About two years or so ago, I noticed a mole on my shoulder. It was a bit irregular and I was anxious about all sorts of things, so I fixated on it, worried it was serious. But at the same time, in denial that it could be and having fabulous dreams about dying young and leaving my children while I ignored it. Then after I started losing weight involuntarily I *knew* it was cancer. I had looked after women not much older than myself with metastatic melanoma and with my lily white skin I was a sitter. It fit in perfectly.
Then one day I slapped myself across the face, got a doctor to look at it and after a cursory 2 second glance with a dermatoscope he deemed it benign.
That reassured me somewhat. Or at least, I stopped blaming my inevitable demise on metastatic cancer and instead went with the more obvious anxiety as being at the root of my issues.
Recently, I noticed the mole again. It was raised, irregularly pigmented and every time I went to sleep my fingers would find it, and it was sensitive to touch so I kept doing it, poking it to see if it was sore. The fixation began again but I knew I was being silly so I couldn't talk to anyone about it. But that's the way these anxiety things work. I knew going to see a specialist about it would make me feel foolish, but because I couldn't convince myself it was benign it would keep me awake.
I contemplated cutting it out myself, but it's on my right shoulder and even with ambidexterity it's in an awkward spot. Plus I knew for myself that i would not be able to just throw it away - I'd need it looked at under a microscope once and for all before I could calm down again. So it simmered and stewed in my consciousness. A bit like my overdue Pap smear that I could justify thanks to all clear results previously and a full round of Gardasil vaccination. It's not the test itself that frightens me, it's the result.
Then I took some study leave so I could feasibly see a doctor during the day, and in one mad rush I booked all my appointments. Turned up at an anonymous skin cancer clinic and stripped off to my underwear (matching and tasteful, but not provocative, that was a good anxiety provoking decision in and of itself) before explaining, apologetically my fears.
To his credit, the good doctor was very thorough, but he was also very certain that there were no real suspicious features in my mole. He ran through the expected options, suggesting photographing it if I was worried, and coming back if it changes. Or, he said, he could cut it off now if I wanted, but it would be a decent scar and I couldn't swim or do any sort of exercise with my shoulder for the next 2 weeks. From his perspective there was no need to cut me, but there was no real decision for me, this thing had been on my mind and on my body for years now, I needed it to be gone.
So I lay back on the cold examination table in my underwear while he washed his hands and grabbed a trolley before washing me down with antiseptic. I heard the same consent spiel come from him that I give most days as I chatted nervously about medical school and where I was training before stopping to catch my breath as the sharp sting of local brought tears under my lashes. Then I felt nothing aside from slight panic at watching the scalpel slice into my skin as the mole was removed forever with 5 synthetic stitches pulling my skin closed again as if it had never been there.
I got up and dressed, came home and trembled a little. Glad it was gone, but realising that it actually really hurts when you have a chunk of skin removed and then held together with stitches, no matter how neat they might be.
It wasn't a melanoma. I think I'd always known it wasn't. It was dysplastic though, cells doing things they shouldn't but not quite tipping over into cancer and I'm glad that they're gone. Glad that the new cells are even now poking up from their germinal layers to fill in the gap where it was. I know there will be a new scar there, another to add to my collection. Red and puckered at first before fading to smooth and shiny white.
I once shared all my scars, all the ones from the jagged one on my chin to the rounded one on the tip of my finger, and it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my life. To take all the parts of me that had been broken and sewn together and to share them with someone else, who touched them and somehow healed them all.
This scar though, I'm keeping just for myself.
Showing posts with label I make a terrible patient. Show all posts
Showing posts with label I make a terrible patient. Show all posts
Friday, 15 February 2013
Thursday, 4 August 2011
Sponge Worthy
*ahem*
She says as she watches the tumbleweed roll lazily across the screen, scattering dust that billows in the late sunset and windchimes tinkle mournfully on the saloon verandah...
So, I've been away. You may have noticed, and you may have not. I certainly did, being as writing here has been my therapy for years. But then, suddenly it wasn't.
Now just like the first time I tangoed with depression at the awkward age of 11, it happened all of a sudden and nothing happened. No one took me behind the bus shelter and roughed me up. No one broke up with me, or called me a slag, or crossed my name off of their ruler. In fact in bloggy terms, I was actually on the up with page-views again.
But suddenly, one morning, I woke up, and I did not want to talk to anyone. Every time I tried to talk, it felt like bits of my guts were heaving out of my mouth and splattering viscera all over the pavement. And I don't like that feeling. That feeling, and really, that imagery, makes me nauseous. I tried to keep it in, and I think, in the main I succeeded, but I wanted to all the time. I wanted to talk and talk and talk about stupid things and my thoughts were always racing.
This wasn't just online, this was in real life as well. My entropy fizzed and buzzed in the enclosed space that was me and nothing lined up. Chaos reigned. I still got up and went to work every day. Most days I worked more than 12 hours, because at least at work I had goals for every second of the day, and when I came home a bit tired, the chaos was at least a little bit dampened through the inability to move.
I didn't eat, because I didn't need to and I didn't want to. I bought a lot of new things, because the joy in buying something, and then sometime later receiving it in the mail brought little fizz pops of joy that I could focus on for a few minutes, sometimes hours.
Bingley loved and hated it. I was suddenly wildly affectionate and desperate for affection at the same time. I wanted touch - more, more, more! But I was irritable too. And which of the two states I felt were sometimes inseparable.
Part of it was driven by the hunger. I started losing weight this year and got addicted to it. I'm an addictive person in general and losing weight is a fun one. You get so much positive reinforcement that you don't even think it's an issue, until you literally stare at food and start daring yourself not to eat it. And if new hollows appeared under my eyes (but happily sculpting out a small amount of cheekbone) then it was probably worth it to have people commenting favourably on my appearance every single day. I don't exaggerate that, literally not a day went past without someone commenting or congratulating me.
Now considering I started at a healthy weight, this should probably count as some kind of moral message, but in truth I am too tired to pontificate except to say that even though I knew it was slightly fucked, I liked it. And I still do tbh. I like buying clothes from the UK in a size smaller than I wore a year ago in US sizes and know that it will fit. And look kind of ok really. I still think I look pretty much exactly the same, except tired. But I'm not the best judge of this. And I've gradually been allowing myself to eat again. Occasionally.
One of the things that tipped me off was when my Mum started voicing her worries. Now to many of you, having a concerned Mum mentioning your weight is nothing new. But my Mum never does. Never ever. She didn't mention it when I got to 85kg after I had the Elfling and she said nothign when I lost the weight with hyperemesis. She knows painfully well how much noting weight instead of person plays with the mind, and she had the experience of me as a teenager and disordered eating so she said nothing. Until a few months ago when she started in a phone call to mention my weight. And ask if I was eating. Or sleeping. And for my Mum, for her to say something, that meant something.
But after all that, the weight was not a disease, but a symptom, just like those earnest high school health sciences messages said, of wanting control. I am not someone that needs to have rigid order. I'm not obsessive about things and have never been an A type personality. I don't freak out about changes and generally my philosophy on life is expressed by the ideal of a shimmering river cutting through the country or the wind that blows where it will. I like to feel unsure of destinations and to enjoy the journey to get there.
I cope with things. That could be my epitaph. I'm often asked how I do things, how I manage and my answer is usually (because I don't know how else to say) I just do.
Sometimes though, you don't just have your own life bobbing around in that beautiful shimmering river wending through life. Sometimes you have other people, some that can't swim, and you have to hold onto them and help them float too. And if you are lucky, maybe you have things in your life that belong to you, or matter to you or that have attached themselves to you, and if you want to stay in that river, you've got to keep them all afloat as well, or else you're all going to sink.
And I combined all of that, with certain ports that I wanted to stop off at for a while. Little towns along the river that I wanted to visit and explore and suddenly I was tethered to all these things that were trying to drown me AND stop me from exploring at the same time. I would wake up gasping sometimes, from the weight on my chest and the fear. The Fear. That grips at the tangled outer margins of the ego and whispers all sorts of things that are clearly insane, but you can't get out of your head. All those foibles that you worry all add up to overtake the sum of who you are. And I worried, constantly, about all the things and people tied to me and that I was drowning them too. Me with all my Not Good Enough.
Funnily enough, that Jenn doesn't feel up to chatting much. She might post pretty pictures, because in a slightly hysterical tense way they can patch up the truth for a while. Hey look at all this evidence that actually I'm doing brilliantly! Isnt' it wonderful just how normal and well adjusted and coping I am! Drowning? Not me! I'm just waving my arms above my head in JOY.
Ok, so maybe not that dramatic. I'm not very good at that. I can't do accents either. But there was a little bit of hysteria there.
But one thing I was sure of was that I am good at my job. I am very good at that. I always have been. People tell me that regularly. Unbidden. And while I think peopel are just trying to be nice about many things, I knew it was true about that one. Until one day when something happened at work to make me wonder if maybe I didn't know. Maybe they were just being nice. And that last little certainty in my life slipped out of my hands too and I freefell into space. Into a vacuum where I fell but in all directions at once.
So the only way I have known how to keep going is to break things down into infinitesimal pieces and to take it one step at a time. I write lists. I rigidly lay things out in my mind with neat little check boxes next to them, and when I get to it, complete a task and put it neatly on a shelf, another box is ticked and I get the joy of both progressing and having finished something. And all this rigidity feels foreign and slightly itchy, but I have started noticing things again.
Like how big the sky is and how it tastes on a cool, clear night. Of how much simple joy it gives me to find Orion and Scorpius and Alpha Centauri. To trace pictures in the sky that have been copied and studied and revered since the first man looked up into the heavens. Of how blue the sky can be in midwinter and the way that white light off a sandy beach makes everyone who plays on it seem to be lit from within. Of the feel of sand under toes and the way that light plays on the ripples of the water.
Of how beautiful my children are and how much I love them. How much it makes me smile in the middle of the night to be woken again by the tickle of auburn curls wedged under my nose and my little Monkey girl snuggled into me with her arm across my chest. Of how funny the Possum is and how brave and fearless he can be. Of his giggle and his cuddles and the earnest expression in his big blue eyes before they crinkle into mine when he smiles. Of my Elfling and her honeyed hair and her desperate fear that she is somehow missing out on something. Of her long limbed cuddles and her temper and her dramatics. Of the way she practices ballet without even noticing while watching TV in her pyjamas on a Sunday morning.
And even though sometimes I just want to give in and drown, to just not have to swim any more with all these things attached to me, mostly I just want to lay back and watch the sky overhead. And for a long time there I blamed all those things attached to me, made it all their fault. Forgetting of course that I was the one that attached them in the first place and only I could decide which things I wanted to stay where they were. And I stopped feeling panic when I loosed the ties and let them drift on their own... watched them for a moment and then lay on my back and stared up at the stars. Letting the current drift me along.
She says as she watches the tumbleweed roll lazily across the screen, scattering dust that billows in the late sunset and windchimes tinkle mournfully on the saloon verandah...
So, I've been away. You may have noticed, and you may have not. I certainly did, being as writing here has been my therapy for years. But then, suddenly it wasn't.
Now just like the first time I tangoed with depression at the awkward age of 11, it happened all of a sudden and nothing happened. No one took me behind the bus shelter and roughed me up. No one broke up with me, or called me a slag, or crossed my name off of their ruler. In fact in bloggy terms, I was actually on the up with page-views again.
But suddenly, one morning, I woke up, and I did not want to talk to anyone. Every time I tried to talk, it felt like bits of my guts were heaving out of my mouth and splattering viscera all over the pavement. And I don't like that feeling. That feeling, and really, that imagery, makes me nauseous. I tried to keep it in, and I think, in the main I succeeded, but I wanted to all the time. I wanted to talk and talk and talk about stupid things and my thoughts were always racing.
This wasn't just online, this was in real life as well. My entropy fizzed and buzzed in the enclosed space that was me and nothing lined up. Chaos reigned. I still got up and went to work every day. Most days I worked more than 12 hours, because at least at work I had goals for every second of the day, and when I came home a bit tired, the chaos was at least a little bit dampened through the inability to move.
I didn't eat, because I didn't need to and I didn't want to. I bought a lot of new things, because the joy in buying something, and then sometime later receiving it in the mail brought little fizz pops of joy that I could focus on for a few minutes, sometimes hours.
Bingley loved and hated it. I was suddenly wildly affectionate and desperate for affection at the same time. I wanted touch - more, more, more! But I was irritable too. And which of the two states I felt were sometimes inseparable.
Part of it was driven by the hunger. I started losing weight this year and got addicted to it. I'm an addictive person in general and losing weight is a fun one. You get so much positive reinforcement that you don't even think it's an issue, until you literally stare at food and start daring yourself not to eat it. And if new hollows appeared under my eyes (but happily sculpting out a small amount of cheekbone) then it was probably worth it to have people commenting favourably on my appearance every single day. I don't exaggerate that, literally not a day went past without someone commenting or congratulating me.
Now considering I started at a healthy weight, this should probably count as some kind of moral message, but in truth I am too tired to pontificate except to say that even though I knew it was slightly fucked, I liked it. And I still do tbh. I like buying clothes from the UK in a size smaller than I wore a year ago in US sizes and know that it will fit. And look kind of ok really. I still think I look pretty much exactly the same, except tired. But I'm not the best judge of this. And I've gradually been allowing myself to eat again. Occasionally.
One of the things that tipped me off was when my Mum started voicing her worries. Now to many of you, having a concerned Mum mentioning your weight is nothing new. But my Mum never does. Never ever. She didn't mention it when I got to 85kg after I had the Elfling and she said nothign when I lost the weight with hyperemesis. She knows painfully well how much noting weight instead of person plays with the mind, and she had the experience of me as a teenager and disordered eating so she said nothing. Until a few months ago when she started in a phone call to mention my weight. And ask if I was eating. Or sleeping. And for my Mum, for her to say something, that meant something.
But after all that, the weight was not a disease, but a symptom, just like those earnest high school health sciences messages said, of wanting control. I am not someone that needs to have rigid order. I'm not obsessive about things and have never been an A type personality. I don't freak out about changes and generally my philosophy on life is expressed by the ideal of a shimmering river cutting through the country or the wind that blows where it will. I like to feel unsure of destinations and to enjoy the journey to get there.
I cope with things. That could be my epitaph. I'm often asked how I do things, how I manage and my answer is usually (because I don't know how else to say) I just do.
Sometimes though, you don't just have your own life bobbing around in that beautiful shimmering river wending through life. Sometimes you have other people, some that can't swim, and you have to hold onto them and help them float too. And if you are lucky, maybe you have things in your life that belong to you, or matter to you or that have attached themselves to you, and if you want to stay in that river, you've got to keep them all afloat as well, or else you're all going to sink.
And I combined all of that, with certain ports that I wanted to stop off at for a while. Little towns along the river that I wanted to visit and explore and suddenly I was tethered to all these things that were trying to drown me AND stop me from exploring at the same time. I would wake up gasping sometimes, from the weight on my chest and the fear. The Fear. That grips at the tangled outer margins of the ego and whispers all sorts of things that are clearly insane, but you can't get out of your head. All those foibles that you worry all add up to overtake the sum of who you are. And I worried, constantly, about all the things and people tied to me and that I was drowning them too. Me with all my Not Good Enough.
Funnily enough, that Jenn doesn't feel up to chatting much. She might post pretty pictures, because in a slightly hysterical tense way they can patch up the truth for a while. Hey look at all this evidence that actually I'm doing brilliantly! Isnt' it wonderful just how normal and well adjusted and coping I am! Drowning? Not me! I'm just waving my arms above my head in JOY.
Ok, so maybe not that dramatic. I'm not very good at that. I can't do accents either. But there was a little bit of hysteria there.
But one thing I was sure of was that I am good at my job. I am very good at that. I always have been. People tell me that regularly. Unbidden. And while I think peopel are just trying to be nice about many things, I knew it was true about that one. Until one day when something happened at work to make me wonder if maybe I didn't know. Maybe they were just being nice. And that last little certainty in my life slipped out of my hands too and I freefell into space. Into a vacuum where I fell but in all directions at once.
So the only way I have known how to keep going is to break things down into infinitesimal pieces and to take it one step at a time. I write lists. I rigidly lay things out in my mind with neat little check boxes next to them, and when I get to it, complete a task and put it neatly on a shelf, another box is ticked and I get the joy of both progressing and having finished something. And all this rigidity feels foreign and slightly itchy, but I have started noticing things again.
Like how big the sky is and how it tastes on a cool, clear night. Of how much simple joy it gives me to find Orion and Scorpius and Alpha Centauri. To trace pictures in the sky that have been copied and studied and revered since the first man looked up into the heavens. Of how blue the sky can be in midwinter and the way that white light off a sandy beach makes everyone who plays on it seem to be lit from within. Of the feel of sand under toes and the way that light plays on the ripples of the water.
Of how beautiful my children are and how much I love them. How much it makes me smile in the middle of the night to be woken again by the tickle of auburn curls wedged under my nose and my little Monkey girl snuggled into me with her arm across my chest. Of how funny the Possum is and how brave and fearless he can be. Of his giggle and his cuddles and the earnest expression in his big blue eyes before they crinkle into mine when he smiles. Of my Elfling and her honeyed hair and her desperate fear that she is somehow missing out on something. Of her long limbed cuddles and her temper and her dramatics. Of the way she practices ballet without even noticing while watching TV in her pyjamas on a Sunday morning.
And even though sometimes I just want to give in and drown, to just not have to swim any more with all these things attached to me, mostly I just want to lay back and watch the sky overhead. And for a long time there I blamed all those things attached to me, made it all their fault. Forgetting of course that I was the one that attached them in the first place and only I could decide which things I wanted to stay where they were. And I stopped feeling panic when I loosed the ties and let them drift on their own... watched them for a moment and then lay on my back and stared up at the stars. Letting the current drift me along.
 |
| source unknown, please contact me if you wish to have credit for this image |
Wednesday, 6 April 2011
Stream
It is the most beautiful afternoon, and I am home, having left work at a time when the sun was still in the sky and the blue was almost blinding. It is windy this afternoon, whipping around and the sun and the blue and the wind are seeping under my skin and making me cheerful.
Bingley brought the Possum to work today to have lunch and we ran around in the sun and the wind and watched the helicopter take off and ate chips. And the Possum babbled away in earnest sentences that make no sense and dodged and weaved and launched himself at my chest for fierce cuddles, and for the first time in some time I laughed. Properly laughed. Down to the bottom of my toes laughed.
I did not realise until Monday, when I trudged to work after having worked all weekend (over 12 hours each day), how tired I was. It didn't hit me until Monday night when the Possum was sick and I held him in my arms just how much I needed to stop. Inhale. Breathe. Eat. I have developed, as Ave rightly pointed out in the last post, a flirtation with an eating disorder that has mostly left me alone since I was a teenager. I am both bemused and frightened by its reappearance. I have not sent it packing just yet, but I am aware of it, like an annoying guest that you're tolerating until such time as you turf them out of doors. I am somewhat fascinated by it, in a detached way, as one would be by a particularly ugly sculpture perhaps. It does not own me. But I acknowledge that it is not good for me either.
Bingley and I had a tearful discussion last night. About all and everything. And I realised a few things that I hadn't realised before. And I remembered some things I hadn't thought of for a lot of years. Happy things. Things that you forget when you're tired and miserable. And we talked of things that we wanted, and how sometimes we can't have what we want, no matter how hard we try. And I'm still not sure what I want, or what will happen, or if I will survive it, but sitting out here, with the wind on my face and my eyes closed I don't care.
When I have been lost or frightened in the past I have always reached a point of anxiety where I have been terrified to move, paralysed and unable to make decisions. So I have stopped trying. I'm laying down in the stream and letting it take me where it will and having faith that wherever I wash up, no matter what shore I find myself on I will make the best of it. That I will be happy there.
Bingley brought the Possum to work today to have lunch and we ran around in the sun and the wind and watched the helicopter take off and ate chips. And the Possum babbled away in earnest sentences that make no sense and dodged and weaved and launched himself at my chest for fierce cuddles, and for the first time in some time I laughed. Properly laughed. Down to the bottom of my toes laughed.
I did not realise until Monday, when I trudged to work after having worked all weekend (over 12 hours each day), how tired I was. It didn't hit me until Monday night when the Possum was sick and I held him in my arms just how much I needed to stop. Inhale. Breathe. Eat. I have developed, as Ave rightly pointed out in the last post, a flirtation with an eating disorder that has mostly left me alone since I was a teenager. I am both bemused and frightened by its reappearance. I have not sent it packing just yet, but I am aware of it, like an annoying guest that you're tolerating until such time as you turf them out of doors. I am somewhat fascinated by it, in a detached way, as one would be by a particularly ugly sculpture perhaps. It does not own me. But I acknowledge that it is not good for me either.
Bingley and I had a tearful discussion last night. About all and everything. And I realised a few things that I hadn't realised before. And I remembered some things I hadn't thought of for a lot of years. Happy things. Things that you forget when you're tired and miserable. And we talked of things that we wanted, and how sometimes we can't have what we want, no matter how hard we try. And I'm still not sure what I want, or what will happen, or if I will survive it, but sitting out here, with the wind on my face and my eyes closed I don't care.
When I have been lost or frightened in the past I have always reached a point of anxiety where I have been terrified to move, paralysed and unable to make decisions. So I have stopped trying. I'm laying down in the stream and letting it take me where it will and having faith that wherever I wash up, no matter what shore I find myself on I will make the best of it. That I will be happy there.
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
I look like a vampire
I won't scare people at work tomorrow. Surely?
Edit: apparently I did. Leave without pay until Monday. $1k+ gone from the fortnight budget. Fuckit.
Monday, 21 March 2011
Quarantine
I am sick. Awfully, miserably sick. I have lost a fair bit of weight. I have conjunctivitis, I have enlarged tonsils, I have blocked sinuses and last night I spiked a high fever and moving any of my muscles hurt. I can't eat, I can barely bring myself to drink. I am dehydrated and the corners of my mouth have cracked and begun bleeding. The pain mingles and makes me cry. I am intermittently boiling hot and freezing cold. Sweating but needing the doona on so that I don't freeze. Airconditioning on because I can barely breathe it's so hot.
My neck is stiff and sore, rolling over in bed hurts and my hips are starting to stick into the bed so that it feels all springs. Aspirin and paracetamol took away the fever but the eye that keeps weeping and the neck that feels like it's in a vice continue. I took the day off work today. One of my precious sick leave days and calculated that if I don't go in tomorrow, I will not get paid.
This cold probably came from work. A couple of people have been sick with viruses. But because most of my leave goes on my children, there's not much left for me. I have buckets of annual leave. Weeks worth. Not only leave but leave loading, because the assumption is that I never work 38 hours per week. But I can't access that until October. 14 months in a row of work. Stupidly long hours, being grateful if I have two days off in a row, thanking deities if they happen to be on a weekend. And I'm working myself into illness. And tomorrow I will have to have an unpaid day off, sick, violently so, and financially impacted because of it.
I am grumpy and miserable. No one likes being sick, but I feel unfairly sick. I can't use the computer much because it hurts my eyes. Holding a book last night took more energy than I could muster. I can't watch tv (even if there was anything on) and lying in bed hurts.
I took a photo today with the webcam to show my incredibly shrinking waistline and bust. It reminds me of being pregnant and not being in control of my body. It's doing its own thing and eating itself from the inside while I hover as a ghostly shell wringing my hands. I have not felt this physically miserable in some time. Even when my anxiety was bad and I was vomiting all the time, getting out into the sunshine helped, and going to work and focusing on something else helped. But now I'm at the whim of some bastard nanoparticle that is abusing the hospitality of my mucous membranes.
I'm clearly not good in hostage situations.
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