Logic is easy when talking existentially. When I am talking about these vague ideas and concepts, or when advice is being offered to others, it is so clear and easy to see and act upon. Yet it is in the execution of the advice where issues tend to arise.
That is how it has been for me today. I don't know what happened, but I feel like I've gotten entirely off the rails today. It's not even over the big things. It's all the little stuff that has been bothering me and getting to me today.
I guess that is the first thing to discuss. "It's all small stuff" is a platitude which when adopted blindly for everything can in fact discount some very serious things. I am a big gentleman. While I've been lucky to have the worst heart thing I have be some well controlled hypertension, my weight is still a big big issue. There is no guarantee that things won't suddenly cascade on me very soon and go wrong and I could die. It could be tomorrow, it could be next week. It could be any time. People who weigh less than me have died of heart attacks younger than me.
No matter which way you cut it, I wake up every day and go to bed every night with that same thought in the back of my head. I could die at any time if I am not careful. I don't try and obsess over it, lord knows I try and forget about it sometimes, because it falls into that category of I am doing everything that I can. Yet it is something that is -huge- and every time I have a small failure, I feel like I am just signing my own death warrant.
Nurses, doctors and everyone else are constantly reminding me about that fact. it's part of what is driving me so hard to do this. I remember the fear that I had when I had my TIA (transient ischemic attack. also known as a mini stroke) and I couldn't talk for a day. That was when everything became so real to me. But even then it took me so long to do this.
Today I met with the physical therapist. Everything was going fine, I was having a normal day, no worries, feeling good with my exercises. We began to go over the exercises I was doing and I think that this is where things started to go down for me. I felt like every third exercise I did it was 'alright, that's great, but lets do this'. Most of it was really great advice, really all of it was. It was a lot of small changes all at once which is a bit tiring, but nothing bad.
The real thing that got to me was when we were working on my ankle and toe lifts while sitting up along with my knee lifts. These two exercises I have been doing, but struggling with doing how she wants me to do them. When I lift my knees, the weight of my lymph-edema in my right abdomen causes my right leg to lift awkwardly and turn. It should be going straight up and down. I kept not being able to do it properly until I had this very awkward stance where I was holding my lymph-edema lobe up while doing the exercise.
Then, immediately after, when we did my ankle and toe lifts, some of my long standing issues came to the fore front. My feet always tend to roll outwards, it is what makes finding shoes for me such a difficulty. If my foot rolls out and I've got a thick sole in my shoe and I trip, I could snap my ankle. When doing my toe lifts, my feet kept wanting to lift the inner part, but I was really struggling with the outer parts of my feet. We had to work and work until I felt like I was contorting my feet inward, almost painfully, just to get them to lift evenly.
The reasons for why we were working on this is all sound. It's so I can do these exercises properly and to do them safely. That is what I want to work with them on. But I felt like such a failure there, that I couldn't even do these most simple things, that my body was fighting me so much and I had to fight it so much. I had become used to my exercises and being able to do them pretty well. My body stumps me so often, but most of it I've been able to overcome. This was much more difficult, for such a small thing and I kept on messing it up even after knowing what I have to do. That is really what started me feeling off balance today.
To be honest, I didn't really notice it then. I just went along, we did everything and I went about my day. I did my laps then and then i encountered what was for me an embarrassing moment. For those who don't want too much information, don't like bodily functions, skip to the next paragraph. ... Still with me? Okay. One of the big issues that I've had is that when I work out and walk, I tend to have to go to the bathroom, a lot. I read an interesting article that discussed that when fat is broken down and we burn calories, most of it is expelled in our breath. But some of that break down goes into expelling liquid waste either in urine or in feces. For me, I tend to get diarrhea. Usually I take care of these things when it's just a caregiver around (because I need aid due to flexibility issues). Today I had it happen while walking with the physical therapist there. I had to run to the bathroom so I wouldn't mess myself and then the physical therapist had to set up the next two appointments with me through the doorway while I was doing this. Then I had to get my caregiver to help me clean myself with them there. I know they understand the need, they have others who have the same issues. yet it is very embarrassing for me to have it happen there in the moment and feel so exposed and feel like I'm putting them off with how disgusting it was. It made the situation very awkward and I think after that point is when I got very quiet for the day.
From there things were just normal, as I said, until my mother got home, rushing about. She had a sandwich wrap for me for my dinner (this was at 4, dinner is at 6). In all that was going on today I completely forgot she was going out to dinner with a friend (who happens to be my usual caregiver, but not the one I had today). Because I had forgotten I hadn't asked the caregiver to set me up to be good for the rest of the day. Thus I ended up needing extra help from my mother so that I was good for while they were away.
This ended up delaying them so I started to feel really guilty. I didn't want to delay them and I felt bad for it. But she had set my dinner down on my legs so I could have access to it later and I told her I needed it elsewhere, I still had to walk (my usual spaces for holding it were occupied with extra water bottles). She ended up not wanting me to walk alone, because of the fall risks, even though I have done it before. She ended up waiting an extra 40 minutes to go to dinner, so that I could do my walk. The entire time I was feeling just so guilty, because last Friday they had tried to go do this dinner, but kept being delayed because of my sister and had to cancel because they ran out of time. Now here I was delaying them further. My therapists and doctors had been telling me that when it comes to my health and exercise, I need to be selfish and put doing my exercises above everything else, but i still felt like shit for delaying them and tried to make them go and I would do it on my own, but they refused. They wanted to be here while I walked.
This is really when things began to come to come to a head for me. I was feeling guilty and frustrated from earlier. Unknown to me I was also bleeding and injured on my leg, but due to the lymph-edema in my leg and the numbness that comes with it, I hadn't noticed it. It just wasn't very good. but then I noticed that my exercise tracker was all messed up and miss recorded, so I had to start redoing it. When I tried to re-do it, I kept on messing it up again and again until I just gave up in frustration. I scribbled angrily over my mistakes and in the process broke the pen and just threw it all down.
That is when I realized just how shaken I was today and how off balance. It feels even now just so silly, I was getting upset over these little things, I was letting them bother me so much. But I do think there is a reason for that. It doesn't make me feel any better, I am still mortified at having had such a bad day and reacting so to such little things, but I do think there is an explanation for it.
As I said earlier, I live with that constant big worry in my head all the time. I worry about dying. I know that I could die anytime. That isn't an exaggeration or or hyperbole. That is just a fact. We are doing everything right currently. We are doing everything that we can, but I still could die anytime. Because I cannot address that issue anymore than I am, I feel like everything else, I need to try and be perfect or have control over it. Or I feel guilty because I feel like a burden on people. These things become amplified through that lens of my core problem.
I really shouldn't be sweating the small stuff, but sometimes, when you have so much else going on, you have only the small stuff that you can address. But no matter how hard you try, stuff will go wrong some days. Most days I'm not like this. I can't really tell myself, but my nurses have said I seem in better spirits most of the time, more positive, but at times like this it really doesn't feel that way.
I can logically analyze all of the things that have happened and look at it and find the reasons and rationalize it, but making that step from the logical understanding to feeling okay with it and not letting it bother me is just something that I haven't been able to master yet. I envy those who can do so, who can bounce back so readily. I hope to be one of them. Someday.
photo credit: Innocent X via photopin (license)
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