No matter how things go wrong, it’s always a blindside. Life goes tits up on a fucking dime. There’s no warning. No easing into the skid. One day, it’s all systems nominal. The next you’re crashing down to Earth, staggering through the wreckage, reaching out for something solid to steady yourself for one goddamn second to get your bearings and reorient yourself. A daily routine is boring, but when it’s gone, you want it back as much as you’ve ever wanted anything in your life. We take quotidian predictability for granted.
The upheaval starts because one day, something happens. Maybe Earth shaking and cataclysmic. But probably not. Most times, it’s a small thing. A sudden pain. A discomfort that won’t go away. Maybe something you knew was inevitable. The problem with inevitability, we always think it’s further away than it is. That we have more time. Objects in mirror are closer than they appear because the call is coming from inside the house.
We don’t have more time. It is always later than you think.
One day, something happened. It was a small thing. So small, in fact, that it didn’t seem like anything at all.
One day, my toe went numb.
During the first week of February, I had an appointment for a minor oral surgery to get a dental implant. The previous October, I’d had a cracked tooth removed. Not that big of a deal, aside from the fact that two of my uncles died and I learned that my youngest aunt had been moved to a hospice the same week I got that tooth yanked. The autumn felt darker than usual. The recovery from the extraction didn’t go as smoothly as I thought it would, but it was a temporary inconvenience. Halloween, Thanksgiving, Festivus, and New Year’s sailed by, and that gloomy month of sickness and loss became a thing of the past. January arrived with its clean slate optimism. The rest was c’est la vie and shit.
So, yeah. February. Time to start replacing my yanked-out tooth. I was stoked. I did a 45-minute P90X workout, feeling fit as fuck. I mean, my big toe had gone numb, I couldn’t stop belching for some reason, and my stomach hurt. No big deal. I’ve had stomach issues since I was a kid. I probably pinched something while working out and ended up with a weird toe. Whatever. My oral surgeon drilled a hole in my jaw and put in a fancy new titanium implant.
The perfect storm gathered momentum and blasted a massive thunder bolt through my head. I awoke one chilly February morning with one of the worst migraines I’ve ever had. I took some paracetamol and waited for it to subside. It didn’t. My stomach pain worsened. My toe was still numb, and the belching had increased so much that it continued while I slept, waking me up and leaving me tired in the morning.
Then my legs went numb. That’s when I called a doctor.
On the video call, I recounted my symptoms and watched her face, waiting for her to nod sagely, then fire a series of questions at me before prescribing something and instructing me to walk it off. Instead, she slapped me across the face with a worst-case scenario. Go to A&E (the ER) because it’s probably Guillain-Barre Syndrome.
I didn’t know what to say except for, “That’s what killed my grandfather.”
She kept talking, but I couldn’t listen. Something about being on a ventilator by next week, and possibly for the next few months. More talking about aftereffects that could last for years. For fuck’s sake, why wouldn’t she stop talking and let me crawl into a dark corner to die already?
Somehow, the call ended. My hysterics commenced as I struggled through hyperventilating to recount the conversation with my husband. We found another doctor later that day who said, no it isn’t GBS, but something is wrong. “We certainly need to investigate,” he said.
I lost control over the ship, hurtling through space with red alert lights flashing all around me.
February became a maelstrom of neurologists, MRIs, and an overnight stay in the emergency room because hey, maybe I’m having a fucking stroke. Blood tests. Another blood test. And that dental implant? A thing that goes wrong 0.01% of the time? Yeah. It went wrong. So wrong that a painful infection spread through my jaw and into my sinuses. Eating became a struggle, as everything I put into my body caused pain and threatened to emerge in a projectile stream from one end or the other. From head to toe, I was unstable and wobbly, as though I were on a boat in choppy waters. Standing up and walking across the room felt risky.
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I got a text from my younger sister that said, “Mom has lung cancer and it’s pretty bad.”
It had been years since I’d had a panic attack, but now they were happening nearly every day. Tests and exams provided no information. Nobody knew what was wrong with me.
What I knew was, something was definitely wrong.
What I knew was that I had to get from England to Pennsylvania where my sister and dying mother were. Sure, I hadn’t spoken to my mother for 14 years, but that was beside the point.
The things I do every day to enjoy life and keep myself alive abandoned me. Writing. No longer possible. My creative engine stalled, the train of thought not only derailed, but lay crumpled in a smoking ruin at the bottom of a fiery chasm. Stories. I longed to lose myself in a book or a film, but I now had the attention span and retention of a goldfish on meth. Food. Well, I couldn’t eat anything without nausea or stomach pain. I mostly stopped eating. Exercise. My morning workouts are what fuel my body, yeah, but they also keep that thinky creative engine humming along. Only, I’d become so weak that a walk around the block sent my heart rate through the roof and fatigued me for the rest of the day. My weight plummeted, every day the scale a lower digit than the day before.
So I stared mindlessly at old episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation in between messages and phone calls about my mother’s rapid descent toward death. I wallowed in what was comfortable, familiar, and required nothing of my mental faculties.
I scrolled through Instagram and landed on the video of Aaron Bushnell in flames. I got news that an old friend died. I watched videos from Gaza. A couple of other relatives landed in the hospital for various reasons. I lost the ability to cry or rage about anything. Everything near and far dripped with a bleakness and finality that drenched me, leaving me submerged and unable to move forward. I stopped thinking of the future as something that might be relevant to me.
My breaking point. I found it.
Doctors squinted as I rattled off my list of symptoms. Words came at me and then floated on by. Nerve damage. Thyroid disorder. Neurological disease. Menopause. Stroke. Ulcer. Transient ischemic attack. Vitamin deficiency. I needed more antibiotics for the jaw infection. No, I needed less. They looked over my test results and informed me I was in good health. As I insisted that something was wrong, I either received a serious head nod, or an expression that said, “Sure, Jan.”
When March arrived, my deterioration picked up momentum, as downward spirals tend to do. At the beginning of the month, I arrived home from another appointment with my oral surgeon and attempted to call my mother. I didn’t know if she’d want to speak with me, or if I wanted to speak to her, but none of that seemed to matter. The only thing that felt important was to do it. Struggling for breath through my infected jaw and sinus, I left voice mails that she’d never hear.
The next morning, I said goodbye to a semi-conscious woman on a ventilator with a phone next to her head as I tried not to sound sick or in pain. Did she hear me? I don’t know. Does it change anything whether she did or not? Nah. I don’t think so.
A few days later, I channeled all my zen from the past eight years of daily meditation while remaining perfectly still in the MRI machine. Inhaling. Exhaling. Listening to banging and clanging all around me, thinking about how now my mother is dead. The person who was my abuser and my worst critic. The woman who told me I had no writing ability, and that no one would ever “want to read any of that shit.” The same woman who I caught more than once stalking my author pages online, and who, as I discovered months later while sifting through old papers and photos, had kept some of my long-lost adolescent scribblings among her family keepsakes. The person who screamed at me when I had the audacity to bring home an application for a creative writing program when I was in the 6th grade, yet also bought me my first typewriter.
She was the person who bloodied me bad enough to get me sent to a group home for abused girls. The one who slept with my teenage boyfriend when I was eighteen and continued the relationship after he went to jail for assaulting me with a knife. The one who put the men in her life before me over and over again. The one who made me her literal and figurative punching bag until I finally walked away for good.
And yet. She was the person who baked a ridiculous amount of cookies at Christmas and took photos of them year after year. She was the one who always found the perfect gift for everyone, even if she’d only met them once. She was the person who went to the gas station down the street with me to rent low-budget horror movies on VHS and laughed just as hard as I did at all of them. And when I ended a long-term relationship to live alone, she asked no questions, but made sure I had a toolbox and a decent set of tools because a woman should know how to fix things herself.
She was a lot of things I loved and hated. Now all of them were gone. And whoever existed in that nether region between love and hate is someone I only caught glimpses of and will always wish I’d had a chance to meet.
At the end of March, the morning after our 18th wedding anniversary, I could no longer get out bed. I had become too weak to sit up on my own. My husband spent the morning on the phone trying to get me help. When the voice on the other end of the line offered to send paramedics to take me to the hospital, I panicked. The month before, paramedics had been called to take my mother to the hospital and she never went home again. In the moment, it didn’t matter to me that my situation was totally different. So I waited and that afternoon, I saw a doctor who didn’t give me a “Sure, Jan.” She looked me in the eye and fucking listened.
Did she know what was wrong with me? No. But she tried to help, and that made all the difference. I got some medication and a follow-up appointment. The medication helped. I started eating again. Well, dry crackers and boiled chicken. But believe me when I tell you that boring-ass, bland as hell chicken was one of the best things I’ve ever eaten in my goddamn life.
Over the next several weeks, my weight gradually started to come back on. The panic attacks and infection subsided. By summer, I was able to travel again. Go to shows again. Visit with friends. The future existed once again.
So what was the diagnosis? Well, we still don’t know. My doctor is still baffled. I’ve had several tests, scans, x-rays, and exams. I’ve been poked, prodded, and stabbed with needles. It seems there were a few genuine issues that popped up simultaneously and were exasperated by stress. Would things have gone differently if that first doctor hadn’t immediately jumped to a worst-case scenario? Yeah, I think so. The numb toe that kicked everything off (see what I did there?) went back to normal on its own. My current doctor says I likely pinched something while working out and just had a weird toe for a while. Yeah. Like I said.
It isn’t totally over. I lost four people in my immediate family in less than a year during my own health scare. I’m still processing grief and my own mortality. I’m different now, but I don’t know how, exactly. I’m still figuring it out. I just had another visit with my oral surgeon last week and am more cautious than I’ve ever been about what goes into my body. Never mind the fact that I did away with cigarettes, booze, and red meat long ago. But I gained back the weight. I began to move my body again, picking up the pace on those walks around the block. Then moving onto stretching and yoga until finally, I was throwing the dumbbells around, doing intense HIIT and kickboxing workouts. I felt strong and sweaty again. I still do. COME AT ME, BRO.
I picked up a book that didn’t require much from me. A fast-paced, entertaining read. My focus was returning. Then I read another. And another. Then ten more. Twenty more. Before long, I was devouring books again.
Writing, though. That proved to be more of a challenge. Day after day, I sit in front of this screen, pushing myself to get back on that literary horse. This here, what you’re reading right now, is me, back in the saddle, working my way up to a gallop.
I’ll get there. After all, I’m still alive.
Thank you, old friend.