to grab my attention, and say, “Don’t go. Stay with it, ride it. Because this is the road to the next thing. This is the good part.”
Image credit: EraPhernalia Vintage
Filed under How To, Myth or Reality, Writing | Tags: anxiety, blog, Blogging, change, copywriter, life, stress, writer, Writing | Comments (14)Cherry ChapStick, Resilience and Non-Hoopla
I had another post planned for today, but I feel totally compelled to write about our surgery experience – and yes, it does have something to do with writing, because it has something to do with life – and life seeps into everything. And by everything, I mean everything.
So, for those of you that don’t know, my four year-old daughter had surgery yesterday. Not a heart transplant, mind you, they just removed her adenoids and put tubes in her ears. But, she did have general anesthesia and a lovely anti-nausea and narcotics cocktail.
Things you see in hospitals
She did great. First, she was thrilled to have her moms to herself this morning. But, then we got to the hospital. I saw an elderly (to be honest, half-dead looking) woman being gurney-ed by and I tried to distract Sophie, but to no avail. She maneuvered and watched and absorbed…and I think that was the moment when she started to cling to me with all she had.
And then, a scary looking nurse who looked like she hadn’t eaten anything but Mary Kay products since 1984 took us into the changing room and poured her cold demeanor all around us like lighter fluid on an arson’s target. Soph started to cry shriek and wouldn’t let us undress her. Not even the kitties on her teeny, tiny scrubs could get her to budge. Promises of popsicles and ice cream finally did.
More TV references
The worst part for me was seeing Sophie’s fear and hearing her cry. I had weird Ally McBeal type visions of throwing my baby to the wolves. How could I voluntarily put her in a scary and painful situation? Oh, yeah. Because she was already in a painful situation and this would help. So, I mommed up and put on just about the sexiest moon suit you’ve ever seen so that I could go into the OR with Sophie until she was soundly drugged sleeping.
Mystical ChapStick
And then, the nurse did something so magically enthralling – my head is still spinning. Pay close attention because I can’t figure out what her trick was…so maybe you can: She showed Soph the little mask that she’d wear while she was getting gassed (What?! That’s essentially what was going to happen!) and then, wait for it, she took out a tube of cherry flavored ChapStick. She smeared red goo all over the inside of the clear mask and handed it to Sophie who instantly put it over her nose and mouth and delighted in sniffing fake cherry, talking to all of us through the mask and trying to look down at it with cross eyes.
I carried her into the OR, mask still voluntarily glued to her face. We met the nurses and I put her on the bed. Mind you, she’s still holding the mask securely on. The anesthesiologist attached the hose and suddenly she’s acknowledging that it might not smell quite as good now. Sophie keeps the mask on. Then he tells her that it might make her laugh, this new smell in the mask. So I start singing, “I love to laugh’ from Mary Poppins (because my plan when they told me that they were going to start and my baby was freaking out was to sing to her – like I was sung to 4 years and 3 months ago – the last time Sophie and I were in an operating room together).
But they hadn’t given me any warning. I was joining this program already in progress.
There was one moment when, I imagine, the room began to swirl around her that Sophie’s eyes widened and she pushed herself towards me (mask still firmly affixed by her own hand) and called out ‘Ma J!’(that would be my name according to my children) in a fairly concerned and scared voice. And I kept singing and stroking her hair and smiling into her eyes, until they closed.
And she’s out
At which point I burst into tears and begged the nurses to take care of my baby. They said they would – one remarking that they didn’t want the responsibility of hurting her in anyway. I think this was a joke, but it was a strange one. Right?
Forty minutes later, while we refused to think about anything but the Olympics on TV in the waiting room, they called us back in. We could hear her crying from the hall. She was PISSED. And confused and totally disoriented. She wanted my water, she wanted the IV out, she wanted to go home, she wanted – and this is an educated guess – to feel normal and not so damn uncomfortable.
Finally, the nurse narcotized her via the IV in what I can only imagine is akin to what they do to belligerent mental patients. Soph fell sound asleep for 45 minutes and woke up covering her ears because for the first time in about two years, her ears were no longer filled with fluid and she could hear. At that point, she sat up and told us – quite lucidly – that she had been very crabby before, but then had taken a big nap and now felt all better.
That resilience I was talking about
We threw her in the car and took off. By the time we got to the ferry, she seemed completely normal. By the time we got off the ferry she had consumed a bag of carrots, a bunch of fruit and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich…and she wanted more. By the time we got home she was jumping up and down with her brother and hugging her dogs and bossing everyone around. She had two huge plates of veggie stirfry and rice for dinner.
The hospital bracelet around her ankle was literally the only sign of her morning’s activity.
So, that’s the story, but what’re the lessons? What did we learn?
1. Well, cherry ChapStick has magical powers. I think we can all agree to that.
2. My kid kicks ass. (Come on, like you weren’t thinking that too?)
3. Resilience is awesome to watch. And it comes easily when one is full of gumption and surrounded by love.
4. But, the most important lesson was this: Practice Non-Hoopla. In other words, Don’t make a big deal out of things. Can you imagine if, when we went into the OR, they had told her what they were going to do, and said things like, ‘you might feel dizzy’ or ‘here it comes!’ or ‘we’re going to start now!’ Instead it was all very matter of fact, no frills, no alarms, no danger signs. It just sort of happened – no muss and no fuss. It was brilliant.
I’m thinking hard about how to apply this lesson to life, to my business as a copywriter, to my writing – and I’m going to break it down tomorrow…so stay tuned…
(Oh, and thanks to those of you that sent kind words and messages…your support was so, so appreciated!)
Filed under How To, Myth or Reality, News | Tags: copywriting, kids, life, parenting, stress, Writing | Comments (18)What to do when it just won’t fit.
I haven’t been sleeping well. Even when I appear to sleep well (ie. I go to sleep at 10 and wake up at 6), I open my eyes and feel like I’ve been fighting a war all night. I’d say 99% of the time, I wake up drenched in a cold sweat. Last night at some point I had that horrible feeling like you’re plummeting to the ground that jerks you awake and freaks the shit out of you.
And then, there are the dreams. My dreams are long, intricate, heavily detailed and almost always remembered in the morning with startling focus. Also, many of these night visions are recurring. Not that I’m having the same exact dream over and over, but I’ve had three themes that have attached themselves to my subconscious for the last 3 decades.
1. Flying. I’m not a bird or anything, these dreams are usually more about airplane travel. Usually, I’m preparing for a trip, running around an airport, on an airplane that either looks like an actual plane or sometimes a big bus. These dreams are almost always stressful, dare I say frightening, chaotic and downright eerie.
2. Swimming. I’ve always been a swimmer, I’ve always loved it. These dreams involve me in water of all kinds – rough and calm, pools, rivers and oceans. In general, the stories are soothing, interesting, expansive. They are so real, these water dreams. I can feel the water, I can feel my body in the water.
[Yes, I know. Flying and water dreams are incredibly cliche. And I'm flogging my subconscious for being so mundane. But, don't close this window yet, my 3rd theme is just plain odd.]
3. Contacts. I started wearing glasses in the 4th grade and contacts in the 6th. Without either of these aids in real life, I am fully inoperable. And my recurring dream about my contacts is that I’m trying to put one of the lenses in my eye and it’s too big. Instead of being the size of a dime, it’s the size of a quarter or a half-dollar or the lid of a Campbell’s soup can. And I’m trying so hard to get it in my eye, but I can’t.
Let’s psycho-analyze, shall we:
- The flying/travel dreams are about fear of change and taking risks and moving forward. Even if I rush headily into change and transformation in my waking hours, I deal with the stress of it all when I sleep.
- The swimming dreams are about being held, being safe. There’s just no way around that analysis, I can feel it in my bones.
- The contacts dreams? I think it’s about vision. I think it addresses this deeply held belief that we need something to help us see, something to enable our vision, that we need ‘other’ to find fruition, success, sight. And in my dream, this crutch is useless. I can’t make it fit. I can’t make it help me. In the, I’m guessing, 50 dreams I’ve had about my contacts thus far, the story ends with me trying to get this big, sloppy, plastic saucer in my eye. I never get beyond that point.
I wrote this post because I’m tired and I want to sleep peacefully. And because, good or bad, every night or every other month, these dreams haunt me a bit. And because when I write, I get to look at the struggle from a different side – not all wild in my head, but down here – civilized – on the ‘paper’. I find order and sense and, most often, a path out of the maze. I think writing helps with things like this. It takes the floaty, overwhelming stress and pins it to the paper. Like a butterfly under glass.
So, maybe it’ll be tonight. Maybe tonight I’ll sleep really well. And when the contacts don’t fit, I’ll defiantly toss them aside, look up and realize that I can see regardless, that I can actually see better. And then, maybe, I’ll walk into an orderly airport, buy a cheap ticket and fly somewhere warm. I’ll go straight to the beach…and swim in the sweet embrace of the blue ocean until morning.
Image credit: Jason W. Stanley
Filed under Myth or Reality, Writing | Tags: contacts, dreams, flying, recurring dreams, stress, water, Writing | Comments (12)
