Still hanging in there

Continued from here:

She’s still holding on. Still not eating, still vomiting despite high levels of anti-nauseau medication. But a little more energy now so more hope. Every day is a triumph. Please keep praying, sending om manis, whatever you’ve been doing.

(The picture was taken a few weeks ago, when she was her usual rambunctious self.)

Continued here

Holding on

Continued from here:

Sadie’s holding on. I transfered her from the emergency hospital to the regular vet today. When I tried to leave her in the new cage, she grabbed me with her front legs like a little child clinging to Mom. Arms around my neck, her nose on my nose, pleading.

“I have to leave you,” I said. “I have to. You have to be here for a bit.” She pressed herself against the front of the cage, her eyes fixed on mine as I walked out. She has energy to cling to me, I think. Energy to shoot me angry looks for leaving.

Her liver enzymes are still increasing, a bad sign. The vet tells me that dogs can regenerate their livers even if only 10% of the organ is left. “If she has less than 10%,” she says, “well….” Add failing liver to the danger of rupture. But she had the energy to wake when she heard my voice in the emergency vet hospital, to stand and pace, waiting for me, to cock her ears in my direction.

“She’s doing about the same,” they tell me, every time I call. In the morning, they’ll check her enzymes again. I pray the numbers drop, that the signs of healing begin.

Thank you all for your good wishes and prayers.

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Vet hospital

My dog is in the hospital. She might die. I don’t look at the word die. I don’t look at the picture of her in my head. I don’t say her name. I don’t listen for her. I don’t turn towards her ghost. I don’t move.

I drink wine alone. I’ve never done that.

The littlest dog is home again, leaving her friend hooked to IV fluids. She lies on the couch with accusatory dark eyes, desperate to know when She will be home. She has always loved She, the alpha dog, the Jack Russell who cannot be named. To name her is to admit that she might in the end be no more than a name, a memory. It won’t happen. I write and I can’t believe I’m writing this. I’ve been walking around the house in shock, cleaning up, cleaning up brown dog vomit on furniture and carpet and beds and sofa and laminate wood floor.

I’m writing about this because I drank wine alone and I want to walk into an ocean of darkness and sink down through the layers to the place where eyeless fish swim.

I bought a big bottle of Rimadyl home on Friday, for the big Rotweiler/shepherd who was my ex-husband’s dog till he abandoned her. He was going to take her to the pound because his new wife didn’t want her. I found a home for her, with a big yard and loving people, my Portuguese friends. She’s 12 and has osteoarthritis, so I buy her big pills for the pain every month. 75 mg of Rimadyl twice a day. Sixty of them. Sixty of them on the counter in a prescription bottle that was sealed tight shut. Sixty of them tasting like beef, palatable, yummy. Doggy chocolate.

My daughter was a damas at her friend’s quinceanera. We’ve had rehearsals since we got back from our trip, every day, miles away, an exhausting schedule for her, for me. Saturday was the big night. My father came. All day I drove kids around and drove to and from the store to pick up extra forgotten things for the event. At 3:20, all dressed up, Dad and I left to go to the party. Zeke was already there, in her fancy satin dress, with her tuxedoed chambelane, their dances practiced to perfection.

It was great, a lovely night. We got home to vomit all over the floor, an empty pill bottle, two distraught dogs.

Emergency run to the vet. Both dogs hooked to IV fluids. Brijdi’s bloodwork was OK. Today, the vets decided she didn’t eat any of the pills. She’s the underdog, submissive to the powerful Sadie.

The powerful Sadie ate 60 Rimadyl tablets for a 75-pound dog. She weighs 11 pounds.

I don’t think about it. I write about it without thinking about it, only because I drank wine to forget and now there’s a fog where my mind should be. I like the fog. I like the fog on this night when Zeke is with her dad for dinner and I’m alone with little Bridji. I tell myself that Bridjie is OK. Doesn’t that mean something?

Sadie. My Sadie. My sweet Sadie, with her energy, her love, her eyes-only-for-me. I call the vet every few hours. Today I held her for five minutes. She perked up when she saw me, wagged her tail three times, wiggled her ears.

“We need to take her back now,” the doctor said. “The calmer she stays, the better for her.”

Little milestones. She hasn’t thrown up much since they induced vomiting last night. The danger is a ruptured gut. If her gut’s OK, she’ll be OK. The vet thinks we caught it early. “There is some hope she’ll pull through.”

I want to be happy, hearing that. I remember her little tail, the way it wagged when she saw me. I conjure her in my mind. I tell her I love. Can she hear me?

Four years ago today, my mother died.

Continued here.

Santa Cruz prayer

On Graci*sa one night I walked through Santa Cruz from the square to the church. In the pictures I had seen, the village looked of a decent size, but as I walked, distances seemed to contract. I turned a corner and there was the church, barely a block from the square. I walked to the doors and found them locked. I had not seen inside an Azorean church yet, and I stood silently outside in the gathering dusk, hoping for the chance.

For many nights during the trip, I found myself alone in my hotel room because I couldn’t be in the smoke-filled Azorean restaurants, or even outside on the balmy sidewalks. Smokers were a feature of the islands, although I discovered early on that a bill banning smoking in public had already passed but would not be enforced till January 1st of 2008. “I wish,” Zeke said one day, “I’d taken a picture of all the ‘no smoking’ signs with people smoking all around them.” Smoker defiance was the attitude that reigned during my time there, a challenge for one so hypersensitive to smoke. Early on I realized I’d have to forgo the extended evening meals, with all their intricate social interactions. Instead I walked, or read, or on the days Zeke stayed with me, we’d find some special activity to make our evening special.

Our second night in Graci*ca is my favorite on the island, one of my favorites on the trip. Nada came with me for a walk after dinner. The square was hopping with music from the fiesta of the day. We walked around the ponds, then up to the church. The doors were open. “Look,” I yelled, and ran to the building. Inside I saw immediately a small knot of women gathered at the altar, talking amongst themselves. Nada and I kneeled to pray, the church silent and shadowed about us. After a moment the group at the front began singing acapella in Portuguese. The words rose to the arched ceiling, filling the nave, haunting me with their yearning. We prayed for a few moments and then Nada nudged me. We left quietly. Outside, he told me that we had walked in unwittingly on a private service for someone who was to enter the hospital for surgery the next day. The women were praying for him. I wished I could know Portuguese too, could have used music to pray for the anonymous man as the women in the church had done. I still remember the clear tones of the music, the way the light intensified around the group of women as they prayed, and the way the heavy wooden doors closed behind us, silencing the women’s voices and closing off the light so that we stood in the darkness of the night with only the memory of the light and the music to accompany us.

Black and white

The light spreads its warmth across my neck, presses gentle fingers into my nape. I look up, at the water stain on the white paper taped to the ceiling, then down to my red-painted toenails, the paint chipped, a legacy from an evening in the Azores when Zeke and I ate alone together in our hotel room and she painted my nails to comfort me.

“Turn to the left a little,” R.C. says. “That’s right. Beautiful.” The flash snaps, shadows scramble into different corners for a moment, then settle back into their quiet place. “Good,” R.C. mutters, playing with the light settings on his camera. “You’re beautiful.”

I don’t feel beautiful. I feel fat and ugly. I feel lumpy and riven. Gravity pulls down on the fat I gained on those antidepressants three years ago, weight which I just can’t seem to lose. My skin dries, grows flaky and inelastic. When I squat, it bunches behind my knees. “Stretch out that leg,” R.C. says. I stretch it, and the stretching pulls my skin taut. Perhaps this photo will be beautiful.

I first became his model in 1999, eight years ago. A couple of black-and-white prints of me hang on the wall in his studio. One is a full body shot of me with one breast, taken three days before my second mastectomy. The shadows obscure the spot of my mastectomy scar. My right breast stands up pert and tight, hard nippled. The other is a shot of me on my back, no head, no lower legs, just the “landscape” of my body, the swell and dip of my belly, and the straight clear lines of my mastectomy scars.

R.C. is a professional photographer. For years he took pictures of weddings and cute little girls and horses and dog shows. Now he teaches photography at a local college and sells the occasional photograph from the occasional showing he does in various local galleries. He’s sold a few pictures of me, I know, hopefully to homes that will appreciate that a mastectomy doesn’t mean destruction of beauty or loss of femininity. My feminist colleagues mutter words like “cutting off the head objectifies the model,” but for me having the photos taken was a healing act, one in which I recognized that I could still be attractive even after an operation that too often was labeled as “maiming.”

R.C. has been at me to model for him again recently. It’s been a couple of years. The last set of pictures were fine, but I can’t shake the image of myself as fat and covered in lumps in the wrong places. “You’re beautiful,” R.C. says. “Let me show you what I have in mind.” He’s downloaded some images from the internet, abstract pieces that are pure light and shadow, where images of human bodies are mere suggestion, often genderlesss. In others the human body becomes a backdrop for patterns of light and dark. I think of the landscape pictures he takes: sweeping, swirling lines of wheat fields, some places fallow, some stubble, some ploughed, some still alive with heavy-nodding wheat heads bending before wind. They are the land as art, as a place for light to pool and in which shadows linger. His abstract nudes are similar.

“I want real women,” he said when I first arrived this morning. “Not Playboy models.”

I shook my head. “I can’t do it,” I said. We started talking. He’s a friend too, someone who’s known me for nigh on 20 years.

“What happened to you?” he asked. “I’ve been trying to figure it out. You used to have so much confidence. Even after losing your breasts you had confidence. And now….”

And it’s true. The divorce, my painful, difficult relationship with Nada, the destruction in my family as my mother was dying, all of these have shredded me. Every day is a fight to lift my head and feel that I have the right to be alive and to live with joy. And Nada, Nada of my heart and of the night, is at the center.

Yesterday I broke it off with him. I want more than friendship with benefits (on his terms), which is all he is willing to promise. I want love. I want a future. So I called it quits. Now I need to focus on loving Zeke and repairing the damage I’ve done in letting Nada hurt her (there’s a story there, an argument, a pitting of daughter against daughter, that maybe I’ll tell one day, maybe not. But it was enough, along with the ambivalence of his love, for me to see the way clear to walking away). Now I need to find my way back to the peace I know hovers before me. Maybe R.C.’s black-and-white pictures will help, the sweeping light caressing curves that are little more than suggestions, capturing the stillness of shadow, the quiet of waiting.

Chemical sensitivity

Today I read on StellaPlainAndTall about Stella’s chemical sensitivities, and all I could think of was, “Oh, yes. I know. I know.” My “asthma” was triggered three or so years ago by remodeling in the studio apartment in which I was living. I got a cold, which turned into bronchitis, which didn’t get better, which turned into increasing difficulty with breathing until I ended up in the ER on breathing treatments. Cough-variant asthma was diagnosed, but what I think I really have is a chemical sensitivity known as RADS. I first read about it in a link I found on the website for organic body products, Terresentials. The symptoms, the triggers, everything felt familiar. I don’t have asthmatic reactions to cat dander or dust, to hay or grasses or pollen, to anything natural. But I have mild to extreme reactions to anything containing formaldehyde. That’s cigarette smoke, the lumber area of Home Depot, wood stains and new furniture, carpeting and particle board, new buildings, paints, some perfumes… the list goes on. Exposure leads to uncontrollable coughing and wheezing, with eventual airway shutdown if I don’t get away from the trigger. Other symptoms are headache and fatigue.

Interestingly enough, my dean told me that he can’t enter our lovely new building, in which I have an office and — maybe — a classroom (if I can tolerate it, which right now I can’t). He has a formaldehyde allergy which took him years to get diagnosed. Plagued by headaches and exhaustion, he finally consulted a specialist in a distant town who discovered elevated levels of formaldehyde antibodies in his blood. Now he knows where he can go and where he can’t, and how to avoid the triggers that wore him down for so long. So do I. Only for people like us, it gets harder and harder as more and more chemicals enter our environment. Students who wear perfume are a problem for me, as is my daughter, who insists on wearing scents despite my pleas against it on her behalf (and mine). We have an agreement; she can only wear perfumes that I know I don’t react to — which tend, of course, to be the most expensive! I’m hoping she’ll grow out of the desire to smell like artificial flowers as she grows up.

In the meantime, I use only natural cleaning products in my older condo (no remodeling for me!). I don’t/can’t paint my house, or put in new carpets. I’ve found a carpet cleaner who is able to clean my carpets without causing a reaction. I fill my house with plants, and I use the highest quality air filter that I can buy in my air system. It seems to work OK. I’m better than I was three years ago, though I still have periods that challenge me. In the meantime, I’m glad I figured out what was wrong, and I live a more limited life than I would like, but I thank God/Allah/the Absolute/the Ground of Being/Fate, whatever, for the health I do have.

Synchronicity and no reason to whine

I got a surprise email today, from StellaPlainAndTall, asking for access to the private area of the Blog-City blog that I abandoned when it wouldn’t accept comments or let me give people permission to access the members-only area. I had just discovered her blog about two weeks ago, through another blogger on whose site I sometimes lurk, and I admire her for her grace in hard times — a kind of grace I wish I could emulate. And then, bingo, there she is (well, symbolically, OK, all you literalists) in my email, asking for permission to read my blog. I directed her here — Hi Stella — and then got all shivery about writing again. I’ve been so sporadic, so disinterested, though I still read my favorite blogs most days. I wonder sometimes why I quit something I really enjoyed. Lack of time, lack of cohesion in my mind, desire to read. These things all. Yes.

Also the opiate of happiness at times, and in contrast, the despair that still threatens — though never as destructively as two years ago during the antidepressant fiasco. Still, I don’t wish to depress people. When darkness looms, I dive into books, escaping through the words of others. Why are my whinings worthy of airing in an open forum?

There are decisions I must make. I line up the pros and cons and move them around constantly. Next week I have an appointment with a genetics counselor in Big City. I saw her with my mother eight years ago. At the time she said, “Don’t ignore any symptoms.” What she meant was, “You’re primed for cancer. Catch it early.” When I didn’t ignore symptoms, my primary doctor became frustrated and stopped responding. Now I have a new doctor, not senile, and much nicer. (No, he isn’t the type to prescribe strong anti-psychotic antidepressants for a 13-year-old with headaches, which is what my former doctor tried to do!)

I’ve been to the doctor only twice in the past two years (odd for someone on cancer watch for the past 11 years of her life, used to blood tests and chest x-rays and ultrasounds etc at regular intervals). The last time I went only because I needed asthma medication for the Azores. The time before because I hadn’t had a pap smear in three years.

These days I do my best to ignore all symptoms. When I have a smokers’-cough coughing, wheezing asthma attack and people say “Can’t the doctors do something about that?” I tell them “no” and change the subject. I’ve never smoked, but sometimes I sound like I’ve smoked two packs a day for a lifetime. And there’s really nothing the doctors can do. “You have asthma and bronchitis,” they say. “Use your inhaler.”

But still, last month, when I went in for asthma medicine, my new physician suggested the genetics counselor. It’s almost time for me to consider an oopherectomy. I had melanoma at 31, breast cancer at 34. My female relatives have a discouraging habit of dying relatively young of breast and ovarian cancer (at least my mother was reborn as a heron!). So the genetics counselor thinks I ought to have my ovaries out. (Or so she suggested eight years ago.) And now I have to decide. But god, no ovaries, and no HRT either — unless they have some alternative? How can I face precipitous menopause when I’m such a whiny bitch anyway? Wouldn’t it be better to risk dying of ovarian cancer?

Truth is I’ve been in a study for the past eight years for women at high risk for ovarian cancer. Ultrasound every year. Blood draw every three or four months. (Cough cough, the last blood draw was over a year ago and my CA125 markers were elevated and I was supposed to go in again for another blood draw to eliminate ovarian cancer and did I? No siree.) The study nurse is on my case. I want to go. But driving three hours and working and being a single parent to a teenager and trying to care for my dad long-distance now that my sister is mother to a newborn… well. It does wear one down. Some days I can hardly move. Yesterday, when breathing was a challenge because of the cruddy air, and I was tired, and I had to advise at work and film Zeke diving so her coach could point out her good dives, and my dog had to go to the vet for cheet grass in her ear and I had to get an affidavit notarized at the bank because someone charged two airline tickets to Dubai on my credit card and now the card is canceled and Citibank is investigating fraud, and then I lost the affidavit (before eventually finding it again) and Nada is stressing stressing stressing over not having a job… and I was just tired. Wanted it all to stop. And I’m not even working officially yet. Yep. How is there time for being pre-emptive about health, I want to know? How?

OK, you got it. The whine. Fecking whinging, as the Irish would say. I’m a whinger. Oh, and did I tell you the love lease on my horse didn’t work out and I had to quick-quick find him another home and that — God knows — was stressful, because I prefer to pretend he doesn’t exist. Thinking about him brings a veritable fountains of salty water to my environs. How did it come to this?

So there you have it. Total lack of grace. A blubbering whingeing whiner. And in the midst of all the whining, yet still that marvellous trip to the Azores. Who gets to experience something like that? And in doing so, who has the right to whine?

So I haven’t written much. Things are either too easy, or too dang hard. Nothing in between. And I know I lack grace. So I just swallow the dark-cloud words, take the dogs for a walk, and read the blogs of people like Stella, who give me something to aim for. Thank you, Stella. And please don’t stop writing!

The Smell of Sulphur

…Odd, to write that title, and to remember it’s the name of a novel-in-progress of a friend of mine.

Yesterday Diana asked if the volcanoes we visited in the Azores smelled of sulphur. The answer is yes. One particular one, on Graciosa, was a huge underground cavern containing a lake which, in wetter years, is large enough for visitors to boat upon. It’s accessed down a series of about 150 stairs in a square tower, but only if the weather’s good, the gatekeeper is in the mood, and the sulphur levels are safe.

A blinking machine measures levels of sulphur and determines whether or not visitors can climb down into the cavern, and once there, how far into it they can go. We were lucky enough to be able to go all the way to the bottom on our second attempt, but not lucky enough to go further. The sulphur levels were too high, according to the equipment, as though our noses couldn’t have told us as much.

Apparently in the past, when sulphur levels were lower, or people didn’t know the danger of suffocating to the smell of rotten eggs, one could go from one end of the island to the other through a cave that connected the lake-filled caldeira with another one several miles away. (Graciosa is five by seven miles in size. A peanut on the waters of the Atlantic.) Needless to say, modern technology has made such experiences impossible, so we had to be satisfied with looking at the rocky path that disappeared into black shadows on the border of the dark lake.

Back from the Azores

So the summer has just scooted away, wind-whipped, sun-blitzed, leaving me dazed and blinking. I spent two-and-a-half weeks in the Azores, saw five of the nine islands in that time, saw two bull fights (No, they don’t kill or even injure the bulls there — at least in the street or beach bull fights. I’ll say more anon.), saw soaring, gold-leaf-plated, life-size-statue-filled, Our-Lady-of-Fatima-honoring churches. I ate food cooked in the ground above a living volcano, cooked BY the volcano, surrounded by steam from boiling ponds, listening to the glutinous bubbling of volcanic mud in a gloriously green and saturated landscape. Hortense flowers, the national flower, raised dried heads in hedgerows separating tiny fields, maintaining merely the ghostliest pallor of their former blue glory. Dry-stone walls stitched the landscape. Circular caldeiras held grass-green water, or left fairy-glen-like impressions in  pasture. Cows, goats, dogs, sleek cats, lizards. Horses and donkeys. Tiny cars. And the ocean. Always the vast, undulating, light-speckled, greedy ocean. From every mountain top, from every switchback-road viewpoint, from every church doorway in every oceanside village, that heaving brilliant expanse of blue and green and gray called out its supremacy.

So, hello again. I’ll write more, maybe post pictures, when I’ve caught my breath.