So you’ve probably noticed that it’s been kind of quiet around here lately. Even though I’ve been moving through so many different situations at what seems like the speed of light, for the first time in my 35 years, I seem to be out of words to describe what’s currently going on in my life.

I haven’t really known how to BE in this place, because always before, even if everything else fell apart, I could always fall back on a cushion of words to soften the blow. So I turned to one of my tried and true coping strategies, namely; “When in doubt, freak out.”

Because I am nothing if not generous, not to mention an excellent Drama Queen, I decided to share the freaky love with my coach during one of our sessions.

“GOD,” I announced, in my best, quivering, innocent-victim-of-the-universe voice, “God has taken all my words away! The one thing I most loved to do in the world, and now He’s taken it away from me for no reason!”

In what can only be described as a Superhuman Exercise Of Will which most likely led to severe internal hemorrhaging on her part, not only did my coach NOT laugh at me, but somehow she was also able to ask me helpful, non-mocking coachful questions to help me work through this issue.

“Well,” she asked, “does everything you write on your blog have to be funny?”

“Uh, DUH! YES!!” I replied. (Aren’t I just a dream client? Don’t you want to coach me too?) Fortunately she has raised two children, so she never takes snottiness personally.

“OK,” she replied, recognizing an Intractable Brick Wall Of Stubbornness when she saw one, “think about this. You had a plan for your blog when you started it three years ago. But you’re not the same person you were three years ago. Think about everything that has happened over the past year. So what if you could allow your blog and your writing to change, and reflect who and where you are now?”

She makes a good point. Especially given the fact that, if I had to give it a title, the theme of this past year would be,

I have hurt, in some way, every single day, for the past eight months.

Eight months of sickness, trauma, my life being completely out of my control, and pain.

One day last October I lost my health. Not because of anything I did or didn’t do. Not for any logical, rational reason. Just ‘cuz.

Overnight, I lost the ability to be the person I had been, and do everything I’d been doing up to that point.

This is the hardest thing I’ve ever had to deal with.

I never knew pain could hurt like this.

And even though I seem to have reached a place where the original illness is gone and the side effects are more or less managed, who’s to say they won’t show up again one day, out of the blue, for absolutely no reason at all? My body, my mind, my emotions, they are all tied up in knots and braced against more pain. Because I remember the pain. And I don’t know if I could bear to go through it again.

This was, and continues to be, a huge trauma for me. And I really don’t know how to be with it.

But I am still here. I do show up every day, even if all I do is open my eyes in the morning and acknowledge that I’ve arrived at the beginning of another day.

And maybe, just maybe, that’s enough.

So today I had to go to the doctor for, um, we’ll just call it a lady problem. This concerned me because I knew I needed antibiotics for this particular problem, which I’m not supposed to be taking on account of they could reactivate the Hostile Alien Bacteria, in which case I would have to hurl myself into oncoming traffic, because there is just NO WAY I can be that sick again right now.

Happily there is another, safer, kind of antibiotic I can take, although my doctor did tell me that there is another treatment option we could try for C DIF, should the need ever arise. But when he told me what it was I thought that I might still choose the oncoming traffic, because the next level of treatment involves a stool transplant.

That of course is really too horrifying to even consider, which I told him, to which he replied, (and I SWEAR I am not making this up):

“Hey, the healing power of stool is legendary.”

LEGENDARY.

I really had nothing to say to that, but I didn’t have to because while we were on the subject he told me about this company which allows you to send poo through the mail to whomever you wish, in order to convey the message that, “Dear My Congressperson, You are full of …it.”

Happy Tuesday!

Every so often my life leads me to a place that I think of as The Wall, which I know are places within myself where I am not yet able to act from love. I can tell when I’ve reached another one, because I feel exactly like I’ve hurled myself headlong into an extremely solid brick wall at about 120 miles an hour. Then I pick myself up off the ground, dust myself off, and do it all over again.

I usually bash around quite a bit before I am able to find a more gentle, easier way to get past my latest wall. My first response is always to go for the sledgehammer, without even stopping to ask if there’s another tool that could possibly get the job done. I just get so frustrated whenever I am stuck in a pattern of thoughts, and I can’t find another way to see a given situation.

Sometimes the “sledgehammer method” does help me to release my frustration, but it is a pretty brutal method of navigating through life. So over the past few years I’ve started to ask if maybe there’s another way I could approach these situations in which I feel so stagnant and stuck.

Of course the Universe loves it when we ask questions like this, and so it was not long before I was inspired to pick up Martha Beck’s book on The Joy Diet. In addition to giving us 10 practices for creating a more joyful life, she also talks about Bill O’Hanlon and his suggestion to Do One Thing Differently. As in, if you find yourself having the same argument over and over again with your spouse, the next time you have the argument you have to Do One Thing Differently, like put on a hat, or have the argument while lying in the bathtub.

It sounds silly, but holy cow does it work! I guess committing to take some kind of action opens up a space for new thoughts to come in.

So I decided to apply this strategy to my latest wall, and over the weekend my inner guidance started talking to me about Pema Chodron. I saw a quote of hers on a blog I read, and suddenly she was all I could think about. Suddenly they were replaying Oprah’s radio interview with Pema Chodron on the afternoon I was listening to XM’s “Oprah and Friends” channel. Suddenly I found myself reading the descriptions of all her books on Amazon. And this whole time my inner guidance was chanting, “Get thee to a bookstore,” so I finally went, if only to get that little voice to shut up.

At the bookstore I found a little volume titled, When Things Fall Apart, which is perfect for me because that is exactly how I feel about my life right now. I feel like everything has broken open and spilled out, and maybe I can catch a few grains over here, and mop up a few drops over there, but I can’t change the fact that there’s a great big mess on the table in front of me, at least in my mind.

Pema Chodron describes her own “falling apart” in this way:

“What happened when I got to the abbey was that everything fell apart. All the ways I shield myself, all the ways I delude myself, all the ways I maintain my well-polished self-image-all of it fell apart. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t manipulate the situation. My style was driving everyone else crazy, and I couldn’t find anywhere to hide.

I had always thought of myself as a flexible, obliging person who was well liked by almost everyone. I’d been able to carry this illusion throughout most of my life. During my early years at the abbey, I discovered that I had been living in some kind of misunderstanding. It wasn’t that I didn’t have good qualities, it was just that I was not the ultimate golden girl. I had so much invested in that image of myself, and it just wasn’t holding together anymore. All my unfinished business was exposed vividly and accurately in living Technicolor, not only to myself, but to everyone else as well.” (p. 6,7).

What has come to light for me during these months of sickness and recovery is the issue of self-compassion. I can practice it up to a certain point, but then once I’ve decided that I “should” be better, and I “should” be running at 100%, and I “should” whatever, but I can’t, because I’m still physically rundown and need more time to heal, then I turn into a slave driver and constantly drive and abuse myself mentally. I would never treat another person as meanly as I’ve been treating myself. But I apparently have no problem tyrannizing myself internally to the point of despair.

So I guess it’s finally time for me to learn how to do this differently. I’m not happy about it, but I’ve reached the point where I don’t really have any other choice. Well, I guess I always have a choice, but I’m tired of repeating this same cycle of self-abuse. I guess that I have finally suffered enough. I would really like to start feeling better, and I’ve been doing this long enough now to know that in order to start feeling relief, I need to learn how to change my mind about this situation. So, okay Universe, I’m finally listening. I’m ready for a shift in perception so that I can see this situation differently. And if possible, I’d really like this new view to be sledgehammer-free.

Today I am very grateful for my coach.

When she heard about my severe sleep apnea her first thought was, “Wow. Imagine the amazing things she’s gonna do when she’s rested!”

That was really nice to hear, because when I got the results of my sleep study, my first thought was

I

have

not

slept

for

thirty

five

years.

Thinking that thought was a lot like kicking a tiny pebble and accidentally dislodging an avalanche.

Suddenly it was as if I’d woken up one day, and everything was wrong with me.

If I could, just out of the blue, contract a serious intestinal bacteria, then what else could happen to me?

If suddenly my sleep is all wrong, then what else could go wrong with me?

If Heath Ledger could drop dead in the blink of an eye, then I could too.

Suddenly, all I could see was evidence for being weak and sickly. But that’s not what my coach saw.

She said, “Look at everything you’ve done, even though you’ve been completely exhausted!”

This is true. Even if I haven’t really slept for the past thirty-five years, I have done an awful lot of amazing things. I do have a pretty fantastic life.

She said, “You’ve had relatively good health over they years, given how impaired your sleep has been. To me, that is evidence of how strong your body is.”

Also true.

She said, “Once you get your sleep apnea treated, world domination is just around the corner!”

That sounds good to me.

Ironically, just as I was in the middle of writing yesterday’s post I got a phone call from the nurse. I was really excited to hear what she had to say, which unfortunately turned out to be: a whole lot of nothing.

After an awful lot of hemming and hawing, she told me that my sample had been located, and it had been analyzed, but no one was allowed to know what the report said.

So apparently I was wrong; my poo was not on the run. It was actually in the witness protection program.

Apparently the secrets it contains are so valuable to some (what was the effect of the drug on my illness) and so dangerous to others (actually, dangerous to the same people, as apparently releasing any information about my sample would unblind the study, thus causing the earth to crash into the sun and bringing the end of life as we know it) that it is being highly guarded in a secure, secret location. And I don’t have a high enough security clearance to have any further contact with it.

Well alrighty then. Now I understand how Sydney Bristow felt when the FBI wouldn’t tell her how they were planning on taking down SD-6.

So I’m two and a half weeks past the end of the kick-ass antibiotics, and I’m happy to say that I am starting to feel like myself again. So much so, in fact, that every day before he goes to work my husband sits me down, looks me in the eye and says,

“Remember. You are still recovering from a serious illness. You are not well. You need to take it easy today.” Otherwise he will come home to discover that I’ve re-shingled the entire roof and added an extra room to the back of our house while he was gone. And I’ll be upset, because I didn’t get around to repaving the driveway as well.

The people in charge of the study still call me once a week as a follow up, and last week I asked them if they had the results from my final stool sample. The nurse said she didn’t have them at that moment, but that she would call me back this week.

So I heard from her on Tuesday, only to learn that, “We’re having some trouble tracking down your sample.”

Apparently my poo is on the lam.

If I had to guess I’d say that it committed an act of violence against Science, and then escaped to some Latin American country which has no extradition treaty with the United States. It is bilingual, after all.

Today I am feeling every single moment of the three months I’ve been sick. I think now that the infection is gone and I’m off the medicine, I’m settling into my body and just feeling things out; okay, this is what has happened, and this is where I am right now.

I’ve been taking an inventory: okay, this is how my knees feel; hm, it still hurts to walk and wear shoes; wow, my jaw is tight. It’s almost like I’m getting reacquainted with my body. I have to get to know myself again after all that I went through in the fall.

And if I was tuned in before to people and situations that were not a good match for me, now I am super-sensitive in those areas. I know right away if an opportunity or a relationship is not going to work for me, and I literally cannot rest until I take the action I’m being prodded into by my inner guidance.

Mostly that has meant, once again, learning to be okay with disappointing myself and other people. I’ve had to rearrange some tutoring clients to better accommodate my needs, rather than fitting myself in around their lives. I’ve had to let go of being able to manage our entire household, and instead pick just one thing to do, like keeping the kitchen clean. I’ve had to learn to speak up and say, no thanks-please don’t tell me about the C DIF research you’ve been doing on the Internet, or all the illness horror stories other people are sharing with you, because that makes me feel worse, not better.

Today I’ve had to learn how to be all right with the fact that I feel bad-Just. ‘Cuz. There’s nothing to investigate, and nothing to blame. In my recovery, today is just a day where I don’t feel good. Today the best I can say is that I was here, and I showed up for this day. And eventually, this day will pass.

So I had this big plan to write a whole “2007 In Review” post today. But I’m not, because I don’t feel good.

I’ve treated it pretty lightly here, but the truth is that I’ve actually been really sick for the past three months, and am probably looking at a few months of recovery and recuperation.

Fortunately I was told about this great website called CaringBridge, which is a free, nonprofit web service that connects family and friends to share information, love and support during a health care crisis, treatment and recovery.

If you’d like to check out my page, read a little more about my experience with C DIF, or sign my guest book, you can find me here:

Jenny’s CaringBridge site

Here’s to a happy, healthy 2008 for us all!

Today I had a follow up visit with Science.

This visit went much better than last week’s, because I was able to be seen right away, plus Robert-the-blood-guy knew exactly where to stick me in order to insure the least possible blood-taking drama.

I also met the doctor who is supervising Science.

Good News: He completely believed me when I told him that I’m experiencing reactive arthritis as a result of this illness. (Which was good for him as well, because I had loudly declared to the Universe at large that if one more person said to me, “Hm, I’ve never heard of arthritis happening as a result of C DIF”, I was going to punch them in the face.)

Bad News: When I asked him how long I could expect the arthritis to last he said, “I don’t really know. You’re the first person I’ve ever seen who had it.” (Important Cross-Referencing Note: See also, Being A Trailblazer, And Why Sometimes It Totally Sucks Ass)

Before I could leave I had to let Science take my vitals, a process which really didn’t go very well last time (as you may recall). So we made it through the temperature taking, and the weighing, and then all we had left was the blood pressure reading.

So Science, who is alleged to be a registered nurse, put the cuff on my arm, pumped it so tight I could no longer feel my fingers, and then put the stethoscope…directly over my heart. And stayed there for like, an Entire. Minute. I have no idea what she was listening to-perhaps the dying moans of my poor, deprived cells as they cried out for oxygen.

Finally she realized that something wasn’t quite right.

“Oh, what am I doing?” she asked, laughing giddily.

“I have no idea,” I replied, counting down the seconds until I would be free from the clutches of Science.

And frankly, I think that’s a question you should have asked yourself a long time ago, like perhaps back during the moment in which you were choosing your future career path.

That is really unfortunate, because “they” are the people involved in treating my C DIF. Not my doctor-him, I love. But because this illness is becoming more and more of a problem, and because the medicine required for its treatment is apparently handcrafted by tiny elves who live in remote workshops in a distant land and spend all their days grinding down rare nuggets of 24-caret gold into a fine powder, carefully placing the powder into fragile, jewel-encrusted capsules, and then glazing the capsules with the wings of the silver faeries who reside in the blossoms of a flower that only blooms at the stroke of midnight on the top of the tallest mountain when the light of the moon falls gracefully across its petals, causing each individual pill to cost somewhere in the neighborhood of 850 frajillion dollars, my doctor suggested that I allow Science to step in and lend a hand.

So for the next ten days I’ll be filling out excessively detailed reports documenting every, minute bodily occurrence (as in, “Lost 5 eyelashes on upper left side at 10:39 am Saturday morning in freak gift wrapping accident”), and in exchange for all this scintillating personal data, Science is covering the cost of my treatment.

But as grateful as I am for the medicine, I must admit that I have really not been all that impressed by Science.

For example, on Wednesday I arrived at Science’s office, where I was told that I would have to complete a number of tests, undergo a short physical, and provide data on the history of my illness. Part of this data involved the taking of my vitals, which Science knew in advance that it was going to have to do. But apparently neither Science, nor anyone else in Science’s office, possessed a thermometer. So Science was forced to send its nurse (who incidentally, is also Science’s real-life daughter), to the drug store to purchase one.

Once Science was finally in possession of the necessary medical instrument, it tried valiantly to affix a protective plastic cover over the end of the thermometer before placing it in my mouth. But no matter what it tried to do, it wouldn’t fit. So Science was forced to call on the aid of her daughter, who took one look at the situation and said, “Mom, you have to take the cover of the thermometer off first, before you put the plastic part on.”

I very nearly gave up on Science at this point, but unfortunately I was too sick and tired to be able to make my escape.

Science also needed to collect some of my blood, so next we paid a visit on Robert, the guy who collects all the blood. It did not go well.

Science then informed me that I would have to return in three hours, once I’d taken my first dose of the medicine, in order for Robert to collect even more blood.

I then turned to Science, looked her dead in the eye, and said, “This medicine had Better. Fucking. Work.” And Science had no idea what to say to that, because Science is clearly used to spending all of its time with numbers, graphs, and various bodily fluids, rather than desperate, half-crazed women who have been sick for the past three months and might, at any minute, decide to rip your face right off your head and make you eat it just so they can find a little relief.

But I F-I-N-A-L-L-Y got my medicine. And the second trip to Robert was a little easier. And I have been faithfully filling out my worksheets (”At 5:04 am, right buttock began twitching uncontrollably in time to the song, “Ice, Ice, Baby”).

And even though Science did give me a little check to cover my traveling expenses, right now?

My feeling is pretty much that Science can just go ahead and suck it.