Last Christmas, I mentioned on this blog that Richard and I had had such a hard and bumpy stretch of road the last few years, I decided to do whatever I could to create some playful and positive energy in the world. That’s when I came up with the idea of the Holiday Treasure Hunt. I made seven found object Christmas tree ornaments and hung them along the Lema Ranch trail at the McConnell Foundation headquarters, and the way this conceptual public art project played out exceeded my fondest hopes (you can read about it on these two entries: “Holiday Treasure Hunt” and “The Gifts That Art Can Bring”). Of course, mentioning the rough road begs the question, what happened during that bumpy stretch? It’s not so much that I wanted to be mysterious as I was hopeful that I could put it behind me. And I didn’t want people to think I wanted them to feel sorry for me (although, of course, compassion is always welcome). And let’s face it, overall, I am unbelievably fortunate. I have my health, my home, a happy 35-year marriage, my family, kind and loving friends, enough to eat and good work that I believe in. It really doesn’t get much better than that, as I am acutely aware.

 

But in the same way that I decided to post the story of our experience with the Motion Fire so that I wouldn’t have to recount the same story over and over again for concerned friends, I’ve decided just to go ahead and write down all the weird, scary, and painful shit that happened in the last few years. Well, the highlights, anyway. As a writer, writing things down can often help me to make sense of them, to gain a fresh and larger perspective, and to lay certain things to rest. Those who prefer my more playful or informative posts might want to skip this more somber, personal (and long) one. But I’m hoping to exorcise some demons here, and as I say, give those who might be wondering a picture of what happened. Hopefully I won’t have to recount these events again—if someone wants to know, I can just refer them here.

 

It started three-and-a-half years ago when Richard’s annual trip to the dermatologist revealed a basal cell on his scalp. No real biggie, mainly just a pain in the butt. He was scheduled to get it removed and the day before his appointment, I was trimming his hair when I noticed an odd discoloration on his scalp, above his right ear. It looked like a big birth mark, but I knew he didn’t have a birth mark there.

 

“You should have the dermatologist take a look at this when you go in to get your basal cell taken care of,” I told him, feeling uneasy. And glad that he already had an appointment so that he could get it looked at right away. He assured me that he would.

 

A little background: When I first met Richard, when I was 18 and he was 21, he was still deeply affected by the death of his favorite uncle from melanoma at the age of 39, which had happened two years previously. In fact, it seemed that the entire family ended up forever scarred by it, the death of this playful, mischievous, loving, brilliant, and dedicated man. He was a Presbyterian minister who liked to brag that he had “champagne tastes on a beer budget.” His motto was “Celebrate life.” When he died (a long, slow, horrible, painful death), he left a raw, gaping hole. And everyone in the family nervously kept in the back of their minds how much Richard, equally beloved, resembled Bubba.

 

 

Then, bizarrely, I developed a basal cell on my scalp, pretty much in the same place that Richard had his! Again, in the big picture, not such a biggie, but as I got ready to have my procedure done, my dermatologist told me that she’d have to shave quite a bit of hair and gigglingly asked me if I’d ever thought of wearing my hair short. She had no way of knowing that this would trigger a childhood trauma that I had submerged in my subconscious. When I was little, I desperately wanted long hair so that I could have braids like my best friend up the street and I imagined my mother lovingly braiding my hair and tying the ends off with beautiful satin ribbons, the way that my friend’s mother did. But this was not my mother’s fantasy. By a long shot! She didn’t want to have to deal with my hair at all, so she chopped it off regularly into a “pixie” while I stood in front of the mirror sobbing. This was part of a larger pattern, actually, and probably why I have such lousy boundaries as an adult (which I am now working on assiduously). At any rate, in this case, it added a psychological burden to something that was not super pleasant to begin with.

 

Fortunately, the surgeon I ended up having do the procedure was very kind and clued into the fact that, since I had long hair, I probably wasn’t into short hair. He shaved as little as he could get away with in making sure he got all the margins of the skin cancer but also take into consideration concerns about my appearance. Whew. So that was over. And it turned out okay.

 

But more bad news was on the horizon. We found out that one of our oldest and closest friends had a brain tumor. For a year, both she and her lovely husband (our family practice physician) suffered horribly while the tumor slowly killed her. Then we found out that our other main health care provider and good friend acupuncturist Frank Campanale had lung cancer. No one survives lung cancer. Well, practically no one. We lost both of them that year. Talk about gaping holes. I still haven’t been able to make myself go see another acupuncturist in the same way Richard and I haven’t been able to bring ourselves to get another dog after our beloved malamute-retriever mix died at the age of 17 ½—and that was eighteen years ago. Still, we know that the older you get, the more certain you can be that you will lose people (and animals) that you care about deeply. Not everyone lives to a ripe old age. That’s just life. So, you know, we dealt with it.

 

Then one morning, as recounted in my post, “Bedbugs on the Rise,” I found a suspicious bug in our bed. It turned out to be a bat bug, and the presence of it in our bed could only mean that our home was infested. I won’t go into the details here (you can check them on my previous post if you want), but getting this taken care of turned out to be a major ordeal. The amount of work involved in treating the house was Herculean. So much so that I sustained a back injury. For months, I couldn’t lift more than five pounds and I couldn’t walk very far, either. For someone as active as I am, it was very hard. But I underwent physical therapy and was very lucky that this healed my back enough that eventually, I could start biking and walking again. It took a year before I could sleep soundly through the night and not wake up in a panic if I thought I felt something crawling on me and two years not to regard every single bug bite I got with alarm—and we still haven’t completely unpacked from this incident. But overall, I’d say we had mostly gotten past this when … well, when the worst happened.

 

A year after Richard’s experience with melanoma, he had a routine colonoscopy. During the procedure, they found a fairly large polyp in a difficult-to-reach place. They removed it, but lurking beneath the surface was a small artery that didn’t get fully cauterized. Three days later, Richard called me into the bathroom to show me something. The toilet bowl was full of blood.

 

“Jesus Christ!” I yelped. “Call your GI doc!”

 

He did, but the physician on call was sanguine. He said that a little bit of blood could look like a lot in such circumstances and to just keep an eye on his blood pressure. If it started to fall, only then should we feel concerned. He didn’t tell us how many bloody stools would be of concern. So Richard made several trips, each with the same result. We kept checking his blood pressure, which seemed to be holding steady. And then, as I was preparing dinner and Richard was making yet another trip to the bathroom, I heard a thud. I went racing into the bathroom.

 

Richard was convulsing in a pool of his own blood, his lips completely and shockingly white. Blood was sprayed all over the walls. Richard, of course, was drenched in blood as well. I frantically called our family practice doc—who had just recently lost his own wife—and asked him if I should call 911. He said he’d be right over. Fortunately, he was very close by. The minute he saw Richard, he called an ambulance. And fortunately, the EMTs arrived quickly, too. Richard was either minutes away from cardiac arrest or may have actually suffered a small heart attack. His blood pressure was 40/10.

 

As they hooked Richard up to an IV and carted him to the ambulance on a gurney, shock started setting in. All my senses were numbed but my veins felt like they were full of liquid nitrogen. My brain must have dumped a liter of adrenalin and cortisol into my system. I felt like I was looking at everything through a dirty pane of glass or the wrong end of a telescope. My vision was literally darkened, like I was in a basement with no lights on. I could barely think.

 

Jack stayed with me while Richard was taken to the hospital. “This can be fixed, Celeste,” he kept telling me to reassure me, lovely, kind man that he is—so generous in the wake of his terrible loss. I couldn’t stop thinking about how painful this whole scene had to be for him. Before leaving, I cleaned up the blood in the bathroom. To this day, I cannot bear the smell of 409. I’ve switched to other cleaners. Occasionally, I’ll catch sight of a small blood stain in the odd spot that I missed that night and was unable to remove later, which still triggers flashbacks, despite two separate rounds of EMDR.

 

At the hospital, Jack facilitated my getting into the ER where Richard was being stabilized. Thank God I was there, because the tech who took Richard to x-ray forgot to hook up his IV when he brought him back. And when I went to go get Richard some water shortly after that and came back into the curtained-off cubicle where he was waiting for admission, he was looking terrible and told me he felt as bad as he did when he collapsed. I ran to get someone (I have to say, it was very frustrating how little the nurses checked in on the patients during the three hours that Richard was in the ER—instead, hanging out and chatting with one another at the nurse’s station), and they went into high gear, getting his IV hooked back up and getting fluids back into him. Because of the fear of malpractice, everyone wanted to pretend like nothing had happened, which was weird. And because of the same fear, when the GI doc who told us we had nothing to worry about finally showed up, he wanted to pretend like what had happened was no big deal, either.

 

 

Still, I was thankful that Richard was alive and when he was discharged, I nursed him back to health and slowly got his red blood count back up. Two weeks after feeling completely numb, I fell apart. I started crying and couldn’t stop. That’s when I got my first round of EMDR, which thankfully, got me to where I could function again.

 

We got back on our feet from this, but a few months later, we were forced by the county to tear down a 27-year-old outbuilding on our land that hadn’t been permitted way back when. Tearing it down and replacing it was a major, unplanned expense, but we tried to make the best of it and told ourselves that the two small sheds that we replaced this building with served our needs much better. And they are very cute.

 

Right around that time, Richard and I finally finished our house, after twenty-five years. We were ecstatic, as you can imagine. Especially as my back injury and Richard’s weakened health made continued construction work less appealing than it had been in the past. A few months after that, the lightning siege struck, igniting two major fires right behind our ridge. Anyone who wants that account can read my first blog entry, “The Motion Fire.” Suffice it to say, I realize now that no one can know what it feels like to contemplate losing their home until it actually happens to them. And how incredibly traumatic it can be. Not to mention the stress of being evacuated for eight days. Again, it’s almost impossible to know how stressful that feels until it happens to you. I was surprised, actually.

 

But the winds shifted at just the last minute and the brave, hardworking firefighters saved our neighborhood, so we were able to move back several days later, our place looking none the worse for wear. We had awful smoke all summer, but we were just thankful that our home was spared.

 

We were recovering from that when we received even more terrible news involving the health of a close family member. By now, I was back in therapy, trying to deal with the fire and my residual PTSD from Richard’s near death experience. In addition to that, Richard had knee surgery coming up. I had heard that the rehab was a very intense experience, and I was feeling pretty emotionally and psychologically maxed out already. It also didn’t help that I now had a bit of a phobia around hospitals and medical procedures because of Richard’s last hospitalization. An additional complication developed when the surgeon scheduled to do Richard’s knee surgery canceled the surgery at the last minute when he found out Richard has a nickel allergy. Thankfully, another surgeon took Richard’s case and generously fit us into his schedule so that Richard wouldn’t have to completely re-do all his pre-op lab tests, chest x-ray, EKG, etc., etc. He used a zirconium prosthesis and did a partial instead of a full, which the other surgeon was going to do, so all in all, we probably dodged a bullet. It was still very stressful, though, as you can probably imagine.

 

The nurses on the floor where Richard stayed after his operation were by and large efficient, friendly, and attentive, but soon after Richard was installed in his three-person room, a man with severe dementia was admitted, who took up all the nurses’ time. He was continually pulling out his IV, crawling off the bed with his catheter inserted, and cursing and shouting vile, disgusting things. We were very relieved when I was able to take Richard home, but all the warnings I’d received about the rehab turned out to be only too true. I won’t go into detail here—I’ll save that for another post, to let people who are going to have this procedure know what to expect (I found information spotty when I was preparing)—but suffice it to say, it was a job for four people and I was one person. There were times when I just lay down next to Richard and sobbed from sheer exhaustion. There was also the concern about whether everything was going okay. Richard was in so much pain just from the surgery that we couldn’t use that as any gauge.

 

But that eventually turned out okay, too—in fact, better than okay. Richard’s mobile again and mostly pain-free. We can go on walks and bike rides again. Our quality of life has improved considerably.

 

Well, after my Holiday Treasure Hunt, the tide did seem to turn. Things got better. The economy was of concern, and it affected Richard’s work in stressful ways, but these were simply problems to be solved, not earth-shattering events. I went to work on repairing my bruised and battered psyche. As regular readers know, I’m highly sensitive and highly emotional. I cry easily and feel things deeply and have too many empathic sensors for comfort. It has been a lot to absorb in a relatively short amount of time.

 

I’m just keeping this post current for one day. It makes me feel sad to read it (though, in fact, it seems to have been helpful to write it). And who knows how many people are going to want to read it anyway. I just want to have it as a reference, I guess, for when people I haven’t talked to in some time ask me how things have been and I don’t have the energy to tell them or I don’t want to maintain a stiff upper lip if I’m not having a good day or if I’m having trouble concentrating or focusing, which is not my usual M.O., and people who depend on me need to understand what’s going on.

 

I have to tell you, I hate that saying, “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.” It seems to be just one more variation of “Suck it up, why don’t you?” We all have different capacities for suffering without breaking down and whatever our capacity is, whether we’re tough or fragile, we all deserve kindness and compassion, IMHO. But I’m hoping it’s true, though I’ve never developed that thick skin I’ve always wanted. I’m having a bit of a sinking spell at the moment due to some further painful developments; but I’m receiving so much love and support from my friends and family that it is filling me with hope and gratitude. And that is carrying me through.