‘Isn’t Staying Alive the Most Important Thing?’

There is a reason I want to march for Death With Dignity (read before you freak, please)

The next three posts brought to you by Cynical Unhinged Woman who was supposed to be recovering from surgery eventually and not living Groundhog Day without the perks of Bill Murray… Hold tight to your honest bonnets, please

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Little scraps of life leading up to what was going to be some new operations (it was 10 to 12 appointments to get there, with almost no warning. That’s life, and that’s medicine). Here is the evidence

I have to interrupt living to prevent my life being interrupted.

In dealing with squishing a lot of surgeries into the next couple of years, while also dragging them out so I can keep dancing or writing or trying to exist in other ways, many people often don’t understand.

‘Isn’t staying alive the most important thing?’ we seem to say.

I think if any one dealt with this many pains, all the time, to the level some of us truly do… I think ‘they’ would understand that if our mind can’t keep fighting through, our body serves us nothing. We HAVE to find the balance between what mentally makes the pain worth it, and what keeps the pain (which, for me, isn’t going away) slightly less bad or the least amount of ‘stop me in my track’ interruptions.

(I have to interrupt living to prevent my life being interrupted.)

Sometimes reassuring others becomes such an amnesiac-experience, as well… We just have to hope that they’ll trust that we will disappoint as little as possible, stick to our word barring deathly circumstance, and try to report from the trenches (a la now) for the rare few who need to see their pain recognized too. (I am one of those people, when I look for lighthouses in the world, hoping to spot another person living through similiar-ish circumstance.)

There is a reason I want to march for Death With Dignity act in my state if I could. I’ve seen death without it… I’ve wondered about where the lines blur between staying alive and just being viciously cruel to someone… and I know that 1/3rd of those who are eligible to get the meds don’t ever take them, because its just about protection from the fear of how dehumanizing some deaths can be.

It’s about the choice where one doesn’t exist. It’s about wanting your suffering to mean something or… at least to not spread to others who will remember you, forever, as someone who is no longer fully ‘yourself’. It’s about choice… not action.

We don’t have choices when we are this sick…

So, for me, holding my bones and brain matter together becomes a delicate balance that’s hard to explain to anyone who isn’t in these shoes and I promise you (I promise you) whatever you think you would do or feel or choose or be able to endure… is not always the case when you get there.

(Watch “Take Me Out Feet First” on Amazon Prime.)

If you haven’t watched death with needless suffering or if you haven’t worried about your own, you’re lucky… but it doesn’t mean that this conversation shouldn’t be had. Needn’t be had. Isn’t critical to those that are critical.

Do I know I have a lot ahead of me, on a personal note? Trying to schedule around what feels like “living”, in order to survive? Yes. Propping me up on the table like a mannequin (or a Ben Folds lyric) isn’t going to sustain this level of pain I have to keep existing through. It just isn’t.

“I’m definitely trying to fight for my ‘purpose’ that’s beyond motherhood. Though that provides purpose but, as you know, eventually, they leave the nest. So … what keeps me pushing through all this pain after?” I text a friend recently, who is a fellow parent and could understand the cross-roads. “And then for me it’s like ‘and how do I mentally stay alive as a person when there is this pain cloud, and I get punished whenever I do anything fun’?”

That is not drama, either (though I love drama).

If I dance… I suffer for a week. If I type… I suffer for days. If I take a bath… I suffer for days. If I drive a car… I suffer for a day. And most of these things add up to what we see now: “You need your neck discs replaced” [Pretends she doesn’t look down at her computer all the time]. “You need your pelvis and lower back stabilized.” [Pretends she doesn’t drama-breathe to contemporary music for a living]

And when I took almost half-a-year to recover “properly” after my winter double-surgery the way I’ve been told I should all this time… I feel just as bad. It didn’t heal faster, do better. In fact. I was often way more depressed (and often very profoundly alone), and since you never know what’s going on in someone’s life behind closed doors… I basically traded one physically taxing thing for another.

Except one had community, and music, and catharsis… And one was being in pain in more than one way, utterly alone.

Am I still trying to hack my brain this month into finding the corridors of my mind that feel like the feeling I imagine it feels like to have people pray over you before you into an operaton- a feeling of connection and love and optimism? I imagine that feeling and… well, I want that feeling sometimes.

I want to feel less alone in the literal sense.

You too?

Part One. More Tomorrow. (They connect)

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