Pre Diagnosis

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.