Something From Nothing

 

A Day In the Life is sort of a personal spot.

I reflect on teaching, or some current news, my class or a project. 

I used to post a lot about my children or recipes. I used to be happier here.

I took an art-like stance because I trained in the arts, and that is a world-view based in the optimistic thought- go create something.  

I include poems and projects, pictures.

Sometimes I go back and face the music.

Poor grammar.

A theme of illness.

Blindness to something.

One thing I noted awhile back was I presented only about myself, too much "I"  because lacking  many friends, it was somewhere I could reflect as I watched my Mom in the evening, and that gets very old for you-a reader.

But this isn't a post about that. Err...

Well.

It is.

It's a post about  an experience "I" had Thurday.

Somewhere in my blog there was a time I wrote a poem and posted to almost losing my life to intestinal bleeds. I can't find it to link- ruining the blog and archives in response to a very mean person. And situation. That story I will tell in the summer after school is out. But suffice it to say it's gone. But in my reflective blog, somewhere I once posted so that I could look back on a time when everyday I had medical tests, pain, nausea, fears of death and then lived as if that wasn't my reality to earn $, take care of my kids and relieve everyone of having to know or be bothered. The poem was about the feelings of being in a paper towel, in another test, one that found cancer.
But I can't have a reflective blog. Not really, Not anymore.

And then wrote it after more years struggling with the nightmare that is intestinal cancer. 

It was about the isolation in illness.

And about the invasion of my personal space and identity that I was experiencing in the hundreds of colonoscopies, CAT and PET scans, infusions, so on. The sheer de-humanizing experience of modern medical care. It was about waking one day for work, going in the restroom to shower, feeling an explosion in my bowels, standing shakily about to collapse in shame, looking down as I felt faint seeing hundreds of huge blood clots and a volume of blood unbelievable going down the drain-cupping handfuls in my hands. Not even knowing what was happening or why. Something to date I've told to about four people with not even one fully present or willing to allow me to really share what I experienced. And then spoken here.

On that occasion, undiagnosed, an artery was infiltrated by a tumor.  As I sat downstairs in a bit, in front of young kids wondering what I could mumble, shaking, close to going unconscious, cold, barely dressed facing a week away in a hospital (but it could easily have been death), trying to direct my husband to get me to an ER-the distance and calm descended. In fact even as a doctor later was telling me that he might not be successful in saving me, I was still trying to think of how to help the kids I gave birth to. Finding myself like a being on the outside looking in. But I was way, way, way back inside of a calm space.

And it is to that I'm speaking having returned from weird Thursday.

I haven't really ever had the opportunity to ask others if they've experienced that.

I assume it's pretty normal. I assume that the place is one you know.

Years ago I went on to slip almost from the earth- and had what you might call a near death experience. I grew very cold, my blood pressure was below 25/30 and I was determined to try to live so that my children would have a mother (til 18 I kept thinking) a goal I accomplished. I also had apparently a doctor focused on my survival, dumb luck, and a miracle in the form of- on that occassion and several after it -the artery itself closed or clotted. 

I recall that there was- in later procedures and episodes of peridonitis and the incapacitating pain- times I had to remove to somewhere else. I don't know how to explain this.

If you haven't had peritonitis it's hard to explain the pain. Kidney stones and childbirth were nothing in comparison. But coming out of these episodes-and I had six or seven-I was somewhere for a long while. Struggling for years with serious back pain prior to surgery, with the synix, it was a state of this.

Thursday I had another experience of this ilk. So it brought to mind the past. Patterns. Cycles.

It brought to mind the clarity of understanding that from birth to now I've had a life where I often had to shut down, somehow, but be there in it-just...calm...something.... because the situations I experienced, frankly, required it. In childhood there were things that had to have my removal from a state of feeling. Weathering to this day my father's episodes of anger, his unlimited ability for destruction of his child's esteem, and then his raging-it all required it. And in my later life certainly during a physical assault, illness, during certain emergencies, and terrible moments which there were many in part from my momma I think now having a stroke but I thought was mental illness-I went into a calm. A kind of place to react and that's all.

But it wasn't quite like the medical one, this most recent experience- I can't will it, or bring it into being-that state. It seems way out of my hands.

However in a way, it was in my hands-because I did look up at that car coming at me head on Thursday and think-you cannot do anything but live this and accept this moment as it was as it presented to you to be experienced.

I wrote this about it:

I was driving in Ventura on Telegraph Road.

It's two lanes and a middle and two lanes in the other directions with lots of these island divider things to cross you over to shops. I was suddenly aware of a car coming right at me driving on the wrong side of the road. I'm in the left lane next to a palm tree median with a curb with traffic on the other side. I CANNOT pull right and I'm thinking rapidly due to the situation I'm going to die. Coming at me at 40 I'd guess. Like death coming was my thought-sh*t.
This was bad. An old woman was driving with no awareness she's on the wrong side.

Suddenly she just turns across two lanes in a turn to my right, her left, saving me from death but she doesn't even register that, seemly oblivious. Onto a street she plummets fast. Really it's a miracle she didn't hit a car beside me as she crossed that lane and that was a split second miss.

What happened after that was I immediately went to finish a root canal on a tooth that has in three attempts foiled the oral surgeon- because of bad infection. And then drove home. But coming home I stopped to get a cake, fruit, and felt amazed to be alive, and just hoping to have more time for my kids. For me to enjoy them and know their lives.

Anyway later in the evening I told one of my daughters, then the other, my son as I slowly crept back into my own skin. It's something you can't explain- but wanted to note here. Mostly for my own cataloging and reflection.
The sheer lack of panic, that calm detachment-it stayed until the next morning. It lingered and was innervating, It was, in a way, exhausting.  During the years and years of the every month CAT scans, slipping away for blood tests, and not bothering others to do things that were hard- but to leave that stuff out of everyone else's awareness,  drinking the gallon of muck, during the weeks where I had blood tests weekly, and transfusions, and infusions, sometimes even weekly, during the times when due to this syrnix I had so many nerve studies, pain, episodic months of mind numbing headaches and pain in nerves,  and MRI's and during the cancer years-that are not gone-I had to make my peace with that detachment.
Because I do detach to make it.

With not knowing what movie was out, a reference people were into, not knowing a lighthearted just fun, easy stance. Because the head on collisions of then were not ones fleeting in a second-many were long-like the 17 days nearly unconscious in a hospital with infection all through my abdominal cavity.
I had to make my peace with no one caring. Or not even being aware to care. Or caring, but I was living it and knowing they might be living their own personal version. Knowing I wasn't helped by another's worry.
I had to make my peace with my not being there for others in that state. With the tremendous disappointment that family didn't realize or help, and I probably do nothing for them in times I never learn, with the fundamental understanding that you go through it alone, with understanding that in our world illness is seen as a fault, made my peace with understanding that  our insignificance and replacebility are our hallmarks. I had to make my peace with being told that because I had experienced tough, hard things someone would tell me I had a victim mentality-or make accusations about my not being a friend up to their exacting standards- after basically abandoning any relating at all because I was defective, or demand my accounting for their own nonsense.
I was away doing all of that.
Re-reading my blog I had to make my peace with who I lost. Often myself, to these times I had to detach in surviving.
I find my blog reminds me of this person I don't know entirely writing her thoughts out in open space.
Which is rather amazingly complex to experience. Good and not so good.

In the state it is hard for me to explain.
It's a calm  place, a state of acceptance. But Thursday provoked a return and jogged my memory of one of the over-riding things about the last 18 or so years in my life.
 I had a lot of days of entering this detachment.

I was preparing myself for the direct blow a full headon crash was bringing Thursday. I knew the person driving was just going to likely kill us both- but it would happen on a physical plane. It was a step to go through.

What can I take from all of that?

Later I was talking to my daughter Sylvia realizing that I wasn't fully here or back to myself. And then, not there fully for her. The regret I feel over that is tremendous. I was struggling to take her life in.
At least that night at ten or 11 I wasn't there for her.
Nor was I pumped up with adrenaline.  I was somewhere- I suppose. A state of emotional abeyance. Not even capable at that time of telling her how much she, her sister, and brother truly mean/have meant to me.
Just glad to have her think to check in on her chat thing with me,  because it had been awhile.


So that's a deeply personal thing to share.
I thought a long time ago that art and writing, poetry, perhaps were the ways to talk to those kinds of things. We experience the unfathomable, mundane, unearthly, spiritual, profane, ordinary often in a system with no mediator, no meter. It's full on one thing, then another. The amazing thing about Thursday was how I went immediately from the event that potentially was my last, to getting a tooth drilled, to buying a couple apricots and fixing a BLT without the b. Doing some wash.
No one to tell it to.

I like that in art you can sit down with a blank piece of paper, some materials, calm your mind, and connect to such an experience or memory of them, respond with creative interpretation and move that experience into awareness, self knowlege, a communication of feeling and emotion  for others and thus reconnect. In childhood I always responded to the fears, pain, abuse, confusion by making something. I found a way in art. It was construction from destruction-it was what I COULD do. And I think at the very core of my being that I believe children need to have the experience of that as a powerful thing to learn to do.

It's true that Thursday night I turned to write, because over the past ten years I chose to explore that venue over drawing. But for me these are the same things-pulling something from nothing. Being open to responding creatively to events.
Metaphorical bandaids.

I suppose it's all some tiny version of PTSD. But this reminded me Thursday that the place I went to literally seeing a head on crash coming at me- was addressed better through the arts than anything else I had as a coping mechanism, or a bridge back to a state of normal. For others I'm sure it's another outlet.

We talk about the time wasted in art with our kids in classrooms-"I have no time for art now," a teacher told me months ago seeming to judge my work through her lens. She's proud of addressing reading and math- and believe me we've got to do that. However my own living tells me -from a lifetime-we have a lot as humans to process and learn from, that might require other skill sets.
It probably is that work we all are doing through the arts.