Perfection

I’m going to jump right from sorrow to babies.

After a year of heart medication my ejection fraction went from 27 to normal, and I was less tired and less breathless.

Dr. Heart took me off the pills to see if my heart would pump well without assistance. I had to wait for six months before getting another MUGA scan to measure my heart function. Near the end of it I was getting insanely impatient.

The glaring green hands on my biological clock were killing me, but I had to wait for the green light.

Nurse Heart makes fun of me now for being so impatient. I thought Dr. Heart was slow-playing me, so I called to bump my test up a month. My plea worked.

All the anxiety in the world didn’t change the results of my test. (There goes the straightforward mind-body connection theory.) My heart passed and we threw the condoms in the garbage. I wish I had cut them up into little pieces and then burned them in a cathartic bonfire, or at least mailed them to a country with limited access to birth control; it would have made a great story.

We were lucky: we got right to it and got pregnant within three months of trying. I felt amazing. The shift from cautious to all-out-cardio quickly killed my breakable -complex.

And then I was back to fragile with a teeny tiny embryo in my belly. I was happy and comfortable; I couldn’t ask for anything more. My life was perfect. I didn’t feel completely healthy when I stopped taking the heart medication, but as soon as that embryo burrowed into my uterus lining, I started feeling better and better.

But it was a long journey. I was still classified as sick, because I was diagnosed with Fibro, and I still sometimes think this is the story of somebody with life-long health issues.

It got worse – scary worse – before I woke up in the hospital as a new person. I’ll tell you all about the bad stuff soon.

You Must Have Been High

The first person outside my family to call me a hippie was my high school History teacher. He was referring to my spirit.

Some hear hippie and think pothead. Co-workers who didn’t know me well may have gotten that impression, though they never said it to my face. I was a laid-back, peace-loving girl. All that was missing was a perma-smile. They decorated my pigeonhole when I started wearing sunglasses to work and forgetting my words.

Little did they know, the sunglasses were shielding my eyes from the burning white computer screen that I stared at for eight hours a day, five days a week. My eyes were super-sensitive to the light.

I’ve always been peace-loving, but the laid-back Jenn was born from necessity. It was a combination of drugs and systematic shut down. My body couldn’t handle too much stress, so I started ignoring it. Yup, just like that. With the help of my dad and my husband.

My dad told me to asses a situation by asking if it was going to matter in five years. Wow. That helped me big time.

My husband has always been an easy-going guy. Some days it takes mountains to move him. A bit of his mindset has rubbed off. He’s also the funniest guy I know, and laughing until pee almost comes out is a great way to forget stress.

The off-label pain meds messed with my chemistry just enough to keep me on an even keel until I was diagnosed by Dr. Heart. Unfortunately, I had to switch it up a bit at that point, and I got stuck taking another, not-so-good off-label pill that altered my brain function a little too much for my liking.

When I started taking beta-blockers to fix my heart, I would have stayed calm if a rhino charged me. Oddly enough to those who don’t believe cardiomyopathy causes shoulder pain, my muscles have never been more relaxed than when I was on those meds.

I was a hippie-at-heart even as my heart was only flesh and blood, pumping with the tenacity required to keep me alive; because my brain was lead by my heart into a calm existence.

Because my cardiomyopathy diagnosis didn’t automatically rule out Fibromyalgia, I was on pain meds and heart meds at the same time. And being over-medicated didn’t help me find my words.

Sometimes in the vein of doing no harm, harm is prolonged.

Pieces of Peace on Earth

I’m reading a novel called Sweetness in the Belly by Camilla Gibb. The main character is a white Muslim from Ethiopia.

Before this book, I’d only encountered the word Jihad in the news. I know the media is not objective, but there are still some things I hear and take for granted as true.

Since 2001, the talking heads have told me that the meaning of Jihad is holy war. They said terrorists had declared Jihad on us and innocent civilians in the Middle East.

I had no reason to think their definition of Jihad was wrong.

But in Sweetness in the Belly, one character describes Jihad differently. He says, “Jihad is the holy war we have within ourselves. That is the meaning below the surface. Our eternal struggle for purity... It’s the war of ascendance over our basal instincts. It has absolutely nothing to do with others.”

One of my ongoing psychological struggles is a struggle for peace.

Peace is not something that sticks around when located. It’s a state of being that comes piece by piece.

When I was sick and looking for a diagnosis that made sense to me, I was in a constant state of turmoil. In that state, I thought peace meant finding the answer.

Luckily I did find the answer, but when I didn’t know, I found peace in little pieces.

About a year after I started my first safety net job, I got a similar job with a better company. And a year or so after that, I landed a small promotion, which gave me the chance to do more writing and less typing.

Aside from the regular good feelings that come with being promoted, I honestly felt that my arms were saved thanks to the person who chose me to be on the new team.

By that time, even with the medication I was taking, my wrists and forearms and shoulders and neck were so stiff and sore that I didn’t know how much longer I could keep typing almost non-stop for eight hours a day, five days a week.

That was a pretty big little piece of peace for me. Even though it brought me no closer to solving the problem of my broken body, it changed my life because it helped with the pain. And I took time daily to appreciate my new peace. If you’re a co-worker, you might have seen me do this simply by smiling.

What does peace mean to you? Do you have any little pieces of peace you’d like to share in the spirit of the holidays?

Grateful for Great Things

Good health is a gift that I am thankful for every day. But after all I’ve been through, I’m still a little paranoid that my illness will come back. I shared that worry with my specialist during my last appointment.

If my life was a low-budget movie, his response would have been, "Janet, you’re healthy now."

In real life he basically said, Jenn, there are no guarantees.

That’s as good as it gets from here on out as far as health goes. And I’m lucky. Why? I’m not dead. I can walk and talk and think and dream. I recognize myself in the mirror. I can love.

There are great things that have come out of my awful journeys.

I know that I’m a fighter. I know that I am a good person. I know that I’m loved unconditionally.

I used to believe that we're only faced with challenges that we have the strength to deal with, as if life experience is paired with each of us by a match-maker like Heidi Fleiss. It was something that I wanted to believe because I wasn’t sure how much I could handle.

Now I know that it comes down to a choice.

There is peace in knowing.