Photographic Memory

Yesterday should have been a very, very sad day in our house.

Except… it wasn’t.

Our beloved hockey team’s season ended too short once again.

Some of you are relieved. Others are happy. And a rather large selection of you so-called friends are ridiculously happy that us doomed Canuck faithful are sentenced to yet another painful ending.

I love you. But I don’t understand you.

(Don’t worry, you don’t need to explain. I will never understand you. Or, that part of you, at least.)

But there are a few who today, like me, are sad, somewhat confused, and yet… okay.

It’s only a game, of course.

But a great game.

(High fives to all who agree.)

A few years ago we sat around our dining room table with some great friends and played Settlers of Catan. We’d just come back from Disneyland, and they – having never been – were struggling to understand why we had such a good time. David and I stammered to explain ourselves. We know we’re just five-year-olds in thirty-something-year-old bodies, of course. But there was something else that had made that trip so great.

Some of our best memories happened there.

See, both my husband and I were fortunate enough to visit the Happiest Place on Earth several times as children. For both of us, those days were some of our happiest childhood memories. Our parents were happy, we were happy. My dad, in particular, seemed to be extra-alive at Mickey’s house.

And I like to remember himat his best.

…which is why I love hockey.

My dad grew up in Nelson. This picturesque, unassuming town in southeastern British Columbia has produced some of hockey’s greats, and Dad grew up with some of them. In the 60′s, rumblings that Vancouver would soon get an NHL franchise permeated the left coast and raced through the province. As neighborhood families dreamed of the day their children would play for the then-unnamed Vancouver Canucks, Dad coached peewee hockey and brushed shoulders with people like Gus Adams.

You Canuck faithful might remember Gus’s son Greg – he scored one of the most important goals in Canuck history on May 17, 1994.

Dad and I were at the Pacific Coliseum when he did.

That spring day is one of my most vivid memories. I wore my awesomely-red-orange-black-and-white-colored White Hot Vancouver Canucks T-shirt (the same T-shirt that I wear as playoff pyjamas now). I had brown hair and bangs.  I had light-blue jeans that came up to my waist, not hips. I was not-quite 14.

Neck-deep in multiple overtimes, my teenage friends and I whined about how tired we were. Can we go home to bed now, Dad? I asked.  Dad hesitated. Just a few more minutes, ok?

A moment later the red light went on, Greg crashed into the glass below us, and the city erupted.

Dad honked the horn almost all the way home. We screamed out the windows and blew our flags in triumph. I began to put every penny of my allowance towards a coveted flying-skate-logo Cliff Ronning jersey.

Every year on May 17, I remember the unrestrained joy of that night and the people who were there with me when it happened, and I can’t help but grin.

That’s the power of shared positive experience.

So much more than sharing a cup of coffee with someone, these shared memories provide a lifelong point of connection to whoever lived them with us.

And sometimes the point of connection happens with perfect strangers.

For example, last September David and I attended a Canuck pre-season game. We landed seats in the non-alcohol section, which, we believe are some of the best in the building. Not distracted by the party, these beer-less fans can remember every stat from every one of the Canucks forty-plus roller coaster years. They are free to focus all their attention – and self-depricating humor – on the game.

I speculated with the guy sitting next to me on this year’s prospects. We cracked jokes about Vancouver sports fan psychosis and mused about coaching theories and why hockey is the best sport ever. We laughed with the guy down the aisle from us who kept yelling for Boom-Boom Bieksa to come out and show the other team who was boss.

We lost that game, but it was still like being at a great party with long-lost friends. We’d lived and breathed with this team. It was just a game, but it was also so much more than just a game.

Some people have applauded the Canucks’ early exit, claiming it teaches us an important lesson – this isn’t what we should live for. I get that. I do. But I think those of us steeped in Canuck lore know that the slogan wasn’t meant to be taken so literally.  We know that this (the Stanley Cup Playoffs) is awesome, and we live to love it, but we don’t live for it, not literally. If anything, we live for the community it brings the further our team gets in the playoffs.

Or as a wise friend said, it’s a means, not an end.

Last Friday, in a brief moment of foresight, we sold our tickets to last night’s game. We said it was to help pay for Noelle’s new glasses. Or to help fund our future (ahem) playoff tickets.

But the real reason we sold them was that we’d rather watch the Canucks live out this year’s fate with our good friends. Win or lose, we knew we could make it a great night.

And that’s exactly what happened.

At seven o’clock we were all screaming for joy. At eight o’clock we were stunned into silence. I worked hard to keep the swell in my chest from spilling over into tears. But when I dared to lift my eyes from the floor, I realized everyone else was teary too.

It lasted only a few moments before one of us jumped up and said,let’s go outside.

It was a gorgeous night. The view from where we were was incredible. It was one of those nights that I paused, looked around me, and realized I was living something pretty awesome.

Do you ever have those moments? I hope so. Some days they’re so hard to remember. Sometimes they seem so few and far between. Our most painful memories are often – biologically – the most powerful.

But I believe we can do something about that.

I think that’s why last night was so great. It could have been really, really sad. In many ways, it was.

But we weren’t sad alone.

We didn’t let each other stay sad, either.

I realized then that there’s something even more powerful than shared positive experiences.  There’s shared negative experiences that we choose to make positive together.

Vancouver, we have the opportunity to do that here.

We could complain about what went wrong. We could puzzle over why the hockey powers-that-be hate us. We could dream up ways to fix it. Unfortunately – or fortunately, I’m not sure what yet – there will be lots of time for that.

But I think it’s a little too early for this die-hard fan to analyze. (I admit that’s because I might still be just a tiny bit sad about last year.)

Instead, I’m going to do what I urged us to do last year…

Act like we’re still in it.

No, I’m not suggesting creepy-delusional breaks from reality. I mean this very literally: act like we’re still in it.

Be happy. High-five strangers. Talk to everyone you meet with a genuine interest. Act like you all have something in common, because often, you do, and you just don’t know it yet.

And if it takes you wearing your jersey to do it, then… wear your blue-and-green with pride. (I will too, just so you’re not alone).

If we do that enough, we might realize this is all just another chapter in our soon-to-be-epic history.  One day, perhaps decades from now, we’ll muse about 2011 and 2012 and how upset we used to be, as we cheer on the team that does finally win us the Cup.

Until then, if you find yourself in one of those moments when you realize you’re living something pretty awesome, no matter what you’re doing right then, capture it – with a camera, a thought, a few words, or even just a deliberate pause. Frame that memory, if only in your mind.

And… if you’re not a hockey fan – insert whatever thing you’re really into at every point I mentioned hockey in this post. And… if you don’t have a thing you’re really into… well, you might be missing out on some really great memories with some really great friends.

Together we can build new memories.  Together we can make good memories. More importantly, together we can weave memories of bad things we made good by our decision to find something to be happy about.

What a photographic memory that would be.

 

Be Not Yourself

He who conquers others is strong; He who conquers himself is mighty. – Lao Tzu

You all know I love Glee.

Well, I don’t love everything on that show. I don’t love the occasional schizophrenic character changes or the wheel of revolving relationships. I also don’t love the defense of every minority except one (those of you in that one know exactly what I’m talking about).

But I love the music.

They also know how to deal with bullies.

Last month I wrote an article about the effects of trauma on children. The counselor I interviewed for that article claimed that in her twenty-five years of practice, she had never seen bullying as vicious or intense as she sees right now.

Yet this generation claims to be more tolerant than any before it.

Seriously, people, what happened to us?!

Every day I witness human beings treat others poorly. Their justifications are numerous. I’ve heard everything from they’re so pathetic, they deserved it, to they’re so intolerant, they deserved it, to I can’t help it, it’s just in my nature to mock people.

I hesitate to call these people bullies, even though they fit the description.  Their behavior is so common its almost considered normal.

If you doubt what I’m saying is true, if you’ve not seen anything like this yourself, then, well,  just turn on your computer.

Last year I said that the interwebs were merely a place for the messed up people of the world to gather and get more messed-up together. But not everyone knows that.

Today’s Texting Teenagers, for example, live a large portion of their lives in the electronic world. Without a strong sense – and acceptance – of who they are, as well as the courage to be unpopular once in awhile, they’re vulnerable to all sorts of pressure, confusion, and persecution from people they’ve may have never even met.

Glee addressed this in an episode this spring. Recently transferred to a different school for his bully behavior, football player Dave Korovsky returns to apologize to the Glee kids.  He admits the thing he’d persecuted most in others was the thing he was ashamed of in himself.

Perhaps that’s the reason for our increased impatience with others. Perhaps we’re all more miserable inside than we used to be.

In any case, Korovsky’s repentance – and subsequent revelation – was rewarded by a hurricane of cyber-bullying.

Not from those he’d once bullied, of course. The underdogs usually understand each other.

No, the bullying came from fellow bullies.

And also from people he’d never even met.

Korovsky’s history of power and popularity ill-prepared him for the sudden persecution. He cracked under the pressure.

But, of course, the Glee kids bailed him out – and used his situation to send a message to their peers: opposition can make you stronger, if you let it.

Too often we believe that as long as we’re ourselves, everything will be okay.

Isn’t that the message we tell those who feel insecure? Just be yourselves, and people will like you for you.

But sometimes that just isn’t true.

And sometimes, we really shouldn’t be ourselves.

In fact, it could be this message alone – the I’m ok, you’re ok, let the world see exactly who you are – that invited bullies to flourish. If we’re all free to be our unrestrained selves, if we’re all conditioned to never edit our thoughts or words, if we’re always permitted to say whatever we want under the auspices of just being ourselves, then too often we sacrifice character for emotional vomit and true security for offensive propaganda.

After all, truly secure people don’t have to make everyone else think and act like them.

Secure people let others be different than them. Secure people say they’re sorry. Secure people take responsibility for their actions.

And secure people know that sometimes, it’s best not to be themselves.

Let me explain.

The last few months have been a bit, erhm, intense.

And while most of the posts on this blog might proclaim otherwise, I’m not known for handling pressure well.

For more than a decade, my husband has done a hilarious impression of me and my best friend handling a crisis. I won’t get into her part of it – it’s not her blog, after all – but under pressure, my first response makes Eeyore look like a motivational speaker.

If I were to follow the world’s advice and just be myself, I would be – pretty consistently – sucked into a vortex of despair.

Myself isn’t always so great.

In fact, myself is often exactly what I shouldn’t be.

But there’s another option.

I can be better than myself.

It’s not easy. It’s like trying to extract a sumo wrestler from quicksand.

But each moment I choose to fight back wards off the devastation of giving in. The cumulative repertoire of these moments looks something like hope.

That’s not my biological – or psychological – tendency. In the past I’ve too often relied on the belief that good things must be coming soon.

But I’m starting to realize even that’s a shaky foundation.

What if the good thing never comes? What if our Gandalf never shows up? What if we never hear the words, ‘I come to you now, at the turn of the tide‘?

All dorkiness aside, this is one of the many reasons writers write – to correct the real-life endings to better ones.

But perhaps we need to stop expecting real life to be epic.

Perhaps its time to stop waiting for the turn of the tide.

Sometimes we need to stop being Sleeping Beauty.  Sometimes we need to stop waiting for someone else to rouse us back to life.

Sometimes we need to grab our swords and slay the dragon… if only the dragon of ourselves.

I feel that happening these last six weeks. Between the moments of grief and irrational fear grows an even more irrational hope – not that things will change, but that I will.

It’s not the hope of certainty. The only certainty of our current situation is uncertainty. While doctors do more tests – experiments, even – on my husband (the next is a Holter monitor this upcoming Thursday and Friday), none of them expects a clear diagnosis. And while no news is good news, as I’ve written before, there’s no guarantee that we’re out of the woods yet…

…or, well, ever.

But there’s still hope.

And maybe that’s what Glee does best.

It’s been three years now, yet the club kids are no more generally accepted by their peers than they were during the pilot. They’re still outcasts. They’re still mocked. They’re still persecuted.

But they choose to fight back anyways.  They refuse to believe the negative press about them – at least most of the time.

Maybe that’s all we can hope for. Things might never be different, but we can be.

We don’t have to resort to just being ourselves.

We can be better than ourselves.

That I can say this – when my tendency is to doubt, not believe –

…perhaps that’s the good thing coming.

If so, then I guess it’s already here.

No Guarantees

I’m just trying not to hang on too tight.

A friend of ours said these words as we celebrated with them this week. After years of hard work and manifold bends in the road, they are in a positive, hopeful, great place. So great, in fact, they can’t bear to think that right now might not last for the rest of their lives.

But they’re old enough to know better.

These past few days I’ve wondered if I have a stamp on my forehead that says, my life’s a little intense right now, so please make it harder, if you can. I’m so sure this sign exists – perhaps even has blinking lights around it – that the edginess of a few weeks ago looks happy in comparison to the feisty, cynical bark escaping me now.

I guess I thought when I got cancer, that would be it. I remember breathing a sigh of relief when I first found out about it. Yes, there was actually something physically wrong with me, and I wasn’t just not coping well.

I remember thinking, well, I don’t have to worry about my life turning on its head anymore.

Life had already turned on its head. So, it wouldn’t happen again….

Right?

But, as the friends we celebrated with this week are also smart enough to know, that’s not the way it works.

There are no guarantees.

Sometimes we go through something hard, or scary, or unsettling, and our world spins differently for awhile. We call these moments, days, hours, or years – “scares.”

When something good happens, we think the scare is over.

Life goes back to normal.

We brush off the scare as an anomaly – something really hard we did once, because we had to. And, maybe if we don’t talk about, ignore it, maybe, it goes away and never comes back.

But…

What happens when the scares come closer and closer together? What do we do when they pile up one horrendous layer at a time?

We can get bitter. We can think we’ve been screwed over. We can think that life has done us horribly, horribly wrong.

(I admit I’m flirting with that right now.)

But each time the undertow threatens to drag me under, one gentle thought keeps me from giving in:

Maybe this is real life.

Maybe this is what was supposed to happen.

I don’t know why. It doesn’t seem right. But maybe, maybe, we were always meant to live with the knowledge that there are no guarantees.

We grow up thinking the world operates under a set of rules. As children we crave structure. We thrive in clearly-defined boundaries.

Structure makes us feel safe.

As adults we learn that the rules aren’t as clearly defined as before.

For example, Wednesday David and I drove to his cardiologist’s office in Surrey. The building is beautiful. The doctor is well-spoken, kind, humble.

But the drive there is terrifying.

No, really. I am starting to believe that David’s stress may be entirely due to the Wipeout-style obstacle course he navigates every day on his drive to work.

See, for some reason, drivers in South Surrey aren’t like drivers in the Fraser Valley.

Every time I go there, I feel like any one of these people could run a red light and hit me – at any time.

I told David this as we meandered our way to almost-but-definitely-not-quite-White-Rock.

That’s a valid concern, he acknowledged.

We laughed. But it got me thinking.

The rules help control the fun, David and I often joke.

It’s one of our favorite quotes from Friends.

But in some degree, Monica was right.

We spend most of our lives clinging to rules we didn’t even know we had.

We feel shaky when things don’t look like we expected them to look.

On Wednesday David’s cardiologist reviewed the events that led to the referral. He asked question after question. David often glanced at me with that look – what is he getting at? – and I’d explain. The doctor reviewed every test we’d had done so far.  Then he said the good news:

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with you.

As I wrote before, sometimes lone events of atrial fibrillation occur in young men.

As the cardiologist said, they’re usually triggered by binge drinking or cocaine use.

I laughed.

Yeah, that’s not him.

The cardiologist admitted that he wasn’t sure what the trigger was for David’s experience.

It could be any number of things, he said.

There’s still a few things to rule out. He wants a detailed echo report. (Our family doctor had previously told us it looked normal). He recommended a holter monitor to make sure there isn’t some ‘symptom-free runs of atrial fib’ happening without David knowing.  He also hasn’t seen the results of the adrenal tumor test yet. It often takes a long time to get a definitive answer for that. So, technically, we’re not in the clear.

But there is a very good chance that what happened is not indicative of anything bad. There’s a very good chance it will never happen again.

But there are also no guarantees.

Except one: what happened IS most likely due to stress.

The people I’ve talked to about this have been relieved for me. I admit I am also relieved. As far as we can tell - so far - there’s nothing in David that will significantly impact or shorten his life span.

But, many have misinterpreted this relief as an easy thing to deal with.

They’re right in a sense. If all this is due to stress, it is a better problem than the host of other possibilities.

But it’s still a problem.

This week David and I looked at our life. What can be changed? What can be cut? What can be different?

But here’s the thing – a lot of the causes of stress in our life can not be changed.

And that’s when it hit me.

We talk a lot about stress in our society. We say we’re more stressed than ever – and we are. We think, if we could just get rid of the stress…

But sometimes we can’t.

Sometimes, all we can do, is learn to be okay with it.

See, I don’t think we were ever meant to live a quiet, gentle, constantly-happy, boring little jet-setter lives. I don’t think it was ever part of the plan to be entitled to all the things we’ve learned to be entitled to.

I starting to think we were never meant to live stress-free lives.

Parents, hear me out on this: can you imagine what would happen to your children if you let them get everything they ever wanted? Can you imagine what kind of people they would become if nothing was ever hard for them?

Perhaps you don’t have to imagine. Perhaps you’ve already seen it. Perhaps we’ve all seen it – in the over-indulged 1%, in the kids who live in the mansion down the street, in us.

I’m starting to think that maybe the happiest among us may also have the most significant challenges. I’m starting to believe the most satisfying lives are lived by those who fight insurmountable obstacles.

I think they bring out the hero in us -

- if we let them.

We might not be able to rid our lives of stress.

But maybe that’s a good thing.

We might be able to do something better:

Learn to live at peace with stress.

It’s not easy. But I think there might be a happy ending in there somewhere.

Strength for Today

Believe it or not, this is not the craziest stretch of life I’ve walked through.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s nuts. It’s a psychotic, insane, you’ve-got-to-be-kidding-me season.

But it’s not my first time feeling this way.

Never mind that. You’re all reading this because you want news about David. So, here it is:

Yesterday I went to work. David was feeling well when I left. He wanted some activities to distract him, so he volunteered to do some of Noelle’s school work with her and plant some seeds in our make-shift garden. He said the activity made him feel energized and refreshed.

Then came late afternoon.

The ‘fluttering’ started again – he thought. He tried calling me. I was at work. I couldn’t answer my phone.

So he called 911.

The paramedics brought him to our hospital. He sent me a text.

I think I better stop reading The Hunger Games until this is all over.

David called while I was on my break. I had just read the part in Catching Fire where (block your eyes if you’re not there yet) Peeta’s heart stops.  David chose that moment to tell me his heart was acting up again.

I stormed downstairs to emergency and told him he has got to stop being the boy with the bread.

He laughed. He looked well, actually.

And of course, he didn’t choose to do this at all.

Who would choose this kind of life?

We chose the life of money trees and insane wealth. We chose the life of four vacations a year and four perfectly behaved children. We chose the life of a huge house and two SUVs.

But we got this one instead.

We maternity nurses know the inherent danger of birth plans. We know that the more detailed you script your experience ahead of time, the more concerned you’ll be about reality matching your script.

I think that might apply to other parts of life, too.

Each time I hit one of these crazy seasons, someone inevitably says, good grief, girl, you can’t keep up what you’re doing forever.

They’re right, of course.

No one can keep up insane amounts of stress forever.

That might be why David is sick right now.

But the more I think long-term, the more I plan. The more I plan, the more I analyze. The more I analyze, the more I recognize the potential problems. The more I recognize potential problems, the more I worry.

Of course, there’s a different kind of plan. The helpful kind – the kind that analyzes why we feel so worried and breaks things down into bite-sized pieces.

If there’s one thing eight years of nursing has taught me, its that helpful kind of plan.

It might have been good that I wasn’t with David on the 13th.

But I’m glad I was there last night.

Now I understand what’s happening. I talked to the right people. We saw at least five different medical professionals. Each were very thorough and extremely calm. I asked them all the questions I could think of.  We looked at every possible scenario.

There are six things that could be causing David’s symptoms:

1. (extreme) Electrolyte imbalance – that might be nutritional, and yes, I’m on it.

2. Hyperthyroidism – would explain a lot of the symptoms, and has a relatively simple treatment.

(both of these depend on blood tests we had done last week – I will call the doctor tomorrow to get results)

3. Benign tumor of the adrenal gland – this depends on the 24-hour urine test, is very unlikely, but something to rule out.

4. A ‘lone atrial fibrillation’ – the ER doc last night said that sometimes healthy young people have – for no good reason – isolated incidents of atrial fibrillation.

5. A cardiac issue - he needs an echocardiogram (what I had in November) and/or a cardiac treadmill/stress test to rule out an electrical abnormality or other problem. But I saw his ECG. In the words of the ER doc, the 12 lead looked pristine. It showed no abnormalities whatsoever. There is no evidence of heart muscle injury or electrical conduction problem.

6. Chronic stress and anxiety – in fact, all his symptoms could be due to this. ALL of them.

As I watched David last night and listened to the doctors, I realized that though it could be any one of these six things, or, I guess something we haven’t considered yet, there’s a strong possibility its only number 6.

So, we rule out numbers 1-5.

And, we deal with number 6, no matter what the tests say.

I’ve cut down his activities. I’ve set up the right appointments.

Tomorrow, I will call our family doctor for the blood and urine test results; I will schedule his echocardiogram at the hospital; I will take him to the stress test in Surrey.

That’s what I’ll do tomorrow.

Today, I will take care of my family.

I know David’s worried that what came out of nowhere before, will come out of nowhere again.

But for the first time in twelve days, I’m not.

It could happen again, but I’m not worried.

This isn’t denial; this is discipline. This is what I learned from all of those crazy seasons I’ve walked through before.

Deliberately choose not to worry.

Today, when David looks at me, he calms down. My face no longer betrays concern. I know he needs care, but I no longer feel subject to the merciless whim of some unknown disease.

We have a plan.

That plan could change.

But we’ll take it one step at a time, one day at a time.

Today, I choose not to worry. 

Today, I choose to take care of today.

Today, I choose to let tomorrow take care of itself.

After all, ‘Can any one of you by worrying add a single hour to your life? ‘

Um, well…. no.

Yesterday I woke with the strength for what I needed to do yesterday. Today I woke up with strength for what I needed to do today. Tomorrow I’ll wake with strength for tomorrow.

That’s how we’ll do this weird thing we’ve been given to do right now.

Maybe if we do it right – if we choose strength for today – then we’ll also get the other part of that line.

Bright hope for tomorrow.

 

Thanks for hanging in there with us.

 

Survival

Last Saturday my Kindle broke.

Yes, Amazon will fix it – for free. Yes, the new one arrives today. But at the time, I thought, really, universe?! If you’re going to suck my whole life down the drain doing things I really wish I wasn’t doing, couldn’t you at least have left me with my Kindle?

Yes, I know. This is one of those first world problems. For a list of more first world problems, join me on Pinterest. My board ‘words to live by’ has an excellent – and hilarious – explanation.

But, though I’m ashamed to admit it, the loss of my Kindle did mess me up.

Why?

I was re-reading The Hunger Games.

Yeah, yeah. I know. I know! I’ve heard it from all of you. People I gave the book to said, yes, this was entertaining but predictable, or I liked it, but it just didn’t grip me like it did you, or – my favorite – I hated the ending, she picked the wrong guy.

Others who followed my recommendation were aghast that I could tolerate – even praise – a story about kids killing other kids.

When they put it like that, yes, it did sound horrible.

So I thought I better test my first impression. This week I poured through the electronic – then hard copies – of the trilogy. Despite my best efforts not to get involved, it gripped me even more than the first time.

Perhaps I desperately needed an escape.

Maybe I was just able to think deeper about the issues involved.

But if this book isn’t a comment on the disparity between first world and third world problems, I’m not sure what is.

Those in the glittering Capitol stress over ridiculous standards of fashion and beauty.

Those in the stark districts worry about whose child will die in the annual Capitol-mandated fight-to-the-death on live television.

It doesn’t help that the districts’ children’s deaths are seen as Capitol entertainment.

The privileged few are consumed by pleasure. The rest are absorbed with survival.

I have spent most of my life as part of the privileged few. Even now, under more pressure than ever before, I am still part of the first world. My biggest daily trouble is having time and energy to make dinner.

But I have enough food for that dinner.

And if I didn’t, I could go down the street and get it. I could press a button on my iPhone and order it. I could call up a friend and ask them to meet us somewhere for dinner.

I have spent the last weeks and months complaining – internally or externally – about everything that’s going wrong. Yet it’s only because I have so much experience with things going right that I can even recognize the difference.

Perhaps that’s what’s happening to us right now. Perhaps that’s why it hurts so much. We are being plucked from our reckless pursuit of pleasure. We are being taught survival skills. We are being trained for a battle we don’t even know.

We spend our days doing what we need to do. We go about our lives. And we wait.

Monday we saw our family doctor. David’s electrolytes are low. (Those of you in medicine will understand that a potassium of 3.2 can cause atrial fibrillation all on its own).  He’s lost fifteen pounds in eight weeks without trying. He’s far more worried than he used to be.

The last week I’ve seen a version of my husband I never knew before. He resists closing his eyes for fear of what he’ll remember. He hates bedtime. He doesn’t like the dark. Instead of scoffing at danger, instead of saying, what could possibly go wrong, Lana, and don’t be silly, that’s never going to happen, he’s far ahead of me in anticipating the worst-case scenario.

The thing is, I know exactly what he’s talking about.

I spent the first part of this week angry that I now manage my own internal battle with the possibility of death as well as his.

My friends who have shared this experience – a scary phone call or a sick husband – haven’t been sick themselves.

That’s the way it should be, I’ve thought. The sick one should have a healthy one to care for them.

Except… because I fight the same thing he does, I know exactly what he’s talking about.

I know what it’s like to think you could die at any moment. I know what it’s like to fear the next phone call or set of test results. I know how it feels to wait in a doctor’s office for news that could change your life.

I’ve learned that I have something I may never fully beat. In fact, it might beat me.

But I’ve also learned how to fight back anyways.

These past few days, I’ve been flooded with emails, comments, and messages. So many of you have said, I know exactly what you’re talking about – I know this anger, this desperate search for grace under pressure. Even more of you have courageously told me your stories, your battles with  dark – at times uncertain – opponents.

I can not express the privilege it is to hear your stories. They remind me we are not alone.

“Two are better than one, because they have a good return for their labor; If either of them falls down, one can help the other up. But pity anyone who falls and has no one to help him up.” – Solomon, Ecclesiastes 4

They also remind me why I loved The Hunger Games so much.

(I’d say spoiler alert, but seriously, if you’ve not read these books yet, you’re probably one of the ones who doesn’t want to, so…)

With only six of the original twenty-four tributes left, the Gamemakers lead Peeta and Katniss to believe they both have a chance to make it out alive – if they’re the last ones standing. Moved by the possibility of going home, Katniss gives up her independent fight to nurse an injured Peeta back to health. As they wait out a violent storm in a temporary shelter, each risks their life to save the other. As a result, each also takes turns being not the healthy and the sick, but the healthier and the sicker. The healthier keeps watch. The healthier stays ready to defend.

Meanwhile, they wait for the battle to resume.

When I found this spot in the story on Wednesday night, I grabbed David’s arm. We both laughed out loud. This is us.

As we wait for our battle to resume, we take turns being more messed up about it. The healthier helps the sicker. Then we switch.

And we wait.

We wait for David’s blood test results. We wait for the results of his twenty-four hour test. We wait to hear if he has an adrenal tumor, hyperthyroidism, or exaggerated electrolyte imbalance.

We wait for his cardiac treadmill test on Monday afternoon. We wait for more than a week after that to hear its results. We wait to know if he has an electrical problem, muscle injury, or neither. We wait to see if anything can be done about it.

Somewhere in there I’ll have to find time to get my own blood work done. I’ll wait for my own results. I’ll wait for my oncologist to tell me if I’m a little more alive or dead this time.

But the point is, not only do we have virtually unlimited access to all the health care we both need, neither one of us does this alone.

Yesterday I found one the now-frayed, nearly ten-year-old programs from our wedding. At the bottom we’d quoted from the same passage I mentioned above:

Though one may be overpowered, two can defend themselves. A cord of three strands is not quickly broken.

David and I both laughed at the irony – did we know this was going to happen? - then he said:

I never really understood you until now.

I grinned back at him.

I know.

It shouldn’t work like this. We’re both so overwhelmed we should be snapping at each other far more than we actually are. And while that still happens, very much, there’s this other thing that’s happening too.

We understand each other.

Too often all of us keep our real stories hidden from each other. We give each other edited versions of the hard parts.

While we need to be judicious in who we let witness the unvarnished truth, I think our emotional isolation sometimes does us more harm than good.

If we were to crack that shell, even just a tiny bit, to the right people, we might find that we’re not so different from them. We might find that there is more than a few of us who have tackled impossible odds.

We might find there are many, many others who thought they didn’t have a chance, but fought back anyways.

We could find that our tales weave together into a powerful story. We could build an arsenal of shared survival skills.

We might become the community of the overcomers.

Do you want in? I think there’s room.

Scraping for Grace

Last summer an old friend found this blog and sent me an email.

It brought me to tears. But the part I remember most was where he told me it was okay if I broke down once in awhile.

I knew what he meant. He was giving me permission to be less than perfect.

I thanked him for his wise words. But I also told him the truth, which was, I wasn’t faking the decision to be happy. In fact, cancer – somehow – increased my capacity for joy.

I’ve not felt much like breaking down these past three years.

I’ve gotten tired. I’ve gotten sore. I’ve gotten frustrated. But I’ve never really felt like I’m falling apart.

People tell me that’s incredible. I’ve just thought it seemed the only thing to do. I didn’t have time, energy, or space to let myself break down.

And then came last Tuesday.

For any of you who’ve expected a serious collapse at some point, well…

It finally happened.

Almost a week ago now - has it really been that long? -  I took the girls to a local bookstore. We looked at toys; we read stories. I talked Noelle into trying Adventures in Odyssey instead of more Veggie Tales.

As we went to the cashier, I remembered something David had said about a store credit. I pulled out my phone to call him.

The phone blinked at me.

Two missed calls – David Meredith.

I scrolled over to text messages. Nothing. David always texts me if he doesn’t get through. I tried calling – straight to voicemail. I texted him – where are you? When he didn’t respond after five minutes, I texted again – what did you say about that store credit again? They can’t find it.

But he didn’t reply.

Frustrated, I paid for our things, got in the car, and turned on the newly-purchased Adventures in Odyssey. The girls complained at first – Mom, TV is so much better than this radio thing – but quickly became engrossed in the story. As I pulled into our garage fifteen minutes later, my phone rang.

David Meredith, mobile.

Finally, I thought.

But he wasn’t in the mood for small talk either.

Where were you? he begged.

His voice was croaky. Is he getting a cold? I wondered. I sighed heavily. Just what I need, on top of all the rest, is a sick husband.

I recounted the events of the day, irritation creeping into my voice. You didn’t answer my calls, I said.

He was quiet. Then – I’m at Surrey Memorial.

What? I gasped.

Somehow my vibrating fingers turned off the car. David fired out random facts over the phone as they came to him: I’m in emerg. They put me under. They gave me drugs… chest… pain. 

Okay, I nodded. Okay. He’d had that before; each time he’d gone to the ER it had checked out normal. The doctors said he was anxious.

But this time the pain didn’t go away.

Someone at work broke a door down. They put me in an ambulance. My heart rate… too fast. Nothing … worked.

I gulped.

So they put me under and shocked me back.

I’m not sure what to call the sound I made when I heard that. I think perhaps the closest word is shriek.

Noelle reached out and grabbed my hands. Why are you crying, Mommy?

I closed my eyes and counted to ten.

I’m sorry, kiddo. Deep, deep breath. Everything’s fine. Daddy just had a scary day.

But he’s fine?

Yes, he’s fine. 

Noelle frowned. Daddy’s had scary days before, Mommy, and you’ve didn’t cry then.

I forced myself into nurse mode. 

Get the kids food. Assess the situation. 

I scrambled to get coherent information from my now-post-anesthetic husband. What did the doctor say? What drugs did they give you? Are you staying overnight? Where are you?

He relayed my questions to the nurses.  They answered in reassuring tones, but I could hear the pause – the one I give to patients when I really don’t know what’s going to happen but I know they need something to hold on to. 

We’ll see what happens, they said.

David took several shallow, uneven breaths, then: Can you come? 

It was almost dinner. We were going away the next day. My kids were starving. I needed to pack, clean, and finish an assignment.

Of course I’ll come. 

My whole body shook as I packed up the girls. I’ve dreamed things like this before. Each time, I’ve woken in tears. And each time, the steady snoring of my husband reassured me that it didn’t really happen.

Not this time.

I kept trying to reason with myself.

It must be a dream.

We’re dealing with too much already; why would we be given something else?

I mean, this stuff gets evened out eventually, right?

Everywhere I turn, I see people under stress. Some sag with the weight of the world, others grate that things aren’t happening exactly as they planned them.

I’ve been… edgy… for awhile now. As things have gotten harder, I’ve worked to keep anger out of my words, my thoughts, my tone. Who wants to be around someone who lets their trouble color everything they see?

I’d been doing okay until Tuesday. But now…

I can’t hold my tongue anymore when someone tells me their biggest problem is whether they should go to France or Italy this summer. I’m in constant battle with the raging bite that threatens to engulf the next person who complains about a problem comparable to hangnail.

I scrape for every smidge of grace I can find, and it seems like there’s none left. 

And that’s when it hit me.

We lack grace for others when we don’t feel like much grace has been given to us.

In other words – what comes in, goes out.

I know there’s no grace left in me. But fortunately, I also know that I am not left alone to handle all this.

And if I look at it right, there were little scraps of grace left all the way along this whole week.

Last month Noelle had asked me, Mom, have you ever seen a miracle?

My answer was immediate: yes.

Her sweet voice sighed. I haven’t.

I smiled. I think you have.

She frowned, then gasped. I missed it? Where? When? 

I took a deep breath. My smile got deeper. Together we remembered two days where she was really worried about something. Contrary to probably every parenting book on the planet, I pointed out everything that could have gone more wrong and didn’t.

After a few minutes, she smiled with me. Those were miracles?

Yes, girl, I said. Those were miracles.

And, let’s face it: sometimes those tiny things – the small escapes or good fortunes – are the only miracles we get.

This past Tuesday, my best friend got an extension on life.

That’s a pretty big miracle – one I didn’t even know to ask for.

That best friend also got the right people to pay attention to something he’d worried about for months, even years. He sees the cardiologist next week.

Those of you familiar with our health care system know that’s a miracle in and of itself.

But that’s not all. In fact, as I remember these last seven days, I see detail after detail far too provisional to be coincidence.

I’d initially ignored these small miracles because I was so caught up in how unfair it all was.

But as my six-year-old forced me to remember, there was grace all along.

So, if any of you feel like me, that the world seems to be spinning off its axis, that you don’t manage problems so much as brace yourself for the inevitable breeding of stress with more stress into grand-baby catastrophes, know that, again… you are not alone.

That’s grace right there.

But more than that, know that no matter how hopeless your situation seems, no matter how steep the hill you’re climbing gets, there is at least one other person who stubbornly chooses to believe that there is -

- still grace - 

for each step along the path. 

And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to miss it.

 

Great Power, Great Responsibility

Last Tuesday I pulled my six-year-old girl out of school.

I’ve agonized over the decision for weeks. Many of you know that I intended to wait. I wanted her to finish grade one with her friends. I wanted her to have four more months with the fabulous woman she’s been blessed with for a teacher. I wanted the transition to be gentle.

None of that happened.

Out of respect for Noelle’s privacy, I won’t share details here.  But my girl begged me to let her learn at home. And once I’d shared her concerns with a couple of close psychologist friends, I realized it didn’t matter if her request fit my plans. Pulling her now was what we had to do.

The next day BC teachers voted to strike.

The last seven days have been overloaded with emotion and activity.  I told only our close family and friends about the switch. I didn’t want to burden anyone else with the fallout of our decision. I didn’t want to give opportunity for opponents to tell me they told me so.   So, I stayed quiet, kept smiling, and chose to look at the bright side.

The thing is, the bright side of homeschooling can be very, very bright indeed.

Noelle appreciates the extra time to get ready in the morning. She adores the one-on-one attention. Her inquisitive mind loves being able to ask any question she wants without concern for the thirty-plus other children who need her teacher’s attention (seriously, how they do it I’ll never know). At the end of the day, even when I have to refocus her repeatedly, motivate her to finish her math lesson when she’d rather go play, or correct her when she fails to show friendly behavior to her sister (I’m forever grateful to her Kindergarten teacher for the kind of behavior she reinforced in her classroom), Noelle still says, “I love learning at home, Mom.”

Still, every night I go to sleep, overwhelmed with the thought that this is all up to me, now.

It’s not, really. Noelle is registered with a school. We have a teacher that supports our family and ensures Curriculum Guidelines are met. We have a principal who cares about the welfare of his students. There are support groups, more curriculum options than you’d ever possibly have time to research, and the valuable input of friends and family.

But in the back of my head every morning, I think, my child’s education is entirely within my hands.

What was it that Spider-Man‘s Uncle Ben said again?

With great power comes great responsibility.

You’d think homeschooling families wouldn’t be affected by the strike.

In terms of where my kids go each day, then no, we’re not affected. But the controversy is unavoidable. I can’t seem to go or be anywhere without having someone tell me what they think – or worse, what I ought to think – about the dispute. And, as someone who doesn’t do well with being told what to think about anything, I’ve been a bit… conflicted.

I’ve tried to keep this an internal conflict. I’ve not known exactly what concerned me. I was afraid feeling unsettled meant I was angry at someone, or I was angry with one particular side, and I was afraid that made me a judgmental person.

I also saw what happened to those who voiced their dissension – with either side – on social media. They were at best, chastised; at worst, condemned.

And so I’ve read,  I’ve thought, and I’ve taught my kids.

After seven days, I realized that I’m not angry at anyone. I think I’m just sad.

Is education an essential service? I’m not sure. But I do know the effects of education should not be overlooked.

When I went to university, I thought I knew all the things to think. I’d been to school for thirteen years, thank you very much, and I graduated with excellent grades. These university classes wouldn’t be challenging so much as they would be interesting.

Ah, the ignorance of youth.

The more interesting my classes, the more they challenged – even offended – me. The idea that I didn’t have it all figured out shook me.  The possibility of another perspective equally valid to mine made me want to throw my books on the floor and storm off.

Most troubling of all was the potential I was just plain wrong.

Too often we confuse worth with being right. Worse, we mistake it for winning. But winning belongs in wars – sports, for example, were initially developed to train young men for war – and not in healthy relationships. As our marriage counselor used to say, successful partnerships use more dialogue than debate.

Of course, wars have a place. They begin when dialogue ends.

So do strikes.

It worries me that my government feels so comfortable violating the constitution. It scares me that they think up to fifty children per public school class is not only acceptable, but safe.

But what makes me really sad is that this is how they teach our children to resolve conflict.

This, this, from the most educated country in the world.

Education is directly linked to wealth. The least educated countries in the world are also some of the poorest.

A well-trained mind brings opportunity, confidence, and hope – hope for change, hope for growth, hope for improvement.

But the best education also brings maturity.

One of the marks of maturity is how we handle opposition.

I’ll be the first one to admit I often don’t handle opposition well. But I want to get better. And I know that the sooner I ask other people their opinion and the slower I am to spout mine, the more I learn.

Which makes me wonder – just as I wonder after every marital disagreement my kids witness – what do the kids learn from this very public, very heated disagreement between two of the most powerful groups in the province?

Hopefully they learn that there are some people who willingly sacrifice reputation and comfort to protect their welfare. Hopefully they see the importance of advocacy, risk, and respectful opposition.

But what if that’s not what they see?

What if all they see is a war? What if all they see are two parties who are so unwilling to listen to each other that they just keep shouting back and forth until the other side gives in?

What do they learn then? To stand up for themselves? To push back harder? To prove they’re bigger and stronger?

What kind of world is that?

Moms, dads, uncles, aunts, grandparents, its time we stop seeing our government – or our teachers – as the only ones responsible for our children’s education. No matter where our children go to school – public, private, or home locations – we are the ones ultimately responsible for how they grow up.

We are the ones responsible for their maturity.

Those teachers who wake up like this mother – sobered by the power given them, nervous at what happens if they don’t do it right – deserve every single penny they make and more.  Those dedicated individuals are an essential service to society.

We can’t afford to lose them.

I guess if it were up to me, teachers would have everything they needed to make every child’s experience at school utterly amazing.

But, if it were up to me, every teacher would put their heart and soul into their profession.

Many of them already do.

Many of them already know they’ve been given great power.

And those who do also know:

With great power comes great responsibility.

So, teachers, union representatives, government officials, and negotiators, please consider this a plea from a frustrated mother.  You’re all on a very big stage right now. What you do – and how you do it – is visible to everyone, even children who learn by distance like mine. And while some kids will only remember the days they didn’t have to go to school, others will be watching you very, very closely. How you handle this – and not just which side ‘wins’ – will teach them more powerfully than almost anything you do in the classroom – or in legislature.

Please respect our children.

If you do, you have my unequivocal support.