If Only This Could Be Said

On the Seventh Day of Christmas my Cardiologist gave to me…an Angioplasty and a 1 and 1/2 inch stent in my LAD Cardiac Artery

MUSIC, STROKES, HEAT-DISEASE, BELL'S PALSY

AND READJUSTING TO AN UNPREDICTABLE LIFE

Not many people know what has been going on and why this blog, which I had such high hopes for, didn’t quite make it off the ground.

I have been blogging, but in other places…like “Mended Hearts Heart Disease Support” Community and “WomenHear Support Community” and a private posts to the Facebook walls of close friends…but I figured the stuff I am posting here is probably PRETTY BORING compared to REAL LIFE.

And as my blogger friend, Bill Lindsey at Bilgrimage, has taught me: real life is what changes life and matters most in the GREAT SCHEME of THINGS.

So here is my post from my WomenHeart Journal…and I will try to fill in the gaps of the life-changing events that have rocked my world in the last few weeks:

The right facial pain continues and the weakness and droopiness returned.  They have done all the tests and there is no sign of stroke or tumor...but this is still disconcerting.  A month ago I was celebrating  successful  eye surgery to remove the cataracts that formed early due to the use of so much prednisone for my rheumatoid arthritis.  I could read without glasses and the all the colors that I didn't know I was missing I could see again.  I have even taken out my photography equipment again and have restarted a favorite hobby.

The Bell's Palsy that started right around the time of my angioplasty they are pretty sure is was not caused by the eye surgeries or the heart problems.  I have had the Herpes Simplex I since I was a chid and had cold sores for the first 40 years of my life.  About 10 years ago they decided to vacate their normal lip breakout and, instead, breakout inside my nasal passages.  They think the change was caused by the severe stress I was under losing my sister and mother and brother all within 5 years.  It's an opportunistic infection and, similar to shingles, it usually picks a time when your body is down from other things to breakout.

They think it chose to breakout in my facial nerves (and maybe my sinus') due to all the trauma to my body and the stress of finding out that my long time vegetarianism, active life had led me into a sweet  delusion of heart-disease free body and impending angioplasty and sten...compacted within a  three hour span.

(I am only 55 years old…so it is classified as “premature onset heart-disease”).

 Even though I knew, being an RN, that angio-catharizations are as common and more risk free than any previous time, the specters of the sudden deaths of my brother and sister and the long deterioration of my parents due to strokes and heart disease weighed on my mind. 

I actively worked on a positive attitude; kept right on planning the future things like my trip to Finland to visit my daughter, putting a genuine Finnish Sauna (for a Finn-that is nirvana), restarting voice lessons, joining a community choir and restarting work on my songwriting, ontinuing to increase my physical activities and adding new ones oafter the surgery, cutting out the few things that have crept back into my diet that shouldn’t be there…I did everything they told me to do for a positive outcome...AND I HAVE A POSITIVE OUTCOME...

 BUT this Bell's Palsy...the look of my face... and the MEMORY of the look of my father's face AFTER HIS STROKE, I know...it's an emotional and irrational reaction.

 It's also messed up my NEW, PERFECT EYESIGHT that I was so thrilled with...my right eye either won't stop tearing or its too dry and the facial muscles that help it focus just aren't working properly....I can still read and see things without glasses, but it's work.

BUT TODAY a gift my father gave me returned to give me some extra assurance.   I started playing the piano...something I have only done maybe once a month.  It's SOLID PROOF TO ME THAT I HAVEN'T HAD A STROKE... everything from the neck down works properly.

 

I started playing through my Suzuki book 1 ...Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, Lightly Row (I am a certified Suzuki Piano teacher) and into book 2-Bach Minuets, Schumann...

They feel like familiar friends who are telling me....it's going to be OK.  

The Music is still here even if your face looks a little funny and your eyes aren't perfect at the moment; the music is still in your body

They say the Bell's resolves completely in 75% percent of cases, but being associated with the Herpes Virus may come and go.

So it's still one day at a time, even an hour at a time because the symptoms change that fast.  The Prednisone and Valtrex and pain meds are helping.

Tomorrow I Am Singing In The Worship Ensemble At Church--a surprise to most people who thought I would still be recuperating - but music is my medicine, as much, if not more needed than anything the doctors have prescribed

 

"Let the statues crumble. You have always been the place."

I dedicate this poem to my 2 daughters,

 

THE TYPE
    by
Sarah Kay

If you grow up the type of woman men want to look at,
You can let them look at you.
But do not mistake eyes for hands or windows of mirrors.
Let them see what a woman looks like;
They may never have seen one before

If you grow up the type of woman men want to touch,
You can let them touch you.
Sometimes it not you they are reaching for;
Sometimes it is a bottle, a door, a sandwhich, a Pulitzer, another woman;
But there hands found you first.

Do not mistake yourself for a guardian or a muse or a promise or a victim or a snack.
You are a woman;
Skin and bones, veins and nerves, hair and sweat.
You are not made of metaphors, not apologies, not excuses.

If you grow up the type of woman men want to hold,
You can let them hold you.
All day they practice keeping their bodies upright.
Even after all this evolving
It still feels unatural;
Still strains the muscles, holds firm the arms and spine.
Only some men want to know what if feels like
To curl themselves into a question mark
Around you;
Admit they do not have the answers they thought they would.
But some men will want to hold you
Like THE ANSWER.

You are not THE ANSWER.
You are not the problem.
You’re not the poem, the punchline or the riddle or the joke.

Woman,
If you grow up the type of woman men want to love
You can let them love you.
Being loved is not the same thing as loving.
When you fall in love,
It is discovering the ocean;
After years of puddle-jumping,
It is realizing you have hands,
It is reaching for the tightrope,
When the crowds have all gone home.

Do not spend time wondering
If you are the type of women men will hurt.
If he leaves you with a ‘car-alarm’ heart,
You learn to sing along.
It is hard to stop loving the ocean,
Even after it has left you gasping, salty.
So forgive yourself for the decisions you’ve made,
The ones you still call mistakes when you tuck them in at night.

And know this,
Know you are the type of women who is searching for a place to call yours.
Let the statues crumble. You have always been the place.
You are a woman who can build it yourself.
You were born to build.

Remembering My Aunt Part 3.....I Look at You

 RETURNING HOME


    I want to tell you a
    gentlest thing. Like light
    to you. Like old faces
    being fed a good memory
    from inside themselves.
    Like eyes that do not
    watch but slowly meet
    across a room in which
    everyone is, and no one
    need hurry to what he is
    sure of. I want to say
    before we run out of
    rooms and everyone
    that I am slowest,
    surest, gentlest, too,
    across whatever room
    I look at you.

 

Remembering my Aunt Part 2

 

Until today I have never seen a picture of my Aunt holding baby Jody.  I didn't think any existed.  Jody was very sick as a baby and I thought pictures were the last thing on their mind.

TODAY a pile of these pictures literally fell into my lap while going through some boxes and papers.

Stories go on and on.

Today I also found out for the first time in my life that my aunt's husband had been a prisoner of war in a German POW camp in 1944-45.  Another thing that 'fell' into my lap today.  There is even a picture of him in the striped clothing behind barbed wire.

I am left with abosolutely NOT A SINGLE relative left alive from that generation to tell me why I did not know this, why it wasn't even mentioned.  

 

Remembering My Aunt "Janie" , One Hard Headed Women

My dear aunt Elizabeth Jane died this morning. She was born in 1929; not a good year for the US, but a good year for for the world because of her love, grace, dignity and overwhelming strength in the most difficult of circumstances. 

Her only child, Jody, who has Down's Syndrome lives up North. Jody was born on MY Birthday, but a year earlier; I guess that means I was born on Jody's first birthday. Like a sign I was to kind of watch over her. Like my twin brothers, I always had a double birthday since we celebrated all birthdays together until we became adults and I grew up and she didn't.

The 50s and 60s were not an easy time to have a mentally challenged child. Back then she was always referred to as 'retarded'. It was the official term and everyone used it. Against the recommendation of doctors, friends and even family my aunt refused to put her daughter in an institution (she also was born with a cleft palate and couldn't feed normally-my aunt kept her alive by sheer willpower. Then the doctors told her Jody would not live to be an adult and also wouldn't be able to do anything for herself and was not 'educable'. Jody will be 56 this year. She graduated from high school. She can read and write, loves music and singing and just by being in our lives made us better, more compassionate people. 

My aunt would not be what I would call a feminist. She was raised to be quite traditional; but it was watching her fight for her daughter; fight for a life of her own; ignoring remarks about her 'kookiness'-that's what they called women who were born artists and pursue the creative arts by hook or by crook.

I still will have her beautiful drawings and paintings AND my memories to remind me of this very gutsy women born during a time when gutsy women were put down socially, verbally, and even at times physically.