My Healing Journey
[Note: reading all of these entries will be repetitive,
because many of them give recaps and updates that cover the same ground
already covered. My plan is to finish cataloguing and bring this
thread up to date, then compile a "best of" or highlights list.]
For some of my readers, the weight loss aspects of this story will
be the most interesting. Others may focus on different parts of
the journey. For me, healing is holistic and the only way I can
adequately tell the story is holistically. I can find no way to
separate body from mind, heart, soul, and spirit. In a
well-ordered being, the spirit controls the mind and the mind controls
the body. If that hierarchy is disordered, the body’s weaknesses
and demands can bring on illnesses of intellect, emotion and soul, or
emotional disorders can wreak havoc in other aspects of being, etc.
As I make clear early in my memoirs, I was never truly healthy.
One of the most severe medical crises of my life occurred in the fall
of 1999 a month or so after my 55th birthday, when a viral infection on top of a number of chronic
illnesses brought me down hard.
Gastro-intestinal ailments
made me miserable. If I didn’t eat, I had hypoglycemic
symptoms: hunger pangs, irritability, sleeplessness, vertigo,
tremor and horrible cravings for sweets. When I ate, I had a
different set of symptoms from irritable bowel syndrome, acid reflux,
unstable blood sugar, reactive hypoglycemia, etc.
Heart palpitations scared my family and
me. Breathing difficulties immobilized me. I couldn’t move
from room to room without help. If I tried to walk unsupported,
I’d fall. If I got tangled in the bedsheets, the effort to free
myself would trigger an ashtma attack. Simply rolling over in bed would get me out of breath.
I spent about a year and a half in bed and depended on several kinds of asthma medications to keep breathing. The
immobility and my being dependent on a starchy diet of sandwiches and
prepared foods provided by my husband and son made my weight rise into
the morbidly obese range. It topped out at over 240 pounds before
some gradual recovery put me back on my feet again. One of the
first things I did when I was again able to cook for myself was to
adjust my diet to conform to my blood group (A) as detailed in Peter J.
D’Adamo’s book, Eat Right for Your Type.
I tried exercising, but was prevented from doing much by the asthma
and chronic fatigue syndrome. I read several diet books including
The Zone
and The Carbohydrate Addict’s Diet. I synthesized the information
from a number of sources into a diet that I thought would be best for
me. I tried several times to adhere to that diet, but each time
within a few weeks my food cravings would defeat me.
Already gravely physically ill, the sense of failure from my inability
to stay on a diet just made everything worse.
When my son graduated from high school in 2001, we had only recently
gotten internet access and a digital camera. I managed to dress
up and go to the school for the ceremony. The physical effort
required made it difficult. It was also hard just seeing the
looks on the faces of those who had known me in better days and were
appalled at the change, and of those who didn’t even recognize me.
In Spring of 2002, I was obsessed with my health, or rather, with my
illness. When an old woman came to me in a dream and said I
needed to keep a journal, I jumped to the conclusion that it was to aid
me in my healing. It probably was that, but it has turned out to
have been much more than that, as well.
Extinction Burst
was my first Xanga blog, May 1, 2002. In it, I asked the
question, “Am I digging my grave with a fork and spoon?” A week
or so later, I tried defining the problem and admitted that I was
looking for an easy solution. I questioned if I was malingering and in denial. Floundering about for answers, I hit upon and then rejected astrology. I acknowledged that I was caught between conflicting values. Then I had a valid and useful insight about my essential ambivalence. Exploring the ambivalence, I asked myself, “Is life without pizza really worth living?”
The healing journey went on hiatus for a while after I got the first clue to finding my long-lost, now-middle-aged “little boy” first-born son.
That segued right into the first contact with my eldest grandson since
he was a baby, finding out I am a great grandmother, and other
family reunion stuff. The family reunion stuff led into the first
of my memoir blogs and then the memoirs became the predominant blog
topic for a while.
I picked up the thread of the healing journey again when I did my shadow’s inventory.
In response to a comment asking about how to “use past life work in healing our today,” I wrote a bit about regression and past-life therapy.
Next in the addiction dilemma thread was a blog about talking it out with my soulmate. Then there was one about my addictive history, with a discussion of addiction as biochemistry vs. personality disorder.
Some time after that, I wrote in some detail about a fibromyalgia flareup.… and then there was my coal-miner’s canary rant. As I worked away at some difficult years in my memoirs, I paused to describe what my present-time chronic fatigue felt like, and to explore the issue of self-esteem then and now.
Then there was a notable rambling blog that includes a bit on another fibro-flare.
“Where
does malingering leave off and masochism begin?” I ask in another
blog about being sick and tired of being sick and tired.
Now having progressed to late August, 2002, here’s a brief glimpse of how I’m feeling and what I’m eating.
In early October, Doug and I were finishing up some mickeymouse roof
repairs using poly tarps. Working in the chill wind and rain was
painful and I needed help getting out of my wet clothes after I came inside. A week or so after that, I described the pain and difficulty of making a trip to town on which, “I told Greyfox, ‘I usually get a fibro flare-up after a trip to
town. This time I’ve started from home with one, getting an early
start, to beat the rush.’ ” and revealed indirectly, in passing, that the sugar and wheat addictions were still going strong.
Around the middle of that month, I started mentioning a new plan
devised to incorporate what I knew about my food sensitivities with new information I’d learned from End Your Addiction Now: The Proven Nutritional Supplement Program that Can Set You Free, by Charles Gant, MD. Up to this point, with the
exception of my first, “extinction burst” post, most of my mentions of
health and healing issues had been in passing. Now I devote an
entire post (making it private at first and then publishing it) to the
big plan I’d been hatching, my life-changing new regimen.
Who knew at the time that it would end up being a lot more than just
another diet? Not I, certainly, but I was hopeful.
It took some time to get my ducks in a row. The addict in me procrastinated, wasn’t in any big hurry
when the reality of kicking sugar yet again had finally sunk in.
I expected it to be difficult, and feared yet another failure of will
and relapse into active addiction. I dragged my feet for a couple
of weeks, immersing myself in memoirs, blogging about the weather,
making only an occasional oblique reference
to my healing journey. My avoidance of the task of
setting up the daily packs of nutrients and the prospect of abstinence
did result in some notable progress on the memoirs, but finally a scary
occurrence of diabetic neuropathy got me moving on the med-packs.
Before two weeks had passed, I was surprised how easy it was
to resist the taboo foods with the help of the amino acids. I started sharing gluten-free recipes. After
less than a month on the new diet and supplements I was complaining
that my improved health and increased physical activity were causing me to cut back on my writing. In the second month of the new regimen, I gave a health update
in which I mentioned a decrease in my appetite and that I was “shrinking” but
not losing weight. I told about an old friend who saw me in the mall,
commented happily on my getting some spring back into my step, and said that I had previously been looking so bad
she was expecting to get a call to my funeral.
When Christmas came around I realized with pleasure that I could cook taboo foods for Doug and Greyfox
without craving to eat them myself. The new year, 2003,
found me looking and feeling better than I had in over four
years. After my second month’s supply of med-packs ran out, I was
slow about getting around to making up a new set. Even after a
week without the supplements, my food cravings didn’t return.
Undeniably better, I still wasn’t entirely well, but of course
I’d not been well my entire life, so that’s no surprise. I was
breathing better and moving better, but still had some severe ME/CFIDS flareups.
Four months into the gluten-free regimen, I continued experimenting with muffin recipes.
Those frozen muffins quickly became and have remained my most reliable
source for fast, easy nourishment. I remained free of cravings,
but not of food
fantasies. One of those fantasies reminded me of my “last brownie
binge” during an abortive attempt to kick the sugar addiction a few decades
previously.
On Valentine’s Day,
Greyfox gave me some unexpected support and reinforcement for my sugar
abstinence. This is the same guy who had been bringing me candy
bars (in, I suspect, an effort to finish me off) when I had been at my
sickest.
The next time I posted a gluten-free muffin recipe, I included some general nutrition information and info about gluten in particular.
Despite my generally improved health, at the end of February, 2003, I was still having occasional severe “fibro flareups”, exacerbations of the ME/CFIDS (myalgic encephalomyelopathy / chronic fatigue immunodysfunction syndrome).
In the dysfunctional family makeup of our household at that time, I had some mental health issues, too. I may not be able to avoid an occasional derangement, but when I start weirding out, I know how to do some reality testing. Often, just a little change in my environment will get me back into balance.
The family dysfunction was getting a lot of attention in my
blogs in the spring of 2003. Greyfox was heading for a crisis
that began with some problems where he worked. Physically, I’d been feeling so much better for a while that the next exacerbation hit me hard.
This was the time during which I was beginning to do readings at KaiOaty and hadn’t gotten the FAQ and the screening system set up yet. Online clients were reminding me of some realities I’d chosen to forget.
Relationship issues
were still getting a lot of my attention. My clothes were getting
looser, but I wasn’t noticing any weight loss indicated on my bathroom scales.
A case of the flu
brought out the first real cravings for comfort foods since I had
started taking the amino acid supplements. I was able to
withstand them without caving in. A little progress report
on that infection brought some comments suggesting that a few other
Xangans were interested in my nutritional regimen.
When I mistook
a bit of drive-by spam for a stupid comment, I responded with some
specifics about my condition and what I knew about nutrition and the biochemistry of addiction.
What struck me upon recently rereading that entry was how rapidly I
have been expanding my knowledge in those fields since I wrote
it. The entry that followed that one answered questions and addressed issues raised in comments to the former one. Then I briefly explained my misunderstanding about the spam.
About the time of my first Xangaversary, in the blog that explained my baggy pants,
I related for the first time the story of my feast that never happened,
which had begun the downward spiral into that extinction burst I’d been
in when I first came to Xanga. My improved physical condition at
the time is indicated by the fact that when Doug came down with the
flu, I was able to do a solo water run.
Around that time I was making rapid and steady progress on the
childhood end of my memoirs, but on May 12, Interational ME/CFS
Awareness Day, I took the occasion to post “Thief of Many Lives” by Kathleen Houghton, a description of what life can be like with ME/CFIDS.
As Greyfox’s business situation went critical, I was
successfully abstaining from the taboo foods, although nobody was
making it easy for me. My trip to the local clinic
caused my health care provider some unease, but that was her problem,
not mine. I had truthfully told her that my breathing
difficulties were clearing up, but didn’t bother mentioning that I was
having a fibromyalgia flareup. There was nothing she could do
about that anyway, and I didn’t want to listen to her sympathetic
noises. Meanwhile, having gotten booted out of Talkeetna, where
he had moved his stand after the state billboard police had chased him
from his roadside spot near to home, Greyfox rented a place in Wasilla, fifty miles away.
My life went on in the usual way for a few days after Greyfox moved out. I posted a new muffin recipe and delivered a nutrition lecture along with it. When he phoned on Tuesday and left a message on CallWave saying that he was drinking again, I didn’t take it personally.
We had been around his binge-alcoholic merry-go-round so many times and
with such destructive consequences that I was ready to let him
go. That message had said he’d call the next day, but by Friday I
still hadn’t heard from him. When I got the first psychic hints
that he was in serious trouble, my choice was to ignore it, leaving him alone to
deal with his addiction by himself:
On Friday, shortly after I got up and fully awake, Spirit
signalled me that Greyfox was in trouble. I tried to tune in to him,
his vibes, his consciousness. When we are in sync, I can view the
world through his eyes, so to speak. I can pick up on his perceptions
and feelings. I was getting nothing. As usual when my questing
consciousness doesn’t receive clear impressions, I consulted an oracle
for insight.
I pulled out the runes and asked the Norns if Greyfox was alive.
Three runes, one yes, one no, one maybe. Thinking, “fuck the Norns,” I
put the runes away and got out the Crystal Oracle, which does not lend
itself so easily to ambiguity. A series of castings of the stones told
me that he was alive, but barely. He was in deep trouble and there was
no certainty one way or the other whether I would be able to help him
or not. This seemed perfectly logical to me. I know the limitations
of outside “help” when one must take responsibility for one’s own
actions.
My final casting was on the question, “Is it in my own best
interests to go check on Greyfox and see what I might do to help?” The
answer was a yes, but with the qualification that it would be a massive
pain in the ass. So, what else is new? After a long career in the
“helping professions,” I’ve experienced plenty of those pains trying to
help people detox. In such situations, the helpers tend to find what
comfort we can in knowing that the detoxing inebriates are in more pain
than they are putting us through. I put away the crystals, woke Doug
to tell him I was going to town, and hit the road. What had finally
made me decide to go was this thought: “I would do this for anyone,
stranger, relative or friend–anyone who needed my help. Since this
was no more than I would do for anyone, how could I do less for my
soulmate, my spouse?”
I went and scraped him up off the floor.
From this point on, it becomes difficult if not impossible for me
to separate Greyfox’s healing journey from my own, and those threads
become entwined in my blogs.
As that post linked above makes obvious, there were payoffs for
me in that act of kindness. The weeks that followed and the work that Greyfox and I did on our relationship
provided more mental health payoffs. Inspired partially by
that personal breakthrough and partially by massive amounts of denial
I’d been encountering at AA and at Xanga, I wrote Breakthrough and Denial. Then, after a couple of stressful non-stop weeks, I realized I oughta slow down a bit.
I’d had such success from using the amino acids to help me deal with my food cravings that Greyfox was finally convinced to use them
for his addictive cravings, too. He wasn’t just kicking the
alcohol addiction. He also stopped smoking tobacco and marijuana
at the same time, and cut down on sugar. Since he wasn’t doing
dope any longer, and I had no need to continue growing it for him, I
stopped smoking weed at that time, too. It made it easier
sticking to the diet, not having the munchies.
We started
attending NA meetings within a week of the first AA meeting, as I mentioned in my “All healing is self-healing” entry.
In Wasilla, there are about ten times as many AA meetings
each day as there are NA meetings in a week. For a while, Greyfox
was going to AA every day, and I’d drive to town twice a week. On
Tuesdays, we’d go to NA together, and on Fridays I was chairing a new
women’s AA group at an outpatient drug treatment facility.
Until I stopped going to AA meetings and had completely absorbed the
NA teaching about taking what you can use and leaving the rest, I was
beset by conflicts between my philosophy and the 12-step dogmas.
I expressed some of that in an online meeting here of Xangroup 12-step Therapy.
After Greyfox had diagnosed his narcissistic personality disorder and
committed himself to therapy for it, our relationship became closer and
more satisfying, but I still found things to bitch about.
My health wasn’t one of them. I had been too busy to notice that
most of my symptoms were in remission. Even so, my new fast-paced lifestyle and the caffeine consumed at 12-step meetings started getting to me. I went dancing and hurt myself.
In the entry, Throwing Out the Old Rule Book,
I went into detail about the healing work that Greyfox and I were
undertaking together. When I was sick, I thought I’d found the
right word for how I felt when I called it “malaise”.
Greyfox, however, seemed to think when I described the sensations I
felt that it sounded more like euphoria to him. Once again, words
fail me.
After a couple of months in the “spiritual kindergarten”
of 12-step programs I found myself, to my chagrin, acting out in a
childish manner that I’d thought I had already outgrown. Even
with all my new challenges and the imperfections I’d been seeing in
myself, I could still say that, “life is good.” Among many other significant insights I was picking up around this time, were some regarding gender differences and differing from the norm.
Overhearing Greyfox talking to his mother about family issues elicited a blog from me about therapeutic talk. After a near miss on the highway and some related insights about other close calls, I say that it could have been worse. I was pleased with the results of various choices I’d made, including Xanga.
Having lost enough weight that I could wear my old bangle bracelets
again, I needed an excuse to wear them. I wore a dress and heels
on my next trip to town, and at the post office I ended up chasing a goose through the mud. After ten months on the diet, I’d lost ten sizes, from size 20 Gloria Vanderbilt jeans, down to size 10.
I mentioned my early abortive efforts to do this blog-catalog
project and index the healing journey in an entry that was mostly about
NPD,
and not just about Greyfox’s NPD.
I had been acquiring and
studying several books about the biochemistry of addiction. One
of the most informative ones was Alcoholism as an Allergy
by Mary Greeley. It was where I found the detailed article about
the PGE1 cycle, which I transcribed later and posted. I can
hardly wait ’til I come to that entry again so I can post that link.
People keep asking me and I can’t remember all the details.
One day, after I had broken down over some frustrations and conflicts, I decided that I had needed a good cry, anyway. To clear up some misunderstandings, I then had to let my readers know that nobody “made” me cry. This was a time of numerous frustrations, when I worked hard confronting Greyfox
on his NPD. One big plus around this time was finding another
helpful informative book about the differences in individual
biochemical makeup: Your Body Knows Best by Ann Gittleman.
After 3 months of AA and NA meetings, in a blog I called, Serenity Now!,
I gave an update on my addiction progress and some of the background on
my recovery.
Following a rough night as a result of a day of
overworking, I wrote about the risks, costs and rewards for breaking the rules.
With the return of cold weather in October, Greyfox moved out of his
cabin in Wasilla and back in with Doug and me at the upper end of the
valley, commuting to town on pleasant days to work.
Allergic reactions to mold and perfume brought out a blog on nasal tampons. As I medicated for and recuperated from that, there were some rare relationship moments.
On Halloween, our thirteenth wedding anniversary, I posted a mini-recap of our addiction recovery. The following day I posted What to do with that used jack o’lantern,
my pumpkin or squash muffin recipe. A few days later, I went into
detail about my recovery from sugar addiction and my one little slip
when I licked the knife after cutting Doug’s birthday cake, in “A Year of Life without the White Death.”
When the next ME exacerbation came along, I wrote about hitting that wall: “Wham… THUD… crash… *tinkle*” My next recipe, for Beans, Corn and Squash Muffins, came with some of my tips for Alaskan winter survival.
Six months after I’d started going to 12-step meetings, about the
time I first started driving the van taking clients from the rehab
center to NA, I told the story of the blowhard who overdosed on a banana cream pie.
My wretched debility and other petty crap was getting to me, so I vented about it here. With some difficulty, I disciplined myself to write about self-discipline.
I have been experiencing browser crashes when I try to add to
this. Thinking that it may be because it has grown too long, I’ve
started a new hub entry for the continuation. This thread
continues here: http://www.xanga.com/item.aspx?user=SuSu&tab=weblogs&uid=2096247
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