Читать книгу Depression Hates a Moving Target - Nita Sweeney - Страница 12
ОглавлениеWeight loss and the looming prospect of the “Big Five-Oh!” would have been enough reason for me to take up running again. There was also that wacky recurring dream. But these were surface factors. In fact, the seeds of Kim and Fiona’s posts landed on ground made fertile by difficulties starting five years before. A perfect storm of life events had created the critical mass necessary to get me off the sofa.
Still, I wanted to lose weight.
In high school and my twenties, I might gain five pounds during the winter, but easily lost that in the spring. By my early thirties, I looked anorexic. For the six months before I met Ed, I coped with the stress of practicing law with stringent diets. Chunks of my hair fell out, and I was frequently lightheaded, while my period stopped completely. The first time Ed opened the refrigerator in my house, it contained only an expired bottle of ketchup, a bag of apples, and a sleeve of bagels. By that time, I was only eating one bagel and one apple, cut into thirds, each day.
After my nervous breakdown, I could no longer summon the effort required to control my food. When I began taking antidepressants, the obsession transformed into overeating and yo-yo dieting, which packed on the weight. By my early forties, the scale hit two hundred pounds. I joined a recovery group for food issues and lost nearly forty pounds, but when I saw Kim’s posts about running, I was far from happy with my size.
I’d gone off antidepressants several times to lose weight. The weight came off, but the depression, anxiety, and panic attacks came back so viciously that, within a few months, I was back at the psychiatrist’s, begging for a prescription. My most recent experiment with quitting meds, just a year before I took up running, had also failed. I went back on the drugs, but it takes several months for my antidepressant to take effect, so once again, I missed nine months of well-being for the sake of twenty pounds.
I knew from my previous exercise stints that depression hates a moving target. I’d taken Nia dance classes in 2004 and 2005. I would ease in, but before class ended, I was jumping, kicking, and panting like a fiend. Happy at accomplishing something, I left the class hypomanic, which felt like an improvement.
But when our golden retriever Bodhi died, I couldn’t bring myself to dance. I took long, slow, dogless walks, mourning my canine friend, or escaped the silent house to write in coffee shops. The solace of summer air, wind in the trees, and the swing of my arms was the best medicine. Happily, when Morgan joined our family, he became my walking companion and canine therapist.
***
On a September day, just a month after we adopted Mr. Dawg, Mom called to say Jamey was being admitted to Children’s Hospital.
At the hospital, my twenty-one-year-old niece lay on the bed in a “spica” cast that covered all of one leg and half her body up to her waist. The room purred with the hushed voices of her friends. They were students at Ohio State University, coworkers, and high school classmates. More than a dozen of them filled all the chairs, every inch of floor space, and the windowsill. My sister and the rest of our family sat in stunned silence in a meeting room across the hall.
The young people took turns signing her cast. When a young man offered me a package of markers, Jamey brushed a blonde hair away from her eyes and said, “Write something, Aunt Nita.” I pulled out the purple one and, just beneath where her toes peeked out, scrawled, “Here. Now.”
The pain meds hadn’t knocked her out the way the medical staff thought they should. Her tolerance would also prove too high to dull the pain to come.
I pointed at her toes and said, “When you get scared, remember there’s only this moment and I’m with you.” I felt so helpless and pathetic trying to apply mindfulness techniques to her situation, but she smiled.
When Mom had called, I’d asked, “Why Children’s? She’s twenty-one.”
The cancer she had, osteosarcoma, usually strikes teens. The doctors at Children’s were the experts. The tumor in Jamey’s thigh had likely been growing for months. By the time an MRI found it that morning, it had broken her femur, the largest and strongest bone in the body. Ultimately, that tumor and the lesions already in her lungs would also break our hearts.
Jamey had been five when her parents divorced, and, because funds were short, I’d taken her shopping. We’d walked the aisles of the big-box store hand in hand, choosing first a frilly, pink, impractical dress that made her eyes shine. Then we filled the cart with underwear, socks, T-shirts, pants, shoes, and a warm coat, all the things she needed to start school. This shopping trip and the few birthday parties I attended had been the best I could do. I spent the precious time I now wished I had devoted to her, and the rest of my family, drafting legal documents and priding myself on the number of hours I billed. I had never wanted children of my own, but thought of her as the next best thing to a daughter. I vowed to be there when she or Amy needed me.
***
In 2006, while Jamey was sick, I enrolled in Goddard College’s non-residential Master of Fine Arts (MFA) program in Creative Writing. I chose Goddard because they could accommodate my mental health issues. Between residencies, and when I wasn’t at Jamey’s, I lived at my desk or on the sofa reading and writing. I drank large decaf soy lattes every day. While completing the assignments gave me a sense of accomplishment, I gained weight and lost touch with the positive body sensations exercise had brought.
During the July 2006 residency, Amy called. I had to excuse myself from the classroom at Fort Worden to go outside to get phone reception. As I stood on the grassy lawn, I listened as my sister wept into her phone back in Ohio. “It’s in her spine!” she shrieked. I sank to the grassy lawn and sobbed, unable to maintain the composure I wished I could keep to calm my sister.
By November, the tumor in Jamey’s leg had stopped the circulation to her foot. She had to have her leg amputated. After the surgery, she called from the ICU in agony. Because of her high tolerance for medications, normal doses weren’t blocking the excruciating pain. “Tell me how to meditate,” she begged. I guided her through a basic body scan. As I talked, possibly from the drugs finally working, she went to sleep. My sister took the phone and thanked me.
In February 2007, Jamey died. She was twenty-four. Her death turned the natural order of the world on its ear and plummeted me into despair. I began having panic attacks again and took to my bed.
***
For the rest of 2007, grief blasted Ed and me as if from a fire hose.
In July, one of Ed’s good friends and former coworkers died.
In August, Ed’s ninety-six-year-old father died.
In September, the man my mother had dated after my father’s death died.
In October, both Jamey’s cat and Jamey’s father died.
In November, Mom’s best friend died.
With each death, I thought, “This is it for a while.” I imagined burning my black dress.
But 2007 wasn’t finished with us yet.
***
In 1996, when he was sixty-seven, my father died of metastatic lung cancer. After his doctor told him to “get his affairs in order,” I spent as much time with him as I could, golfing, traveling, and sitting by his bedside when he and my mother moved in with me and Ed during Dad’s final months. I grieved his death, but that loss did little to prepare me for 2007.
I was at a writing retreat with Natalie Goldberg in New Mexico when Amy called to say our seventy-seven-year-old mother had been admitted to a central Ohio hospital with a bowel obstruction. “But she was just dog-sitting Morgan!” I protested. She had seemed fine when I left town.
Illness plagued Mom her entire life. She spent hours in bed, behind the closed bedroom door. I would pull a wooden chair up to the kitchen counter near the toaster and put in the bread. When I had buttered the toast perfectly, the way Dad taught me, I would take it to her in exchange for a smile. Many of her illnesses were real, but others remained a mystery, as doctor after doctor couldn’t find the cause of her symptoms. I grew up worried she was on the verge of death.
And her mood swings were legend. Undiagnosed bipolar disorder aggravated by drinking compounded her hypochondria. She alternated between clinging possessiveness and near-abandonment. I never knew which mother to expect. When I came home from school, she might be pounding out tunes on the organ at a volume that rattled the windows, aiming to throw a potholder at me, or in bed, paralyzed by negative thoughts and alcohol. She stopped drinking after I was an adult, and we healed many of our wounds, but I still found her confusing and unpredictable.
After Dad died, I spent countless hours with her in medical waiting rooms as they treated her for diabetes, C.O.P.D., and a chronic cough. I lived closest and didn’t have a day job. Despite my protests that I wasn’t her “primary caretaker,” when she asked, I packed my laptop and headphones and did my best to write in the lobby. Every crisis seemed fatal, but each time she survived. She’d even been hospitalized for a bowel obstruction before, but it resolved without surgery. When Amy called, part of me rolled my eyes wondering if this was another imaginary illness. Regardless, I got on the next plane.
When the obstruction hadn’t cleared after five days, they took her to surgery. Ed, Amy, Jim, Deanna, and I sat in the gray hospital waiting room. I tried to read but couldn’t. We talked about things I can’t remember. I ate a lot of snacks. After many hours, the surgeon greeted us, smiling. Adhesions had strangled her small intestine and shut off blood flow to one area. He had freed her intestines from the tangle of scar tissue and that section had “pinked back up.” Confident it would heal, he decided against resecting it. “He’s the doctor” I told myself. I would not want to second-guess him.
The days in the hospital wore on and on. Still in graduate school, I wrote annotations by her bedside. Day after day, she remained in her bed, while other patients who’d had the same surgery were up and walking the halls. When the doctors or nurses visited, we advocated for her, but frankly, the deaths that year had worn me down.
One night, when I came home from another long day at the hospital, Ed asked me to come into his office. He pointed to his computer. On the screen was an article about adhesions. “Her prognosis isn’t good,” he said. I shook my head, cried “She will be fine!” then stomped off to bed, sobbing.
After she had been in the hospital twenty-four days, her intestines remained blocked and became infected. The doctor called for a second surgery. As her medical power of attorney, I again signed the forms warning about the dangers of surgery. As a lawyer, I’d seen many releases, but my hands shook as I signed this one.
Before the hospital staff wheeled her back, Amy, Jim, Deanna, and I stood around her bed. Her tiny frame, now thin from so many days on a liquid diet, lay in a mass of tangled sheets. With speech slurred from pain and anxiety medications, she called out, “I know you all think I’m a pain!” We laughed and groaned, “Oh, Mom!” She was right, but we still loved her. I remembered how she had encouraged me to learn to play the flute despite my anxiety. I could see her at the kitchen table, cutting fabric I’d chosen for a top. I could hear her singing “Happy Birthday” in her sweet soprano. I couldn’t let her go into surgery thinking we hated her. I went to her side. “You gave me my creativity,” I said. “Thank you.” I kissed her and they took her away.
Back in that gray waiting room, we sat again, hour after hour. When the doctor finally came out, I stood. Nervous, I made an awkward joke about how much faster this surgery had been. He glared, his face a stone.
“She’s not going to survive this,” he said.
My knees buckled and I stumbled backward into the gray chair where moments before I’d had hope. Deanna gripped my arm. I covered my face with my hands and tried to listen, but the doctor’s words spun through my mind on repeat:
She’s not going to survive this.
She’s not going to survive this.
She’s not going to survive.
He had not expected to find Mom’s small intestine disintegrated. “It was like wet tissue paper,” he said. Nothing to salvage. Jim, Amy, Deanna, and Ed all asked questions as I stared at the gray wall. Surely the doctor was wrong.
As it turns out, you can’t live without your small intestine. If it’s not there to absorb the nutrients, you starve of malnutrition. None of us had any medical training. None of us knew that.
The surgeon’s face softened as he asked, “What do you want me to do?” If they treated her infection, she would remain alive, but die of malnutrition in weeks. If they let it go, the fever would kill her more quickly.
Regardless of the questions everyone asked, we knew the only humane answer. Mom, still heavily sedated, was transferred to the hospice wing. The next afternoon, December 30, 2007, we surrounded her while she died peacefully.
As irrational as even I knew it was, I felt responsible for “letting” her die. I hadn’t made the toast properly. I hadn’t gone to medical school. I hadn’t seen it coming. This insane belief, combined with all the previous deaths and the notion that I was now “next in line” for the mortuary, sent me into a spiral. I ate, slept, and cried.
***
I remained stuck for nearly a year after Mom’s death and almost two years after we’d lost Jamey. Finally, in November 2008, Morgan and I began to take slow walks around the block. Throughout my years of mood disorders, my long-time friend Lora had used vigorous exercise to treat the depression from her fibromyalgia. Another friend, Pat, had taken up tennis to treat her depression. “You need to break a sweat,” they each said. I was skeptical. I’d tried and abandoned so many forms of movement. Plus, when fatigued, the last thing I wanted to do was sweat. I thought about Nia dance classes, but the instructor I loved had stopped teaching, and I didn’t have the energy to drive somewhere. I needed something at home. Those long, slow dog walks in the fresh air, along with therapy and recovery groups, started to bring me back to life. When I saw Kim and Fiona’s posts, I secretly hoped running would speed the healing.
