The body remembering

I haven't been moving very much in the past three weeks. Or rather, I've been stuck in a hunched over position: at the computer, over my handle bars, propped up against pillows. I've been sick, there was my sister's wedding, I've been sick. A cold and not enough sleep was all it took to give Lyme some room to play. I'm feeling much better now. Not completely back to where I was a month ago, but better.

The past week, I've felt stiff and stuck in my upper back and neck and locked up through my ribs. I knew the whole time that it was because I've done not really much of anything at all. This morning the sun woke me up at eight am and I knew that it was time to get out there. I laced on my shoes and hit the road, promising myself that I'd take it slow and steady, nice and easy.

This is what I love about running: my body reverts to ideal posture as I go. I only ran three miles, nice and slow, but the second half, my abs turned on and shifted my ribs back and my spine opened up. I felt long and fluid and easy. I felt so good, I couldn't even remember what pain and stiffness had felt like an hour before. I felt perfectly right in my alignment.

The body knows, the body wants to heal, wants to maintain perfect alignment (which, of course, is dynamic). I just have to remember to give it the space it needs to find it.

the daily practice

This morning I woke with a fever and sore throat and that horrible lung congestion that feels like catarrh and always comes after I've had a drink. In this case, I'd had two glasses of wine at my sister's three days ago and haven't been getting much sleep at all and the symptoms had been slowly coming on since Wednesday. Here it is, Saturday morning, and I had to bail on plans with a friend. Again. I hate cancelling on friends, especially last minute like I did this morning.

I got to thinking about what I could be doing to change this pattern of mine--of going out and doing everything I want until I reach the point of collapse and then bailing on all plans at the last minute, sleeping for days and then going out and doing everything I want until I get sick again--and it's so obvious but I resent it so much that I haven't been able to see it. I need to consider getting well and taking care of myself a daily practice. In the way that I write daily and meditate daily, I need to make those choices to keep me well daily. Yea, it was just two glasses of wine on Wednesday night but I know that that sends my health plummeting within hours.

Its the same for people with chronic injuries. I used to assist in the athletic training department at Hunter College and these kids who were playing sports would come in right after they'd been injured and then never follow up with either the exercises we gave them or with appointments--until right before a big game or meet, when they'd come bursting into the office, demanding that we fix them right then, they had a game in three hours. It drove me crazy, both how these kids treated their bodies and their expectations of us. and yet, it's essentially how I have been treating myself. I am burned out on taking care of myself, of feeling always on the edge of getting sick again, of never quite being able to step into the life I want to live for fatigue and a vague sense of unwell. It comes down to this: to the choices I make daily, to making the choices that I need to make to keep myself well and getting better every day instead of justifying them with, it's just one glass of wine, or, I'll be fine not sleeping tonight. It's not easy but the alternative sucks.

None of us exist in a vacuum

This article is the latest in a series of articles that I’ve read or stories I’ve been told (my friend went fishing with his friend, who is a fisherman. They caught a fish and my friend says, “You can’t sell that fish, it’s sick.” And his friend says, “all the fish are sick. I sell fish sicker than this all the time.”)  that stop me and make me really see that we are all interconnected, that nothing stands alone in this world and that our actions ripple out and affect everything.

The descriptions in this article, of the absence of bird calls, of the interminable mire of floating garbage, of fishermen trawling reefs of everything living make me really stop and think about my food choices. Last night, I made fish tacos and they were delicious. But if the oceans are dead, and much other meat we get in this country so polluted, the current trend towards veganism begins to make so much more sense to me. I was a vegetarian for ten years and have been a rapacious meat-eater for the past ten but over the past few months, I keep coming back to the idea that maybe, right now, with the environment clogged with chemicals, meat stuffed with antibiotics and fed who knows what and the oceans and rivers and streams dying, perhaps it is time to change what and how I eat.

The obvious reason would be, if the fish that I can get are indeed sick (and farmed fish are dirtier than anything) and I am working my way out of a long bout with chronic Lyme, why would I eat it? As a nutritionist once told me, what I eat literally becomes me on a molecular level so eating polluted food just adds another layer of crud for my immune system to deal with. There is this: choosing not to eat animals or animal products for my own personal health. And there is recognizing that, in changing my choices, I change my impact on the world around me. 

I'm not sure what I am going to do; I used to believe that I could eat consciously raised meat infrequently and not negatively affect the environment but reading "The Ocean is Broken" hit home for me more than anything else that we are nearing (or at) the breaking point. Over the past years, I have weeded out anything processed and moved towards mostly organic eating but we're long past that being enough now. Especially since Fukushima, I have been pretty careful about the fish I eat (nothing from the Pacific) but now I am going to stop eating it altogether. Food choice, I realize, is not enough alone, but it is a starting point and already, my perspective shifts.

Injuries as teachers

One of my mentors always used to say that insanity is to keep doing the same thing and expect different results. But this is how most people end up with injuries that affect the quality of their lives.

Most of my clients have found me because of their injuries and pain and most people that I work have injuries that got worse over time, from the low back pain that started in law school and then became utterly debilitating after a few years of work to the generalized achy knee and hip that made distance running impossible. It seems to me that there is always an element of mystery to many people about their body that stems from a lack of understanding of how it works and an inability to listen to it—or to trust their own instincts about their body. I think that it is this, this unknowing, that keeps people from moving out of the ruts and patterns of habit to try new things when pain presents.

At any rate, so many people that I work with seem to have waited until what had been a minor injury has become debilitating and its effects have spiderwebbed out into their lives, stopping them from doing what they love or, worse, making day to day functioning a challenge. 

I think that injuries can be our teachers. They can be the way in to understanding and knowing the body and learning a new way of being and doing what you do. The trick is learning to listen, to not freaking out or denying the first sign of pain but to sit with it and to begin to reach learn what is going on with alignment or movement or stress to unwind it. As we go down the route of reaching out to various practitioners, we can learn from them and start informing our own choices and understanding of the body, choosing to supplement or weave in new habits not just to alleviate pain but to promote a healthier more resilient body overall.

Summer's end

Summer comes to an end just as I am finishing up some of the hardest months of my life. I just finished nearly six months on a super-aggressive antibiotic treatment for Lyme disease again—years after I thought I’d never have to go back on them again. Being on any medication long-term is hard on the body and so is coming off of it.

Sick sucks. It’s limiting at best. At worst, it makes the best moments miserable. These days I am in awe at how easy life is when I feel well.

I had plans to end this phase of treatment in style by heading back out to Burning Man but I bailed at the last minute. I have outgrown it. It is so easy for people to say, “Well, yea, outgrow it already. It's just a party in the desert,” but for me, it is about so much more than sex, drugs and electronica. It was the first thing that I did after being diagnosed that made me believe myself to be a part of this world. The first year I went out, four years into treatment, I was still so sick that I slept most of the time, the same as if I were at home, and had to watch myself carefully so that I didn’t collapse.

Out there on the playa, after years of living close to home, of hooking up to an IV at breakfast and dinner, of living the saddest half-life I could have ever imagined, I felt like a part of something communal, something bigger than myself instead of isolated outside of it. Becoming a part of the world again allowed me to believe in my potential to heal and grow stronger.

I have outgrown Burning Man, yes, but not in the way of someone in her mid-thirties has outgrown partying like a 25-year-old. Years following my first burn, even with knock-me-on-my-ass treatment, I do live with both feet in this world. It’s taken a lot for me to get here, though, and it all started by being around the crazy vibrancy of people playing in the desert. Years of shuffling from doctor to doctor and wilting under a barrage of medication, I had forgotten how to play and laugh. I had forgotten how wonderful life is.

This year, instead of dancing under the open sky, wild and free, I want quiet and the chance to tend to myself. This city is giving quiet to me right now—San Francisco is never so vacant as mid-week into the burn. I am healthier than I have ever been, but I still have a ways to go.  I want quiet because I am finding that the hardest thing so far about chronic illness is putting together a life when the illness is nearly over. It feels a little bit like showing up to dinner when everyone is already on dessert.

Closing the door

I am on antibiotics again, since I finally acknowledged being sick again back in February. This summer has been brutally hard to live through. When I was first diagnosed with Lyme disease ten years ago I had to grapple with my own mortality (which I wrote about for Seven Ponds here) intimately. Though I prepared myself to die, through all my healing, I never closed that door.
Working through the past months of antibiotics, I finally realized that--that I'd never really chosen to be fully in this life again, that I'd kept one foot inching towards the door out all the time.

In having to admit that I was sick again, in going back to the doctors' again and going back into treatment, I had to stop denying that I have a chronic illness. Moving out of denial was painful but I hadn't even suspected the aftereffects of it: that in acceptance, I also stepped firmly into this world and closed that door.

On Acceptance

Lyme disease reared its ugly head in my life way back in July. Nine months ago. I made sure that I brushed the night sweats and daily fevers off as ‘just fighting off a cold’ or “that nasty flu that is going around.” I ignored the fact that I was blowing off more and more commitments because of fatigue, always promising to reschedule things to some vague time in a two weeks or so when I was sure that I would be feeling so much better and have more time.

It took the past three weeks of intense sore throats, disorientation and not being able to get out of bed again for me to admit that what is going on, that what has been going on, is a recurrence of the disease that has shaped my life.

The past few months I have been unduly harsh to the people around me as I have been filled with fury and flipping between rage and depression as I’ve become less and less able at keeping on top of my life. I felt like I was fraying at the seams and stumbling to get to work. Finally, last Friday, I admitted to myself that I was experiencing a recurrence of Lyme Disease, that it wouldn’t pass just by waiting it out, that I haven’t been sick with the ‘never ending flu,’ as I had begun to refer to it.

I'd gone in to see Matt again, for an MAT session, and he asked how my body was doing.

"Well," I said, "it hurts. But I don't think that it's injury but a Lyme flare-up."

"What does a Lyme flare-up look like," he asked me.

"Weird muscular pain and achy joints and just feeling like I am about to get the flu."

"And how long does a flare-up last?"

"Oh, a few weeks," I said, but as I said it, I realized that I'd been complaining about these symptoms since the holidays. No, since the end of summer. Since I started a fellowship back in July. Oh shit. I'd managed to completely ignore that the sum of the symptoms I'd been experiencing was Lyme.

Once I’d admitted to myself and accepted that I was dealing with Lyme Disease again, I began making different choices out of respect for where I am, health wise, and what I need to do to get better. I have different expectations for myself and have begun to treat myself gently instead of forcing myself to get it all done, right now, no matter how I feel. I reached out to family and friends. Since acceptance, I’ve become quiet, gentle and patient. There is a sense of ease to my days that didn’t exist when I was denying that I was sick.

It was incredibly difficult for me to come to this point of acceptance and I only did when I had become so sick that there was no denying it anymore. I lost almost everything of myself in my first go-around with Lyme’s that I would much prefer to deny that it’s never gone away than to deal with it.