Spoiled Only Child

The plan

On Monday, my surgeon recommended spinal fusion. He presented it not as a tragedy, but as a great hope for an end to my disability and pain. He said I should make a great recovery and get back to all my activities, and that with new minimally invasive techniques, the recovery won't even be that bad. He said I could still go on the vacation I have planned in early June. I scheduled the surgery for next week and felt fairly peaceful about it.

Today, I went through an agony of indecision. This agony was greater than physical pain. I spent hour upon hour googling, reading studies and news stories and message boards and any fucking thing I could find. I read many things three, four, five times. I went for a second opinion, and that doctor recommended a more conservative approach--another surgery like the last that will, almost certainly, eventually fail. The only question is whether it will be weeks, months or years. He said that 80 percent of fusion patients do well, and 20 percent suffer permanent disability. I talked with another of my surgeon's patients--who also happens to be the OBGYN who delivered Mia--and he told me to have the fusion. I did nothing but think and talk and read and fret about my back.

It comes down to this: I am in a shitty position. I have to make a decision without knowing the right answer. I am in a place with no guarantees, with no true ground under my feet. I have to make an educated guess that could have a huge impact on my future, and simply hope against hope that I fall on the right side of the odds this time. I have to trust that things will unfold as they are supposed to, and that I am not in control here. If I were, I wouldn't be in this spot to begin with.

So here is my plan for getting my act together and finding some kind of peace. These are my rules, which are ironclad:

1. NO MORE GOOGLING. I have read every bit of relevant information on the web, and reading any more is sure to have only one effect: Driving me fucking insane. If you catch me on a back pain message board again, even if it's a thread about success stories, please shoot me.
2. Step back from this for a day. Let things percolate, but don't read about it, don't talk about it. Let it be.
3. Spend time in meditation and remembering what I have to be grateful for.
4. Get one more opinion on Thursday and then make my decision. Stick with it.
5. Remember that the present is just as valuable as the future. I don't want to make a decision that means giving up the ability to lead a full life now. Now is important. I don't want to think in terms of "getting by" for another few years.
6. Accept risk and uncertainty as an inevitable part of life.
7. NO MORE GOOGLING!

 

 

 

Bearing the unbearable

Here I am. The unbearable has happened, and yet I will bear it. Not just because I have no choice, but because I am determined. I am determined to live a good and worthwhile life, and to be an asset to the world. I am determined to give the people I love everything I possibly can. If I have to, I will walk through the fires of hell to do that.

I have reherniated my disc. I have not yet gotten the results of my MRI to confirm it, but my body is speaking a language I know well. Pounding pain in my calf. Sharp nerve pain jabbing me in the butt, hips and knees. Spasming muscles in my back. I am able to shuffle around the block, but that's about it. I will see my surgeon Monday to confirm what I know is true. Reherniation was a risk I knew about all along, and one that I have done everything possible to avoid. But I have come out on the bad side of the odds. It's just one of those things that happens. I truly don't feel I made any bad decisions along this path. I just got unlucky.

The pain is pretty terrible, and I would not recommend it to anyone. But in some ways, it is freeing. It means I don't have to fuck around this time. When you're in this kind of disabling pain, and you've been down this road before, you don't try four weeks of physical therapy. You don't wonder if you should drop $400 on accupuncture. You get an MRI and you go back to the surgeon and you get that shit off your nerve before you go fucking crazy.

I have Googled for hours upon hours (upon hours), and here is what I know. If it is a simple reherniation of the same disc as before, most surgeons will recommend a second surgery like the first. However, there is now an increased chance that it will herniate again. If it does, they will likely recommend a spinal fusion. Judging from what I have read, a good scenario for someone like me would be to do a second surgery and buy myself some years (hopefully, years and not months this time) before I get the fusion. When I first figured all that out, I had to take a valium. Jesus, that is a frightening future to behold.

But if I take one step back from it, I think, this is just life. It is no different from anything else. We all find ourselves in places that feel like the end of the world. But somehow, we keep going and we survive and we adapt and we do what we have to do--and we realize in retrospect that it wasn't an ending, it was a beginning. I see now that I have to stop thinking about getting back to "normal." There is no such thing as normal. There is only what is, and we take it and do what we can with it. This trial with my back is the beginning of a different life for me. Not one of disability, I hope, but one in which I have to accept more fully my vulnerabilities and the uncertainty that is part of human existence. One in which I have to buck up and do what it takes to help myself, even when it's terrifying. One in which I feel gratitude for what I am able to do, in which I sieze the good moments I'm given, in which I see that petty things aren't worth worrying about.

For much of the time before my last surgery, I worried ceaselessly about not being able to be the mother I wanted to be because of my back. I have even wondered, if I could have seen the future, would I have had a child? Or would I have decided that it was simply too risky, that I might not be able to give her the life I wanted for her with my broken back? (I know these thoughts are ridiculous, but there they are.) But the other night, as I felt this new crisis coming on, I realized how lucky I am to be a mother. It is Mia, more than anything or anyone else, who gives me the courage to face this. It is for her that I will keep going, no matter how much I feel like giving up. It is for her that I will face down the scariest demons. And along the way, I will teach her that there is nothing more powerful than love.

The other day, just before my back fell completely apart again, I was walking my dog through the park. There was a girl lying in the grass alone, sobbing. I asked her if she was OK, but she didn't answer. She didn't look like she was homeless or in need of medical attention, she just looked broken-hearted. There was probably nothing I could have said or done that would have helped. So I walked by, but as I went, I wished her happiness and love. I told her silently that I have been there, I have felt exactly the way she did at that moment, absolutely broken and lost and not seeing any path out. In that moment, I felt so intensely how we all suffer and struggle in this life--but also how heroic we are. How we find our way out of even the darkest places. How we get up and keep going and, somehow, we face the unknowable and bear the unbearable and find happiness and love along the way.

No guarantees

Throughout my recovery, I've had a mantra: Be patient. It's only been XX weeks. As long as I was under that magical three month threshold, I had no right to expect perfection. But three months, March 21, that was my mental deadline. That was when spring would arrive and I would begin the next phase of my life as a person fully recovered from successful back surgery. So why, on March 26, am I lying here on the fucking couch with an ice pack on my back? Fuck.

There has not been a disaster. I am, for the most part, a normal and functioning human being again. I can cook and wander around museums and go away for weekend trips and go to the gym (though I still have to be very gentle and cautious) and run errands. I am back to my ever-growing to do lists. But I do it all with the background noise of mild sciatica, and the attendant worries about what that means. Somewhere around the 2 month mark, things kind of leveled off. I stopped seeing a week by week improvement, and it became more of a mild up and down cycling of nerve irritation and twinges. Sometimes its more noticeable and sometimes it's barely perceptible. It's always mild and manageable. I am plagued by the fear that it's gradually getting worse, but I don't know if that's true. Time clouds things, and I'm not sure anymore if I remember what it was like a month ago. If it was really worse, I would know for sure.

I went back to my surgeon last week, hoping to get some answers that would calm my mind. Instead, I got what I already knew: This stuff is not an exact science. It might keep getting better. It might not. You might need another surgery in the future. You might not. I guess a part of me hoped he would say I needed a new MRI, and that he would look at it and say that everything looks good, and that it will take approximately X more weeks for my nerve to heal completely, and that he promises I will be back to backpacking and Zumbaing and skiing before I know it. Instead he told me that I have a bad back, and that I just have to live my life day to day and trust my body to tell me when an activity is safe and when it's hurting me. He said to stay away from MRI machines, because I really don't want to know what's in there. It will only scare me. And we don't need to know what's in there unless I have pain bad enough to consider another surgery.

So I am left, once again, facing the inevitable truth: I have to live with uncertainty. I am naked and unprotected in this world, and the best I can do is to live and love and laugh, even in the face of disaster. On the days when it is feeling great, that is not so hard. I feel gratitude for the simplest things. I marvel at the many lessons this ordeal has taught me. A simple day of work, errands and family is enough in a way that it never was before. But on the days when it flares up, and I feel the sharp edge of that old nerve pain, that's when the fear leaps up. That's when I wonder if my body will hold up long enough to raise my child, when I wonder if I will ever see the wilderness again. When I imagine a future of not being able to climb mountains, ski and ride bikes with my family.

Most of my suffering is caused not by actual pain, but by this mental 3-month deadline. The idea that, if I'm not cured by now, I might never be. But my rational mind knows that, even though three months feels like a long time, the ordeal I went through was huge and intense. I know, in my gut, that I am still healing, physically and emotionally. And healing is not always linear. It goes up and down. Today I am feeling scared and shaky, because my nerve is a bit flared up after a long day of sitting yesterday. So I will treat myself with gentleness and compassion today. I will hope for the best but know that I can survive the worst.

I know that my back is not always going to be the focus of my life. Eventually, somehow or some way, I will heal and change, and other things will move into the foreground. Someday I will be able to look back on the period when I worried about my back all the time--and with the benefit of perspective, I will see how I worried too much and about the wrong things. I will see that I should have been more patient. I will see that my life was far from over. It helps to remember that. This is another passing phase, and I am doing my best to live every day to its fullest even in the midst of uncertainty and fear. I can't ask any more of myself.

The big and the little picture

In two days, I will be six weeks post-op. I am so grateful to be looking back on that pre-surgery period from a bit of a distance now. It was an instructive period, but living it was horrible. It's difficult now to imagine those days when my husband and daughter would walk out the door in the morning and I would immediately begin sobbing. I have never cried like that before, with the feeling that I was falling into a bottomless pit.

Things are, without a doubt, getting better week by week. One of the best gauges is my medicine cabinet. At the peak of this ordeal, I had so many pill bottles I could hardly keep them all straight. Anti-depressants, anti-anxiety meds, other kinds of anti-anxiety meds, pain meds, more pain meds, sleeping pills, you name it. Now, I am off everything but the sleeping pills (all things in due time). For the past four days, I haven't even taken an Advil. And one week ago, I quit the anti-depressant with (at least so far) no ill effects. I actually hadn't planned on this, but I started to suspect it was behind some of the muscle aches I've been having, so I dropped it. And I have noticed no emotional difference at all. I also haven't frequented back pain websites in at least a couple weeks, which is maybe the biggest step forward.

I need to write this down to remember that I am getting better. Because sometimes I still worry. While the nerve twinges are lessening and moving out of my leg, I still get them. I still worry that I will have pain forever. I still have muscle pain in my upper back that is uncomfortable and annoying and makes me think my back will never be right. Perhaps most of all, I still struggle with the fear that every passing ache and pain will be permanent, and that my good health is an incredibly  fragile commodity that could shatter at any moment. I still wake up in the mornings and feel more dread than joy about what the day might bring. I still obsess over my many aches and twinges.

The best example is this damned muscle tightness and soreness, which I didn't have before surgery, but has haunted me for almost five weeks now. I discovered that it can be a side effect of the anti-depressant I was on, so I quit it, and for the first couple days the muscle problems were almost gone. And then they came back. (What the hell? Why can't anything ever have a simple solution with me?) The pain is still more mild than before, but it is here--that constant feeling of tightness and tension. What does it mean? Will I be able to enjoy my life fully with this feeling always in the background? Will I have to try? I don't know if the aches really are that annoying, or if I am just ultra-sensitive and fearful about any kind of discomfort.

My rational mind tells me that these feelings, emotional and physical, are part of my healing process. This is what I need to remember. If I look at the small picture, the one that has me locked into every passing twinge of pain, I find much to worry about. I still have an imperfect back, a limited present, and an uncertain future. But if I look at the big one, the one that encompasses where I was three months ago and where I am now, things are getting steadily better and I have so much to be thankful for.

Hollowed out

One of the many lessons I have learned over the past few months is how self-centered an illness can make you. When you are consumed by your own pain and fear, it creates a hard shell around you. It disconnects you from the world and from other people. For months, I couldn't concentrate enough to read a book. The only TV I could handle was 30 Rock reruns. I had only the dimmest awareness of the news. As horrible as it is to say, I was so consumed with my own problems that I didn't even spend much time thinking about the Newtown massacre. Of course, I cried a little when I saw that picture of the terrified children filing out of the school. (It was the little girl in stretch pants who got me, as those are the kinds of pants my kid wears almost every day. To think of a kid in those pants being shot at, I can't explain it.) I developed stronger opinions about gun control, and for a couple days, I looked at my daughter and thought about the horror that those parents must face, not only the loss of their children but the thought of the terrifying way that they spent their last moments. And yet, while I was in the depths of my personal turmoil, all these things were only passing thoughts, momentary distractions from what felt like the only real problem in the world — my fucking leg.

Now that I am beginning to recover, I feel somehow hollowed out by the experience. There is an empty space that is no longer filled with doctors appointments and paralyzing fear and pain, and I have to figure out how to fill it up again. The past three months felt like an eternity, and I can hardly remember what I used to do with all that time and mental energy. What was all that stuff that kept me so busy?

I am so tempted to keep filling the space with my reflexive, self-centered worries. What does that twinge mean? What about that one? Am I going to reherniate my disc? What if I need another surgery and we go broke because of medical bills? Why is a new muscle in my back flaring up? What if it keeps getting worse? Will I be healthy enough for the trips we have planned in the spring? Will this screwed up back be able to carry me through the rest of my life? Maybe I should Google just a little...

But I am realizing a little more each day that it is time to start reconnecting with the world outside my own medical drama, time to start caring for other people as well as myself. Slowly, slowly, I am starting to remember what used to fill that space in my life. I am thinking again about my work, and my desire to make a difference with my career. I'm rejoining the PTA at Mia's school. I'm reading the newspaper. I'm reaching out again to friends. It even feels like I am relearning how to do the basic maintenance of life: balancing my checkbook, watering plants, returning library books, making grocery lists. These are things that, during that dark time, were simply impossible.

In many cases, I am still doing these things with a sense of emotional vacancy and bewilderment... "Why did I once think this mattered so much?" But I am doing them, and that is the first step. Maybe one day soon, I will finally unpack the suitcase I brought back with me from Mexico almost three months ago. It has been sitting in the guest room ever since, waiting for the day I am ready to reassemble my life.

Season of healing

For at least 10 days after surgery, I was planning my triumphant announcement that I am CURED. That back surgery is the best thing on earth, and that I recommend it to all. That recovery is the easiest thing on earth. That birds are singing and rainbows are lighting up my days. And really, I have no reason not to continue to feel that way. I am still eternally grateful that the pain in my leg has been reduced to intermittent twinges. I can walk again, sometimes miles at a time. I can sit in chairs. I can, for the most part, go places and do things without spending every other second noticing the pain in my leg increasing. I can cook simple dinners and go out for drinks with my husband. I feel like eating food again. I spend zero minutes per day sobbing my eyes out and fearing that I will never walk again. I am — finally, finally — getting better, physically and emotionally.

And yet, and yet, this still isn't easy. As time goes by (16 days post surgery now) my standards for what it means to feel "wonderful" start to go up. Having to spend significant portions of every day lying down starts to feel like prison. Being able to run no more than one or two errands at a time becomes frustrating. Having new (and very uncomfortable) muscle spasms appear in random parts of my back becomes demoralizing. Worrying that every new ache and twinge means I might have reherniated becomes mentally exhausting.

Yesterday, I took my daughter to a museum and realized my body wasn't quite ready yet. Part of my back became intolerably sore and my leg twinges intensified, and I started to get that old sweaty, anxious feeling. Will I ever be able to do enjoy these simple activities again? Will my back ever be well enough for me to live a normal life? Will I ever climb a mountain or ski down one again? Will I enjoy vacations or be able to work in an office? Will I ever do anything without the fear of injuring my back? The answer is, of course, yes. Time (and successful surgery) heals, and it has only been 16 days. (Even though it feels like ETERNITY right now, 16 days is not a long time.) In a few months, I will be fine. I will take scrupulous care of my back, like never before, and I will get strong. One day, this monumental crisis in my life will be a distant memory.

But I have to learn to trust my body again after what feels like the worst kind of betrayal. I have to get over the grief and fear that this has caused. On the way home from the museum, my daughter and I talked about a time when we had gone to the movies. Maybe a year ago? And she said, "That was the time before your leg was hurting." The idea that she now has these dual images of a sort of before-and-after mother, an able-bodied one and a disabled one, is devastating. I know that, eventually, this will be on a blip on her radar. But right now, our entire family is still coping with the seismic shift that has occured. There is no small amount of guilt in the knowledge that my suffering has caused the people I love to suffer, too.

I know that my problems are not unique. Millions of people every year suffer with crippling back problems. Many, many people deal with health problems far worse. Every single one of us lives with the threat that illness or disaster could strike at any moment. At least once a day, I hear about someone who has dealt with an illness or a heartache exponentially worse than my own. And yet, that doesn't change the feeling I get in my gut when my leg or my back hurts. The feeling that everything can be ripped away from me, and that it is completely out of my control. Right now, I am feeling my vulnerability in an entirely new way. All I can do is be gentle and kind with myself, and remember that, whether I like it or not, this is my season of healing.

Prepping for surgery

In three days, I will have back surgery. I still cannot believe this is happening. But after two months of complete disability, and a neurosurgeon's opinion that I will not get better on my own, I no longer feel I have any choice. I have all the indications that surgery is warranted and necessary and very likely to help. There was no agonizing over the decision. In fact, I felt immense relief when I found out that surgery was an option for me. Knowing there was some way to fix this problem almost immediately brought me out of a depression during which I spent most days sobbing, wracked with despair. Not knowing how long this ordeal would last was the hardest part.

Still, I am scared to death. I am scared of the surgery, yes. But I am even more scared of the future beyond it. The doctor says the prognosis looks good, that I should feel better quickly, that the surgery is minimally invasive and I should feel better a couple days after than I do right now. (That wouldn't be a high bar, since I can barely walk or sit right now.) I've heard lots of stories of people who made full recoveries from this type of problem and went on to many years of active healthy living.

But I've also heard the other kinds of stories, some from friends and some on the internet. (Oh lord, why can't I stop Googling?) Stories of people who had poor results. People who were still having lots of pain many months after the surgery. People who were cured temporarily but then the pain came back. People who reherniated their discs shortly after surgery. I'm terrified that it won't work, or that it will take many months to make me feel better. I'm scared that I will no longer be able to live an active healthy life. I'm scared of what my future with a weakend back looks like. I'm scared  that this kind of pain and disability can just descend on a relatively young, healthy and active person for absolutely no reason. Another layer of my innocence has been stripped away by this realization.

I know I need to stay in this moment and deal with what is here now. I know there is no sense in playing out these scenarios in my head. I know that life is full of uncertainty, that anything can happen at any moment. I know that worry is useless. I know that people face far worse than this. Still, this is so, so hard.

I guess I never knew what a back problem could do to your life. As this blog has chronicled, mine has reduced me to a pile of rubble over the past two months. Two months doesn't sound like much when I type the words, but it has felt like eternity. When you are lying on the couch hour after hour, every day feels like a month. I can hardly imagine what it's like to live without pain anymore. I believe in my heart that this experience will make me stronger, that it will transform me. I am still on the hero's journey. But I'm so ready to get out of the mountains and onto smoother terrain again.

Acceptance and hope

I realize that what I have been going through is a grieving process. I don't know the official stages of grief, but I have definitely been through the darkness of fresh grief. The feeling that everything is officialy over for me, that all hope is lost. I have also been through the intense wanting, the desire for everything to be restored just as it was, the despair that comes from wanting so badly to just go back to "normal." I think I am beginning to move on now, to the stage where I accept that my life is different now, and that it will never be the same again.  There will be no magical day when everything snaps back into its old place.

This does not mean that I have given up on healing my leg and back, or my brains. Not at all. In fact, for the first time in a while, I feel a sense of genuine hope that I will get better. I will be an able-bodied person again who doesn't spend all day lying on the living room floor, trying not to panic and/or cry. I am going to psychiatrists and therapists and spine doctors and physical therapists. I am getting epidural injections, popping more pills than I care to name, reading books about healing back pain.

But I also realize that I am walking through fire, and that I will not emerge from it unchanged. I will have a new awareness of how suddenly everything can change, of how thin the ties are that bind us to what we have in this moment. I hope these revelations will teach me how to live with new gratitude for every day that I have my health and my family. We say these are the things that really matter, but you can't truly feel it until you have seen them slipping away. I know now that the things I once took for granted, or even dreaded, are sacred gifts. Being able to walk my daughter to school, to pack her lunch, take her to a museum, or to dance with her in the living room. Being able to clean my home, to help with the dishes, to cook dinner, all those acts of care that we do for our families. Being able to go to the gym, to run errands, to throw a stick for the dog, to take a bike ride on a warm winter day. I didn't truly realize what gifts all those things are. But I will never forget again, that I promise.

I will also know that I am bigger than my thoughts and emotions. I have seen what dark places they can take you to. I've seen how they lie, how they tell you stories that aren't true, how they cripple with you with fear, how they separate you from what is real. I will remember that the only true wisdom emerges from a place far deeper than the emotions and thoughts that swirl around me like clouds, obscuring my view of the truth.

For now, I am trying to walk through this ordeal — which is not over — with both acceptance and hope. For now, I have to accept my limitations and try to be the best person I can be within them. I have realized a few things during this time of weakness — most of all, how much we need people in our lives. The love and care that I have received from friends and family have been humbling. My mother has spent more than three weeks here, doing everything in her power to help me. My husband has held me while I sobbed more times than I can count. Friends and family have sent cards, dropped off meals. Even the many kind messages I received on Facebook felt like sacred reminders of our capacity to comfort and love one another. There is such power in reaching out to one another, and for the rest of my life, I promise to give that gift as often as I can.

I am doing my best, and I am making it, day by day, through the darkest time of my life.

Pain

I have been crying on and off all day. Yet, depression no longer feels like the big issue in my life. The issue is my leg, my leg, nothing but my leg. I know for a fact that, if I could escape this pain, I would be fine. I would embrace my life, my normal life of school pickups and chores and errands, with passion so intense it would probably be inappropriate. You don't realize until these things are taken away what privileges they are. To be upright and mobile and without chronic pain, it is the greatest gift on earth. And it is a gift that I don't know when I will have again. Part of me believes I will never have it, but I have to keep slapping myself across the face and saying, "Shut up, brain. Stop your fucking lies!"

The sciatic pain has not improved. In fact, it has gotten worse. Worse to the point where I can barely walk or be on my feet at all. To say it sucks would be the biggest understatement on the fucking earth. I am not dealing at all well with this. I cry and rage against it. I feel overwhelming guilt for all the things I cannot do, with my child, with my husband. Every holiday event, every school meeting and activity, is another reminder of something I likely won't be able to do. I am just so sad about it. A host of different medical professionals have promised me that I won't be crippled for life, but for some reason my brain and my heart won't believe them. I think it's the not knowing that kills me, not knowing how long I will be crippled or what it will take to get me better.

Mr. SOC doesn't understand my thinking. He doesn't understand why this has to be such a big deal. Yes, it's hard being crippled and in pain. But what reason do I have to believe I won't get better? Why can't I just be hopeful about my chances? Why can't I wait it out and accept what is? He is right. That is the rational way to look at this. But I am not rational right now. Right now, this moment feels like forever. And this moment is not how I want my life to be.

I have to take this space and time to remind myself of the things I know to be true. I am bigger than this pain. My child has all the things that are important: unconditional love, safety, a warm place to sleep, plenty to eat, friends and family to entertain her when I can't. I have a husband who loves me enough to weather this storm with me. I have to believe in my own capacity to heal. Life can't always be what I want it to be; all I can do is stay with it, breathing in and out, knowing that this too shall pass. This, like every hard experience, is a chance to grow.

Just a few days ago, I was mobile enough to cook Thanksgiving dinner and do arts and crafts with my daughter. It wasn't a perfect pain-free day, but it was enough. That was only five days ago. So why is it that I believe I'll never be there again? Yesterday, I had an epidural steroid injection. I know several people who were helped by these. Why do I believe that it's probably going to fail for me? I have to remember that my brain is lying to me right now. Yes, I am hurting right now, but the stories about "the rest of my life" are all made up, all horror stories concocted in my mind. I think I'll go meditate right now. Maybe it will help.

EDITED TO ADD: The meditation did help. I found so much wisdom arising in myself. First, I repeated these phrases that came to me:

• I believe in my intrinsic worth, despite my physical limitations
• I believe in the power of my mind and body to heal
• I believe in my strength in courage

And then I found myself being able to make space for my grief, my impatience and my fear. I was able to simply allow them to be there, which felt so much better than trying to fight against them. Afterward, I took a walk with the dog. Yes, it hurt. But with every step I asked myself, "Can I just feel the pain and not the fear of the pain?" It made the unbearable bearable.

 

Stumbling through

I think the most destructive thing about depression is the way it robs me of my perspective. When I am in the black hole, that is all there is. All good times, past and future, are lost to me. My brain tells me that this is how it's going to be for me now, crying and panicking for no reason, burdening my family with my misery, being constantly exhausted by insomnia, struggling just to hold it together in public. It's that lie that makes it feel so unbearable. That I am permanently crazy now, and that the me who laughed and hiked and sailed and biked is dead. Now I'm just the me who has to fight tears and panic during the Thanksgiving lunch at my daughter's school—for absolutely no fucking reason. The me who limps around on her bad leg, feeling jealous of all the people out there living normal lives without crippling sciatic pain.

To bring you up to speed... After my terrible reaction to Zoloft, which was followed by rapid cycling between feeling fine and feeling overcome with panic and tears, my primary doc suggested that I was bi-polar. Yes, bi-polar! And she put me on a mood stabilizer. It seemed to help, as evidenced by my last post. But there were still hard times, when the panic and tears would descend without my control, and the word bi-polar weighed heavy on my mind. So this week, I went to a psychiatrist. And he said, rather definitively, "You are not bi-polar." Instead, he diagnosed me with major depression, likely triggered by my chronic sciatic pain and the steroids I used to treat it. What a relief! I thought. Not bi-polar! And then I came home and looked up major depression and, hey, that's not really a fun diagnosis either.

What I'm learning first hand is that depression is a real disease, not just a bad mood. It takes over your brain, like an alien being, and sucks out all the hope and happiness. It can completely disable you for months (or even years). It saps my brain power, makes me shaky and woozy with fear, robs me of my already impaired ability to sleep. And it has to be treated just like any other disease. In my case, the doctor tells me my prognosis is good. There was a pretty clear trigger. The steroids are still working their way out of my system. Once my back problem resolves, it will take a major burden off my addled brain. I have a good support system, and I am motivated to get better. But for now, I am dealing with periods of  anxiety and sadness that descend for parts of almost every day, for no good reason at all. They're not moods that I can talk myself out of. They are like electrical storms in my brain, and the best I can do is ride them out.

Still, I refuse to become a helpless victim. In the spirit of determination, I make these declarations:

• It's OK to be fucked up right now. No, I am not myself at the moment — and I don't have to feel guilty about that. For now, this is my journey. I will give myself this time free of the expectation that I should be "normal." It's no different from having mono, or some other disease that takes months to heal.
• I will not believe my brain's lies that this is permanent. Millions of people go through periods of clinical depression every year. They find medications and therapies that work, and they get to the other side. They live happy lives, they parent their children, they hold down jobs, they have sex with their husbands. I am going to get there too.
• I will do whatever it takes to heal myself. I will spend whatever money is required. I will assemble a team of doctors and therapists that I trust. I will try a dozen different medications if I have to. I will ask for help when I need it. I will remember that I deserve to get better.
• I will fix this fucking leg! The pain, the inability to exercise, all the limitations that come with being hardly able to walk, sit or stand are the biggest contributing factors to my depression. Oh, how I long to go to the gym, to take a long walk in the sunshine, to take a step without thinking of the knife sticking into my calf. I have just started with a physical therapist that I trust. She told me to give this therapy two weeks. If it doesn't work, I will go to a specialist. I will not balk at my $2500 deductible. I will keep going, I will do what it takes to get myself mobile and physically healthy again. Everyone has promised me that I'm not going to be disabled for life by this, and I'm going to believe them. It may take some time, but I will fix this leg.
• I will come through this stronger and more compassionate. I will know when this is over that, if I walked through this hellish journey, I can walk through anything. I will not let it close me down with fear or shame. I will let it transform me.

So that is my story for right now. I am stumbling through the hardest time of my life, but even though it may not feel like it, I am moving forward. I am headed toward the other shore, and I am going to get there.