Category: Mental Health

In the week after Christmas, I often find there is an emptiness that is difficult to address. The month of merriment is over, the draining of bank accounts complete. Careful wrapping has been shredded and the echoes of delight have died away. One may discover, upon eating the last tree chocolate, that the relentless consumption of leftover vittles has not filled the hole, and it seems ludicrous to bake more after such gluttony. One might ponder what to cook for dinner and come up empty having concluded only that there is nothing at all to be excited about eating.

This sense of aimlessness lies in the problem of there being an allotted season for giving. For the months of November and December we string up lights in joyful celebration. We wear out shoes in the pursuit of the perfect gifts for our loved ones. We stay up too late baking cupcakes for the teachers, and sweet buns for the children, we so love to see the wonder in their faces.

We stand in line to donate toys, and wrestle wallets from purses under covers to contribute to a stranger’s go fund me campaign. We give of ourselves in all the ways we can fathom, and are available to us. It’s exhausting, it ’s expensive, and it feels like pure joy and purpose. And when a gift arrives in our laps on Christmas morning, a llama teapot carefully picked, it is somewhat of a surprise. Yet we have been joyful all the while. The excitement is in the anticipation, not of receiving gifts, but of giving them.

What a delight it was this year to make for my dad a retro trifle, to watch him devour two big bowls full. What a pleasure to carefully trace Santa’s handwriting onto a return letter for Cleo, to stamp it with Santa’s official seal and watch her face light up at the discovery. How wonderful to bake gingerbread for the elderly, to watch our littles sing them carols as the childlike among them reached out to touch their precious hair. How quickly it was all done.

In January, it’s all juice cleanses and gym memberships, yoga challenges and workout videos. The focus turns inward as we return to searching for the thing that will make us feel whole, most of us oblivious to the fact that instead we unwittingly turn away.

So this January first I challenge you not to dig your Vitamix from the depths of your kitchen cabinets, nor to procure another weight watchers membership. I challenge you instead to go ahead and bake another cake festooned with gold stars or rainbow sprinkles, walk it to your neighbor’s house, the one having the trouble with her hips, and let her see the children. And on your way to work roll down your window, offer a wide smile and give five bucks to the guy with the cardboard sign, the one who believes you’ve forgotten him now it’s January second.

Leave up your decorations and light a fire, watch movies together with your family, and realize that there is no great mystery here. The way to happiness and fulfillment comes each December and stares us in the face. Reach out and touch another human being, every day. And each morning when you wake up ask yourself what you can give.

It’s been a slow morning. I’m lounging in a pile of pillows, putting product in my damp hair, and talking with my friend on the phone. I have a cup of tea on my nightstand and a plate with breakfast crumbs teetering there as well. My feet are still sore from a busy day prior. They’re poking out from beneath the comforter, and I’m rotating them at the ankles to relieve the discomfort. I notice that one ankle is slightly swollen. One could even say “barely.” My stomach lurches. I should stand up, I think, find something to do. Instead, I snatch away the blanket for a closer inspection. I flex my feet and hold them parallel. I can’t unsee it. I say goodbye to my friend. My tone is terse, my heart rate has picked up, and sweat is gathering around my hairline. It’s far too hot in here, I think.

I call Andy into the room. “My ankle is swollen. I can’t look at it.”

He examines my feet. “Which foot?” he asks. They are in his lap now.

“The left one,” I snap, irritated, and I jab at the offending area with my finger to demonstrate. The hysteria is mounting. “I have a blood clot.”

“You don’t have a blood clot.”

“But, my ankle is swollen. I never get swollen ankles! Oh my God. I’m going to be one of those old ladies with cankles…” I’ve arrived at middle age. All the evidence is there. The teenage children, the excess weight, and now the cankle. Or blood clot. Jesus, it’s definitely a blood clot.

This is a familiar fear. It tags along every road trip, and for at least a month of each pregnancy. I’ve hoisted my bump into several emergency departments and visited doctors in faraway towns in the wee hours while my family slept. I’ve hobbled around a popular amusement park hoping only to make it back to the campsite, so I could more easily sneak away. I’ve had multiple ultrasounds, excessive bloodwork, and I’ve even allowed concerned doctors to radiate the shit out of my chest. Twice.

But this time it seems legitimate (it always does). I schedule an appointment with my beloved Dr.R. He’s seen me work myself into a WebMD frenzy on multiple occasions and he’s pretty good at making the right call. My appointment is at one thirty. By the time I arrive in his office my whole left foot is tingling. Dr. R checks me over and measures my ankles. He confirms that the left one is swollen, but reassures me that it is likely due to excess salt intake over the holidays. He nonetheless fills out the order for an ultrasound, and requests the results “STAT.” He knows what happens if I am left to wonder.

The appointment is scheduled for three thirty, and I limp through the automatic doors. I wad up my clothing and shove it into my bag, don a paper sheet, and allow the tech to spread cold jelly over my leg. I study her face as she takes measurements. She hovers too long on a spot just a few inches above my knee then leaves the room to speak with the radiologist as I wait to be advised of my imminent demise. Cleo makes balloons out of latex gloves and Huey becomes preoccupied with my lack of pants before the tech reappears with Sponge Bob stickers and a reassuring smile. I leave the exam room feeling silly, and without a limp. The pain and tingling have vanished and I am once again befuddled by the ways that our brains can trick our bodies. I receive a phone call within the hour. The results are negative for Deep Vein Thrombosis.

There is whole a population of psychiatrists who have designated hypochondria a form of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, and I wholeheartedly agree. In my experience, they are almost identical. On any unremarkable Tuesday, a fearful thought might arrive in my consciousness and consume my thinking. I will spend the ensuing days and weeks on a quest to eliminate doubt, only to be reminded that nothing is ever quite reassuring enough. There is no website, test, doctor, or human who can promise I do not have rogue cancer cells setting up shop my lymphatic system, or that I won’t die, suddenly, of a heart attack. We are not promised tomorrow, and for hypochondriacs this is an unacceptable truth.

It’s easy to make fun of hypochondriacs because our experiences are not unfunny! Even when the situation seems dire I am often able to laugh at myself. I once refused to look at my left pinky toe for over a month. Toe cancer. Did you know Bob Marley died from toe cancer? I have moles on my body that I don’t dare look at. I once had an ill-informed doctor recommend that I measure these moles, take photos of them even. Instead, each September I receive a text reminder from my dermatologist to schedule my annual appointment. I do this promptly and then fret for the two-week interim as the threat of melanoma grows ever bigger in my mind. I do NOT perform self-breast exams. God knows I’d find more lumps than you’d expect to find in a Christmas custard gone awry.

I’m not supposed to google. But this is the compulsion. As are the return trips to the doctor for second and third opinions, and the relentless testing required to keep the anxiety at a tolerable level. I have endured scopes and swabs, x-rays, and obscure blood tests. I have had more EKGs than I care to count and twice ran on a treadmill, braless, in an open front bib. You’ll never guess; my heart is fine. I read and re-read “How Not to Die” by Michael Gregor, MD. I played the audiobook in the car. Then I went vegan for two years.

Still, I wake up each night to stark darkness and the sound of my own heart, and my only thought is that someday I will die. It’s not a risk to mediate or a theory to ponder, but a fact, as cold and hard as they come. Maybe it’s today and I will choke on a piece of home-baked stollen. Or perhaps, in ten years, I will die in a car accident backing out of my driveway in my new-fangled automated vehicle. They’ll talk about it on NPR. More likely I’ll die from a preventable cancer because I didn’t measure my moles.

These thoughts haunt us all, though some more thoroughly than others. There are Buddha-like individuals out there who have accepted the inevitability of their death and it propels them to live a more vibrant life. This has to be the goal, doesn’t it? There are people out there working to halt death, but they’ve missed the point. When I stop to think about it (and believe me I do), life without death would be devoid of meaning. What better reason to wake up and to love your little family, to notice the color of the sky or the snow on your face than that you have a finite number of days to do so? What better reason to live?

Andy has bought the test with the blue dye, and I’m frustrated. Every fool knows you need the pink test for better squinting action. I’m used to looking hard for that coveted second line, studying stark white in different lights for a whisper of a positive, digging the thing back out of the trash to “double check.” This time the line is there. I hold the test by it’s plastic grip and I see her life unfold in seconds, birthdays, and big brothers, and dainty bonnets with little yellow flowers, judgement day in reverse. A lump rises in my throat, I feel lightheaded, and remind myself to breath.

This time last year I took the test that reaffirmed we are the lucky ones. I’d just accepted a new job. I looked forward to new friends, new hope. Six weeks later a gentle nurse packed me into my car, and I left hope behind in a cassette marked with my name and date of birth, “contents consistent with early pregnancy tissue.” I drove home, and that night I made a halloween party for my loves; a crock pot full of chili, and spiced apple cider. Darkness fell. A miniature pilot, a pajama clad wolf, and a zombie all ventured out into the night, and this unicorn’s heart was quietly breaking.

When I was about eight years old, and just beginning to grapple with mortality, I was shaken by our world that will spin even as it holds impossible pain. While goodbyes are uttered and caskets lowered, the mailman will make his route, and news anchors will shuffle papers and speak in monotones. I was struck by the indifference of people to the tragedy that surrounds us. While we stood in line to buy cold cuts and strawberry milk, people, one hundred to the minute, shone their lights one final breath, and went out. It felt like an unbearable truth.

As an adult, of course, I’ve accepted that this is the way it must be. We can’t pause for every light extinguished. So as hearts break, cashier’s chirp, tears flow, and angry drivers honk. People wonder at the crazy lady, crying in the parking lot, and they don’t stop to ask.

I’m not sure why it’s accepted wisdom to hold inside the joy of an early pregnancy. When loved ones celebrate engagements and marriages we don’t hesitate to share in their excitement. We offer advice and support, and even though statistics inform us they’ve only got a fifty-fifty shot, we rejoice, and wish them the best.

When friends grieve for family members passed we extend understanding, food, and the warmth of our presence. We make space, and give grace. We don’t extend these to the woman whose loss is too tiny to conceive. We expect her instead to get on with it, to arrive on time, hair fixed, and the kid’s teeth flossed. And she wasn’t supposed to tell us, so when her grief becomes a mental health crisis we will claim that we couldn’t have known.

For months I was disappeared. I piped frosting in the dark, counting breaths, and made cupcakes for parties I couldn’t attend. I abandoned carts full of groceries, called EMS from a mall parking lot, and chased ambulances in dreams, holding a baby, wrapped in a stained blanket, whose face I couldn’t see.

I am not one who declines help. I have arrived, more than once, in emergency rooms seeking nothing but company and a kind word. Yet, even for me it was hard to get out the words;”my baby was lost, hope has become a tiny speck of a thing, and I’m afraid.” When I did it was cathartic. After months of dark spaces, and barely there coffee dates, of memories on a reel, played on repeat, I began to speak them, and to invite others to do the same. “She was real. She was loved, and when her light went out I struggled to accept. Do you know this place? Then we are not alone.”

Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.” Anne Lamott