What's a Grrrl to do?

I’ve always been health-conscious though not a granola. I grew up with a Dad who was into organic gardening before organic gardening was cool. He was also a vitamin and supplement freak, always latching on to research recommending megadoses of vitamins. What he chose to ignore however, was the basic medical advice given everyone: watch your weight, eat right, and exercise.

He was thin most of his life but his weight ballooned in his 50s and 60s. He loved to garden but didn’t exercise. He took lots of supplements but never saw a doctor for a physical. He had a stroke when he was 65 and never fully recovered. In mind and body, he was a shadow of his former self. I didn’t want this to happen to me.

As a teen, I developed an interest in health and fitness and took up long distance running, competing in track and field as well as running road races. I did a lot of reading on nutrition, watched my weight and diet, and worked out regularly.

By the time I was 30, my scoliosis made running painful for both my back and my knees, so I began walking for exercise instead and taking step aerobics classes. I put some weight on after the births of my two children, but lost most of it. I continued to walk regularly when my kids were small and eventually returned to taking fitness classes, though my left knee was giving me more and more trouble. Eventually I dropped out of the aerobics classes and never found another class I liked as well.

In my early 40s, I kept walking and took up yoga, practicing regularly for a year or two before moving to Belgium. As I struggled to adjust to a new country and way of life, I let myself gain 15 pounds and quit practicing yoga.  Bad move. While I’ve done a lot of walking, my body has slowly gone to mush. In that classic midlife move, my waist has disappeared and I’ve lost a lot of muscle tone.

Meanwhile, in the last few years, for reasons no doctor has been able to explain, I’ve developed a heart arrhythmia that requires I take medication to slow my heart rate down. This makes it challenging to exercise with any intensity, especially during those time frames when my heart has a tendency to fall out of rhythm easily. Then a flight or two of stairs can knock it out of whack and flatten me for a few hours—another obstacle to exercise.

Happily, in the last six weeks or so, my heart’s been behaving itself, and I’ve been trying to get beyond walking and start an exercise program to build strength and burn more calories. A few weeks ago, I bought a stepper, thinking it would be a good low-impact way for me to get some aerobic exercise and enable me to exercise regardless of the weather. I also bought a balance board to stand on while I do some work with small dumb bells, a relatively painless way to engage those “core” muscles.

I started very s-l-o-w, using the stepper every other day for 20 minutes and the balance board about twice a week for 10 minutes. Within 10 days, I noticed a weird sensation in my right leg, a sense of it being flushed. During my regular chiropractor appointment, he noticed my lower back and glutes were tight and my hips off balance.

“What’s going on here? You’ve got some new problem areas. Have you been doing squats or something?”

“Actually I bought a stepper,” I said proudly. My chiropractor works with elite athletes, and I figured he’d be impressed by my newly upgraded fitness program.

“A stepper?” he asks incredulously. “That explains why these muscles and joints are so tight.”

I tell him about the “heat flashes” my leg has been having. They don’t exactly hurt, they’re just uncomfortable. Sometimes my leg kind of aches.

He looks at me and says, “That flush is the first stage of sciatica. Your nerves are getting increasingly irritated. No stepping for you.”

My 10 days of exercise have now resulted in three weeks of therapy with my chiropractor. My leg and hip still aren’t back to normal, and I don’t know if I’ll ever be able to get back on the stepper.

I feel more than a little frustrated, caught in a Catch 22 where I need to exercise to keep my back and midsection from slumping and causing more problems, but my heart and my scoliosis make it really difficult to exercise without injury. It takes far more exercise now to get the results a moderate amount of exercise used to deliver, and yet I’m not physically capable of doing what I need to do.

One step forward, two steps back. That’s the aging process in a nutshell—enough to make a grown Grrrl cry.

Copyright 2006 Veronica McCabe Deschambault. www.v-grrrl.com.

December 27, 2006

The end

(This is the final installment in a three-part series. If you would like to start at the beginning, scroll down to the post titled "Why I Support St. Jude's.")

After more than a week in the hospital, my son had a CAT scan that located an infection in his abdomen, behind the incision from his surgery. This meant a second surgery, and I didn’t even try to hide my anguish from the doctors—up until this point everything had gone wrong. I’d lost my ability to believe in good outcomes. Happily, this surgery went well.

The incision was reopened and the infection was cleaned out. My son’s fever immediately broke and he was remarkably perky in the recovery room. Unfortunately the incision could not be closed. We were told it had to heal from the inside out in case any bacteria were lingering there. My son now had a four-inch wide incision just below his belly that was a gaping wound. It would need to remain bandaged and be packed with saline-soaked gauze; three times a day, the old packing would need to be removed and new packing put in.

“Can you do it?” the surgeon asked.

As if I had any choice. I wanted my son to heal, I wanted to take him home as quickly as possible, I would steel myself to do whatever I had to do to accomplish that.

The first time they showed me his incision, I was freaked out. An entire fat roll of gauze had been packed into it. I watched with disbelief as the doctor used tweezers to carefully extract what looked like two feet of gauze, and then used swabs to poke more gauze in. E couldn’t bear watching, and admitted he couldn’t handle dealing directly with the incision at all. I swallowed my fear and revulsion and over the course of a day or two, learned how to pack and dress my son’s wound. The constant putting down and tearing off of the surgical tape was damaging his tender skin, so the nurses worked on a system to hold his dressings in place.

We finally got to go home TEN days after we’d arrived at the hospital for what we thought would be a half-day visit. We hired a nurse to come and help with the dressing changes. Our insurance company only covered a limited number of home health care visits and E had to travel for work so I was often doing the dressing changes completely on my own. Cathy, the visiting nurse, worked with me and gave me courage. Her entire home health career had revolved around adults, most of them elderly. She had never had a pediatric patient before and had to adjust. We were in this together, and she did an amazing job.

The day I took my son to the hospital for his final post-op checkup, I started to bleed. The next day I was at my doctor’s office, watching with dread as my obstetrician’s face reflected bad news during the ultrasound. She sent me off for blood work.

It was Halloween. I heard the staff hush as I walked out of the office, and I knew the blood tests would confirm what the ultrasound suggested: I was losing the baby. I was nearly 12 weeks along and wondered whether the stress I’d experienced at the hospital had caused me to miscarry. I’ll never know.

The good news is my son fully recovered from his surgery, though he had horrible nightmares for months afterwards. While I was devastated by my miscarriage and had to have a D & C, I became pregnant again two months later and was blessed with my little girl. Interestingly enough, she was born a year to the day of my son’s surgery—a karmic consolation prize for all the heartache we’d endured.

Despite our happy ending, I’ve never forgotten the horrors of the pediatric wing and the challenges and pain faced by the children and parents who spend time there. What could be worse than having a seriously ill or chronically ill child?

This is why E and I donate to St. Jude’s. Anything we can do to make a sick child’s life better matters more than we can express. I encourage you to consider supporting your local children’s hospital or a research hospital like St. Jude’s. The children, the parents, and the staff need and deserve our prayers and contributions.

October 27, 2006

Copyright 2006 Veronica McCabe Deschambault. All rights reserved. www.v-grrrl.com

Life in the Hospital

(This is the second installment in a three-part series. You may wish to scroll down one entry to "Why We Support St. Jude's" to read the first part.)

We were in the process of being discharged from the hospital the next day when the nurse took our son’s temperature one more time for his chart, and he was running a fever. His discharge was cancelled, and he was returned to the stainless steel crib. We were left waiting for answers.

For the next week or so, he endured a battery of tests to try and locate the source of the infection causing his fever. His ears, nose, and throat were repeatedly checked, his lungs and heart listened to, his body x-rayed. He had blood draw after blood draw after blood draw, including several in the middle of the night. E and I felt ourselves dying inside each time we faced the trauma of another visit from the phlebotomist. We never got to sleep, and neither did our son. His fever raged on. He stopped nursing, and my stress reached new heights as my patience reached a new low.

When an intern examining my son's abdomen said to another intern that "God, this kid was a screamer," I looked him straight in the face and told him that if five strangers came and pinned him down, pulled off his trousers, pressed on a surgical site, and manhandled his testicles, I’d imagine he’d make a little noise, no? I was pissed. Pissed enough to ream him out in front of the head of surgery. I wanted him and the other "not-quite-doctors" to get the message how STUPID and insensitive his comment was. 

And while all this was happening in our sad little corner of the hospital, there were far more wrenching stories unfolding around me. Walking the floor, I could see the children that should have had hair but didn’t, the mothers with frozen expressions of grief, the kids walking with their IV poles, the sunken-eyed ones who couldn’t get out of bed, and the unending background noise of crying babies and toddlers.

In the morning I could tell when the doctors started making their rounds before dawn because the sound of crying children would start on one end of the hall and methodically increase as they went from room to room. I heard a little one screaming “Mama! Mama! Mama!” but Mama wasn't there to answer the call.

 The hospital, located in an urban area, attracted patients from every socio-economic group. Often, there was only one parent involved in the child’s life. Often, their jobs and circumstances didn’t allow them to spend hours at the hospital with their child. And often, dare I say it, the parents didn’t give a damn. They viewed a hospitalized child as one in Medicaid-funded daycare. One family dropped their child off for surgery and LEFT for the day. Oh yeah, why miss a chance to go out to eat and hangout at the mall.

Remember the baby crying in the room next door? Its mother finally showed up on the weekend, with several other children in tow. When her child started crying, the woman screamed at it, “Shut up! Shut up! Will you just shut up?” A sick baby, alone all week, being yelled at during its only visit from its mother. I felt bile rise in my throat. Life in the hospital was truly hell.

(To be continued...)

October 26, 2006

Copyright 2006 Veronica McCabe Deschambault. All rights reserved. www.v-grrrl.com

Why We Support St. Jude's

(First in a three-part series)

Yesterday E-Grrrl watched us sorting the mail, and her dad noted that we’d received Christmas address labels from St. Jude’s Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis, Tennessee .

She was immediately intrigued, first by the labels themselves, featuring drawings by sick children, and then by the story of St. Jude’s, a hospital devoted to researching and treating catastrophic illnesses in children. I shared with her why we were connected to it.

E and I became supporters of St. Jude’s ten years ago when our son was only a year old. He had to have surgery for a minor condition, a simple outpatient procedure that nonetheless loomed especially large in our consciousness because we were new parents, he was our first child, and our need to protect him from any kind of harm was ingrained and fierce. I was pregnant with our second child, and my maternal hormones were in full swing.

No matter what my logical mind absorbed regarding the need for this minor, common procedure and the outstanding credentials of the surgeon and hospital involved, my emotions were churning.

On the morning of his surgery, we rose while it was still dark to get to the hospital early, and I could see from my son’s face that he wondered why he was being pulled from his crib and strapped into his car seat before the sun was up. We spent the hour long ride to the teaching hospital in silence.

Once there, I dressed my son in a hospital gown and slippers and gave him the sedative the doctor supplied. We waited for it to take effect as he pushed a shopping cart around the patient playroom, admiring how cute he looked in his mini Tweety Bird gown and slippers. When the time came to actually hand him over to the surgical team, I felt my heart drop in my chest. My drugged son didn’t cry, but I did, my eyes welling with tears, which ran down my face as soon as we were alone in the waiting room. All I could think: THEY ARE CUTTING MY BABY AND I’M LETTING THEM DO THIS. I felt sick.

When the nurse came out about 45 minutes later, I thought she’d take us to our son and we’d all go home together—just as we’d planned. Instead she delivered bad news: there were complications, it would be a while. I broke into sobs this time, burying my face in E’s chest. The surgery took hours.

When I finally was led into the crowded recovery room, I was shocked by my boy’s appearance. He was pale and lethargic and mewing like a kitten. He couldn’t even cry. I tried to nurse him, and I held him, singing a lullaby.

Because the surgery had been more involved than expected, the surgeon wanted to keep him overnight. He was placed in a stainless steel crib in the pediatric ward, and E and I settled into chairs in his room.

This was the beginning of a nightmare. That night we hardly slept at all,  disturbed by the day's events and a baby crying relentlessly next door. Every fiber in my body wanted to go in and comfort that child, but the nurses told me I could not. I wondered where the baby’s parents were, what was wrong with it, why no one was there. And, of course, I spent the night praying for my own child. When the sun came up I had only one thought on my mind:

I couldn’t wait to get home.

(To be continued...)

October 25, 2006

Copyright 2006 Veronica McCabe Deschambault. All rights reserved.

Update

Regarding the recently discovered hole in my heart....

I saw the cardiologist yesterday, and she assured me the hole in my heart was not anything worth worrying about. It does increase my risk for stroke,  but I'm already being treated for an elevated stroke risk because of my atrial fibrillation--so I'm covered. She told me the hole and my heart arrhythmia are entirely separate conditions--one did not cause the other.

The immediate goal is to keep my a-fib episodes under control by adjusting my medication dosage and schedule. If that doesn't do it, then I'll have to have additional testing done, and consult with a specialist.

A part of me will always wish for a permanent solution to my heart problems, but that's not the likely outcome. For now I need to be grateful that things aren't worse, that we have some treatment options, and that for the most part, I'm doing OK.

Thanks to all of you for your concern and support.

V-Grrrl

Wondering

Shocked. Relieved. Unconcerned. Resigned. Anxious. Pissed. The whole (hole!) heart thing has me wondering. Part of me is relieved to learn what may be causing my heart arrhythmia, part of me is angry that this wasn't discovered when I first complained of heart issues five years ago, part of me is happy that maybe this can be fixed and I can finally get off medication, part of me is freaked out that I might have surgery on my heart and still have atrial fibrillation afterwards.

I called my cardiologist and discovered she's out of the office until October 9, my regular doctor had not seen the test results yet so I lack a lot of information. I have an appointment with the cardiologist on the day she gets back; my other doctor said not to worry because if I've made it this far in life with a hole in my heart, chances are it's not too serious. She'll call me if there's anything in the report I need to know before meeting with the cardiologist.

I don't have any details yet on the size of the hole, its exact location, or my treatment options. I've spent hours online reading about atrial fibrillation and holes in the heart. What I really want to know is if the hole in my heart is the cause of my arrhythmia or another heart issue to deal with. While the thought of surgery is scary, the idea of having a problem with a concrete solution is a relief. If the two conditions are unrelated, it probably means more monitoring and medication and possibly new symptoms over time--which is more than a little discouraging.

Holes in the heart are the most common congenital heart defect. Now that I know I have one, all sorts of incidents stand out in my mind. While I never fainted as a child or adult, I often felt like I was going to faint. I would get light-headed, see spots and the room darkening. I'd feel a hint of nausea and have to lie down immediately. My mom always attributed such episodes to "getting up too fast" or "standing too long." When I was an adult, I attributed those episodes to my very low blood pressure or getting too warm in a steamy shower.

When I was pregnant, I couldn't stand for more than 10 minutes without feeling faint. I couldn't go shopping, cook, or even wash dishes without taking frequent breaks. Even taking a shower was a problem. Beginning early in the pregnancy, I'd become breathless going up the stairs. Did my heart have something to do with those symptoms or were those just standard pregnancy conditions? I always thought it was normal, now I wonder.

On the other hand, I was a distance runner for years and have always exercised and never had an episode of feeling faint associated with exertion (though sometimes a flight of stairs can knock my heart out of rhythm now). I have had EKGs, ECGs, and stress tests and never showed a problem. My atrial fibrillation comes and goes and only if I'm carrying a heart monitor with me can I capture an episode for my doctor. It can last minutes or hours, be a fluttery feeling in my chest or a wild gallop. It first showed up in my late 30s, which according to the Mayo Clinic is the age adults who have not previously been diagnosed with a hole in the heart are most likely to exhibit symptoms--an irregular heartbeat being one on the list. Significant? Not significant? I don't know.

What I do know is that I probably won't get easy answers, even when I meet with the doctor, but that won't keep me from wishing for some.

Thank you for all the support, prayers, and good wishes,

V-Grrrl

September 21, 2006

The aftermath

The nurse told me the sedatives they’d administer during my transesophageal echocardiogram (TEE) would make me feel “like I’ve had a few pints.”

Which is why when I walked with E on wobbly legs back to the car, I sunk into the seat like a drunk, leaned my head on the base of the open window, and conked out  while he took care of paperwork inside the hospital.

When he got back to the car, he reclined my seat and I drifted in the limbo between being  asleep and awake, the warm September sunshine making everything in the car feel so cozy, my mind drifting like a leaf on a breeze.

Images slide behind my eyes and words float slowly through my brain, finally catching in my consciousness. Did the doctor tell me I have a hole in my heart? I think he did.

If I try I can conjure a blurry memory of his face hanging above mine and his words falling  “An opening in the membrane of the heart.”

My eyes and limbs are heavy. I won’t open them. I don’t want to wake up yet. I want to stay in the sunny safe place where I have not received bad news, where I can still wonder whether I really have a hole in my heart. Truth taps me on the shoulder and shakes me, truth courts my rational mind, which is opening ever so slowly, like a moonflower at dusk.

I'm starting to remember. When he spoke to me at the end of the procedure, my mind had grabbed on to the first part of what he had said: “No clots in the atria…” The words I was waiting for made it easy to let go of the rest: “but a hole in the membrane of your heart.”

We hear what we want to hear. We know what we want to know.

I’ll call my cardiologist when I’m ready to know more, when I’m ready to face what comes next--changes in medication? surgery?

Affairs of the heart

It’s the middle of the day.

I take a long hot shower, wash and condition my hair, finger-comb it into loose waves.

Legs and underarms are shaved then shaved again. My apricot scrub exfoliates all exposed skin, which is then inspected for unwanted hair before being slathered with a rich moisturizing cream.

Heels are buffed and lotioned. Nails groomed. A light cologne spritzed on. I'm ready.

In my 20s, engaging in elaborate female grooming rituals in the middle of the day would mean something GOOD was about to come.

In my 40s, it means I’ve got a different sort of date planned--a chance to sit around (mostly) naked during an hour long visit with my cardiologist.

Here in Europe, doctors  don’t leave you in an examining room to change into a gown and return to uncover only what they need to see during the exam. No, everything here is done mostly au natural. Only the doctor gets to wear clothes. It makes me feel like a scientific specimen laid out for study.

Which I guess is what I am. Sigh.

I tell myself I shouldn’t be self-conscious. After all, all doctors have spent years dissecting cadavers, and while I may not look great, I know I look better than anything pulled out of a morgue’s drawer.

I smell better too. And did I mention my close shave?

Sitting (mostly) nude in the doctor’s office, I convince myself my pulse and low blood pressure are beauty assets, my throbbing blue veins contribute to my healthy glow. I try not to dwell on the electrodes, wires, cables, monitors, and sonograms that will evaluate whether I’m a good-hearted person or not. I try not to feel overexposed.

The truth is my heart has a tendency to be irregular. So does my psyche. Sigh. My physical and mental health are synchronized in their imperfections, something that is oddly satisfying and yet disturbing. What doesn’t balance on its own is kicked into its proper place with pharmaceuticals—thank God. May it ever be so.

Still, on the day they can't save me and I land in the drawer of the morgue wearing nothing but a sheet, I hope I have clean hair and shaved legs. A Grrrl without a pulse has to compensate for her imperfections.

September 18, 2006

Update on September 19, 2006 at 3:25 by V-Grrrl

Because you were wondering:

No, I'm not completely naked; I do get the benefit of wearing a cute pair of underpants. Good thing or they'd never convince me to mount the exercise bike for that stress test.

Unlike in the U.S. where I normally saw my cardiologist for only 5-10 minutes, here I spend nearly an hour with my doctor, which is a long time to sit around (mostly) naked, though as I get to know my doctors better, I am becoming increasingly relaxed about it.  I think the reason I hate to be nearly nude has to do with a sense of vulnerability more than it does with modesty. All the grooming rituals distract me from thinking about why I'm at the cardiologists in the first place.

For unknown reasons, I developed a heart arrhythmia in my late 30s. It's the type of problem normally seen in men over 65 who have had one or more heart attacks, not youngish women who are the picture of cardiovascular health. So despite my remarkably low cholesterol and blood pressure, I see a doctor regularly for heart issues.

Ready to say "Ah!"

Over the weekend, my back decided a world where I didn’t see the chiropractor every week was not a world it wanted to be a part of. Tired of being good and being ignored, it acted up to get some attention. Damn, I hate anatomical bullies.

A knot formed over my left shoulder blade, sending tension up into my delts and neck. Soon my upper back was being punctuated by an occasional shooting pain. Zing! Zing! Ouch.

Putting my chin to my chest hurt, turning my head far to one side hurt, getting in and out of bed hurt, and staying in bed wasn’t much fun either. It wasn't incapacitating,  it was just enough to remind me that full blown back spasms might be one deep breath away.

I stayed out of the cold, damp weather, did some yoga, slapped a heat pack on my back, took some Advil overnight, and hoped for the best. It did get better each day, but it was clear it wasn’t going to disappear.

When I received an e-mail from the massage therapist I see from time to time, it was like getting a message from God. “Go ye therefore into the Land of Brussels, seek out Nikki of the Strong Hands and she will mend your Evil Shoulder.”

And so I sojourned into the Land of Brussels this morning, a stranger in a strange land, and  I sought  Nikki in the place where she could be found.  Soon I was flat on the table, with Nikki of the Strong Hands working warm oil into my muscles. Starting at the base of my spine and working up, all was sweet and pleasant under her professional touch until she hit my Zone of Doom.

I think she said, “Oh Veronica!” at the same moment I said, “Oh Nikki.” And no, it wasn’t the good kind of “Oh” moment. As soon as her hands hit my scapular, it felt like she was massaging sacks full of rocks. Honestly, my muscles were so cramped and unyielding, we could both hear them snapping and crackling as she rolled them under her palms. It was hurting me and I wouldn’t be surprised if it was hurting her. Truly, it sounded like boulders rolling over one another on dry grass.

Ow, ow, ow. Nikki adjusts the pressure, but I don’t’ want her to let up too much. I know it’s going to take some serious effort on her part to break up the adhesions and knots in my back, and hey, I want to teach it a lesson. After a while, it stops hurting, quits snapping, and starts to feel pliable.

She works on me for 45 minutes. When I finally get off the table and reach up to touch my shoulder muscles and back, I’m amazed they now feel spongy. A nap, some yoga, a break from the computer—that’s all I need to finish out my Wednesday.

No more “Oh!,” no more “Ow”—I’m ready to just say “Ah.”

Reality Check

It took me months to muster the courage to pick up the phone and make an appointment for my annual mammogram. Every Sunday I’d make my weekly “to do” list, and every day I’d procrastinate on making the call. I felt like a huge burden had been lifted when I finally dialed my doctor’s number, got my Pap smear last week, and had her arrange for the mammogram—today.

But relief has quickly been replaced by dread.

My mother died of breast cancer 14 years ago. Normally, I simply don’t think about it, but every year when it’s time for my mammogram, I get a reality check. I come face to face not only with the prospect of cancer but the memories of my mother’s suffering and my loss.

It makes me squirm. My stomach churns. When I woke up to gray clouds and rain today and the prospect of catching two buses to get to the clinic, I didn’t feel any better. Not only do I bring personal baggage to this appointment, but every medical first here is a mild source of anxiety because I don’t know quite what to expect.

Never underestimate the comfort of a familiar face and a friendly nurse at the doctor’s office, the confidence you place in the people who have been with you over the long haul.

The technician who did my mammograms in Virginia was an older woman and a Christian. She was professional and didn’t talk about her faith, but her office space had a bulletin board with all sorts of notes and cartoons tacked to it, including Scriptures she found inspirational or meaningful and words and facts meant to comfort her patients. Once when I was preparing for my exam in that room, I noticed she had a Post-it note on her desk calendar with a reminder to “Pray for every patient!”

Maybe some people would be uncomfortable with the idea of someone’s spiritual life and professional life intersecting that way, but I loved that she was committed to taking a moment to meditate, focus, and pray for me before doing my exam. To me, it represented the ultimate standard of care, evidence of a personal and professional commitment to my well being, a sign I wasn't just a "task" but a person.

Undressed and feeling vulnerable in a room with all my fears and memories and the cold glass plates that will compress my breasts until they ache, I can use all the comfort and care that's offered.

May 9, 2006