People! Did I forget to tell you about what I learned from my finished dissertation?

That isn't right, you know?

Because:

1. I never could have done it without all of your help and you deserve to celebrate the end! (even if the "end" was two years ago.)

2. Some of the conclusions were super intriguing! If you're a writer, you might actually want to know them!

3. It feels incomplete, somehow, right? I mean, you guys got the saga while it was happening, but you never heard the end!

So, why, oh why, did I not post this before?

It's obvious if you know me in person.

But it might not be obvious to people who only know me through the blog, and for that, I'm sorry. Shame is my only explanation. Misplaced shame, probably. But isn't most shame like that?

See, I sort of disappeared two years ago, maybe you noticed? My posts were shorter, when they appeared at all. Maybe you thought I'd stopped blogging, or stopped caring. But it wasn't that.

What happened was that I stopped being.

Here's how it went: I defended my dissertation exactly* two days before I had my ill-fated cancer surgery. I didn't tell y'all much about the whole cancer thing because, I thought, blah. Who wants to hear me whine?

And it wasn't going to be a big deal, I was sure of it. So why inflict it on you? It would bore you to death. I mean, skin grafts? No biggie. A little time off and then we can talk again. It'd make more sense to talk about the dissertation off drugs, anyway. And it can't take THAT long to recover, right? Six weeks? Maybe seven?

heh.

the universe loves to mess with me.

It's been almost two years since then. And you know when I first felt like myself again? The first time I was able to pick up my computer and really write? To feel my own thoughts connecting with words? The first time I could write like I used to?

It was three weeks ago.

I'm reminded of that "plans" thing they say. You know? You make plans and God laughs? I didn't plan on having to deal with a freaky-rare-cancery-lesion-thingy. And once I did have to deal, I didn't plan on having a bad surgery. I mean, I've run marathons, had two babies, I hiked 200 miles over 7 mountains while on IVF hormones! I gave birth to a baby 15 minutes after going into labor! And I'd had surgery before, no problem. I am tuff.

Turns out: none of us are tuff.

See,"tuff"is a delusion we cling to--one that completely ignores the fact that there are things in the universe (almost everything in the universe) we can't control. We're "tuff" because we don't want to acknowledge: all of us can be broken. And the things that break us? Never things our "tuffness" can prevent. No matter how "tuff" we think we are.

I didn't plan on a lot of things that happened these last two years, and I certainly couldn't control them. The grafts didn't take, there were gaping, oozing, open wounds for half a year, infections in places there should never be infections, ripping and tearing in places there should never be ripping or tearing, drugs causing language aphasia, legs that didn't work properly, a once awesome brain turned to mush. I didn't plan on any of that.

And the pain.

Well, you can't plan for something you didn't know existed. And pain like that? It's not even pain anymore. It's something ten exponents bigger than pain, something they haven't even named. I don't even know how to describe it. But here's a little of what I know: One part? Dissociation. (Who is the girl in that bed? Why is she screaming?) Another part? Your heart stops. Literally. The pain is so bad that your heart plunges into arrhythmia, unable to handle the bombardment of stress hormones erupting from the brain. They say pain can't kill you? They're wrong. Pain nearly killed me. Twice.

But that's not even the worst of it. Because it doesn't stop with death. It keeps going. Months and months and months and years it keeps going. And somewhere, in that mess of dissociation and hovering between life and death, and the years-long bombardment of hormones and pain signals, and death signals all rushing through your blood... Somewhere in all of that you realize:

you are gone.

The person you were? Not coming back. Everything you thought you were capable of? You're not. Everything you hoped for? Laughable. That's the worst part, really. When you lose the ability to hope.

We need hope.

We need to look at our babies and hope that we *will* survive to make sure they're okay. We need to look at the future and hope that we'll be able to smile again, if not walk normally. We need to look at our husband and hope that, someday, we'll be able to hold him again. Not as an invalid desperately clinging: as a partner showing love. And most of all, we need to be able to pray. To pray and really hope that someone hears us.

When you lose hope? You lose everything.

This post has officially digressed FAR beyond my original intentions, so I'll get on with it.

My point is, I meant to share some stuff, but life got in the way.

But my brain is better now, I'm better now. I didn't know I was going to come back, but I did. I'm not all the way back to the way I was, but I'm me again. I'm more surprised than anyone.

And that dissertation y'all helped me with? It was kickass. So maybe we can pick up where we left off. Maybe we can go back to the place we were. Back in time. And you know where we were? We were at the end of a kickass dissertation.

So in the next few days, I'll share some of it with you.

Assuming, of course, that life keeps it's distance for a bit.




*(okay, approximately two days; I'm too lazy to check, but it was superquick. didn't even have time to mention to y'all that I'd passed my defense. I think. I'm too lazy to check that, too.)

Barb keeps telling me that I never complain. Which is totally not true. I complain all the time. This post is to prove it.

I've been daydreaming about running.

They’re romantic daydreams. And since I actually used to run, I know they’re totally implausible. Daydreams forget the way your knees creak after a few weeks. How you can feel the ligaments around them groan as they start to disintegrate. Daydreams make you forget that one of the biggest reasons why you ever liked running in the first place had nothing at ALL to do with the running (which sux) but with the control. No matter how much it hurts, you can push through the pain. You: master of your body. Daydreams forget that it's a deception, that mastery. It's a way to celebrate the fact that you have puked your lunch into a bush. Yay me! My bones hurt and I puked in a bush! I'm the MASTER! Daydreams also forget about how running makes pain a part of your life. Every muscle in your body hurts. And not just the first day. All the time. You smile to people about "how much energy!" you have. But, really, you just want to be in bed eating carbs. Running, in reality, isn't all that romantic.

But there’s something about not being able to run right now--even if I wanted to. Friction is the number one enemy of the skin graft. Graft survival depends utterly upon the developing of new capillaries, upon them forming a solid network between your graft and your body. Friction destroys tiny capillaries. So until the graft is completely healed and strengthened, friction has to be avoided. I absolutely, 100%, cannot, should not, will not run.

Which is why I want so desperately to do it.

Maybe it's something about the wondering if I’ll ever be able to run again.

Because inside that wondering I feel the running rhythm. Lifting up a foot, feeling the pavement shock its way up my body with each step. Runners feel the texture of the pavement in their face, in the way that cheeks and mouths are wont to bounce this way or that way. You can feel the pebbles under your feet, feel the ground change in your ankles. But most of all, there’s the rhythm. Breath in, breath out, step, step, arms swinging in counterbalance. It’s like music. Only it’s hypnotic. Before I was a runner I thought people who said running was “zen” were basically sickos. Masochists. And, yanno. A lot of them are. But after I started running--it took about three weeks of running every single day to get here, BTW--I started to understand it. It’s meditation. Breath in. Rhythm. No room for thoughts because you’re in motion. It’s calm.

It seems so paradoxical to me that lying in bed for hours upon hours does the absolute opposite of make you calm. It makes you itchy. Thousands of thoughts in your head, gushes of unpleasant emotion in your blood. (Almost never pleasant emotions.)

But when you’re running, you’re calm. The voices in your head (“most people call them thoughts, Kerry!” protested an old boyfriend of mine) learn to wind down, turn off. And then there’s just air and breath and movement. A rhythm that seems to mimic the rhythm of the stars dancing around the earth. Just motion. That transcendental sense that you are not simply alive, but a part of the universe. A universe where every speck of sand is numbered, and every breathing thing matters, and every particle of matter is moving.

You want to go running now, right?

But, see, this is all the fantasy of someone who can’t.

And it’s not like I don’t know the truth, either.

During the second marathon I ran, I slipped at mile 18 on some gravel and fell down the side of a mountain. Tore the ligament that held my kneecap in place. Then, because I was “a runner” I finished the race hopping. Took six hours. People would pull cars over on the side of the road to see if I was okay. Cuz I was hopping. And sobbing.

For eight miles.

Never was able to really run after that. Not like I did when I was training for and/or running marathons. I'd get a jog here or there. And a jog here or there is nice, but you really have to do the consistency thing to find the zen again. Xanax would be a lot more efficient for most people (except for me cuz it makes me hallucinate about blood and guts; ew). Especially when you have small children whose general activities preclude your ability to be entirely consistent.

I’m not sure if/when I’ll be able to run after all these skin grafts, either. The surgeon says my graft will be “somewhat functional” when it's fully healed. But what does that mean? It doesn’t mean it won’t hurt. That there won’t be movement-restricting contractures. That I won't be permanently deformed. That I'll be able to move my legs in a rhythm without tearing my skin, causing more contractures and less function. There's absolutely no way to know until they're finished cutting off my skin (since they have to remove from my knees to back, this could be awhile) and it has all finished healing. In other words: years.

Still.

I feel that rhythm when I close my eyes.

Foot: step
Arm: swing
Breath: in
Breath: out

And I have this image in my head. Me: showing up to a marathon in really short shorts. Skin graft healed, skin supple and massive scars displayed for all to see. Here are my battle wounds. And Lord how I have battled.

I always love the images you see of people who conquer things. And, yanno, maybe I’ll be that image someday. In five years. Or ten. I'm not sure.

Maybe I'll just do a half marathon, though. The whole one sux.

I feel like whining

so here:

whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine whine

and some toast.

Hard day today

You're lucky because I'm not feeling quite as pontificous about it as I was earlier, so you get to be spared my ramblings.

The thing is... Nothing today was really terribly hard. The day was just... exhausting. Whiney, vomiting, babies. Moody, semi-adolescent lapses into the weepies. Naughty students* with their inappropriate jokes about NRB's** and make out-sessions with drunk 40-year olds. Trying to keep the babies from destroying Steve's office at 8PM when we were trying to make him come home.

It's the end of the semester and I'm overloaded with stuff to do; it's the darkest part of the year; I haven't eaten nearly enough carbs lately. All good excuses for my moodiness, I guess. Doesn't seem to make me less moody, though.

Y'all have anything to snap you out of the crankies? (Carbs, unfortunately, are out, but I'm open to other suggestions!)



*obviously not all my students are naughty. some even make me awesome facebook groups. but the naughty ones will know who they are because I've never made a secret about their naughtiness. So, students, if I've never personally told you that you're naughty, then I probably like you and you shouldn't worry about it.

**you don't want to know what an NRB is. Seriously. Except for maybe Margie Mills. She might find it amusing and should email me. Everyone else should probably just wipe the acronym directly from their brains.