Coming to Terms - My Story, Part 1

I was an idealist. For nearly 30 years, I forced reality to submit to my ideals about life, and I was mostly successful. I thought there was great virtue in this approach to living not realizing how off base I was. Now I know better.

This is the first of a four-part series about the story of my health journey over these eight years. The four-part series will be spread out over the next few months. Along the way I will interject posts that aren’t directly part of my story to provide breathing room for you and me. The four posts about my story will be long. I invite you to make it all the way through with me… I know how hard it can be to make it through this story; I’ve lived it. Join me if you’d like. When we get to the end we can celebrate together, because, spoiler alert, I made it through. Here goes…

Does anything take you by such surprise that you watch it and listen to it happen but rub your eyes hard because it doesn’t seem real even as it happens?

I hope this shock exists in the positive form for you. I hope your low-ball offer was accepted on the perfect house. I hope you got the promotion for which you worked hard and may not quite yet deserve. I hope you snuggle the little one that is a miracle to be holding. I hope you see, breathe, and soak the beauty of the beautiful sunset in the stillness of the morning.

The converse may be part of your story. A tragedy to your property. Trauma in your family. A diagnosis that seems unbelievable. There are so many ways in which we can be caught off guard and reel to find our balance again.

The greatest of my surprises that set me reeling was October of almost six years ago. I was rocking motherhood, so I thought. I had stopped working and had an infant and toddler at home. With the second kid, I carried the heavy weight of nighttime responsibility and the full weight of daytime caretaker. I didn’t hate my role, but I was tired. Really tired. The infant didn’t sleep through the night and the toddler kept me running all day. I thought I was living the mommy dream and doing all the things normal mommies in my situation would do. Feel weak. Feel tired. Feel confused. Have trouble eating because everything was out of whack. And a few other symptoms I’ll spare you.

The weirdest of the symptoms was food. Some meals were no issue. I’d eat and clean up dishes and move on. Other meals made me dizzy, weak, nauseas, and other sorts of things food shouldn’t do to you. I had a 20-year history of a few, serious food allergies. So, reacting to food was nothing new for me.

The tiredness, the confusion, the food, the nausea, the dizziness, the weakness… it was mounting, but I was afraid of being a wimpy young mom. To be considered “weak” was one of my greatest fears and I lived out every aspect of my life running from that being said of me. I was a doer and an achiever. I barely saw obstacles as I confronted anything to achieve my goals. I thought I could “will” this away, “push through,” and “hang in there” until it passed, just like I had done every other time I met a challenge in my life. So, I fell back to old habits; I allowed other more meaningful things to distract me. Those meaningful things became my ambition and consumed all of my energy. Distractions and obstacles would then fall away. This tactic had worked a million times before and I expected it to work again. This time was different.

It all shifted when my parents had a come-to-Jesus conversation with me. They told me something was very wrong, and they hadn’t ever had a conversation like that with me. They’ve always been pretty low key about my food allergies, so this conversation ruffled my feathers a bit. I had eclipsed 30 years old and had settled firmly into adulthood by then. I was wrangling a young family that required all of my energy. So, I pretty easily dismissed their concerns thinking this would pass as I allowed myself to be consumed with more meaningful and enjoyable things.

Not deterred, they took a different tactic and spoke with my husband individually. He also dismissed their concerns, but for very different reasons. See, I had already been terribly sick for almost 3 years by now. We attributed the symptoms to pregnancies and subsequent challenges recovering after delivery. My misery had become our norm and he had adjusted well to the shift. So, thinking that anything was so out of place that needed to be addressed was a shock for him.

Sometime after these come-to-Jesus discussions, my husband yielded. He realized that our three-year norm should have shifted by now and it was worse than we were giving it credit. Our youngest was six months old and I should have been showing signs of improvement by then and not decline. He yielded to their observations and started persuading me of the same. It took me a bit of time to see it his way, but I finally conceded.

I wasn’t sure things were SERIOUS, but I certainly saw some signals for caution. In respect to my parents, I was willing to contact an out of state doctor they highly recommended. So, I called. He called me back pretty quickly and I relayed my experiences to him. He tensely asked how quickly I could get down there. I told him 48 hours and we both hung up. My family rallied to cover the kids and I took a trek to see a doctor out of state.

The visit put me in a daze for a few days.

I thought I was seeing a doctor because things seemed off, food was tricky, and I was tired. His version was much more sinister. He saw what I didn’t. He saw that my body was on the edge of the Grand Canyon. Many more steps and my health would plummet to its end. He used the word “die,” and I was in shock. I had driven there thinking I needed a little help to boost my energy and figure out what to do with food. I drove home realizing that if I didn’t do something quickly my kids would be without a mommy. The distance between my mental starting and ending points on that trip changed the trajectory of my life and I’ll never see life the same way.

The doctor thought he knew the source of the problems, so he treated for it. His treatment helped, but it didn’t resolve things materially. Within a few months I knew I was facing something that would require far more testing and investigation than I knew how to manage. So, began my doctor merry-go-round. Countless tests, specialists, practices, and visits turned up no answers. Everything looked “normal” and doctors didn’t take me seriously. I started to wonder if I could even take myself seriously. I didn’t tell most people how serious things were. People couldn’t even tell anything was wrong unless I spoke directly about my symptoms. On the outside, I looked like I always had. On the inside I felt like death was pulling hard.

I pulled out of life – no more commitments. I am a “doer” and this act tore me to pieces. I stopped driving. I stopped caring for my kids. I stopped walking around the house. I stopped seeing sunshine. I wasn’t depressed emotionally; I was in the valley physically. I had gone over the edge of that cliff and I was deep in sickness. I felt ice cold fingers strong on my body, like the doctor predicted I would.

Coming to terms with my new state of existence was confusing. It didn’t make sense to me or the people around me. The doctors couldn’t find ANYTHING wrong with me. I questioned myself. I questioned healthcare. I questioned God. And I slept.

I wrestled with how I had abandoned my role as caretaker for the kids as I fought to keep breathing. I struggled with whether I might, in fact, be a hypochondriac since I couldn’t remember life before I felt like this (it had been 4 years since I felt normal when you include the pregnancies). I thought maybe I’d become a woman of drama and I was exaggerating the symptoms. I wracked my brain trying to come up with some simple or practical explanation for when or how or why my life now looked like this.

I slept. I slept a lot. A saving grace in this time was significant loss of brain function. Lots of things I would have had concern for in my normal state escaped me at that point. The brain damage was real and it ironically helped numb some of the life loss associated with my new state of affairs.

Coming to terms with my new state of existence was hard on the people around me. Some didn’t believe it was really happening. The deep pain in my soul from close ones not believing still haunts me today. Please trust people you love even when you can’t understand or make sense of what they’re saying. Some believed me explicitly. My husband was and is my champion. He never doubted me. He never minimized me. He never pretended anything wasn’t real. Even now my soul swells with gratitude, respect, and love for his steadfastness with me. Without his remarkable character and gentle service to me I am certain I wouldn’t be alive.

Coming to terms with pain is a twisty road. It doesn’t always move in the same direction toward an end goal. Coming to terms with tragedy, for me, meant a lot more wrestling in the mud than strategies to rise. I tend towards brutal honesty. I don’t shy away from hard and true things. This part of my worldview served me well in this season.

I wrestled hard with what had become my reality. I wrestled hard with my losses in life. I wrestled hard with my ideals dashed on the rocks. I wrestled hard with the God of the universe (much more on that later). And I came to terms with it. Reality has a way of forcing acceptance. Lord willing, that acceptance allows us to make peace with circumstances, but doesn’t keep us in the same spot of misery needlessly.

The determination to rise through my circumstances eventually owned my soul. It took a while; it was worth the wait. It was worth the wrestle. So is yours. Give yourself space to come to terms. Give yourself space to find your center. Then pour yourself into rising at the right time. Pour yourself into it like your life depends on it, because it might.

Those early days of coming to terms were of utmost value. Wrestling with reality and idealism was vital for me. Wrestling with a reality for which there was no plan to improve was completely new ground for me (I had a plan for EVERYTHING in life). Shedding the idealism of my youth for the freedom in accepting reality was a new skill I had to build. Pining after ideals prevents building strategies in the face of realities. I was determined to not waste my meager energy pining for ideals when I could, instead, make a difference today. Making that mental shift was hard, but well worth the effort.

So, I’d been told I was dying. I had lost the ability to care for my family or myself. I had lost connection to society. There were no answers and yet the days kept coming. What now? In my next post about my story, I’ll discuss my journey in the wilderness. I’ll discuss YEARS of no answers. I’ll discuss ground re-taken in my life in the face of mystery.

Thanks for being here with me. Thanks for your interest in my story. I’d love to hear about your fight with idealism and reality. I’d love to hear about your fight for the mental shift in hard times. In a couple of weeks, I’ll pick up here and share about wrestling with my mystery. Next week we’ll take a breather; I’ll have far fewer words. Til then.