Dog Days of Summer

As I sit and write this in my air-conditioned-resembles-a-room-on-TLC’s-hoarders-office, I’m reflecting on yet another summer come and soon will go.

Good riddance to bad rubbish I say, or rather write.

My six-year-old niece is in the hospital getting hopefully her last EEG to see if she can be weaned off her seizures medication. Serious heart issues as a baby led to surgery as a toddler. Meanwhile, in Dorothy Gale’s home territory, my 44-year-old cousin is recovering from quadruple bypass surgery after a second stint in the hospital due to a blood clot in his leg.

His adorable wife says he was just trying to copy me.

Recently the ‘perfect storm’ of circumstances led to the diagnosis of a blood clot in my right leg, the kind that can cause a pulmonary embolism. Today I got the ‘go ahead’ to resume most normal activities (see aforementioned office in need of shoveling out) and the quest to regulate the drug I’m on continues.

Fortunately, we have excellent medical care. And everyone who’s ever been on blood thinners assures me this is the way it is with, well, blood thinners.

If not for Coumadin, we never would have met one of our oldest (not age wise) and dearest friends, Jean Holter. She was our neighbor years ago, as was her mother, Doris. When Doris, whom we’d never met, had Coumadin-triggered nose bleed, Ralph took her to the ER… it being the neighborly thing to do.

Since that day, even though we may not literally share blood, Jean is family through and through.

This morning I went into the clinic for bloodwork. Sitting across from me in the waiting room sat a man staring pensively at the ground. He had a port in his arm… chemo therapy for cancer? He also had a titanium leg… bone cancer? His posture said he carried the weight of the world on his shoulders.

Another dear old (not age wise) friend and I often ruminate on how feeling sorry for oneself is selfish because there are always others so much worse off. Conversely, we take turns reminding each other we can’t always adopt the attitude ‘There but for the grace of God go I (and mine)’ no matter how noble.

But at the end of the day, we know we are fortunate no matter what trials and tribulations (health or otherwise) life throws the way of us and our loved ones.

This summer has seen some crappy lows and some wonderful highs -- including time spent with those longtime (not old) friends and others. Instead of wishing the season away, I’m just going to enjoy every day – if not every bump in the road.

Recently on a steamy night, another friend, Elizabeth, and I (definitely not old…she was born the year I was a junior in high school) sat on my deck. She has two wonderful children, a pre-schooler and one about to enter kindergarten. It’s always hard to process when your first child is about to head to school. Me, the queen of holding on and letting go, is finding it hard to believe my ‘baby’ is going to be a senior in high school. I’d say it seems like only yesterday he entered kindergarten (God Bless Mrs. VanHorn) but in actuality it seems like an eternity.

Anway…I digress…as usual. My young mom friend told me I was the one who told her to enjoy the moment(s) with her children, and she’s taken that to heart. Her disclosure touched me.

No matter what’s going on in life, we need to enjoy and embrace every moment…and not let the sucky ones get us down.

Life in the Slow Lane

First some housekeeping: Recently I returned from my 9^th WVWriters, Inc. conference. The event is held annually at Cedar Lakes in Ripley, West Virginia. Every year I come home saying “That was the best conference ever.”

This year was no exception. It really was the best conference ever.

Being around like-minded people is energizing, refilling the creative well. And believe me, I never use phrases like that. I’m a journeyman (woman) writer, not a weaver of sumptuous words.

Seeing dear old friends and making new ones is priceless. I totally want to adopt the amazing couple, Doug and Telisha Williams, who entertained Saturday night with their own brand of Americana music. Everyone in the universe should check them out.

And instead of breaking down weeping when it came time to leave, I either avoided good-byes or did my best Mount Rushmore impression when faced with the partings.

It worked.

I remained dry-eyed all the way home to the prairie, 1,100 miles away.

Inside I was a soggy, blubbering mess, but all things are made sweeter by being laced with bittersweet.

One day after returning, I had foot surgery -- a tendon sheath sliced (or something like that) and toes pinned (my surgeon, the anesthesiologist, the nurses, the staff, the amazing PT who sent me to the surgeon… all rock), and here I sit. I’m ‘non-weight bearing’ for two weeks, hobbling horribly around on crutches. Granted, the end result will be less pain and much better mobility. My advanced years goal is to still be able to hike in Rocky Mountain National Park in my 80s, so more mobility is all good.

In the meantime… here I sit.

I always blame my husband’s Viking lineage for our older son’s wanderlust, but I too bear responsibility for Erik’s boundless energy. (As a holding on and letting go aside, said son is heading to S. Korea this fall for another study abroad program marking his third trip overseas.) I’ve written this before: When all the toddlers in our Arizona playgroup were happily rolling trucks in the sandbox and swinging on a tire swing, Erik was heading for the Mexican border.

When I was four my parents took my little sister and me to the Detroit Zoo to see a Tasmanian Devil all the way from Australia. I wouldn’t say I’ve exactly been a whirling dervish my whole life, but I don’t like to be still. If I didn’t like to eat so much and have peasant forebears, I’d probably be thin.

Being fairly immobile has been… challenging. That no one in my family has knocked me over the head and buried me in the backyard is a testament to their fortitude. My family deserves kudos.

During several scary tornado warnings the other evening my mother put a chair in the hall (which she had determined was the safest spot upstairs) for me and refused to go down to the lower level to our ‘storm shelter.’ I haven’t been this touched since she allowed me (the daughter of a public school administrator) to attend a Catholic high school when I was miserable at the public high school in the town we moved to right before my junior year.

In addition, my younger son is being nice enough to help me overcome my tendency to resort to not-so-nice language when I get frustrated. (There’s a financial incentive in it for him). And my husband is not bonking me over the head with my crutches when I get uber frustrated that the simplest tasks elude me.

My friends have also rallied. I have been touched by the gestures of those both near and far. Calls, visits, e-mails, texts, Facebook messages have inundated my heart. An arrangement of lilies worthy of a royal wedding grace my living room, thanks to my friend Ann Snider, the mother of four… who is holding on and letting go herself as her oldest son is on his LDS mission trip for two years. She is courageous indeed.

Another beautiful arrangement sits on my buffet, a gift from my longtime friend Susan Case. Susan coaxed me though Erik’s first trip abroad to Germany when he was only in high school. Her daughter had been a foreign exchange student several years previous.

Too numerous to mention are my many other supportive friends. It takes a lot to spend time, in person or virtually, with a cranky woman on crutches!

This morning I escaped for coffee with my exercise pals (that was my exercise!) and learned the sister-in-law of one of the women just fell off a horse when the saddle loosened. Broken ribs and a punctured lung resulted. Once again, I’m reminded to quit whining and remember how fortunate I am. I’m slated to be off crutches (I hope!) in another week and plan to have more mobility when I can stomp around in my Herman Munster boot.

In the meantime, maybe it’s time to enjoy life in the slow lane?

Procrastination Nation

I’m sitting here at my computer, surely having exhausted every possible procrastinating tool. If I were my own ‘friend’ on Facebook, I’d hide me in my newsfeed.

Today it took me longer to unpack from my trip to my ninth West Virginia Writers, Inc. Conference than it did to drive from Cedar Lakes to Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, the first leg of the trip home.

In between I did umpteen loads of laundry, went to the dentist, waited around for the surgery center to call with a time for my toe pinning / ankle tendon slicing / Frankenstein’s Monster foot apparel fashion statement ‘procedure’ tomorrow morning.

I even took time to dig out an old photo of my father in his Kalamazoo College marching band days in honor of my friend-since-6^th-grade, Sandy Plenge Taube’s, posting her dad’s photo on Facebook for Father’s Day week.

Since I really have to go to bed, I’ll cut to the chase. Friends…whether those since elementary school who take time to check on you, or newer ones, like my gorgeous friend Franny, whom I met in exercise classes at the Y (and who called to see if I needed company after surgery tomorrow), or like-minded writer friends who are more like family you never want to part from…are invaluable.

They are worth embracing -- physically and spiritually -- and revering. Tonight my heart literally aches for those I just left behind and those I haven’t seen in years but who still remain close in my heart.

The pain of missing those is far more brutal than a few swipes by a superbly skilled surgeon.

Baby Steps

At noon today I headed to the YMCA for a ‘last chance’ workout with two young trainers who I was sure would kick my aging posterior. Instead I left exhilarated after an hour on the treadmill, elliptical, and weight machines followed by a great bout of stretching to cool down. This special session is part of a a three-month program called ‘Resolution Solution.’

Last January the Y offered another program where participants were challenged to do things such as attending different exercise classes for one week. When it comes to group exertion I’ve always been a lone wolf (or a cowering coyote!). The only exceptions were an aerobics class I took 20 years ago after the birth of my first son and a faculty wives hiking group in Flagstaff that introduced me to the splendors of the Southwest and the strain of switchbacks on my then-young knees!

But with my neighbor encouraging me, off we went to 5:45 a.m. classes.

Did I mention I also have NEVER been a morning person?

One year later I can say that nearly every weekday morning (except for Thursdays in the summer when that day’s instructor ran a Boot Camp, which I will never do!) for the past year I’ve gone to a combination of zumba, toning, body sculpting, and step classes.

What hooked me?

The variety, the awesome instructors, the camaraderie of a great group of women, the decision to approach getting in shape at fifty as a lifestyle change rather than a diet...all were factors.

Yes, I’ve lost weight. And over the holidays I gained some weight. But for the first time I’ve kept off more than I gained, and also for the first time I’ve decided not to beat myself up about weighty matters. I have some good friends I can talk about this with (thank you Susan and Angie!), and we all agree it’s a process.

And I’ve been processing for a long time.

I have this little ‘obsession’ that drives my mother and husband bonkers…and rightly so. Beginning when I was 9, I can recite from memory what I weighed most ages of my life. (3^rd grade 89 lbs.; 4^th grade, 120 lbs., 5 foot two and 3/4^th’s…oh to weigh that now! And the list goes on.)

On two occasions (and I’m now slowly aiming for three) I have lost (and eventually regained) a significant amount of weight. The first time was the summer between 8^th and 9^th grade. At the end of 8^th grade we went on a picnic to a park on the shores of Lake Superior and were joined by high schoolers as chaperones. It was a different era. One boy was so beautiful he took my breath away, and I still remember thinking if that’s what awaited me in high school, maybe I wanted to lose weight. So I did.

My starting weight in May 1974 was 175 pounds. I lost 20 pounds that summer (through a combination of staying at my grandmother’s and eating following her diabetic diet and by counting calories when I got home). By January 1975 I was down to 130 pounds. Okay it’s a big obsession with me. For the record, there were gorgeous guys in that high school.

Over the years, the pounds crept back on. By the time I hit 40 I was at an all-time high, precipitated by hitting George Foreman-worthy numbers during my second pregnancy a few years previous. Then my foot-taller husband was diagnosed with diabetes and lost 65 pounds. I didn’t want to be the fat wife of the thin man so I promptly…gained nine pounds that year, going from 180 to 189. Did I mention I’m five foot two? (I lost the ¾’s somewhere along the way.)

Then I lost more than forty pounds again on the what I call the ‘stress and grief diet.’ Please don’t try this at home. I’m a stress eater but this time the stress level was so great, it took my appetite away. My spouse’s diabetes was followed by a cancer scare, and that was followed by a horrifying period. A dear friend died at the age of 49 at the same time my husband fell ill with a mysterious ailment. While sick, he continued to work long hours at his job. Unable to eat much more than cottage cheese and apple slices, he got dangerously thin. And for the first time in my life, I was too distraught to to eat. The diagnosis was his liver having a horrid reaction to a cholesterol drug change, and he recovered fine. But there was a point where I worried he was going to die. He wasn’t, but….

The weight I dropped didn’t come back for a while, but then my Viking-blooded older son took off for a year at the tender age of 16 to be a foreign exchange student in Germany. That combined with the usual stresses of being a working mom, packed the pounds back on. Food (and my friend Susan whose daughter, Emma, had also been on an exchange program) provided comfort.

Then came a cross-country move. I made a difficult transition from working outside the home fulltime to fulfilling my life-long dream of writing fulltime. Finally last December found me with my head in a bag of holiday M&M’s, stress noshing. The same son was in Europe again on a college study abroad program, and he and his girlfriend were stranded in Denmark during a wicked snowstorm.

I had an epiphany a year ago right then and there among the red and green M&Ms. Candy (cake, cookies, brownies, fudge, chips, dip, name-your-poison) isn’t the answer to anything. This is a continuous struggle for me. People gave me fudge for Christmas, which I ate. However, I did leave the holiday M&Ms I bought unopened.

The point of all this is baby steps.

At the first meeting of Resolution Solution at the Y on Monday night, one of the trainers advised us to set realistic goals for the 12-week program. We weighed in that night and will weigh in at week six and week 12. Until last year I would have set as my goal, 24 pounds in 12 weeks or 30 or…you get the idea.

Now I’d like to lose six pounds in six weeks. That would include the five fudge pounds I put on between the first of December and now. And if I lose three pounds in six weeks, well, it’ll be three pounds less.

I will never stop obsessing over the numbers on the scale. After all, I was the only layperson in the crowded room who knew how many calories are in a pound (3,500).

But I will continue to try to pay attention to how good exercise makes me feel and how bad candy is for me. If once in a while I want a piece of chocolate (or, more likely, a donut), I will indulge. And I won’t berate myself afterwards.

What do I weigh now? Less than George Foreman and more than I did in high school.

I’ll let you know in 12 weeks.

April and me

As I sit writing this on a lovely Sunday afternoon on the prairie (which two springs in a row has tried to suffocate me with allergies that trigger asthma), my husband is winging his way home from a conference in Reno, Nevada via Denver.

He’s been attending this particular conference of social scientists, mass communicators, et al for nigh onto 20 years.

It wasn’t until we moved east, however, that the conference ‘curse’ hit.

This year the curse has lain fairly dormant, though the hot water heater is acting funky and my husband nearly got bumped from his flight with a possibility of not flying in until tomorrow morning.

Nine years ago my husband came home from the April conference, also in Reno that year, sicker than a dog. Soon after he was diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes.

Subsequent springs brought a bout of raw sewage on the back patio of our old house, the death of my dear friend Mary Rodd Furbee (sister of my darling friend Susan Case), and more health scares for my spouse.

I called my husband in tears that horrible April of 2004 when 49-year-old Mary, our work colleague and friend, died. He’d rented a motorcycle and was out riding in the snow in Utah, where the meetings were held that year. He flew home early, sick again. Very sick.

He had hepatitis, and the doctor ordered tests for Hepatitis A because of concerns about his traveling. All of us in the family were tested: my mom, my sons, and me.

All negative.

Eventually, hepatitis A to Z (if such a thing exists) were ruled out. We made numerous trips to the amazing infectious disease specialist. I exaggerate, but he was tested for hepatitis you only get from crocodiles in the Nile.

Meanwhile, he kept getting sicker and sicker, dropping weight, his diabetes getting worse. Throughout it all he never let up from his demanding job.

I thought he was going to die.

He wasn’t. It turns out he had pharmacological-induced hepatitis, caused by the change in cholesterol medicine that our insurance dictated.

His pancreas did fail around the same time… and he ‘morphed’ from a Type 2 diabetic to a hybrid Type 1. The hepatitis may or may not have contributed to this.

I know there’s no curse… just the everyday realities of living. The good, the bad, and the annoying.

But I’m gonna be awfully happy to see him walk through that door… like he has so many times before.