Healing by the Season

It’s been about ten weeks since they sawed a piece of my skull out and entered my brain with a knife, and recovering has been AMAZING, like an early spring. After stubbornly facing brain surgery even when it was very scary, it has been astounding how fast feeling good, even better, returned, after years of feeling mediocre. I don’t have the endless low-grade headache anymore. I can affirm I’ve already lost ten pounds only because I don’t feel the need to energize myself with food anymore. My hair fell out last fall like leaves off an aspen in October, and it is now growing back like the leaves on an aspen in spring, all at once. I’m the star patient of my doctors, an affirmation that they did the right thing.

In the same ten weeks spring sprang on us ravenously and rapidly. Such an early spring that nations are sneezing all around the northern hemisphere.  We struggle to fully enjoy it when concerns about a dry summer rise, and fires are already cropping up like the best produce offered this year. It seems that this is the perfect metaphor for my healing experience. It is nearly impossible to say, “too much, too soon,” but it looms.

I remember this particular early crocus from my miraculous recovery: we were all a chatter of excitement about my return from the land of the dead after my surgery, and it was ravishing! Just like before the evidence of any spring blossoms or greening up even at the edge of a sidewalk, the birds knew everything was going to be all right, we also knew that my brain made it through the roughest patch. Lots of chirping.  Ah. This was one of the happiest moments of my life so far. It didn’t matter that there was still snow here and there. Even though there were the few things I needed to straighten out along the way all that really mattered was that I could bask in consciousness. I could walk, talk and even write somewhat. The birds returned.

Then the amazing buds arrived as I began walking my dog, Lucille, around the trails, and the days became longer, and the sun became warmer. As my body returned to functioning, I was overwhelmed by the beauty around me to the point that I saw shapes, forms, colors as never before and felt the need to begin expressing them as shapes, forms and colors of pastel on paper. The buds blossomed and the drawings blossomed and it was gorgeous inside and outside of my brain. It was one tree after another, one painting after another and the birds upped their ante and sang for connections, and so did I.

It was a thrill to feel better, so much so that when invited to do something that I’d been saying, “No, can’t do that now,” for six months, I struggled to hesitate at all and often slipped into saying, “Yes! Yes, please!” It would have been impossible for the crab apple trees to second-guess their beautiful early blossoms. Wouldn’t it? I simply bloomed with, “Yes,” to everything that was offered at first, until the storm arrived and blew the energy of my artwork out the door because there were other things I’d promised. The wind and sleet blew all of the crab apple trees’ blossoms off before the bees and butterflies made it out of hibernation. I felt sorry for the trees, and this caused me some vague self-pity too. I felt concerned that, perhaps, I should have paid attention to the doctors who urged me to take things slowly.  Yet, I wanted to live up to what I had committed to somehow. It felt unnatural to say, “No,” anymore, even though I was often embarrassed by the result of “phenomenal me” disintegrating. How to stop bursting back, I wondered?

Still, it isn’t exactly like I was returned to mediocrity exactly, any more than the trees sucked in their buds for a later date that would have been healthier. It was some other disconnect. For instance, I’m a good cook and so, almost immediately on release from the hospital, I started cooking for my husband and family and was greatly relieved that I could pick this up where I left off, to the point where I backed away from the help offered me by others. Another early blossom? Yes. Oops. I was like a two year old saying, “I do it myself!”

Now, when my children ask me a question, or I get an idea to write a poem or draw a picture, my attention shifts from cooking COMPLETELY. I burn dinner. I simply forget I am cooking dinner. I can’t say that never happened before brain surgery. I can only say that it was not often, and now it is often. It ain’t incense. I realize late that the lovely assistance of having people help me to cook had nothing to do with my cooking abilities, but with the ability of my brain to focus on more than one thing at a time. I feel silly about asking for help when I am often fine, and unpredictable in my “need” mode, and so it boils down to something else, too.

What do I give my attention to? Necessities? Expressions? Requests? Questions? Decisions? Bah! At least, I am sleeping through the night again.

Kim the Knowing

Multi-tasking turns out to be impossible at the moment. This spring has been strange with all the trees blooming at once somehow, and for me explosions of poetry and the ability to read more than a paragraph and DRIVING my car again happened to me all at once. Oh man. Driving. It is so gratifying to be able to go to pick my kids up from school, to go to the grocery store again when I forgot to buy something (so very often). The trees get their leaves, and  I get my responsibilities.

My concern rises again: Where are the bees?  Normally it is too early to be buzzing around efficiently. They’re just now emerging from their hives a month after all the blossoms. I have seen only one butterfly and the lilacs are in full bloom. The lawns mowed now, but the mountains’ snow is already running down to ponds in a sorry manner so that I see geese and ducks fighting each other for the right to lay their eggs at the few sustainable places. Life cannot happen all at once. I am also the most gigantic spring sneeze I can remember, as I collapse every few days from this, yes,  too-much-too-soon scenario.

Grasping for relief I ask myself, what could I calm down reasonably? I noticed the birds were calmer during mid-day. Not so much chatter. What were they doing? I found that they were nesting. There were the birds flying by with twigs and grass from last year in their little beaks. No time to talk. I followed their direction. Stop chatting so much! I apologize. I have to stop talking all day and focus on building my creations, and this is a huge leap for me into a new state of being. It means I don’t just lay my eggs (my creations) along the way, leave them there for another chance. Actually I create a safe place for them to develop and stay with them until they hatch. Hawks spending chunks of time surfing on the warm funnels of air that rise from the fields give me perspective to see the big picture and not just temporary glories. Maybe if I focused on creating quietly and in a self-protected zone during the day, then I could actually start cooking dinner at 5 pm. Well, it is a thought at least.

Meanwhile the lawn-mowing has brought up a new realization. Summer is almost here. There will be days of tending to things and days where nothing will be tended, and my husband will be out of town for work, and it will be hot and slow. There is only so much time for each thing when only one thing can be done at a time. My kids are growing up so fast. Complexities must be abandoned now. I simply must say, “no,” and clip back at the incredible desire to say “yes” to everything with the understanding this will keep the growth fresh for a while longer.

Maybe it was the scare of having an arrow fly through my life, a brain tumor, and the joy that  life blooms here now. I know it is possible for me to focus only on my own priorities: my creative projects, my family and my time.  Yes, there are going to be fewer blooms, but timed for fruit-bearing pollination hopefully.  

I am improving at the artificial life tests thrust at me by the Universe to see if I know what I know. I see the familiar comfort they offer -- those old ways of pleasing others with predictable patterns, so many blushes of color, guaranteed to squeeze out some approval. I see how that serves no purpose in the long-run. This time I bloomed wildly and early, and I know why. I’ve seen what happens when I walk right into what I fear, and it is good.   There is no pity in the lessons of early spring, the mistakes and sneezes, the blooming gorgeousness. There is no pity knowing it will pass into a summer that will require attention and focus like no other. To every season, turn, turn, turn….

Dealing with Discouragement

First Crack at Serious Self-Portrait

There is nothing to be overly discouraged about brain surgery. Honestly, it is a beautiful thing to be able to take care of a tumor, benign or malignant, in one’s head in 21st century America. There’s been vast improvement in the last couple of decades. Since I started talking and writing about the experience I have sensed the need to be open about everything that has happened, if for no other reason than to point to this truth. That statistics point to survival of this surgery at 98% should make this obvious, but the responses ran the gamut from hand-wringing despair to joyful prayer. It is simply hard to imagine opening up the skull and having a decent experience without those prayers, but the techniques and technology are pretty impressive.

This is not to say that discouragement doesn’t exist. Anyone who has read this blog for a while knows well that I have had some real downer moments. It wasn’t so much the surgery itself, but my body’s reaction to some of the preparation, and my mind’s genuine impatience and control freakishness with everything. Now that I’m five weeks out and clearly doing well, I can talk about some of the setbacks I’ve had in recovery without jumping up and down hysterically over them.

An obvious one, to me, is that I’m having a time with writing. I know what I want to write, but getting it out coherently is a real challenge. It’s not the big things. I think that the big, overall ideas are coming out okay, but, sentence-by-sentence, I am recently shocked by how difficult some of them are to read. What I’m used to taking for granted, words flowing out of my brain, I now have to take a step back from and wait for some clarity. It is as if everything I’m writing comes out a bit convoluted, and it horrifies me. I’m sorry about that because in social media, blogging, and poetry I’m used to shooting from the hip.  When I go back and read some response or even a blog, and realize I used the wrong word, or forgot grammar altogether so that the meaning had drained out of the words I got right, or just used to many redundancies, it is discouraging. The time it took to write seemed so blasted long before, that now I am a bit intimidated to start the projects I have in mind until this settles down.

I hope it settles down.

Additionally, I’ll tell you, I’m wondering if this has always been the case (convolution in my writing), in fact. Is it possible that it only just now that I’m becoming aware of it because the obstruction has been taken away? That’s possible. That would explain a lot about my career. That makes my hands sweat, just considering it.

That may be why I'm so happy to be doing visual art instead, and that's not too bad a trade at the moment.

While Cottonwoods Sleep

Then there are the issues of swelling around nerves, facial and tongue numbness paired with pain zapping and dry eye (only one dry eye). They don’t really tell you that in any surgery they’re likely to strike some nerves and push them out of balance one way or another. It happens, and mostly it simply takes some time to heal.

How do nerves heal, you may wonder. Well, I wondered, too, because I figured if I had an idea of how the nerves reset, or heal then I might be able to support the process and feel less worried about it. My research led me in many directions as usual. Perhaps, more importantly, I have cause to simply pay attention to the process unfolding, because some days it really bothers me and some days I forget about it.

So, guess, what? I’m writing about nerves and emotional turns, and it’s going to take me at least a week to put it down straight enough to post comfortably. In the meantime, enjoy the burst of spring this weekend, if it is happening near you, and be truly thankful for your face and tears and even runny allergic noses.

The Long and Winding Road...Leads Me to Me

It has nearly been a full month since I had my skull opened and the little-gray-ball-of-dirty-laundry removed. What a month! It started with what I can only describe as partial delirium. I was so happy to have the thing out of my head, and I suppose the morphine, and anesthesia sort of had me on a different plain of perception for a while. Yet, I was a lot less delirious than I had really expected to be, to be honest. 

Fionn, the Modern Muse

Soon after surgery I woke up and in my daze recognized and remembered where I was and what had just happened. I saw my ancient Neurologist, Dr. Philip Yarnell, across the room and shouted out a, “Hello, Dr. Yarnell!” to him, and I think that sort of surprised him and he came right over and tested how I was responding to left and right movements like touching my nose with my eyes closed with the fingers he chose, and moving my toes. Afterwards, he said, “Yep, you’re going to be just fine.”

At that point I felt no pain but I was terribly thirsty and so I asked for water, but all they could give me was ice cubes to suck on and little sponges to dip into water and suck on. So I did. This was followed by my husband and father bounding into the big room together with smiles on their faces, delighted that I was so chirpy.

Then my Neurosurgeon, Dr. Mark Robinson, walked in to talk to them, and as they talked, I felt some kind of relieving sleepiness. I remember Dr. Robinson pointing at my head, and nodding and I remember them asking some questions and him answering, but I have no real memory of the words, even though I am pretty sure I participated in the conversation as if I were very intelligent indeed. Har.

I was taken care of in Intensive Care for a surprising two days. I say it was surprising only because apparently they expected I’d be going home after two days, and that didn’t quite happen. As good as their intentions were, some things got kind of icky.

Devora is Awake

Before I go there, I want to tell you that I did something very important to my recovery unbeknownst to the medical folks. In secret I took a large dose of Arnica the morning before surgery and then when I got to my ICU room I had Michael bring me a second large dose of Arnica. This homeopathic medication has helped me in previous medical crises (oral surgery, and a hysterectomy) to recover super-fast and very well, with little bruising. I encourage you to sincerely consider finding more about it if you’re facing surgery. Unfortunately, you cannot discuss it with a surgeon or the nursing staff because they don’t work with it, and will rule against it. Someday, I hope this will change because I've healed fast enough to get wide eyes from the doctors...

In ICU, meanwhile, they were pumping me full of Morphine and all kinds of other medications that my body is not fond of at all. Sadly. By the time it was dark outside, I was vomiting in a little pail the nurse quickly provided for me. As I was recovering she started putting in an intravenous dose of Dilantin. If you don’t remember how badly I reacted to the first time I took Dilantin, let me say that my reaction to this way of taking the medication was near paralysis. I made her take it out after only a 1/4th of the dose was given and I could feel it as it climbed up my arm and into my head, like a march of pick axes within my veins. I screamed. I admit it. I screamed. I shouted at her that this was not the way we were going to do anything. I asked her if she had bothered to give me any antihistamines or Zantac (could this be why I was throwing up, perhaps???). What followed is that I had to review with every shift nurse exactly how the medication business was going to work, and I would not let them use the intravenous hoses for anything but water and anti-nausea medications. I stopped taking the morphine and moved to oral Percocet and oxycodone. I didn’t really care if I had a little more pain. I was very self-advocating and protective. 

Meanwhile, the left side of my face swelled up like a puffer fish. I got a black eye that I could barely open. Frankly, I think I had a severe allergic reaction to the entire experience. I looked no different in those moments than I had when I’d reacted to the cotton harvest on my Pretty Pa’s combine in the Rio Grande Valley some 42 years earlier. I had to build up all the anti-histamines in my system and the hospital pharmacy didn’t actually carry one of the anti-histamines, nor the Zantac I’d been taking leading up to the surgery, so my dear husband had to go to the grocery store and purchase what I needed. The hospital didn’t even have the oral Dilantin to fill in the missing 3/4s of a dose of it for several hours.

After two days they moved me to a regular room and they removed the blessed catheter and I was able to move around my room when I rung up the nurse to remove whatever IV was hooked up, the blood pressure arm squeeze and the ever-marching leg thingies. Ah. That was such a blessing. Finally, a neurosurgeon on call at the hospital came and cut the gauze turban off of me, and told me I could take a shower. Hallelujah! I thought I’d be going home right afterwards, but apparently, not.

All this time, my husband sat quietly next to me, reading his phone in the dark or daytime. I must have slept now and then, but I don’t remember sleeping lots. 

Another two days went by. I watched some television and really couldn’t perceive how so many stupid infomercials could exist. I tried to watch news, but settled on The Weather 

Oriah Enjoys the Lake

Channel. That was the only television that made a lot of sense to me. Passing storms, wind, sunshine and snow. I would then dream of the sets of shows and watch people walk in and out of these sets that were actually their lives, and how the world beyond the sets they believed in was totally different, open to change, neutral. The sets were set, but they were not true reality. They were perceptions that had thin walls, and the potential of being blown away in storms. Beyond the sets was a world or a dimension of reality that had not been decided on yet, and I could walk in it.

Another set of dreams I had placed me back in 1996, when I was at another turning point. After eleven years in a difficult and abusive marriage, I had determined that I had to begin living my own life and pursuing the things I was truly interested in. I had done three years of weekly therapy and was meditating daily and my creative spirit was expanding in many new directions. My dream then was to write very artistic, visual scripts about lives that were not easy, poetry and to create a new Tarot Deck called “The Cosmic Egg”. I was ready to consider leaving my first husband (now wasband) and even our house that I had painted wall murals and re-landscaped with a triskelion and a fire pit, a forest of gingkoes and redwoods, California poppies and tea tree bushes. Still the only person who knew that my husband was abusive was my therapist, and so when my therapist became abusive and insisted that I wanted to have an affair with him, my evolution unraveled rather quickly. 

Within four months I went from my first steps towards independence backwards into a desire to be approved of by supporting my husband, and even finally fulfilling his wish to have a family. I turned my therapist in to the board, and I gave my husband a cut up condom for his birthday. I went from being a part-time freelancer with time to paint and write, to a full-time publishing consultant with no time to even mother the child I was pregnant with, so that by the end of the year I would have a personal assistant, a housekeeper, a gardener, and a year later a nanny. I insisted giving up the house with my murals painted, and moved into a swanky Spanish Colonial that may have once been a boarding house to Charles Bukowski on the two block street named after my favorite inventor, Nikolai Tesla. I went from $25 dollars in the bank to making $15k a month. Yes, all of this really happened that quickly. It was all for approval from my first husband, from my friends at the time, from my parents, and I got it. And, it undid my chosen road very precisely. 

Alma in Her Habitat

Oddly, the dreams I had were very much about saying good-bye to those mistakes peacefully and accepting that my dreams continued painfully, like a forgotten and downgraded pavement next to the approved highway, throughout the last fifteen years. The dreams continued to be alive even if they were fought against as distractions from cleaning the house and taking care of my children and seeking approval from everyone. In one dream I told my husband of 1996 that I loved him, but that it was time to move on. In other dreams I made peace with my children and told them that their independence was crucial to me.

The doctors sent me home from the hospital on the fifth day, and the dreams continued in my hour and a half naps, and even as I was awake until they felt processed and comprehended. I found it hard to concentrate on “reality” to the point where I was occasionally overly grumpy at the disturbance of life to the unconscious realm I had such good connection with for the moment. I hate to admit that I occasionally snapped, and apparently this is common for people recovering from brain surgery. The word patience is hardly enough for making a commitment to decide whether to stay in dreamland or start coming into reality.

Making these dream-level departures from the decisions I made in 1996 has been such a relief, but has also unleashed years of frustration and anger over carrying the weight of a life that led me away from my true self. Yet, in just a month I have some sense that I am reuniting with myself, putting my feet on the abandoned road, after years of pounding my head against the wall of approval...could this be the reason for the tumor?  So, as I’ve come out of the haze of medications, and gotten confirmation that the tumor was indeed benign and that it had been caught early enough to have no lasting damage, I have hope unlike any hope I’ve had for fifteen years. Though, certainly, there are temporary setbacks like the pain and lack of rest, and that the left side of my face feels like it is just coming off of Novocaine -- all the time. I feel confident that I’ve turned a corner again and found myself in the realm where the sets of my life haven’t been completely determined and there is the potential to create some new and simple realities that are better aligned with who I am now. Where the road I'm now on can find the door to this set.

I have been practicing artwork again on a daily basis, and thinking about the off-formula stories I’m always intrigued by, but had learned to reject in favor of an approved formula that I've grown to hate. I’ve been resting and waking at all hours of the day or night. I’ve been watching how my daughter, Bea, is increasingly aware of the world she is entering as a new adult, and wears her grief over her lost childhood. Then also I’ve been watching how my younger son, Lio, is already aware of some aspects of adulthood that excite him to the point where he’s leaped ahead of the family at age eleven to webbify his life with video streaming, video chats and group games.

Dear Quimby in Pastel Land

My wasband has been as supportive as he can be, and taken time with the children that I normally would have had. He is who he is still, and they’ve both had terrible colds that lasted longer than a week and needed some Mommified assistance. So, both children have had extra days here and there, but only one at a time.

Finally, my dear husband has been carrying the load of my transportation, childcare and household upkeep for some six months now, and has concurrently become increasingly responsible for projects at work. He’s like a Lancelot, courageously determined to see that things get done because they need to get done, and at the same time exhausted, and falling into the river of forgetfulness because there is just too much on his mind. Now, poor man has collapsed with fatigue and the caught bug of his step-children. 

This leaves me, only me, to be fully conscious and begin taking care of business, too. I’m glad to say that I can to some degree, and that what I can’t do, I’m actually fine about not receiving approval. This is a leap for me. I will hang on more determinedly to the emerging unconscious knowledge I’ve always had and hidden from by trying other roads that might be worthy of rewards outside of me. This, for me, is real healing because finally I comprehend that the road I'm on now leads me to my own door.