Aortic Valve: Again
I got the call. The call said what I thought it might–it needs to get done, again. (the first was done in 1998) This time it’s planned, planned like they always said they should be planned. This is the first time I’ve been able to plan, I mean really plan without anything crazy leading me to force it-he said a month or two. May seems like it might be a good plan–April seems less solid to me, but I guess we’ll see what she says. She, being the nurse who’s going to help me schedule this. I was going to film the whole thing, but it ended up happening sooner than expected, he calling to kind of jar me from a show coma I’ve been in since watching From. I am still inside it. but I know I have to crawl out to get myself in the right mind frame to get out of this surgery alive.
Sure, it’s annoying–it sucks to keep having to go through this, but one thing I’ve realized is shit happens because shit happens all the time. You are either stagnant or moving, and I’ve maybe taken the moving thing a little too literally and maybe moved entirely too much. Obviously lots of the later ones were of necessity–us moving back East was the necessity of having to have the heart surgery but running out of health insurance, our lease expiring and not able to afford COBRA and that-the need for a change to get us somewhere better because getting priced out of CO was just going to get worse. I keep continuing to have to move to follow the whims of my body, often leading me to different places-and right now I am sitting in a place where my support system is my husband. I have no other friends I can call up, I don’t talk to really anyone, I just try to write what I can and get my plans together for my life when I finally start it again. I’m kidding but lately I’ve been less than motivated, wondering when I can get this mess out of my chest, always there to mess the progress up.
I don’t think I have been someone who has experienced PTSD from this because I’ve understand it’s just been stuff that’s happened to me. I didn’t do anything to deserve it, I didn’t blow lines of cocaine and hurt myself–I didn’t do anything karmically to hurt anybody–I try to help everyone I can and I do what I can to help myself. I might lack the discipline for over-achievement, but if I had more energy to move myself I would be pretty outstanding.
The hospitals often give me comfort, see. They’ve been places where I have experienced the comfort and care I never really got anywhere else. This was because I had some pretty beautiful nurses along the way who really took care of me. I’m a little afraid to see how badly they’ve been brutalized and if they have any empathy left for people like me. The pain I always realized was pain you have to go through when your genes fail, as was clearly the case with me. But I never asked to be born, like none of us have, and that’s about as much as I’ve let anything hurt me at all. it’s just bad shit that happens, and you often need to move past the bad shit that happens and remember you don’t have any responsibility a lot of the time. I can control my own reactions to things-that’s been the lesson I’ve learned–but the rest, clearly no. Sure I can control my movements and actions through the day, but the larger influences we don’t always have full control over, and those are the things that give us our experience.
So next steps are: cutting out all things bad for me, that’s drinking, most red meat, no smoking of any green anymore which is what I did for pain and anxiety. I started taking MSM so that’s been helpful in terms of joint pain. The diet continues, but I should try and regulate it a bit. Banana, blueberries, walnuts every day. Cherry juice, salmon 2x a week, avocado, mushrooms. I will regulate the vitamins, even it all out and test for thinness. I am getting an ONX, a loud motherfucker, so hopefully Don will be okay with it. But I will do the maximum thing for maximum all of it and document my progress here. I will be doing the videos, I am not overly excited about it, but maybe that will help me get some money somehow, though I don’t plan on being overly obnoxious with ad banners at all.
So here we go. Another one. One other thing I will be doing pre-surgery is getting my walls up because there is no chance I will be doing that after within any reasonable timeframe. So rug, chair and walls and I will be a happy one. I will be doing most of the recovery alone aside from my friend Alyse, who has been here twice since we moved, once last month and once when we moved here–she’s volunteered so we will see. At this point I don’t have anyone besides D and he makes the money so I don’t want to punish him–I just have to hope my brain makes it through with some magic so I have to find some books and write a few things out to help me through this all. I don’t have PTSD but you do need to guide yourself through the motions if you can–set yourself up for the best experience possible, burn all that worry out of your head.
And here is where I would add my middle finger to this life if I had a photo of one easy.
