Angie Kinghorn

Better living through chemistry

Writer’s workshop prompt: What was your medicine?  Write about a time you remember being ill.

What was my medicine?  The better question would be, what wasn’t my medicine.  At some point during each visit with a new doctor, the nurse taking my history usually asks me what I do in the medical field.  Nothing, I tell her, I’ve just taken a whole lot o’ drugs.
When it comes to medical luck, I have none.  Or rather, I have tons, it’s just all bad.  If it can happen, it happens to me.  Whenever I’m in the office, my OB eyes me warily, looks sideways at my 6 inch thick chart, and says, “Well, normally I wouldn’t worry about it, but since it’s you … I think we should do an ultrasound, some blood work …”
It’s to the point of ridiculousness.  Really, it is.
As in, I’m resistant to anesthetic.  Telling doctors you’re resistant to anesthetic, anesthesia and pain meds in general is not a fun thing to do.  They hear your words and immediately label you “junkie.”  Or, if they’re particularly kind, “wimp.”  Before my c-section, I tried to explain to the anesthesiologist that pain meds just don’t last on me.  Oh, the patronizing look in his eyes as he explained to me that the spinal he was going to administer would be enough to numb me for two and half times the length of the surgery.
Oh, how I wish he’d still been in the OR when the spinal wore off.  Yes, you read that correctly.  My spinal wore off during my c-section.  Once the nurses figured out that yes, my skyrocketing blood pressure meant that I wasn’t faking, that I really was in excruciating pain, they began to administer morphine.  Lots of morphine.  Which is how I ended up with an ileus.  (Google at your own risk.)
I told this story to a physician friend of mine, who looked at me, incredulously, and said, “Nobody gets an ileus after a c-section!  You would be my nightmare patient!”
If I could do math, it would be great fun to figure out what number I am in a million.  After my recent surgery to fix the abdominal muscles the twins ripped apart while in the womb, I had horrible complications from the general anesthesia.  My surgeon told me I was in the 1% of the population to have these complications.  Then, I started to accumulate pockets of fluid around the surgical site, which had to be drained no less than four times.  My surgeon told me I was in the 2% of the population to have this particular complication. 
Seriously, I don’t know how to do the math, but that tells me I should be buying lottery tickets. 
Over the years, migraine headaches, a small brain tumor, four shoulder surgeries, and a host of other maladies have led me to exchange one of those 80’s BFF pendants with my pharmacist, Sam. 
But my medicine is not limited to what’s on Sam’s shelves.  If it’s out there, I’ve tried it.  Massage therapy is delicious and effective, therefore insurance won’t cover it.  They will, however, cover acupuncture.  Blue Cross logic escapes me.  As do the mechanics of acupuncture.  I only know that the first time I tried it, the acupuncturist had only put in about three needles when my body felt like it had been strung up on a power line.  I was burning hot, sweating like crazy, and I almost vomited on his shoes.  He stood back, awestruck, and said, “I’ve never seen anyone react to acupuncture like this before.  You must have had a major blockage in your energy flow.” 
Then there was my experiment with hypnosis.  It was very relaxing, and I learned how to self-hypnotize, which has been useful.  But the hypnotist shot her credibility all to hell when she tried to get me to try her version of biofeedback, which was “based on quantum physics” and involved a machine that could tell you everything about your body, including where you might have imbalances or cancer.  I’m thinking that if this were anything but quackery, it would be at the Mayo Clinic and all over CNN.  The best part was when she told me each of us has the equivalent of a unique radio signal, and that once she’s acquired it, she can treat a person from as far away as necessary, by dialing into their unique frequency, using (natch) quantum physics. 
She knew I was a lawyer and not a physicist, but I couldn’t resist confronting this obvious quackery.  I started asking her questions about how her magic machine worked.  It was obvious that her clients don’t often ask questions.  She stuttered a few explanations, littered with big, impressive sounding words, and ended with, “but it’s all about quantum physics, so I can’t really explain it since you don’t know quantum physics.”
Forgive me, Lord, but I had to do it.  I said, “Oh, I took all kinds of physics in college when I was thinking about going to med school.  Loved my quantum physics course.  So tell me how this thing works?”
And suddenly, we were out of time.
My health issues have also prompted me to try meditation classes, which I loved, but the practice has been hard to keep up.  You can’t see well with your inner eye when your inner ear is being bombarded with “MOMMY!  He just hit me!”
And then there’s the physical therapy.  Oh, the PT.  And the TENS unit.  And the look on my dentist’s face when my incessant tooth-grinding cracked my new Kevlar nightguard, and the even more despairing look a few months later when he figured out I’d cracked an actual tooth while wearing my new (stronger) nightguard. 
However, the doc at the pain clinic has me figured out.  Each time he sees me to administer my trigger point injections, he says, “You have too much stress!  This would all be better if you could just get a Type B personality.”
Anybody know where I can pick one of those up?

Reflections on motherhood

Today is Mother’s Day, and as I’ve enjoyed my day off, I’ve been ruminating over how three and a half years of motherhood has changed me.
There’s the obvious: my body is now the shape of a mother.  I bear scars and stretch marks, and yes, at first, I resented them bitterly.  As bathing suit season approaches, part of me still resents them bitterly.  I see new moms looking like Kate Moss and my subconscious wonders what deal with the devil they struck.  But outside of dressing rooms with their evil lighting and three-way mirrors, in a world where more women look like me than like Gisele, I mostly see these changes as God’s tattoos, branding “mommy” on my skin as clearly as if he’d spelled out the word.  I have soft places that will likely never be buff and toned, but when my children lay their heads in my lap and sigh with pleasure, it pleases me that Mommy is a comfort and a soft place to land.
Motherhood has made me stronger in ways I never fathomed.  Law school didn’t teach me how long I could go without sleep, but two infants sure as hell did.  Several shoulder reconstructions didn’t teach me how much physical pain I could endure, but my pregnancy and complicated c-section definitely did.  For these babies, I’m stronger than I thought, and far stronger than if it were just for me.  In a true miracle, I have acquired some small amount of patience.  Three months of bed rest will do that for you.  As will three years of twins, approximately 542 ear infections, 689 middle-of-the-night fevers, and 301 cases of croup.  Not to mention countless trips to the pediatrician, one memorable visit to the pediatric dentist, one year of speech therapy, and two visits to the pediatric ER.
Yet while motherhood has made me stronger, it has also made me vulnerable in a way only other mothers can understand.  When the doctor plucked my little babies from my womb, pieces of my heart splintered off and went with them.  Gone from the confines of my chest to the brutal environment outside, my heart was no longer safe and sheltered.  My children are pieces of me, and when they hurt, their pain stabs at me, too.  Then there’s the constant worry, knowing they are out in the world and subject to hurt, loss, and pain, and that they will eventually meet all these things.  This is the world in which we live, and nothing can protect them from it, especially if they are to go out and enjoy all it has to offer.  It’s a bittersweet pain, a constant anxiety that feels as much a permanent part of me as they are.
This Type A girl has yet to become Type B, but I have learned to let go of some things.  My house will never look like a museum, but that’s ok.  It looks like a home.  There will always be laundry waiting, and my children will never allow themselves to be dressed and coiffed to smocked perfection.  They prefer Target play clothes to boutique clothing, and that’s ok.  They’re happy, and I don’t have to iron.
Motherhood has deepened my connection to God, at least, when I don’t fall asleep in the middle of my prayers.  It has made me conscious of the things I do, because those little eyes and ears don’t miss anything, and they imitate everything.  So I find myself trying to be the best person I can be so that my children will follow suit.  Some days the best person I can be is a mommy in her pajamas who parks her kids in front of Nick Jr. and begs them to be quiet because mommy has a migraine.  They don’t know what a migraine is, and I pray they never do.  But it’s the best I can do, and I’ve learned that the best you can do is absolutely enough.
However, there remains a lot for me to learn.
For instance, my son is potty trained, yet I still find myself mopping up puddles on the bathroom floor on a regular basis.  This, I do not understand.  The penis simply does not look that complicated.  Point and shoot. Look down at what you’re doing.  Voila!  (Or so one would think.)  I’ve learned never to talk to him while he’s going, because he’ll turn around, mid-pee, and soak the bathroom.
And what am I supposed to do about my children’s honesty?  Last week I asked my son, “Did you hit your sister?” and he looked at me and said, looking slightly offended, “No.  I not hit her.”  Pause.  “I push her.”
Two cheers for honesty, but really, should I have punished him for telling the truth?  I think I said (while trying not to bray like a donkey) something along the lines of, “Thank you for telling me the truth, but we do not hit.  Do not hit your sister again.”
Since she’s been sporting a mysterious black eye this week, I’m not convinced he got the message.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the wonderful women out there who make it their work to raise children.  May your children grow up with all the best parts of you.

The pause before screaming

            Today I forgot my father was dead.
For one glorious second, standing in my bathroom, digging through a cosmetics bag while ruminating about something ridiculous the kids had just done, I thought, “Wow, I can’t wait to tell Dad.  Wonder what he’ll say about that?”
            And then memory hit with a physical pain, and I stared into the mirror and saw a figure clutching her abdomen with one hand and the counter with another.  The abrupt pain of it was such a shock that I actually gasped.
            After a minute or so, the adrenaline drained out of me, along with all my energy, and I felt the familiar, heavy pressure of grief in my belly.  The eyes in the mirror looked old and tired.
            This is not this first time this has happened.  Several times I’ve had the phone in my hand, ready to dial, before I’ve remembered.  I catch myself referring to my father in the present tense or talking about “my parents” instead of simply saying, “my mother.”  Usually in the morning I wake up with the sense that something’s not quite right, but unless I’ve had a nightmare specifically about Dad, it can take me a few minutes to remember why my sheets are tangled from a night of running through buildings trying to find something that isn’t there.
            My father was a sentimental man, though he wasn’t raised to talk about his feelings, preferring instead to stick with small talk about his oral surgery practice, his golf game, or any number of topics that fascinated him throughout his life.   He held his fears close as well, a habit which infuriated me.  I wanted to talk about his cancer.  I wanted him to talk about his cancer.  Because when I’m afraid, that’s what I do: talk.  God made my brain so that it best handles fear by imagining and then speaking about the worst possible scenario, so I can prepare for it.
            My father was wired differently.  He handled fear best through denial.  I wish I’d come to understand this before he died.  Ironically enough, I’ve come to understand the beauty of denial now, as I grieve, experiencing it in those beautiful stolen moments, those unexpected split seconds where my synapses forget to fire and I remember my father as whole, and healthy, and where for just a moment, I can hear him laugh.
            But for me, I’m not sure this denial is worth it.  When the realization hits, it’s like the pause before a baby’s scream, that horrible moment when you know what’s coming, you can hear and see the great intake of breath, yet you can do nothing to stop the onslaught of sound and fury.  That moment finds you cringing, flinching away from an inevitable blow.  Sometimes the anticipation, the pause, is worse than the scream itself.
            In 2000, three years into his cancer battle, I was searching desperately for a present for my father.  Perhaps it was his birthday, or maybe Father’s Day.  I don’t remember.  The usual gifts of cologne, books, magazines, or DVDs didn’t seem appropriate.  I wanted him to have something to hold close, a source of comfort in the dark moments he surely had, even if he didn’t share them.  In short, I wanted him to have the peace of God.
            But how do you put God in a box?
            You can wrap up a Bible, which I did, years later, after he saw me with mine and asked for one.  But without a spiritual Sherpa to guide you over the steep hills and around the treacherous ravines within, the Bible can become an object of frustration rather than comfort.  When I first tried to plow through my beautiful, leather-bound King James version, I started with the first chapter of Genesis and didn’t even make it to Exodus.
            After much thought and research, I bought a silver pendant of Saint Peregrine, the patron saint of cancer.  I made sure it was on a long chain so Dad could wear it under his clothes without it showing, and so it would hang close to his heart.
            Never in my wildest dreams did I think he would wear it.
            But he seemed touched by the gift and put the necklace on that day.  He didn’t take it off again (except for MRIs) until the chain broke.  My mother either had it fixed or got a replacement, I’m not sure which.  It remains the only gift I ever gave him that I’m sure he loved, that he didn’t want to be without.  Perhaps the idea of an intercessor was a comfort, or maybe it was the idea that Peregrine had suffered as he had, and had, through a miracle of Christ, been healed.  I don’t know, because though he wore it constantly, Dad never did talk about it.
            In the emergency room, the doctors and nurses removed his necklace as they worked feverishly over him.  Someone handed it to me in an orange-topped plastic container, and that’s when I started to cry.
            Later, after Dad was stabilized, he asked for his glasses, and to my surprise, his necklace.  The doctors agreed that it was ok for him to wear it, so we fastened it around his neck, and it stayed there for the rest of his life.
            It was there the night we stayed up together watching television and found out that neither of us were smarter than a 5th grader.  It was there when my husband drove to the hospital so he could say goodbye.  It was there, visible on his chest, when his breathing turned agonal, and I can still see it on his pale, waxy skin, heaving up and down with each breath as he fought against leaving.
            After he died, Mom gave me the necklace.  I wore it to his funeral and for several weeks thereafter.  Then it became too painful to wear all the time.  I didn’t need a reminder that he was gone.  Every heartbeat pounded it out.  There was no escaping it.

            Recently I’ve started to wear the necklace again, hoping that the slight weight of it resting above my heart will be a comfort to me as it was to him, a reminder to pray, a reminder to hope.  But I also wear it to help me remember that he’s gone; to protect me from the pause before screaming that follows those exquisitely beautiful moments of forgetting.

Pain

Pain is natural, a byproduct of our human condition.  We sinners are blessed with free will, and with that, license to hurt each other, both physically and mentally.  Our mere existence in this world invites pain.  These frail, human bodies cannot escape the laws of biology and physics, nor their companions, illness and injury. 
If we think about it at all, most of us struggle to place God’s role in our world of pain.  Does he cause us to suffer?  Or does he merely allow it?  If he merely allows it, isn’t that the same thing as causing it, since he has the power to stop it?  Does he punish us with pain?  We watch as bad things happen to good people, and we want to know what God has to do with it.
According to self-help books, people in the psychology business, and what you sometimes hear from the pulpit, pain is God’s way of refining us.  
            Hearing that can flip your world on its head, and if you’re not careful, it can make you angry with God.  It makes more sense that pain would tear us down, and when we turn to the Lord for comfort, we don’t want to think of him as having anything to do with causing our suffering. 
I’m not sure I can form words and sentences sufficient to encompass the experience of losing my father.  The pain was and is multi-faceted, and felt differently by everyone.  The pain of his diagnosis tasted like fear.  Fear of the unknown, fear of loss, fear of the known in the form of twin specters of my grandfathers, both of whom died of prostate cancer.  My mother’s father died a mere two years prior to my father’s diagnosis. My maternal grandfather fought the disease for sixteen years.  I do not remember a time he wasn’t sick.  I do remember the side effects of his treatment, and how it chilled us all to see my father begin to have those same hot flashes and sudden sweats.
            After my father’s surgery, we found out he didn’t have clean margins, meaning parts of the tumors were left in his body.  That pain tasted like dread.  He began radiation therapy, and we felt the pain of hope, but not for long.  Then came the long-term hormone therapy, the pain of watching him suffer as the cancer spread to his bones.  The memory of my grandfather’s metastatic bone pain echoed around my head every time I saw my father wince, and I wanted to weep.  But Dad didn’t want us to cry, so I held back the tears while I was with him, only to dissolve every time I got to the interstate on my way back home.
            Anger.  Oh, how I was angry.  Looking back, I’m not sure the anger had an object.  It was amorphous, the result of my Type A personality trapped in a situation over which I had no control.  I felt the opposite of refined.  I was ready to throw open the window and yell to God, just as I had countless times before, “I’m refined enough already!  Just stop!  I have plenty of character, you don’t need to build any more!”
But the truth is, way back when I first started yammering at God about not needing any more character, thank-you-very-much, I was too young and stupid to realize exactly how much strength and character I didn’t have.  Whenever pain struck, whether in the form of death, illness, depression, or family strife, I found myself shattered, bruised and battered, unable to comprehend how there could still be weddings and parties and newborn babies.  Didn’t people know the world had ended?  I’ve lost count of how many times the world has ended, and yet here we are.  One Sunday I gave my anger to God on an offering plate, and I have never wanted it back.  Instead of anger, I want to understand.  I want to put a reason to suffering, for it to have counted for something.
In total, we spent twelve years watching my father caught in the grip of cancer, edging ever more rapidly and painfully downhill. During this time I never turned away from God, but it took me years to learn to turn towards him.   Six years into Dad’s illness, I married, and it was then I began to study God.  The thirst to know him has been a constant in my life since I was quite small, but in that journey one needs a guide, and I didn’t know enough to go looking for one.  Now I have the blessing of being married to my spiritual teacher, and through Bible studies together, Sunday school, and our own conversations, I began a relationship with God that wasn’t limited to Sundays.
The end of our time with my father came abruptly, with an early morning collapse, an ambulance to the hospital, near death in the ER, and then two weeks of hospital Hospice.  Those two weeks redefined pain for all of us.  I reached for God while bending over the hospital bed, holding his hand and trying to offer comfort and amateur nursing without crushing the central line.  During the nights I spent in his room, on my knees by the bed, I tried to pray but ran out of words, listening to his breathing grow ragged and rough, sprinting to find a nurse every time the pain pump beeped to advertise its emptiness.  I implored God to fill me with strength, and envisioned the Holy Spirit standing behind me, one hand on my shoulder.  As he lay dying an agonizing, traumatic, uncontrollable death, God strengthened me enough to hold his hand and talk to him.  The nurses told us that even though he was unresponsive, he could likely hear, and so I told him it was ok for him to go.  I told him not to be afraid, that God loved him, that through God’s grace he was saved, that he was going to a place where there was no pain, not to worry, that all of us would be ok.  For hours I talked to him and to God.  His agony was so great that I implored God to take him, to release him from his broken body.  I implored my father to let go.  As the hours wore on and the pain seemed worse, I even told him at one point, “Daddy, if you see a light, please, go towards it.  It’s ok.  Please, it’s ok.  You can go.”    
Do I think God caused my father to suffer?  No, I don’t.  Physical pain and illness are a part of life here.  Do I think God used that suffering to produce something positive?  Absolutely.
All this is not to say the pain has been fun, or that it’s gone or ever will be gone. I’ve learned not to run from it, but to face it.  My goal is not to get past, but to get through.  My therapist calls this part “the work of grief.”  It’s horrible work, and there are days when I want to retreat, to pretend it didn’t happen, to hide in that familiar warm place we call Denial.  But when I turn towards the hurt, confront it over and over, it gets infinitesimally less painful each time.  I don’t like this place of grief, this dark, cold place with its stream of images flashing before my eyes, the cruel pictures vivid no matter how many Xanex I throw at them. I know that God will not leave me here forever, but I also know, after grieving for a mere half a year, my stay is far from over.
This week marks six months since my father’s death, and every time I begin to take a breath and think, “ok, I’m fine, it’s all going to be fine now,” something happens.  It’s usually something small; playing ball with my kids outside on that first crisp spring day, the smell of one of his old shirts, or reaching to dial the phone before remembering that I can’t call him anymore.  I had a crisis of grief upon the death of my electric toothbrush, because I couldn’t call my father (an oral surgeon) to ask him what type of replacement to buy.     
Here I have to give God credit.  He has made this pain a gift.  Peeling off the wrappings of suffering, I have uncovered a personal relationship with the Lord and forged a better relationship with my earthly father.  And then there’s the ultimate gift: the certainty that he’s in a better place.
I bought a new toothbrush.  I try to tell my kids about their grandfather.  And sometimes the smell of those old shirts makes me smile instead of cry.