Proud Mary is my theme song. In the summer 2009, burnt out
from over 20 years of working as a counselor/therapist in schools, prisons and
public and private inpatient treatment programs, I left good jobs in the city
where I’d been working for the man. Several years before I began studying with
a writer, healer and teacher in Los Angeles who had a retreat center in the
Sandia Mountains of New Mexico and the land needed a caretaker. Though
terrified beyond belief, I chucked it all to start over, post 50, on a little
bit of savings and a willingness to take the risk to have a more meaningful
life.
The retreats sometimes include fire walks and after walking
on fire New Years Retreat in December 2012, I noticed the balls my feet were
red (No one at the retreats have ever been burned or injured but sometimes a
little redness occurs that correlates in reflexology to a certain area of the
body.) The inflammation was gone in the morning. A few days later on a hike
with a friend, after about 2 miles, the ball of my right foot began hurting to
the point that it was hard to walk – I joked that I was going lame. Thinking it a fluke, a few days later I did
the same hike and experienced the same foot pain.
Then late one cold dark Saturday night in January after seeing
the Hobbit in a theater, I lay down in bed on my right side. Ouch, I wondered
at soreness that I hadn’t noticed before and rolled to the other side. I had
spent the last several months preserving a bounty of apples gifted by the trees
on the property where I live and over the past week I had finally finished the
last bushel by making a huge roaster of applesauce. Needing time before the
final processing, I had struggled to lift the bulk into the refrigerator and
had used my side, under my arm beside my right breast, as a leverage tool. It
actually hurt at the time, enough that I lifted it down and tried to find
another position to get the big thing in. The next morning, when it was still
sore, I remembered the applesauce and thought I must have bruised something in
the struggle.
It had been an intense year. Two Christmases before, I had
flown back east to visit my mother who, at 88 was still living on her own and
driving. The year before it was noticeable that she was getting forgetful and
having trouble with her medications. This year it was much worse. I noticed
that she had several cups of coffee poured and then, several bowls of cereal,
forgetting that she had prepared the ones before. By the time I left I was very
concerned about her driving and living alone. Through the following winter and
spring her condition worsened as I worried from across the country about what
we were going to do.
My daughter, Emily, was graduating from law school in
Washington, DC that May and Mother said that she wanted to attend the ceremony.
Brad, my brother agreed to take charge of her but during the graduation
festivities it became clear that mother could no longer live alone. To make a
long story short, my sister, Lynn, said she wanted Mom to move in with her and
her husband, Roger, and, a month long saga ensued of how to get our fiercely
independent, spit fire, dementia ridden mother who we had seen physically
attack our father; as well as us; kick out the windows in our house and become
an angry hysterical high pitched banshee at slight provocation to quietly leave
her beloved home and move 4 hours away? We were terrified of her, and with good
reason! The three of us had grown up under a cloud of potential and actual
violence that left us hyper vigilant and walking on eggshell. Interestingly, we
had all become “helping professionals,” Lynn a social worker, Brad an
acupuncturist and me a counselor, where we could turn our ability to read
people and situations, an empathic gifts honed in childhood as a mechanism of
self-preservation, into something useful to others.
Finally, we made arrangements to meet with her family doc
and have an intervention. Thank goodness for the doctor who finally said,
either you leave voluntarily or Adult Protective Services will get involved and
give you no choice. So, off we go, with Mother’s bedroom furniture and personal
items in a U-Haul, through the mountains of West Virginia to her new home.
Other things were going on as well. In reaction to a
twenty-pound menopausal weight gain I had began off and on again stringent
dieting. This accompanied raging candida flare ups coinciding with sugar/carb
binging. My serial long distance monogamous relationship pattern continued
(enough said) and though the relationships felt comfortable they did not provide
real intimacy. Finances continued to be less abundant than I would have
preferred and I had finally taken a part-time school counselor position after
having sworn never to do so again. I won’t bore you with more, though there is,
but obviously there were some stressors both emotional and physical. While I
loved life in New Mexico and felt in many ways as if I had come home, it had
its challenges.
The next day I noticed the pain under my arm was not
generalized but associated with a small lump – I knew it was a lymph node. Then
with in a few days my right breast turned red and sore. I had no health insurance. I knew something
was going on that required medical attention but also knew that I couldn’t
afford to pay for the diagnostic tests out of pocket. When the symptoms had not
alleviated by the end of the week I decided to go to a walk in medical clinic
to be checked. The doctor thought it was an infection and put me on a round of
antibiotics. I paid the $150 and left to fill my prescription. The antibiotics
did not work.
