I am trying to recover from surgery while keeping in mind my pre-existing health conditions. I mentioned that I have an allergy to anti-inflammatory meds in my last post. The allergy is actually connected to some minor autoimmune issues that I have.
Autoimmune, simplified, is when your body gets a case of mistaken identity and starts to attack healthy cells, confusing those cells as unhealthy ones. As a result, sometimes when my body is straddling between healthy and germ fighting, it starts to react to things I wouldn’t normally react to. So even if I start eating too much of something when I’m trying to fight a virus, my body will start an attack. It usually starts off as a rash, inflammation, or hives, as a signal that something has been triggered. So I have to be aware of over-dosing on anything and can’t introduce new medications or new food to my diet when I am feeling just a bit off. In view of this, it is crucial that I am always listening to my body and during this season of medical issues, my doctors have always had to keep my pre-existing conditions in mind. This condition accessorized my hospital gown with a bright red wristband that frequently lead to more discussions and clarification.
I also have pre-existing emotional health conditions I am keeping in mind for emotional growth and healing. I struggle with trust issues and I’ve been trying to walk out my life, especially in recent years, being aware that this is a sensitive hot button in my life. For years, if I had deep trust broken, I just iced people right out of my life. I was really good at numbing them out because at the time, it felt like the only safe thing to do to avoid pain from regret. I was so good at icing, it could go under the “Special skills” category on my resume. You know the old saying, “Fool me once…etc”, well, that saying planted quite a seed in my trust-issued heart and the result was, “Fool me twice, Ice Ice baby.” Not quite as catchy, but it was my truth.
Growing up, I dealt with a lot of death and abandonment. The loss in both these experiences felt identical to my adolescent heart.
One early morning when I was 15 years old, my grandma came into my room to leave me $20 for the weekend. I woke up, asked her what she was doing and she told me she was getting picked up by my aunt to spend a few days helping at her coffee shop. A few seconds after closing my door, there was a large crash. I got out of bed to find her at the bottom of the stairs, unconscious. Later we were told that she had burst a blood vessel in her brain and she died that evening.
I had to navigate grief in the dark as a 15 year old. And this event was like the world had told me, “Trust no one, trust nothing.”
I had a sibling-like relationship with my grandma. She was the matriarch of stubborn in our family and we bickered like we were children. There was one time she was adamant that the way to stop a horse was by kicking it hard. I loved horseback riding as a kid and this statement was blowing my teenage mind. After much back and forth, I had to get my dad to intervene. He was a frequent mediator in our family.
I didn’t know how to resolve our differences and mutual stubbornness, and inside I thought we would find peace when I got my driver’s license. My grandma stayed home all day chain smoking, creating her own menthol cigarettes by lathering Tiger Balm on her Craven “A”’s. It may have been silly, but I thought if I could drive her to social events (dim-sum outings, mah-jong marathons), she would be happier. In my head, my plan to make peace and show love was to become her chauffeur. But she died just before I had turned 16, which was when I would be able to start learning how to drive. I had deep regret for not being able to make peace or show my love for her.
Regret was hard. Regret was dark, bitter and wore black throughout the rest of high school. Regret was a bottomless pit of hopelessness. And then I decided, no more, because I couldn’t do anything about it, so regret had to pack up and leave. I say it in one sentence, but it took a lot longer than that.
As a result, one of my earliest life lessons was to not live a life of regret. But somehow, the supporting facilitator to this lesson, created defense mechanisms that established the ability to build strong emotional walls, developing supreme icing skills. Why am I confessing my talent for icing? Because I am trying to recover while being aware of my pre-existing conditions and there isn’t an emotional red wristband to wear.
More to come in part deux…