Too busy. Life catches up with you, tackles you around the ankles and jumps up and down on your stomach.
So I'm on a reduced dose and my target INR is now 1.5 to 2.0. Not too shabby. Now if this rain would get out of town I'd be out there walking.
I've already requested my clotiversary dinner for after I come home from the studio next Tuesday. Fahnz makes these ridiculously good quesadillas with out of control melty cheese and perfectly sauteed peppers. Then I will have cake.
It's odd realizing that a year ago I almost died. But I got me a nifty t-shirt as a Yay, I made it! present and I plan on celebrating the hell out of being alive.
Tuesday, April 26, 2011
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Saturday, April 9, 2011
Friday, April 8, 2011
SO TIRED
Here's what I'm hoping:
Next week they take me off Coumadin. After a month off they retest me and all is well and I never have to take it again EVER.
Realistically I know that might not happen, but the anxiety and stress over not knowing is crushing me. I can't sleep. I'm editing music for the recital and just started crying. It's been a very hard year and it's not over and I just want to rest for a while. Not physically, although I've been fighting off Coumadin-induced fatigue for the last eleven months.
My soul is tired.
Next week they take me off Coumadin. After a month off they retest me and all is well and I never have to take it again EVER.
Realistically I know that might not happen, but the anxiety and stress over not knowing is crushing me. I can't sleep. I'm editing music for the recital and just started crying. It's been a very hard year and it's not over and I just want to rest for a while. Not physically, although I've been fighting off Coumadin-induced fatigue for the last eleven months.
My soul is tired.
Saturday, April 2, 2011
Now fight.
I don’t talk much about the emotional impact of a catastrophic illness because it’s not something people like to hear about. I haven’t discussed the near-death experience because no one really wants to know what it’s like. People just want to know that I’m happy and functional, which is exactly what they deserve to know about me--we all need to hear the positives in daily life because it helps us feel better about the crazy world we live in. But when something comes along that draws out every emotion I have had in the past year, be they good feelings or bad, it’s like the door to a dark room has been opened and I can finally see a way through to the end.
Enter “Sucker Punch.” It’s divided the movie-going public and critics alike, spawning debate after debate about the truth of the storyline and the necessity to spoon-feed meaning to the viewer. Gone are the days when we can sit back and muse about the purpose of things. We’ve become a short attention span society that wants machines to do all of our thinking. Zach Snyder takes that notion, flips it back in our faces, and challenges us to decipher life on our own. Sadly, it seems like people don’t get it. It’s a scary path we’re heading down if we abdicate critical thought and our capacity for wisdom, and we are losing touch with the very things that makes us human--curiosity and imagination.
The movie begins with a whisper, with Emily Browning’s voice urging us into Babydoll’s dream. Snyder tells us everything we need to know about this girl’s desperation without a single spoken word. We are there with her when her mind is shattered by the blunt force of grief and anger. We follow her as she is driven, lost and asleep, to an asylum. We see the inmates, the doctors, and we see them as characters in a charade of hope. Two men discuss her future as if she cannot hear, and maybe she can’t. She’s broken by then, completely alone and at the mercy of a system that treated wayward girls as a threat to the fabric of society. She will never belong to herself again.
Snyder does not show us every detail of the five days, choosing instead to take us into Babydoll’s interpretation of her last week as a functional being. Her world is fully realized, picking and choosing friends to help her from the defeated creatures we see in the asylum when she first arrives. This is not an unfamiliar place to her. Perhaps this is where she would go when her stepfather visited her in the night, when her mother was dying, when she was alone with her thoughts and fears. This is the launch pad for an adventure in self-discovery, the last gasp of a young woman who is taking back control of her life even if it kills her. This is the part of her that, no matter what, will always remain free.
Now, imagine that you’re in the hospital. You’ve just been told that you should be dead. There’s an IV in your hand that’s delivering medicine to thin your rebellious blood and your lungs are full of clots. Where do you go from there?
For me, there was no question that I would survive. I had been married only seven months and the studio was starting to flourish. I had everything to live for, but like Babydoll and the others I was still trapped, looking from the outside in at a body that had become a battleground. So I dreamed. One night my clots were little blobs with sharp teeth that could only be destroyed by shining a bright purple light on them, the next they were soldiers marching through a maze while I shot arrows at them from a balloon. None of it made any real sense but the more I dreamed, the more I felt like I was shifting the balance of my healing, dissolving the clots that threatened my life through sheer force of will.
As I watched this movie, everything I had been through over the past year came crashing down on me like a tidal wave. My life is a series of numbers, blood draws, mornings spent trying to convince my stiff legs to swing out of bed so I could stand up and start my day and nights spent staring at the ceiling, praying that I could go to sleep without the creeping fear of the clots coming back to finish the job. As unrealistic as that is, at least it’s a fear that is universal amongst embolism survivors so I don’t feel as alone when my leg hurts and my lungs are burning. Those of us who have walked up to the edge have been able to let everything go. Maybe that’s where the fantasy comes in.
My care team became wise men and women, advising me in dreams and in life, but I always went into battle alone. Perhaps it’s because I never wanted to be pitied or coddled and treated like glass, fragile and teeming with the potential for self-destruction, but I spent very little time telling other people exactly what I was feeling and thinking. I wanted them to know that I wasn’t a victim, that I would still be the same strong person I was before the embolism, that I was better than before. I wanted to inspire and educate and push them to really think about the way we care for other people and how to live life unselfishly. Unless this world stops relying on impersonal communications and instant gratification and starts demanding better things from everyone in it, I fear we will forget these things. So put aside your attempts at cynicism and put yourself into Babydoll’s mind, and let your imagination run free. You still have one, I hope.
Sucker Punch was the near-death vision I didn't have last year when I fell down the rabbit hole into a darkness that I have kept at bay through dreams and the joy of still being alive. Sucker Punch reminded me to live and to reach out to the people around me and share the best of me, because at the moment this is all I have to give. My treatment is about to end. My war is soon to be over, and a truce declared between me and my body, but Sucker Punch has inspired me to continue fighting and fully claim the title of “survivor” that I have had such a tenuous grasp on for the past year. I have all the weapons I need.
Enter “Sucker Punch.” It’s divided the movie-going public and critics alike, spawning debate after debate about the truth of the storyline and the necessity to spoon-feed meaning to the viewer. Gone are the days when we can sit back and muse about the purpose of things. We’ve become a short attention span society that wants machines to do all of our thinking. Zach Snyder takes that notion, flips it back in our faces, and challenges us to decipher life on our own. Sadly, it seems like people don’t get it. It’s a scary path we’re heading down if we abdicate critical thought and our capacity for wisdom, and we are losing touch with the very things that makes us human--curiosity and imagination.
The movie begins with a whisper, with Emily Browning’s voice urging us into Babydoll’s dream. Snyder tells us everything we need to know about this girl’s desperation without a single spoken word. We are there with her when her mind is shattered by the blunt force of grief and anger. We follow her as she is driven, lost and asleep, to an asylum. We see the inmates, the doctors, and we see them as characters in a charade of hope. Two men discuss her future as if she cannot hear, and maybe she can’t. She’s broken by then, completely alone and at the mercy of a system that treated wayward girls as a threat to the fabric of society. She will never belong to herself again.
Snyder does not show us every detail of the five days, choosing instead to take us into Babydoll’s interpretation of her last week as a functional being. Her world is fully realized, picking and choosing friends to help her from the defeated creatures we see in the asylum when she first arrives. This is not an unfamiliar place to her. Perhaps this is where she would go when her stepfather visited her in the night, when her mother was dying, when she was alone with her thoughts and fears. This is the launch pad for an adventure in self-discovery, the last gasp of a young woman who is taking back control of her life even if it kills her. This is the part of her that, no matter what, will always remain free.
Now, imagine that you’re in the hospital. You’ve just been told that you should be dead. There’s an IV in your hand that’s delivering medicine to thin your rebellious blood and your lungs are full of clots. Where do you go from there?
For me, there was no question that I would survive. I had been married only seven months and the studio was starting to flourish. I had everything to live for, but like Babydoll and the others I was still trapped, looking from the outside in at a body that had become a battleground. So I dreamed. One night my clots were little blobs with sharp teeth that could only be destroyed by shining a bright purple light on them, the next they were soldiers marching through a maze while I shot arrows at them from a balloon. None of it made any real sense but the more I dreamed, the more I felt like I was shifting the balance of my healing, dissolving the clots that threatened my life through sheer force of will.
As I watched this movie, everything I had been through over the past year came crashing down on me like a tidal wave. My life is a series of numbers, blood draws, mornings spent trying to convince my stiff legs to swing out of bed so I could stand up and start my day and nights spent staring at the ceiling, praying that I could go to sleep without the creeping fear of the clots coming back to finish the job. As unrealistic as that is, at least it’s a fear that is universal amongst embolism survivors so I don’t feel as alone when my leg hurts and my lungs are burning. Those of us who have walked up to the edge have been able to let everything go. Maybe that’s where the fantasy comes in.
My care team became wise men and women, advising me in dreams and in life, but I always went into battle alone. Perhaps it’s because I never wanted to be pitied or coddled and treated like glass, fragile and teeming with the potential for self-destruction, but I spent very little time telling other people exactly what I was feeling and thinking. I wanted them to know that I wasn’t a victim, that I would still be the same strong person I was before the embolism, that I was better than before. I wanted to inspire and educate and push them to really think about the way we care for other people and how to live life unselfishly. Unless this world stops relying on impersonal communications and instant gratification and starts demanding better things from everyone in it, I fear we will forget these things. So put aside your attempts at cynicism and put yourself into Babydoll’s mind, and let your imagination run free. You still have one, I hope.
Sucker Punch was the near-death vision I didn't have last year when I fell down the rabbit hole into a darkness that I have kept at bay through dreams and the joy of still being alive. Sucker Punch reminded me to live and to reach out to the people around me and share the best of me, because at the moment this is all I have to give. My treatment is about to end. My war is soon to be over, and a truce declared between me and my body, but Sucker Punch has inspired me to continue fighting and fully claim the title of “survivor” that I have had such a tenuous grasp on for the past year. I have all the weapons I need.
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