North of Achilles' Heel, Somewhere in Tendonville

I'm pretty sure I've mentioned somewhere in this blog that approaching fifty makes me feel like an American car with 100,001 miles on it; things are starting to go just a wee bit wrong, becoming marginally less reliable, slightly less predictable.

The most disturbing of these changes rests somewhere deep within my metabolism. While it's been decades since I willingly displayed my stomach on a beach, I've always been able to knock off  some pounds with exercise when I wanted to. And even when I didn't want to exercise formally, I've stayed pretty active.  

Appearances can be so very deceiving, and if you saw me walking down the street you might think I was the queen of lazy (especially if you couldn't see my legs). I love the look on a new doc's face when, expecting to deliver a standard lecture on cholesterol and blood sugar and the error of my ways, she sees my lab results and then, just to be sure, double checks my blood pressure.  "Still 108/60?" I inquire. "Yep," she admits. Another good one? When a massage therapist, expecting to plunge his or her hands into peanut butter or jelly, encounters instead the muscles in my legs. "So what do you do to work out?" I hear, kind of, as I drift off to a half-sleep.

But my body? She's a traitorous bitch. My new best friend, menopause, apparently has 15 surly cousins....the pounds that have snuck in since March. Yes, you heard me, SINCE MARCH. They're stealthy, well-distributed, not really enough to move me up a size, just enough to make me feel cumbersome and lumpy. 

The summer in Texas may be a contributing factor. I missed the walking and hiking and biking availble in Oregon. About all the outdoor exercise I'm willing to do around here from June until mid-September is uncork a bottle of wine. 

I am fiercely anti-scale, so I only met these slatternly additions today at my doctor's office. Why was I there?  The title says it all.

I am pissed, royally pissed, at those pounds.  I refuse to believe that I cannot sweat them off. I will not take estrogen to make it easier.  I will do it the old fashioned way, and I will even give up cheese.  So I joined the YMCA near Small Child's school. And I did not start slowly. Nope, not me.  I visualized every one of those pounds as a frumpy Sarah Palin in elastic-waist pants (this made easier by the fact that the only cable news show available in the room was FOX) and went after them like an Alaskan shooting wolves from a plane. After ten days, nothing had changed.

Except my left ankle.

I was going to ignore it.  After all, I thought, what could I have possibly done to injure it? I'm no athlete. I wasn't even running. Maybe the double cardio sessions were a bit much, but given the circumstances that was probably what it was going to take to see results so I might as well suck it up. I settled with a couple of days off. After the second one, things weren't any better. Just the opposite.

So, Wednesday night, I casually mentioned the pain in the back of my ankle to The Man.  He didn't look up from his book (Who does when his wife complains about something? And I should probably mention that he is an ex-jock from the "tape an aspirin to it" school of athletic training), but muttered, "Is it swollen?" I said I couldn't tell and asked him to take a look.

His reply?

"That looks nasty. You need to see Our Doctor tomorrow."

That's when I actually looked at the Achilles tendon areas of both ankles and noticed that the left one had an obvious bulge. I rolled my eyes, said I'd think about it, and tugged on a compression sleeve the next morning. No improvement whatsoever.

So today I gave in.

Diagnosis: tendonitis. Pretty bad (I think that's a technical term). The good news is that it isn't partially ruptured...yet. I'm banned from the treadmill and consigned to the bike, which Our Doctor adores but which I despise with every fiber of my being. I begged for the eliptical and she relented as long as it didn't get any worse. I get to bop about town in lace-up shoes (fashionista!) with a gooshy heel cup. I left with a month's worth of Celebrex samples. If it doesn't improve with TLC, I'm off for an MRI and PT.

So, for all of you with odometers in the lower ranges...enjoy your young, reliable bodies while you can.

And don't forget to stretch.

Between the slices....

Ah, reality. The mundane. The quotidian. Whatever you want to call it, I’ve hit the blogging version of what my friends and I used to call The Twenty Minute Lull. It’s the point in a conversation when anything interesting stops, and everyone wonders if it will ever start again. My daily comings and goings (none of which would interest 99.9 percent of you), combined with some personal surprises, have kept me from writing. And yes, I know, nothing should keep me from writing. I’m aware of that, so shut your pie hole (this last imperative applies only to certain readers, and you know who you are).

As you can tell from the date/time stamp, I’m enjoying my usual exciting Saturday night. Here’s what’s on my mind.

I used to laugh at those popular culture labels…that is until I found one stuck on my shirt: The Sandwich Generation. Perhaps the term would have been more precise if it had been coined thusly: The Shit Sandwich Generation.

Without revealing too much personal (i.e. boring) detail, I’m slap in between the slices and I feel like excrement. My mother, who is 85, has been holding her own against the inoperable Stage IV cancer that was discovered, by fluke, in her otherwise healthy body exactly a year ago. She was given three months with no treatment, maybe as much as a year with palliative chemo – that is, if she responded. She did. I hope every day that my genetic lottery card will reveal such vigor when I get around to scratching it off in old age.

But in a Groundhog Day flashback, at yesterday’s oncologist appointment – the one I was hoping would ease both of our minds so that I could hit the road to Oregon this Wednesday and she could hit the skies to California for her usual summer visit in July – we did not get the best of news.

That’s one slice of bread.

The other? My seven-year-old child, brimming with life, who missed the summer in Oregon last year as a result of the diagnosis, has been counting on this summer’s trip for 365 days, and who may very well miss it again this year.

What’s in the middle of the sandwich? Me, feeling alternatively altruistic and selfish, wondering where my obligations lie. Mother or child? Behind or ahead? And dare the poop consider her own needs?

What I wouldn’t give for a crystal ball. I suspect many of you are in the same boat.

Of course, the obligations toward Mother can easily be read as obligations toward Child, as well. Last year, when my mother apologized for our change of plans, I told her not to be silly. I told her that, in a way, she was giving her grandchild a gift through her illness. I very much remember the deaths of the two grandparents who died in my early childhood. I remember sitting in hospital waiting rooms. I remember seeing old people in extremis. Both of my grandmothers lived with us, at different times (I even shared a room with one for a while), and I saw what it was like to be old. I remember families coming together. I remember figuring out that life goes on, and that death need not be scary.

Now, many of my child’s friends’ grandparents live far away. If they live nearby, their aging has been managed and ameliorated, disinfected. Ill grandparents seldom come to live in a child’s home. Illness happens behind closed doors, ones behind which children are not welcome, usually in big scary hospitals where no one would dream of taking a child.

If we could manage to normalize death and illness, I told my mother, we would be giving my child an advantage her peers would not have. We could give her an idea of humanity writ large. And this indeed came to pass to a degree, but not with the drama I’d anticipated. We’ve been very matter-of-fact about everything. For one thing, my mother never spent a day in bed, not even during the worst of chemo. When she began to lose her hair, for another, my child and I took her to have the remaining patchy strands shaved off. It was a surprisingly upbeat event. We made what could have been traumatic commonplace.

My mother would be the first to tell you that she has had a long and wonderful life; she does not want to disrupt mine. If I am brutally honest, I don’t want my life disrupted. I could head west and fly home if things take a turn for the True Worse.

But that does not seem like the right thing to do.