How To Beat Your Winter Funk

For weeks I’ve been completely unmotivated. It happens to me every January. The weeks of sub-zero temperatures wear me down. Eventually I find myself on the couch every night, watching way too much of my favorite programs, like TrueBlood or Dexter or Californication or whatever I can get my hands on.

I haven’t even cooked an actual dinner in weeks. I don’t feel like eating…nothing sounds good…I have no motivation to prepare anything. It is the time of year when I fall into my most unhealthy habits, and I feel like everything I love doing so much, like having a garden, canning/preserving food, cooking, eating healthy, exercising, is all so far out of reach.

How can I break out of this funk?

We all know the common things that we should be doing….exercise, get eight hours of sleep, eat vegetables, meditate, whatever. I know what I should be doing, I just don’t do it. It’s dark all the time. It’s cold. I’m always tired. And cold. I go home and put my pajamas on.

One night this week I did manage to pick up the book I’m reading, The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion (which, by the way, I am enjoying quite a bit…her story is about grief and hope and strength and reminds me of my experience with my mother and her stroke) instead of turning on the TV. I guess that is one step in the right direction.

How do you get out of your funk?

I’m reminded of a post this week on my friend’s blog, Fat Girl Fed Up, about setting goals. Maybe that is what I need to do. A weekly goal for blog posts. A weekly goal for reading. A weekly goal for the draft of my novel……I am going to start small so I don’t get overwhelmed, and then keep setting goals. Notice I am mixing business and pleasure for motivational purposes……..

Starter Goals:

• Make healthy Pumpkin muffins for our “breakfast theme” Superbowl party
• See a movie (I am REALLY intrigued by the preview for Sanctum)
• Finish KSurf Fiction Writing workshop assignments by 2/14. THIS IS REALLY IMPORTANT. This weekend, catch up on lessons
• Finish my office…l’ll post some pictures in an upcoming post…finishing my own personal writing space is related to my writing goals!
• Finish “The Year of Magical Thinking” by the end of February and start a new book
• Paint my bedroom by the end of February

Five Years Later: Part 8

Fourteen weeks after the stroke she comes home, walking with a hemi-cane and an ankle brace, her lifeless left arm in a sling.

Winter is on its way out, leaving an oozy, muddy, rutted-up earth. We sit at the kitchen table, in front of the window. I am in the same chair where she sat on that night almost five months earlier. Framed by the squares of the window pane, the birds outside visit the feeder.

“Dad said I should make sure you know that when I cry, it’s not because I’m sad. It’s because I’m happy,” she says.

I stop chewing for a moment. I look at the bird feeder to see my first Robin of the season.

“You know that, don’t you?” she adds.

It seems like a good place to start. I’ve stopped measuring the future in terms of the past, waiting for myself—and my mother—to re-emerge the same as we had been, as if we’d just returned from vacation or woken up from a dream. We have only just begun to re-define ourselves and our family, one moment at a time. I’ve said goodbye to the familiarity of the past, and accepted the uncertainty of the future.

She starts reading her daily devotions, using a pink index card to help her follow the line. Her hair has grown in around her incision. I glance at her gratitude journal, lying open on the table.

“Our homes are our sanctuary from the world,” she has written. “Our lives are made up of all the little traditions and experiences we share with people. Cherish every moment.”

“Did I sign up for this?” Dad jokes, as he helps her walk to the bathroom. “I’m not sure this was in the contract. It must have been in the fine print.”

“You better make sure you have it in the fine print,” she laughs, turning to look at me.

And I think to myself that we are all in each other’s fine print, neatly inscribed onto lines containing our greatest liabilities. With every patient comes a family, sustained by their community and their faith in the medical professionals to whom they entrust the most precious pieces of their fine print. This is the year I am getting married, and all around me, I see love in fine print.

Five Years Later: Part 4

Lori is different than many of the nurses in the critical care unit. She talks to me. And she uses words I understand. She tells me she has worked as a flight nurse in Detroit and that she’s been a nurse since the Florence Nightingale days.

Mom’s head is wrapped in a turban of gauze and tape. Her brain is so swollen that her right eye is bulging, like someone punched her. Intubated and on a ventilator, her tongue is bloody, crusty, swollen, and sticking out of her mouth beneath the endotracheal tube. Her chest heaves and a muffled, junky cough comes out through the ventilator, triggering an eerie, honking alarm.

We are hopeful. Last night Mom put her right hand up to her mouth and touched her breathing tube. Throughout the day, she wiggled her toes and fingers on her right side to command: thumbs up, thumbs down, and a wiggle of her pinky. Purposeful movements.

But now it is just before 4 am and her blood pressure is erratic. Alarms are sounding. She’s terribly congested. Her temperature is almost 102. Lori puts ice bags and a cooling blanket on her.

“Let’s just see what the next hour brings and then go from there,” Lori says. “This is the way it is with neuro patients. It’s like walking a fine wire fence. They could go either direction at any time. All we can do is read the symptoms and treat each one.”

We go through each night like this, walking the fine wire fence. Wiggle your toes. Squeeze my hand. We read to her, paint her toenails, and play her CDs. I realize that we have the same ridges in our fingernails, and that my toes are exactly like hers in their size and shape.

The noises haunt me. The whistling compression of air as the Venaflow sleeve contracts on her right leg, preventing the formation of blood clots. The beeps and clicks and alarms on the IVs and on the monitor that measures intercranial pressure. So many alarms.

For 13 days she walks that fine wire fence, the mysteries and miracles of critical care unfolding each moment. Medications support her blood pressure and for a while she doesn’t breathe above the rate on the ventilator. We watch fearfully as her intercranial pressure increases. Her heart rate and temperature are persistently high. She receives antibiotics for pneumonia. CT scans check for bleeding and swelling in the brain. A feeding tube is placed and so is a peripherally inserted central catheter (PICC line) for drawing blood and administering medicine arterially. She has high blood sugars so she is on an insulin drip. Her raw and scabby fingers are poked often to test her blood sugars. Her blood is drawn frequently to monitor delicate levels.

We have lost our center. On good days, we are giddy with hope. On other days, we cry and wander and try to prop each other up. We are in the embrace of friends, family, co-workers, and hospital staff who bring us meals, cards, flowers, and prayers. We are disoriented. We lose things—our vehicles, our coats, our minds. We are relieved to find Mom’s wedding ring at home. And life goes on. There are bills to pay, plants to water, pets to feed. We have divided Mom’s life among us, and still we cannot keep up.

One night, a family is standing around the bed of a new patient in the critical care unit. All the lights are on in the room. Moments later, an alarm sounds.

“Code blue, CCU…Code blue, CCU…” a computerized female voice repeats.

A woman screams. Footsteps pound down the hallway. “NO!!!!” the woman sobs.

More footsteps pound down the hallway.

In the middle of the night, I linger alone at Mom’s bedside, in this world of machines and monitors, where the sound of grief is profoundly louder than the combined chorus of many alarms. Where strangers don’t introduce themselves, bringing machines they don’t explain. I am terrified of the code blue. Terrified that we’ll have to bury our mother.

Five Years Later: Part 2

“It appears your wife has had a massive infarction,” the doctor says, looking at Dad.

I stare at the doctor’s ID badge, which says “Neurologist” below his name. He is a thin man with straight brown hair, carrying a brown leather bag over his shoulder.

“We’re bordering the critical window,” the doctor says. “So it’s now 10:15 pm and you say the last time you saw her functioning normally was between 7:30 and 8:00 pm?”

“Yes,” Dad answers, putting his hand to his forehead, re-running the numbers in his mind.

Ischemic stroke occurs when a blood vessel becomes blocked, prevents the flow of blood to the brain, and thereby creates an infarction, or death, of brain tissue. Within three hours of the onset of a stroke, ischemic strokes are treatable with blood thinners or anti-coagulants such as tissue plasminogen activator (TPA), which restore blood flow. After that timeframe, the risk of fatal complications, such as bleeding in the brain, increases significantly.

The doctor escorts us across the hall, and shows us CT scan images of Mom’s brain.

“I’m going to ask you again,” the doctor says, pointing to a darker spot on the right edge of the brain. “Are you absolutely sure about the timeframe? Because the damage I see here is so advanced that it’s typical of an infarction at least 6-8 hours out.”

We tell him again. We are sure. He ushers us back to the small waiting room.

“Look,” The doctor says. “When an infarct occurs, it’s like stepping on a hose. All blood flow gets shut off. The brain tissues start to break down and die. At this point, if we anti-coagulate her and get the blood flowing again, it would be like running over the hose with a lawn mower and then turning the water back on. The water is going to leak out everywhere.”

I feel like I’m deflating, all my vital air whistling out and the ground about to come up fast beneath me.

“What would you do if she were your wife?” Dad asks.

“I would give her the best possible chance,” the doctor replies. “I know I said before that we might do the TPA, but given the magnitude of the infarct and the critical timeframe, TPA would be contraindicated. Her biggest risk in the next 2–5 days will be cerebral edema.”

Dad crosses his legs, puts his hand over his eyes, and faces the corner of the room.

It’s like I’m watching a foreign film without subtitles. Is he saying there’s nothing he can do? Is he talking about my mother, who just turned 60—a thin, non-smoking vegetarian who exercises every day?

“You should call whoever you need to,” the doctor says. “She may not be conscious in the morning.”

Ring the Bells That Still Can Ring

The June 2009 issue of Oprah has an inspiring interview with Elizabeth Edwards.

I found Elizabeth’s strength and positive attitude particularly inspiring, especially given the death of her 16-year-old son in 1992, her ongoing struggle with terminal cancer, and the public infidelity of her husband John Edwards.

Here are some parts of the interview I really liked:

Painted above a doorway leading into the home’s master suite is a verse from the 1992 song “Anthem,” by Leonard Cohen. Befitting this moment in Elizabeth’s life, the lyrics are an ode to human frailty and transcendence:

Ring the bells that still can ring. Forget your perfect offering. There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.

AND this excerpt from Elizabeth’s new book, Resilience:

This is the life we have now, and the only way to find peace, the only way to be resilient when these land mines explode beneath your foundation, is first to accept that there is a new reality.

I haven’t read her book, but I believe she is talking about accepting the present moment, instead of struggling against what is…dwelling on what could have been or what should have been. Resisting what is will drain you of all your strength. I began my practice of trying to remain in the present moment after reading Eckhart Tolle, especially in the years right after my mom had a stroke, and I was overcome by grief.

Elizabeth is a wonderful example of how your grief and your struggles can make you stronger, if you’re willing to learn and to forgive.