To the Rock Candy Girl who had a year much like mine.
Today is day two of three at the Morro Bay Campground, my first home in Morro Bay two and a half years ago. Kismet, and all her elegance, rests a few miles away; I was there yesterday for Music Therapy, returning to Beagle after some soul enriching piano and a meditative walk along the beach. I find myself wanting to live in Beagle awhile; take off (again!), enjoy the freedom, be curious about the unknown rather than fearing it as I have learned to do. But I cannot leave; in one week I will enter the hospital for my third brain surgery in five months.
Many of my dear readers have been with me for years so I
will provide the barest of personal details; I know you will have questions. I have been dealing with two brain aneurysms,
the story is long and arduous and at times dark and hopeless; during this time everything
I relied on to define my life has been disallowed and I found myself understanding
how people become agoraphobic. Fear, not
of dying (you know me better than that), but of my artery bursting and leaving
me paralyzed or it bursting while I was driving and perhaps then causing harm to someone
else. Insidious fear which took up
residence just to the left of my heart and grew with every hesitation of movement.
And gone are my stress-relievers: No tennis, no sprinting, no travel, no
skiing, no hiking, no swimming, no laughing; I cannot even cry without worrying
that my blood pressure is getting dangerously high (two of those I do despite
the risks.)
My surgeon wondered, during the initial diagnostic
angiogram back in October, how it was that I am still alive, stating that normally a person
would have died three times over; my internal carotid artery, as he put it, “decimated.”
So in between the surgeries and the long, slow recoveries as
my artery adapts to life with metal, I found myself wondering Why indeed? Most of you know my life; if I had died, even
at the age of 55, people would have said, “Yes, she died young, but look at
that life! She lived.” And yet here I am. Hence the picture above; it is from my white
board at home. The Why. The best I can come up with is that I simply
haven’t seen what I need to see of this wonderful planet (some things I [greedily]
want to see again) and I have yet to come home to my cozy cabin on a serene lake,
nestled against protective mountains.
In the recovery room following my last angiogram, the nurse
said to me, “Someone sure wants you to stay alive.” And now, after five months, I can say that
someone is Me. She added, “Go home and be
lazy, we will see you in two weeks for surgery.”
And so it is half-time of this sporting event; I am learning
to be lazy and nothing slows me down like time in Beagle. Rest, prepare, the third quarter will be
starting soon. Buckle up.
-K
