Down The Rabbit Hole

Once again I seem to have fallen off the face of the planet, so, oops! I’ve been busy, first with my folks being in town, then with work and house stuff. But I’ve also been in my head quite a bit, and I haven’t really been in the mood to write, mainly because I just haven’t known what to say. And when I do start to write, I’m not happy with the way it comes out. Apparently, I can write well when I am happy, sad, or angry, but not so much when I’m stressed out.

I’m doing much better than I was a few weeks ago. The hypochondria seems to have passed, for the most part. I had a couple days last week right after my folks left where the “early menopause” thing was trying to creep its way back in, along with about forty eight hours of depression of the “pit of despair” variety, but, like I said, it passed. I think it was more about being exhausted from work and driving back and forth to Malibu every day, not to mention ten days of too many cocktails. What can I say - when my family gets together, the booze, it flows freely. After a couple days of teetotaling, herbal tea and evenings on my own couch in front of the TV, I felt much MUCH better.

I’ve also started seeing my therapist again, which is a huge help. She knows me so well and knows just how to reign me back in when I’m feeling like I’m starting to lose it. This past appointment, I had been telling her that I’m having a hard time deciding when the right time to go back to the doctor is, to start the baby making efforts again. I keep waiting for a “perfect” cycle – a month where my stress level is relatively low and my ovulation and period go well (don’t ask me what “well” means, because I really couldn’t tell you) – before we go back. But something always seems to come up. The “perfect” cycle remains elusive, and I don’t know if it should be like ripping off a band-aid and we should just go back at the start of my next cycle to get the anticipation anxiety over with. Or should we make a pact to start again at the turn of the year, and I take the next few months to try and get my head on straight. I told her, “I just wish I knew what the answer is”.

She smiled, wisely and a little mischievously, and said, “I picture you like a comic strip.”

Come again?

“I see you,” she said, “like a comic strip. The first frame is you, drawn in black and white, with your fists on your hips, and your face looking all angry, and you’re screaming up to the sky, to the universe. You’re yelling ‘WHY? WHEN? WHAT’S GOING TO HAPPEN? WHEN IS IT GOING TO HAPPEN?’”

I smile sheepishly because, yeah, that sounds about right.

“The next frame,” she says, “is of a voice speaking back to you from the clouds, and it’s saying ‘It’s none of your business’.”

Immediately I knew in my heart she was right. The answers to those questions are none of my business. I may not believe in God, but I believe in a universe with some kind of order. I have a path, and I am walking it the best I can. I don’t know where my path is leading me, but I trust enough to know that whatever happens, I will be OK.

I am my best source for answers, but for some reason my faith in myself has faltered a bit. When I’m feeling insecure and anxious, I have to be quiet and look inward for the answers only I can give myself. I have to trust that the one person who really knows what is best for me is me. The question isn’t “Should I go back to the doctor and start trying again?” The question is “Am I ready to start trying again?” I think that’s one of the reasons why I’ve been absent from my writing. I’ve been wrapped up thinking on the wrong question and finding no answers.

My “homework” from my therapist is to start a meditation practice, just ten minutes a day, to learn to quiet my mind. It’s funny that she brought up meditation, because I’ve actually been reading a lot about it lately. It sounds like exactly what I need, though I don’t expect it to be easy. But I have to try. The fearful and anxious thoughts get in the way of my real voice being able to come through, and I need to hear it.

I’ve got a question to ask myself.

I’ve been having a hard time lately. I’ve basically been driving myself slowly insane and making myself sick and I don’t know what to do about it. This is a window into my mind, and let me tell you, it’s not a pretty picture.

I’ve mentioned before about the nerve twitch in my foot that I’ve had for several months that my doctor told me was stress related. While we were in France, I was totally fine. The muscle in my foot twitched, but not badly, and I was having a good time so I barely noticed. Then the stuff with Maggie and The Pet Staff happened and the twitch got worse. It got really bad when we got back and I wasn’t sleeping well and readjusting from jet lag. The foot twitch turned into twitches all over my body - the backs of my thighs, my calves, my arms, my back. It’s bad enough and annoying enough that I called my doctor again and she referred me to the UCLA Neurology department, but I couldn’t get an appointment until early September. In the meantime, I’ve sort of stepped my exercise, and it really has helped alleviate the twitches. They are still there, but nowhere near as bad.

Here’s the thing, though, and the crux of the problem. Before I called the doctor, I go online. I look up “muscle twitches” and it spits out a list a mile long of horrible degenerative nerve diseases like multiple sclerosis and ALS and stuff like that. I freak out. Even though when I first went to my doctor about the twitch in my foot she told me that it was nothing like that. Even though she told me it is most likely stress related. I read everything I can get my hands on about MS and read the list of other symptoms, like blurred vision and numbness and tingling in the limbs, and at first I think “oh thank goodness I don’t have that”, but the next day, whaddya know, I have a tingly sense in my hands, and suddenly my eyes are all irritated and I’m constantly squinting at things, thinking to myself “I swear that yesterday I could see that more clearly”. I convince myself that I have MS.

The other set of symptoms that I run across in my search for “muscle twitches” are symptoms related to Menopause. Also in that list are things like “hot flashes” and “tingling skin” and “heart palpitations”. I think to myself, panicked, “oh my god I was really hot at work the other day so hot that I had to take off my sweater and I NEVER get hot could that have been a hot flash that was a hot flash oh my god I’M IN EARLY MENOPAUSE”. Or “Did that little patch of skin on my leg just tingle? It totally tingled out of nowhere oh my god I’M IN EARLY MENOPAUSE”. Or “Is my heart beating really fast right now? It kind of is, it’s kind of fast oh my god I’M IN EARLY MENOPAUSE”.

So of course, I become hysterical. I am completely convinced that I am in early menopause. What with my irregular periods, my doctor-diagnosed hormonal imbalance, and the myriad other “symptoms” I convince myself that I have, what other diagnosis is possible? I think, is there possibly a way that I’m NOT in early menopause? And my brain says, “No. There is no way that this is anything other than early menopause. You will never have a baby, you will lose your sex drive and never desire your husband ever again, and it’s going to happen all before the tender age of 31.”

I am on high alert all the time, searching my body for new sensations – a twitch here, a tingle there. I’m afraid to go to bed at night because I’m afraid of having hot flashes and night sweats. I’ve been constantly checking my pulse, to see if my heartbeat is rapid. Which it always is. I’ve had a high resting heartbeat since I was a teenager. I know this. Plus, all the stress I am putting on myself with all this bullshit can’t be helping.

In my heart, I know how this sounds. I know I sound like a raving lunatic. I have moments of clarity, a voice that comes from deep inside me that says “Don’t you see? Don’t you see what you are doing to yourself?” But I can’t make it stop.

The past two years of infertility has made me lose faith in my body. In my mind, how can I possibly be healthy if I can’t get pregnant, or if I can’t sustain a pregnancy? Something must be horribly wrong. And when all the stress from the past two years began to manifest physically as the twitch in my foot, it was all over. It was as if my body was confirming what my inner demon had been whispering in my ear all this time – “You’re broken”.

I look at my body, this body that has been my true home for thirty years, that has grown with me and taken the brunt of so much, from the scraping of knees from falling off my bike as a kid, to being stuck with needles and forced to grow more eggs than should be humanly possible. I treat it like crap, filling it with alcohol, not giving it the nutrition it needs to operate properly, not exercising enough. Allowing myself to become so overwhelmed with stress that I make it sick. And I blame it? My body has done nothing but serve me as well as it could. There are wells of strength within it that I never knew existed, never knew I could put my body through so much. And when it starts to show signs of fatigue, I think that it’s broken. I think that not only have I lost faith in my body, my body is starting to lose faith in me, too.

Hawk has been so kind and patient with me, always the voice of reason, trying to bring me back down, again and again. It breaks my heart that I’m doing this to him. I had a breakdown in the car the other day when we were going out to breakfast, and I cried and told him over and over that I was sorry, that it’s not fair to him to have to deal with me like this, but that I can’t make it stop. He wants me to call my therapist and go get some help and I’m going to.

We’re supposed to do an insemination with my next cycle and I have to get a handle on this before then. I know that I need to be as calm as possible during that time to give us the best chance of success, and with how I’ve been feeling the past three weeks, there’s no way it would work. I have to be good to myself, to take care of myself, to be kind and gentle with myself. Why is it that my first instinct is to beat myself up, to blame myself, to accept so readily that there is something “wrong” with me?

I wish I knew.