Tag: Health

Nature Girl….Or Not….?

It’s made me wonder who I am, is what spring did.

As we go through life, we acquire ways of identifying ourselves, ways to relate our individual being to the world outside. If we have an affinity for music, we may labels ourselves musicians. If we’re drawn to drawing, we might say we’re graphic artists. If we are, inexplicably, excited by algebraic equations we could proclaim ourselves rocket scientists or mechanical engineers or at the very least math brainiacs. We have boundless external identifiers to choose from and it is the combination of natural inclination and environmental influence that leads us to conclusions about who we are and guide us into who we become.

Throughout my life, I have always thought of myself a ‘nature girl.’ If I made a list of my top ten personal identifiers and named them in order of dominance, ‘nature girl’ would be in the top three—right after ‘writer’ and before ‘dancer.’ An inherent curiosity combined with a childhood that included a horse ranch, a three hundred acre preparatory school, a thousand acre Ashram, and countless hours allowed to roam cultivated the nature girl within me. My favorite pastime was wandering through the woods or over fields with the birds and butterflies for company. I grew to love all of nature; rain, snow, sunshine, mountain tops, valleys, rivers, lakes, and streams. My love of the natural world also influenced my development as a person, I’m conscious of the environment and even my consumerism became naturally oriented, all my hair and cleaning products are biodegradable, my perfume is from natural essential oils, and even my diet is free from chemical influences.

This thing—nature—overwhelming and beautiful, inspiring and terrible, fascinating and dominating, became a part of who I believed myself to be.

Until recently.

Suddenly, without alteration of my inner self, without a mutation of my natural inclinations or a decline in my usual tastes, I cannot go outside! I have allergies, bad ones, thus the natural world I have long loved is now lost to me. If I should hope to refrain from being dreadfully ill, if I should hope to be able to continue to breathe—no longer can I roam the wilds.

It’s been a shock and has taken adjustment. You may imagine I would feel sad thinking on this—but as it happens I don’t anymore. Over the long course of our lives, we are constantly in flux, who we think of as ourselves today will be just a shadow come tomorrow. Change is the only certainty in this world but even through the course of change the essence of things remain. I am no longer able to go out into the wild to roam, but the fine seeds of that world were planted in my psyche and laid roots that extend beyond the physical. From the safety of my allergy-proof home, I remain a part of that brash wind, those groaning oaks, that amorous frog, and those earnest saplings, that optimistic grass, and the furious sunshine. I may no longer be able to justify the label ‘nature girl’ through my lifestyle but the way I see it is this:

You can take the girl out of the nature, but you can’t take the nature out of the girl.

And so, Nature Girl, I will remain—albeit an unusual one.

Speaking of England….

Ah, life–never a dull moment with you.

Everyone says life can change in a flash. When it happens to you, you don’t really notice. Our car accident changed my life, but not in a way that directly makes sense. Or maybe it does—in a convoluted, everything-is-connected, things-happen-for-a-reason, philosophically-oriented sort of way.

It’s hard to find that thread at first. We hit a tree in late 2008 and now we’re moving to England. How are these two things connected? One could ask, and not immediately come up with an answer because it all started way back when I was twelve. Or thirteen. Something like that.

I have been sick forever. My symptoms have never changed, but those docs kept slapping diagnosises on me like they were the latest fashion jeans. I have been tested and diagnosed with a lot of things, and given treatments that never worked up until I got sick of doctors and stopped seeing them as they never did me any good anyway.

Then, we hit a tree. I had to see a doctor then. With very bad whiplash, it was the only sensible thing to do. Recovery from that included an initial round of muscle relaxers and heavy duty pain-killers, followed by the more “me-friendly” applications of yoga, chiropractic treatment, and exercise.

Come February, 2009, I was still feeling pretty bad. I caught a flu, nothing to worry about, just a cold and a cough that came on quite suddenly. I wasn’t going to see a doctor for it, but my youngest son was sick, too. I thought, as I’m going in, why not let them have a listen to me while I was there? It couldn’t hurt and my lungs did sound gurgley. This turned out to be one of those accidentally brilliant decisions. I had ‘silent lungs’ which, as an asthma sufferer will tell you, is not a good thing to have. It means a portion of your lungs have become so inflamed, the air has been trapped inside them, preventing good things from happening, such as getting enough oxygen. Silent lungs will get a doctor hustling. I had some kind of breathing treatment immediately, a scrip written for oral steroids and was given an albuterol inhaler. My son, as it happens, was perfectly fine.

Thus began my love affair with asthma. Do not get asthma if you can avoid it; it is not fun.

Though no doctor has ever said it, I think my asthma finally appeared out of the blue at forty years old due to the car accident. The spinal column is your nerve center, with all communication to and from that master planner, the brain, running through it, out to our extremities and vital organs and then back to the brain. It seems to me that the hit my upper back took from that tree could certainly trigger a condition that might have lurked in me for years. Once I got my inhaler and used it a few times, I realized I had been having asthma symptoms all my life, I just hadn’t realized that tight-chested, breathlessness was an asthma attack. It was a normal part of my world, and only with the inhaler did I realize it was correctable.

Asthma. One more diagnosis to add to my list. I wanted to know why I had asthma. I always want to know why. It doesn’t matter what it is, I want to know why it is. One type of asthma is allergy induced. At some point, I had been diagnosed with allergies to chemicals. I knew you could also be allergic to other things. In talking with my doctor, we opted to get me a thorough allergy panel and see if there was more going on than the chemical sensitivity.

If you could see me now, you would realize, I am laughing out loud. It’s funny, but in that very awful sort of way. I was tested for 70 allergens. I tested positive to 43. If you’ve read this blog before now, this won’t be news to you. As it turns out, allergies is what I’ve been suffering from forever—those same set of symptoms with multiple diagnosises turned out to be allergies plain and simple. Well, plain, maybe–but not so simple.

It’s hard to be that allergic. You feel as if everything is making you sick because, in fact, it is. Once I found out, I dutifully took two doses of antihistamines daily as prescribed. Everyone asked if they made me feel sleepy. Are you kidding? I have been fighting chronic fatigue since I was twelve years old; antihistamines finally gave me some of my energy back. I have often wondered if being so sick is why I simultaneously became focused on health. I eat a great diet. I work out. I practice stress-reduction techniques. I drink gallons of water, I limit my fat and sugar intake. My blood-work is beautiful. I realize now, I have to do all of that–just to feel reasonably well. I have fatigue so crippling at times, I feel as if I am dragging myself through quicksand and I can get sick in a minute, seemingly out of the blue. At any moment, on any given day, I can come across something that knocks me out. That is what being highly allergic is like. It’s like being repeatedly ambushed by the world. I would do anything to avoid being made sick. It’s just not easy to know what to do.

All of this leads us up to this Spring. I was taking antihistamines, I was feeling really good. Life was happy and I was happy in it. I planted a big garden. That same one I went on about in my last post. I enjoyed every moment of fresh air and planting until the pollen started to kick. Being out side in pollen is like having fine sand thrown in my eyes all day. I itched, I coughed and I relied on my antihistamines to protect me.

In my defense, I have only known I’ve had allergies for one year, so I’m not the smartest patient in understanding how to deal with them. Avoidance is, apparently, the best measure. I was not fully aware of this going into Spring. We had record pollen levels in VA and by April 15th, having overexposed myself to the blooming world, I was sick. I was Patagonia Dreamin’ because it hurt to breathe. It hurt to think, to move my eyes. My joints ached, my muscles cramped. I dragged through every day at work and collapsed once I got home. I had lost my beautiful life, once again, to ill health.

In trying to recover, I locked myself indoors, cried over the loss of my beautiful garden which I couldn’t tend, cried over the loss of my horses which I could no longer care for, and cried over the loss of the outside world, which I loved. After all the crying, I took a good, hard look at my life. I realized I needed to do things differently. Of course, I talked with doctors first. What that boiled down to was a recommendation I go on low-level steroids. With my sensitive nervous system, they might as well book me a white-walled room now. I’ve been on oral steroids; they are not good for my mental health.

On occasion, I tend to show slightly obsessive tendencies, particularly when I have a problem to sort out. Understanding pollen was my problem, I became obsessed with learning about pollen and how to avoid it. It turns out, there is pollen everywhere. With the exception of Siberia are the top and bottom of the globe, pollen a part of the natural world I love so well. But, this is not the end of the story. There are places that have better pollen profiles. Cool, rainy climates, with shorter growing seasons mean that pollen exposure is minimized. Mountainous regions also have this same affect. Can anyone say…Patagonia? I can’t really move to southern Argentina. It’s not practical, but there is a place I can move that looks much better from a pollen perspective. Can anyone say…England?

Lucky for me, I married a Brit.

We’re moving. Once the house sells, we’re going to a place less plagued by pollen levels and I will, hopefully, for the first time in my life, breath a little easier and itch a little less.

Cheerio, peeps! Onward, ho!, to Britain!

Grateful

It’s easy to be grateful this year, even for the simple things like being able to inhale an easy breath. Nothing quite like asthma to give you a healthy appreciation of the inhalation. Last night, in the pleasant cool of the November evening, I felt how good the air was in my lungs, how cool and clean. I felt how easy it was to draw breath and I could detect each scent all tangled up within the air; wood smoke, and the rich, slightly acrid scent of dead leaves, faint pine, and trailings of the dinner I had fed to the puppies earlier. I inhaled DEEPLY and pulled all that darkness and starlight, leaves and wood smoke into my lungs. It’s a simple joy, breathing–one too often overlooked.

I have more complicated things to be grateful for. I am happy my husband and children are alive and well. Some of us might not have been after the accident last year. It still gives me joy just to look at them and every action I have taken throughout this year was colored by the uncertainty of life. We never know when our moment will come due. This is why today is so important.

I am grateful for my writer-friends, who gave me a piece of myself I had overlooked–one of the best parts of me as it turns out. I spent months, cocooned in a lovely cabin and then packed my things and branched out on my own, setting out to see if that high mountain pass is, indeed, traversable. I’ll be back, though, so keep the coffee hot for me. I wouldn’t mind a scone, while we’re at it.

I am grateful for my health–which started out bad this year and went down hill! I was diagnosed with hideous allergies, then undiagnosed–sort of. I don’t feel much differently than I used to–less itchy, I guess, thanks to the antihistamines, but the doctors still don’t really know what’s go awry in my system. I don’t care to dwell on it anymore, I am alive and well (mostly) today–what else matters?

I am grateful for my extended family members–of which there are many–my close community and my extended community that I am coming to cherish more and more each day. I am even grateful for my job. I guess anyone employed would say this at the moment, but even without the recession-induced threat of termination lurking in the back of any mind–I would still be grateful to work where I do with the people who are like a new family to me now.

Life is not perfect. It never is. It is wild and changing, full of heartbreak, joy, passion, and love. At least my life has always been. A crazy ride, being me. But I like it and so it is easy to be grateful tonight.

Happy Thanksgiving. I wish you love and passion, gratitude, joy and peace.
❤ and Blessings,
La

Who is that Girl, Again?

It’s funny how life likes to throw a curve ball, just to make sure you’re still paying attention in the game. This winter has been one of many challenges, beginning with hitting that tree in December and then just rolling from there. Whole weeks went by where I lived moment to moment because, quite frankly, I wasn’t sure if I would be easy breathing in the next. Asthma has a sneaky way of making a person come completely into the present. I stopped thinking ahead, stopped planning. I tagged the line, “…if I can breathe” to the end of every sentence, “Yes, we can go shopping on Sunday, if I can breathe.”

It came on me suddenly, even though the propensity had apparently always been there, lurking, for years. Asthma and Allergies, completely new, utterly unwelcome ways in which to define myself.

The trouble is, I do sit well with definitions I don’t like. If I have Allergies and am as highly allergenic as they say, my whole life could be cast in shadow: no more long walks through rippling fields, no more laying in the grass chewing on the long end of a stem, no more romping with the dogs, hauling hay for the horses, no more running over wooded paths unless the mold count is down. Stretched out before me, my new life looked like a desert, vast and wide and utterly empty of all the things green and beautiful, things I truly loved.

Indeed, it didn’t sit well. I had to ask, if not that wild nature girl, then who am I? If I can’t do those things I love, what can I do?

I looked deep into the darkest corner of my soul and found me sitting there, just as calm and peaceful as you please, sitting still and quiet in that close, cool darkness, all soaked up with the essence of me. That was when I knew, I can never be other than what I am. I’ve lived for forty years with all these things they now call Allergies and Asthma. Yes, I have had moments of highly atypical skin conditions, random joint swelling, abdominal irritability, headaches, pain, general irritability, and exhaustion. When the doctor asked my symptoms and I told him, he wondered why I hadn’t mentioned them to other doctors before. I had but they couldn’t find what was wrong with me and anyway, over time, “sick” became my normal.

Now, I have gone full circle, through normalcy, into pain, illness, diagnosis, treatment, recovery, and now back to what I know as normal. I have a lot of allergies, according to my very reliable forearms. I could take that information and no one would blame me if I opted out off the natural world and chose instead to lock myself away in a plastic bubble. I might attain something like wellness if I did that, but what kind of a well would it be? Would I be happy? Would I have a life I actually wanted to live? Would I have love?

A recent study has proven vitamin D is highly effective in mitigating asthma and allergy symptoms. So effective, in fact, they are now recommending we allergenics not stay inside, theoretically safe in our plastic houses, but that we get outside, strip down as much as we dare, and let that hot sun soak into all the surfaces of our skin. When you haven’t been out in a while, the sun is like warm honey pouring over you. It is sensuously wonderful; it feels so good. And the soft murmuring of the leaves sounds like an endearment, as if they are rustling just for you.

I sat on my deck, having gotten the unofficial go-ahead to get out there and soak up some D and just looked at my natural world, the squirrels chasing each other irately through the branches, the butterflies drifting wonkily around the lilacs, those bright green leaves, bending and tipping waving at me in the breeze. I fell in love, in that punch-drunk kind of way that hits you sometimes. I could feel that thick, warm emotion coursing through me. All my aching muscles and even the blood in my veins relaxed. I settled deeper in my chair, and fell back in to wonder.

As every asthmatic will likely tell you, things trigger an attack. Once you learn what your triggers are, you can begin to get a grip on a very uncontrollable, often terrifying situation. One of my triggers is stress, if I get freaked out enough, you can bet I’m going to end of having trouble breathing. This was perfectly apparent during the day we took my daughter in for an emergency appendectomy. That’s some stress, I can tell you, having your daughter become violently ill, then rushing her to the hospital–one hour away– then having her operated on all within an eight hour period. This adventure began at eight in the morning, I stopped breathing normally by about two o’clock.

It makes you wonder, though, if you stop and think about it. If stress can have this great physiological impact, could not the opposite of stress work in reverse? Could sitting still, perfectly relaxed and deeply in love with anything at all make your lungs, as well as your heart, expand? It made me wonder and it made me make some solid decisions.

None of us ever know exactly how long we will have on earth and we are all given the glorious freedom to do what we wish with the time we do have. I could hole myself up in my house, make every person entering wash the pollen and dander and mold spores and dust mites off their bodies before hugging me, and keep my life pritinely sterile.

Or I could live, just as I always have, embracing every part of my world with two arms wide. I could inhale every moment of my life deeply. I could work myself to the bone in my garden and then sit, tipsy-in-love, letting all those good hormones work their magic.

In the end, in the very, very end, I have found, I’m just still me, same as I always was and I will do what comes naturally to me, what lets me remember deep peace and thick love.

I am wishing the same for you.

Peace, Love, and Blessings,

La