Trying to Heal

"High expectations are the key to everything." - Sam Walton 

I'm now in my fourth week of being down with three herniated discs.  I've met the first two of the three goals I set for myself at the start of this latest round of back trouble.  I sat at the dinner table for Jacob's birthday and I went out with Merv, Jacob and Courtney for dinner to celebrate our 25th wedding anniversary.  That was a week ago today.  By the end of two hours of sitting in the restaurant, I was paralyzed by pain.  Nonetheless, I did not regret having gone.  A quarter of a century of marriage is worthy of celebration.  We had a good time.  It was worth it.

A week later, my expectation that I would be further along the path of healing has been crushed.  I've made little progress.  I took a few steps forward and then a few steps back.  I developed new symptoms and new problems.  Today I spent an hour and a half in physiotherapy.  It was a gruelling session.  I feel like I've been beaten.  I only have eight days left to get in good enough shape to meet my third goal - a trip to England to attend a family wedding.  From where I lay today, it seems a bit like a pipe dream.  But I am determined.  I am striving.  I am praying.  God help me.

Progress

"I was taught that the way of progress was neither swift nor easy." - Marie Curie

 

 I checked the box on goal number one - to sit at the dinner table on Jacob's birthday.  Other than my presence at the table and my debit card, I contributed nothing to the events of the weekend.  Courtney did all the shopping, cooking, set up and clean up for Jacob's birthday party with his friends on Saturday and his family birthday dinner on Sunday.  Until dinner on Sunday night, I stayed flat on my back trying to practise the art of surrender.  My surrender mechanism still needs some work but there was little I could do in any event.  I eventually made my way down the stairs on Sunday afternoon, taking them one at a time on my seat.  And with a lot of determination I sat at the dinner table for an hour until I simply couldn't do it any more.

 

By yesterday morning my pain level had escalated to high but I once again went down the stairs on my seat and spent time with Gail who graciously arrived with lunch and iced coffee.  It was great to have some time together and even greater to have Gail grace me with healing energy which warmed the foot of my painful leg and eased the spasms that had me crying before her arrival.  

 

A night of sound sleep, the first in weeks, was followed this morning by a session with my physiotherapist.  Claire is a gentle soul but a no nonsense therapist and I spent an hour and a half reminding myself that no pain would result in no gain.  By the end of the session though feeling battered and sore, I could stand mostly upright.  The rest of the day has been spent laying low, resting, icing and doing my stretching exercises.  Tomorrow is our 25th wedding anniversary and I am determined that I will be upright enough and strong enough to be able to go out for dinner.  

Pain

"Pain is temporary.  It may last a minute, or an hour, or a day, or a year, but eventually it will subside and something else will take its place.  If I quit, however, it lasts forever." - Lance Armstrong

How much pain should one person have to endure?  I've asked myself this questions many times in the last few days, always in a moment of weakness when I'm indulging in a little session of feeling sorry for myself. For the last few weeks my back has been growing increasingly sore.  Rather than go to bed for a couple of days and rest until I felt better, I chose to live on the river in Egypt.  And while denial as a strategy has served me well at some points in my life, it wasn't a good strategy this time.

The doctor's diagnosis was disheartening.  I have herniated discs L5S4, L4 and L3.  The last time I herniated a disc was in 2007 and it left me flat on my back for five weeks.  I can't bear to do that again - thus my retreat to the strategy of denial.  When I stopped being able to stand, walk or turn over in bed, I was forced to face the reality.  So I'm back in bed though trying a different strategy this time.  My physiotherapist has given me some excercises to do along with instructions to ice and use my tens machine five times per day.  The excercises hurt like heck but I'm trying.  I don't have five weeks to spend flat on my back.  I'm looking for a miracle here.

 

Sunday is Jacob's 23rd birthday.  My first goal is to be able to sit at the dinner table.  I'm resigned to the fact that I won't be cooking the meal but there are enough other capable people around to do that.  Goal two is to be upright and able to dress well and go out for dinner on Wednesday - Merv's and my 25th wedding anniversary.  I'm happy I did my anniversary gift shopping early so I don't have to worry about that.  I don't even need to be able to dance, just to be well enough to go out and enjoy a quiet dinner.  Goal three is to be recovered enough to be able to get on a plane and do a red-eye flight to England for a family wedding in the first week of September.  In my current state it is hard to even imagine seven hours in economy class but it's still three weeks away and I'm determined.  I'm praying a lot too.

A Path Toward Peace

“If women ran the world we wouldn’t have wars, just intense negotiations every 28 days.” – Robin Williams

Like a lot of people around me, I can't make sense of what is going on in the Middle East.  There is so much hatred being spewed, so much misinformation being spread, so much anti-semetic and anti-Arab sentiment permeating the fibres of every discussion that I don't know where to begin to sort things out.  What I do know is this - the people of Israel are entitled to a secure homeland, free from fear of attack by their neighbours and the Palestinian people are entitled to a secure homeland, free from fear of attack by their neighbours.  

Every night on the evening news, I watch the casualty count grow.  Dead Israeli children.  Dead Palestinian children.  That the count is greater on one side than on the other is irrelevant.  The common denominator is that they are children and now they are dead.  Not a single one of them deserved their fate.  Not a single one of them had anything to do with this fight that has been raging for more years than we can count.  When is enough going to be enough? How many dead children will it take before we figure out that the way we've been negotiating peace agreements just doesn't work?  

Here is my proposal. Let's turn the negotiations over to the mothers.  No more politicians.  No more men.  Just mothers.  Let's see how long it takes for a group of Israeli and Palestinian women to figure out how to find an agreement that will save their children.  If the idea seems simplistic - it is.  Doesn't mean it won't work.  Just means that I too am a mom and I know I'd do anything to protect my child and so would every other mother I know. 

Sell It To Somebody Else

“Advertising is a racket, like the movies and the brokerage business. You cannot be honest without admitting that its constructive contribution to humanity is exactly minus zero.” – F. Scott Fitzgerald

 
 I don't have Sam in my pants and even if I ever need to, it is unlikely I ever will.  I am so disgusted by the advertising campaign for Poise pads that I would rather wet myself than use this product.  Likewise for the Cottonelle cleaning system, the ads for which make the little hairs stand up on the back of my neck whenever they come on.  I don't want to listen to people talk about how they clean their bums.  The premise of the ads - crashing a wedding reception to talk to guests or talking to men about their posterior hygiene routine while speed dating offends me to my core.  Cottonelle is the brand of tissue I've been buying for years.  I'm in the market for a new brand.

How did we get to this point?  There have been ads that offended my sensibilities in the past (though you would probably think me nuts to be upset by an m&ms candy commecial) but nothing like these ads.  They are crude, rude and gross.  It may not be worth much but until these ads are off the air, I will be boycotting these products. There are enough disgusting things in the world without adding these annoyances to the list.

The New Beautiful

“If you think something is ugly, look harder. Ugliness is just a failure of seeing.” - Matt Haig

I haven't been feeling very good about myself lately.  Though I've put a few pounds on, I can't seem to summon the will to do anything about it.  Added to a slowdown in my business, I've developed a case of the summertime blues.  On Saturday we will be going to the wedding of the daughter of dear friends.  It is a black and white wedding meaning that guests are required to be attired in black or white only.  At the last minute, the bridal couple added navy blue as an option.  Thanks a million.  I'm not sure when it became acceptable to dictate to guests what colours they are required to wear but I'm writing my ignorance off to age.  At some point the rules of etiquette changed and I didn't notice.  But I digress.  I have at least a half dozen black dresses and at least a half dozen white ones.  And for good measure, I have a half dozen black and white ones.  Dressing for this event should hardly be a challenge for me.  But as I'm feeling fat and unattractive in everything I own,  I set out on Tuesday to find a new dress that perhaps I would feel better in.  Big mistake.

Five hours of trying on dresses at Yorkdale made me want to run directly to the freezer where I had stashed a pint of Hagen Daz Black Cherry Amaretto ice cream.  Every dress I tried made me feel a little worse than the last.  I saw some beautiful and very suitable dresses but if I could get into a size six, I wouldn't be in this crisis in the first place.  At one shop I saw a great dress hanging on the rack and thought it would be perfect for my needs.  It had a big tag hanging on it that claimed it was an instantly slimming dress that would make the wearer look ten pounds lighter.  I thought I had hit the jackpot.  But the only size they had in the dress was a size two.  I spent a fair bit of time trying to understand why anyone who can wear a size two needs to look ten pounds lighter.  Then there was the perfect black dress at another store.  It came in small, medium and large.  I couldn't get the large over my hips to even try it on.  Seriously?  Who was the dress made for?  A large child perhaps.  I gave up and went home.  That afternoon I read an article about the new size option at J. Crew - Size 000.  How is that even possible?  Is triple nothing going to be the new yardstick we are being measured against?  It strikes me as sick.

I finally resigned myself to the idea that I wasn't likely to find a dress that I was going to feel good in.  Today I was running some errands at Fairview.  I happened upon a white lace dress.  It was on sale and it fit perfectly.

Going, Going...

“Time flies never to be recalled.” - Virgil

In just a few hours, I will enter the last year of my 50s.  I don't so much mind the number.  I'm not upset about being almost 60 but I have to admit I am surprised by it. And yes, I know that sounds crazy.  I know that 59 comes after 58, but I'm having trouble believing that it is here already.  I could swear it was only a month or so ago that I blogged about turning 58.

When I was little my parents told me that time moved faster as we grew older.  It was a concept that made no sense to me. Those were the days when summer holidays seemed to last forever.  When I counted birthdays in quarter years, always wanting to be a little older, a little faster.  I was seven and a quarter or nine and a half.  I counted the seemingly endless days of the year I was seventeen until I could vote and drink legally.  I thoroughly enjoyed my twenties but they didn't fly by.  In reflection, I didn't notice the shift in time until I became a mother.  Jacob grew so fast I often wished time would slow down just a little so I could keep him small for a while longer.  But of course time did not cooperate.

So here I am, on the eve of my 59th birthday feeling surprised.  One more to the big 6 Oh.  At the rate time is moving that may be next week.