Month: July 2018

Fears

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I used to think I wasn’t a fearful person. Armed with statistics and a healthy lifestyle, illness and accidents were part of a lottery I thought I had little chance of winning. Then I was bitten by a tick. Now I see that I had plenty of fears, I just didn’t admit to them. Except for spiders. I was afraid of spiders. Now I’m afraid of ticks.  I don’t know if I will ever willingly go into actively tick- and Lyme-infested woods. Going through the last four years again is unfathomable to me.

The list of my fears is not rational. Is anyone’s? I am scared of, in no particular order, tornadoes, earthquakes, cycling on roads, drowning in the deep ocean, and losing my daughter. Oh, and volcanoes. Being encased forever in hot magma scares the crap out of me. I realize my chances of dying in a tornado, earthquake or fire are slim to none, but they evoke a primal terror inside of me, as does drowning in deep ocean waters. These fears limit me only slightly, but I would think twice before I lived anywhere along the ring of fire, or tornado alley. Now that I live in the suburbs of Denver, fire is not a real fear, but I definitely live in fire danger country.

I am not afraid of flying, drunk drivers, snakes, mice, or smaller spiders. Large, unexpected spiders make me jump, but I’m not gonna die of fright or anything. I should frightened by cancer, falling down in my own home, fire, heart attacks, strokes, and gunfire, but I’m not. I am less and less afraid of death. I do retain a perfectly healthy fear of how I die.

Getting into existential fears is pointless. Of course I’m afraid of failure, success, commitment, being alone, love, not being in love,  and why I exist at all. I’m not particularly afraid of speaking in front of people or rejection. Any sane person should be afraid of being shamed in public or shunned. I think I probably should have titled this ‘My Personal Fears’. Fears, like one’s belief system is highly personal. No two person’s lists are the same, really. I might argue that these two parameters truly define who one is.

This completely informal list of neuroses has changed, obviously. Life experiences shape one’s fears. Fears about illness and aging have moved to the front For instance, is Lyme like polio? Will it come back with a vengeance when I’m older and physically vulnerable? What if I do something foolish, like trying to descend a flight of stairs with two suitcases while I’m traveling and fall? What is I’m working in the yard and have a stroke? I never gave a moment’s thought to any of these scenarios when I was young. The slow, inexorable accumulation of insults, injuries and illnesses has changed my list.

My fear of ticks is actually grounded in statistics and science. Global warming has exacerbated the upswing of vector-borne diseases. Mosquitos, ticks, and fleas hang around longer because there are less sub-freezing days. We encroach more and more on natural habitats of the deer, mice and other animals these insects feed on, exposing ourselves to an ever growing list of diseases. There are diseases in the water and dirt around us. Houstonians know this firsthand after hurricane Harvey. Southwesterners know that Hanta virus and Valley Fever fungus live in the dust and can kill. People who live where mosquitos are know about Zika and West Nile Fever. I don’t think my fears on this front are misplaced.

With Lyme, I have discovered earlier than some people that I am terrified of losing my mind. I think I could live with loss of mobility, or hearing, but I’m not sure. I also think I could live with chronic pain, but I’m not sure. I am positive I cannot live with the loss of cogent thinking.

As I wrote out my list of significant fears, I left out the everyday fears, the ones I have carried most of my life, because I wasn’t quite aware of them. The biggest one is protecting my deaf side. I do not climb trees. I do not place myself in physically precarious situations, like bungee jumping, cliff diving or skiing. I guard that side of myself unconsciously and zealously. This is another fear, like ticks, where my fear is valid and my vigilance necessary. The other constant fear didn’t begin until thirty-one years ago, when Katie was born. I share this fear with nearly every parent, the thought that I might lose Katie before I die is always there, a kind of low-level current that trips when she’s driving late on a snowy night and I haven’t heard from her, or when she gets sick.

Lifestyle and genetic illnesses don’t scare me at all. My biggest indulgences are smoking pot off and on, depending on how sick I am, and salty chips. I don’t have a family history because I’m adopted. Aside from Lyme, I have zero health problems. No high blood pressure, no cancerous moles or heart problems. No medications outside of Lyme. I tend to feel my chances of cancer are dictated by genetic mutations and bad luck, so I play that lottery without worrying. If it happens, it happens. I’ve worn sunscreen virtually my whole life (thanks, Mom!) and have had one sunburn.

So that’s it. A somewhat incomplete list, to be sure, because I could reel off a whole other list of minor anxieties and half-baked fears. But these are the biggies, both rational and irrational. Right now, and perhaps for the rest of my life, Lyme disease remains the hulking specter that overshadows all other fears.

 

 

 

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priorities

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I am bouncing back from a particularly shitty relapse. I’m feeling overwhelmed and hopeless, like I can’t manage my own life anymore. The worst part of this relapse and aftermath has been mental. If you haven’t heard from me in a while, you are not alone. I prefer to be wiggy in private. To add to all this crap, it’s been four years since I was bitten by a tick. FOUR YEARS. I’ve read anecdotal evidence that people have relapses around the same time they were bitten. If so, it makes perfect sense that I relapse now. On top of that auspicious milestone, heat causes some Lyme patients (me included) to feel much worse.

This one blindsided me. I was, I thought, on the road to real recovery. And so began valuable lesson #1 with Lyme ‘recovery’: plan to relapse at any time whether you like it or not. The hallmarks of any valuable lesson is suffering, humility, pain, and a bunch of other emotions I avoid. Denial, my old bitch of a friend (denial is female in my world), came for a nice visit until I dragged my ass to my LLMD. It seems that my bugs like my brain. It’s where they hide when I’m feeling good. He announced the return of bartonella. YUCK! Bartonella is the worst. Sore feet, sore teeth, ear pains, headaches, neck aches, muscle aches, creaky joints, muscle cramps, watery, itchy, achy eyeballs, and mental problems. I love a good euphemism, and “mental problems” is right up there with “small setback” and “not too bad”. Why is it so hard for me to admit to depression, anger, anxiety, hopelessness, lack of motivation, and obsessive compulsiveness? Everybody has some of these feeling sometimes. If anything, I should announce them like a badge of honor, because I have bugs in my brain.

Denial left the house and self-pity moved in. I wallowed around with him (of course self-pity is male!) like a pig in a mud bath for a few weeks. I cleaned. I cooked. I slept a LOT, walked the dogs and gardened very early while it was still cool. That was all I could manage. Self-pity is that friend who doesn’t like any of your other friends. After that, I had hours to fill with all those fab feelings of worthlessness, sadness and guilt. I was able to read some ‘beach read’ books, and the sheer mindless entertainment helped a little.

It wasn’t until I found Downton Abbey that self-pity had a challenge. I know, I’m late to the party. At this rate, I’ll probably start GOT in 2022, and Breaking Bad in 2024. What can I say? I was hooked. Katie will remember this as the summer her mom sat in the cool dark of her bedroom at midday, the sunlight cracking the edges of the blackout curtains, lost in the delicious machinations of the Crawley family.

My relapse was also worse because I had four months of relative clarity and sanity. Is it harder to bounce back mentally each time my brain becomes inflamed? Is it harder for anyone else in this situation? I meet so few people who suffer from episodes of an inflamed brain. Is the quality of the crazy different if it’s a chemical imbalance, rather than an illness-induced debilitation? These really aren’t the kind of questions I can ask most people. There is the possibility that I won’t ‘work through this phase’. What if I never truly get well? What if I have to live a different kind of life than I thought? What would that look like and would it be so bad?

In a sense, I’ve been given the gift of getting my priorities straight. What adjustments am I willing to make to concentrate on what matters most to me? And what matters to me the most? At the end of the day, how do I want to have spent my time? This is not an easy task. The options all have good and bad sides.  What irks me the most is the adjustment I am struggling with now: the loss of endless possibilities. The emphasis is on ‘endless’. That part of the equation is simple. I can’t do it all. I have to make the hard choices in order to stay healthy. This must be what makes Dad worry so much—he is far more aware of the implication of limited possibilities than I am.

What I must do is what I have always done, and that is to find the positives in relapsing. In that, I have boundless confidence. It’s what I do best, even with an inflamed, fragile brain (and for me, my brain is my vanity, my Achilles’ heel) and low, low self-confidence. As with all things Lyme, this will pass and I will feel better, at least for a while. If I can figure out my priorities and can handle my new levels of expectations, then everything else should be gravy, not the other way around.

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