Leaning Into It
I hate being sick. One of the things I’ve had to adjust to in my 60’s is the increased frequency of health issues. I’ve learned to “lean into” whatever I’m dealing with a little better — but I’ll never learn to like it. I like being healthy much better.
At least when I’m dealing with a bad cold or allergies, like I am right now, or some other passing condition, I can find gratitude in the fact that it’s not a chronic condition. I had one of those, that went on for a couple of years, and that is infinitely worse than something as pedestrian as a cold or bad allergies. Chronic conditions get into your psyche and seriously mess with your mind, if you let them. It takes a lot of effort, and some disciplined mental tricks, to not let them. If you’re smart, you also won’t put yourself above whatever spiritual aid might help your situation. You never know.
When I was experiencing chronic bouts of vertigo, they started out occurring every ten days. They were part of what drove me to get checked out by the V.A., along with my hearing loss. That’s where they found the facial nerve schwannoma that was literally messing with my mind. Technically a brain tumor, it had managed to wreak some havoc in my inner ear and triggered vestibular migraines, which in turn led to the vertigo episodes. If you want to seriously throw someone off their game, mess with their balance. Battling that condition threw my whole life into serious turmoil for a couple of years.
I learned that the worst enemy to healing, or successfully dealing with a chronic condition, is self-pity. It does absolutely no good, other than getting others to feel sorry for you — more pity! It can lead to a pretty pitiful existence, which I can assure you, gets real old, real fast.
Finding a way, any way, to overcome that self-pity is key to getting out of that rut. For me, the trick was finding and talking to people who had much worse situations than mine, but who were handling theirs much better than I was handling mine.
So, I had a brain tumor — I was led to a guy who had a brain tumor that had to be removed right away, who had to go through the whole trauma of brain surgery, and how that changed everything in his life, but who’d managed to see only the bright side of all of that. He saw it all as a challenge to find the reason behind it all, to find the good it could result in, and he did just that. He was a total inspiration to me, and I followed his blogs and kept up with his ways of dealing with his condition, and applied what I could to mine.
Then I met a guy who was engaged in a serious battle with cancer, with kickass chemo and radiation treatments that caused him to lose 60 pounds, who kept a positive attitude through it all. I hung out with him for a whole weekend, and let a lot of his positivity rub off on me. This was a few years ago, and he eventually lost his battle with the cancer — but it never won the battle with his spirit. He kept a strong spirit to the end, and demonstrated to me, and many others, how not to let any physical condition worm its way into your spirit.
One of the other things I did was found a lot of quiet time, to reflect, and to allow healing thoughts to enter my psyche, and to grow with practice. I used to regularly visit one of my favorite peaceful places, where I always felt a lot of healing energy — Sister Jeannie’s garden. Sister Jeannie was my Dad’s baby sister (he had 8 sisters — she was the youngest), who worked as a chaplain at Georgetown University Medical Center for a number of years. She was a catholic nun, in a progressive order that didn’t wear habits. She was one of my coolest aunts, just a delight to be around.
In 1995, she died of an inoperable brain tumor, at the age of 63 (which is my current age — I turn 64 tomorrow). That was about a year before my Dad died of prostate cancer — he was 77 at the time. A couple years later, some folks at Georgetown dedicated this wonderful garden to Jeannie, to honor all the healing work she had done there.
The two of them helped each other through their conditions, and both relied heavily on each other’s spiritual strength as they dealt with the realities of their respective physical declines. Dad had been a Christian Brother for six years before he married and had us seven kids, so they both kind of spoke the same language, and had a very strong spiritual bond.
Yes, I was not above availing myself to their combined spiritual strength and healing powers, so I spent many a Friday night walking the length of her garden (it was 133 yards long), back and forth, and sitting by the koi pond in the middle of it, thinking about the two of them, and their strength of spirit in the face of the ultimate adversity that life can throw at you. I mainly just thought of them, and the comfort they had brought to my life, by being there when I would struggle.
The day that I found out that my schwannoma was no longer embedded in my seventh cranial (facial) nerve, a couple of interesting things happened. First, the doctor couldn’t give me a viable medical reason for it’s sudden disappearance. He was one of the world’s experts on that rarest of tumors, and he’d never seen that happen before. He hadn’t done anything to make it go away. Mine was small enough that we were on a wait-and-watch approach. Wait to see if it grew any larger, and watch for other symptoms of its damaging effects.
They’d given me a hearing aid for the symptom of hearing loss, and would eventually perform inner-ear surgery to address some of the issues causing the vertigo. Surgery for the tumor wasn’t a viable option until, and unless, the damage to the facial nerve became great enough to warrant surgery. What we knew, for certain, was that surgery would cause lasting damage to the nerve. I would likely lose partial function of my face, and possibly my tongue and taste. Thus, we waited and watched.
Driving home from work that day, now tumor-free, I thought about my aunt as I drove up the George Washington Parkway, from where I could look across the Potomac and see the Georgetown campus, where her garden was. I immediately burst into tears, and bawled my eyes out all the way up that parkway. They were healing tears. I got it. Then, that night, Dad showed up in a dream, asking “Is there anything else I can do for you?”
That was all I needed to be convinced that the spiritual stuff helped — and was helped along by a couple of known spirits.
I still don’t feel great, but do feel much better (about this cold I’m trying to shake), knowing it will be gone in a day or so, and that if I really want to feel better, a little bit of prayer can’t hurt. But I’m also taking the medicine that has been proven to deal with the symptoms I’m experiencing. I take all the help I can get, to get healthy again. I hate being sick.
