Sandra Tayler

At the onset of a new year, I’d like to have a philosophical post about my intentions for the coming year. Instead I’m sitting between an ER visit yesterday and a medical procedure tomorrow, knowing that Howard and I are likely to tweet about our experiences and friends will want to know what is going on. So here is what is going on, advanced warning GI discussion and vomit. Philosophical musings about even writing this post follow after the update.

Twenty five years ago I had a non-cancerous tumor in my throat which required two surgeries and six weeks of radiation therapy to kill. It also left me with a party trick where I tip my head back in a way that makes people notice the scars while joking that a man (the doctor) slit my throat and took all my money.

Two years ago I was diagnosed with “Dismotility of the Swallow Mechanism” after two swallowing studies where I got to eat barium in front of an X Ray machine. In case you were wondering, barium is not tasty and doing a test where I attempt to demonstrate how I choke on food was not fun. After diagnosis I was sent to a physical therapist and told to take small bites, chew thoroughly, and eat slowly. I figured that it was just one of the long-term consequences of surgery and radiation exposure.

Sometime in the last year I went from sometimes having trouble swallowing food to having food clog up in my throat in ways that took me up to an hour to clear. And I usually had to clear things by bringing them back up. Fortunately since the food never actually reached my stomach, it didn’t contain stomach acid which is what makes vomit so unpleasant to taste or smell. Unfortunately I could not predict what would clog or when. It got subtly and progressively worse until I started making jokes about my magical ability to choke on water. I was starting to think I needed to go talk to a doctor again because things were worse (clogs about 3 times per week), but then we had a summer full of house disaster and repair where I became a general contractor, A fall with further house upheaval, a daughter getting married, and a pile of additional debt that made me reluctant to spend more on doctors. I managed to get an upgraded insurance plan for 2020 which would make seeing a specialist less expensive. I planned on addressing the issue once the wedding was done.

Two nights ago, on New Years Eve, I ate some food and my throat clogged. I performed all my usual throat clearing steps, food came back up, but the clog did not clear. After three hours, Howard did some googling and found out more information about esophageal dysfunction in five minutes than I’d been told by the doctor two years before. The information made us more determined to see a doctor ASAP because there are better treatments available than “eat carefully.” It also helped us be comfortable waiting until morning to see if the clog cleared. It didn’t. At that point it was New Year’s Day, no doctors were in their offices, but I’d been 15 hours without food or water. I was already starting to feel the effects of dehydration and waiting an additional 24 hours didn’t seem wise. Also, according to the Instacare I visited first, the equipment necessary to help me was only available in hospitals anyway, and an ER was the only way to access that equipment urgently. It was so strange to be sitting there feeling healthy and hungry, but to know that without medical intervention I could be dead in 3-5 days. We went to the ER.

At the ER I described my trouble and they instantly knew what to do. It was a familiar problem to them, one they could solve. Within an hour, using IV meds, the clog was cleared and I could eat again. I was sent home with a referral to a gastroenterologist to send a scope down my throat to fully diagnose and treat the cause of the problems. (The doctor I’d been to before was an ENT. I should have been sent to a gastroenterologist.) I’m scheduled to be scoped tomorrow. I’m certain that Howard or I will tweet about it because medical stuff is fascinating to our writer brains. Also because one of our defense mechanisms when we are stressed or scared is to make jokes. Laughter is medicine. (Not the best medicine, mind you. No amount of laughing can fix my throat, which is why I’m going to have a medical professional stick a scope down my esophagus.)

So that is my medical history. I have mixed feelings about posting it. On one hand, it is fascinating information for writer people who may be able to use details for stories they want to write. On the other hand, medical information is exceedingly personal and often kept private. The gripping hand is that the nature of my job and my friendships is that there are a lot of people out there who honestly care about me, and who I care about, that I only communicate with via the internet. The tweets that Howard and I made from the ER yesterday brought in many concerned and well-wishing responses. So I find myself making a public post about medical conditions where strangers could come along and offer criticism of my life choices. But also where my truly loving friends can come read about what is happening in my life and hopefully be a little less worried.

It is all going to be okay, in fact at the end of this particular emotional (and financial) ride I’m likely to have better quality of life where I don’t have to carry vomit bags with me any time I choose to eat more than five feet away from a sink. There is an entire post I should probably write sometime about coming to terms with an invisible disability. But not today. For today I’m doing urgent tasks, only eating liquid food, and trying not to let my anxiety make up too many stories about my procedure tomorrow.

On the last day of 2019 I find myself longing for a between space. I don’t want to cling to the year just past. It was too full of upheaval and stress for me to want to linger. Yet I’m not ready to launch myself into a new year yet. After tomorrow the holiday pause ends and the world will speed up again. I’ll need to find my work brain so I can pick up business tasks. I have Kickstarter obligations to fulfill. I need to remember how to be a writer, creative, and business person. What I would like to be able to do is let all of that lie fallow until my daughter’s wedding in two weeks. Just extend the holiday pause so I can do these family things while untroubled by all the rest.

I can feel that “all the rest” beginning to move and chew at the doors I’ve hidden it all behind in my brain. I would love to be in a place where I could throw those doors open, joyfully ready to tackle new projects. I’m trying to get there. One of the things I’ve been working on the past week has been the family photo book for 2019. Through placing pictures and words onto pages, I’m reviewing the year I just had and re-processing the experiences of it. It was a year where the financial and stress blows just kept on coming at a pace where we could barely keep up. We reached the point where we just laughed when yet another thing showed up in our lives.

This year ends with us five figures deeper in debt than we were last year. It also ends with important relationships built and lots of personal growth for everyone. We gained a family member (officially linked in two weeks.) Turned our house upside down by suddenly renovating half of it because of disaster clean up. Put two kids into college. Withdrew two kids from college. Paid a lot of therapy bills. And had creative projects significantly slowed down by all the uproar. And yet I treasure every bit of this year because the best bits -the bright, glowing, shining moments- were purchased with the crazy, stressful, upside-down bits.

I don’t feel like I have had enough time to really examine the impacts and gains from the past year. I don’t feel ready to launch into the year that is about to begin. But ready or not, time marches me forward into 2020

We are eleven days from the end of the year and the turn over into a new decade. Tonight is solstice, the point where night is darkest and longest. After today every day will be a little bit longer and dawn will come a little bit earlier. Halfway out of the dark.

I’m seeing quite a lot of social media posts from people who are very ready to say goodbye to 2019. They had hard years for one reason or another. My year was high stakes, high stress, high anxiety, and very complicated, yet I’m not angry at 2019. The hard stuff that happened this year made the best stuff from the year possible. I have a new appreciation for the fact that it is difficulties which make us grow rather than comfort or ease. Since many of my people have been in desperate need of growth, I would feel ungrateful to complain about the very things which triggered the beginnings of that growth.

This year had a bunch of hard things in it. I’ll spend portions of next year dealing with ongoing consequences of those hard things (Hello debt hole which still needs to be filled in.) But I would not wish away the year I had. I gained too many precious things as a result.

“How do you get yourself motivated?” My 17 year old son asked me on the way home from therapy. I could tell it was a question his therapist suggested he ask me, and probably several other adults in his life. It is a good question for this young man to be asking because he struggles with self motivation.

I didn’t have a ready answer for him. Instead I had to pause and think about why (and how) I get myself moving, particularly on the days that I don’t want to. Some of it is a desire to be there for the people who depend on me. I’ve got 24 years of practice at having dependent people who will suffer consequences if I don’t do the basic household things. Yet now my dependents aren’t really dependent any more. I no longer have to carefully manage my days so that naptime falls into the convenient window of time, but the skill of being able to do that has shaped all the years since then.

As I talked I realized that most of my ability to motivate has nothing to do with other people at all. Instead it is about who I want to be and how I want to live. I’ll do dishes before bed, even though I’m tired because I want to have a better start for the morning than waking up to a kitchen disaster. I do the work things because I want to live in a world where I’ve completed the project in front of me and they only way I get to do that is if I work on the project today. This source of motivation depends on me having a longer viewpoint than how I feel in the moment. Developing the ability to see that viewpoint requires practice. Developing the ability to still reach for a future I want despite a haze of depression or fatigue is an additional level of skill.

That is about as far as the conversation got before we arrived at home. It was enough for now. He needs a chance for the new ideas to settle. Then he needs the chance to practice self-motivation, fail at self-motivation, and try again. This kid has so much potential if he can use the next six months developing his self-management skills, then there will be no stopping him.

There is a quietness that comes with the holidays. It seems strange to say that when so many people are running around and stressed. But the running-around-stressed part is the preparations. It is the part where things must be planned, organized, purchased, set up. After all of that, when the holiday truly arrives, then I feel quiet in my heart. Quiet and peace and gratitude. Once I find the quiet of a holiday it no longer matters what did or did not get done. Once I’m inside the quiet all the things which felt so vital just… fade away.

This morning I had a list of tasks and a feeling of stress. This evening, I’ve entered Thanksgiving. We won’t be having our feast until Friday, so tomorrow I will have cooking projects. And Christmas music. And possibly a Christmas tree. Most years we wait until after Thanksgiving to put up the Christmas decorations. This year I needed to invoke Christmas a bit early. The first decorations went up yesterday. Invocation successful, my first period of holiday quiet arrived this evening.

I won’t be able to dwell in it for an entire month. I will still have many tasks to accomplish for Christmas, and the Kickstarter, and the wedding, and family, and basic household maintenance. Yet even when I’m feeling brain fry in full force, I will also have a little slice of quiet. Like background music in an elevator or waiting room. Completely unnoticed most of the time, but waiting for me any time there is a space between all the other things. I’m so glad to have some quiet after a particularly noisy year.

The holiday brain fry is beginning early this year. I can tell because I’m already pulling back from reading news and social media. I didn’t consciously decide to do so, I just don’t have the mental bandwidth to absorb any additional information. This earlier-than-usual retreat is most certainly triggered by the overload of things from the summer combined with a month-long Kickstarter push that just concluded also combined with the seemingly-endless list of wedding preparation tasks. (The bride and Groom had their first “maybe we should just elope” moment over the weekend.) Oh, and holiday season begins this week, so I need to start thinking about gift giving while also making time to ship out packages every day instead of twice per week.

Yet tasks are getting completed. I just need to shut out extra noise and focus on the day in front of me.

It was the quiet part of the morning when I was the only one awake. The thoughts in my brain had finally shaken themselves into an order where I could commit them to words, so I sat down to write. I don’t have a private space where I can retreat to write. I share my bedroom with my husband Howard and due to some family shifts, my office is currently also my youngest son’s bedroom. So I sit on the couch in the front room, which works fine in the morning before everyone else is awake, or later in the day when everyone is occupied with their own things.

The words were flowing when my 18yo came to the top of the stairs across from me and sat down. They were hugging a teddy bear tight, which is a behavior that screams “I’m stressed.” Within a minute I’d coaxed them to sit across from me on the couch to talk. They were worried about their upcoming volunteer shift. The first one they had to do and it was triggering a massive anxiety attack. We’d only begun to tease apart the emotions when Howard wandered down as well. He volunteered to make a smoothie for our child. The child made a choice about how to handle the shift. They got off the couch and headed out into their day.

The space on the couch was vacant for only a few minutes before my older son plunked himself into it to talk to me. He was happy after having a discouraging day the day before. I was glad to hear about his happy things. While we were still talking, my oldest daughter wandered into the room to give me a hug. I suspect if the couch had not already been occupied, she would have taken the space and talked to me for a bit.

It was like a maypole dance. I could almost see the ribbons of connections as my people moved around each other and around me. Howard made smoothies and breakfast for more people. I occasionally typed some words in and around the conversations. I remembered how the day before my youngest son had planted himself on the same couch spot to talk to me. This is family when it is functioning well. It was so quiet and non-eventful. Yet beautiful.

Right now all of my children live under my roof. Including the son-in-law-to-be who spends 90% of his free time here. Things will change again in January when the young couple will move out into their own spaces. It is an important step in their lives, and it will be nice on our end to move my youngest out of my office and into the room that used to be hers. But for now we have this special space where everyone is together and enjoying each other’s company. It is nice to have that again after years of kids living away from home and mental health turmoil.

Several times in the past week I’ve opened up the page to post to One Cobble and not had enough brain to find words. There has been a lot to track between wedding preparations, running a Kickstarter, finishing off home improvements, and shifting kids further into adulthood. So this morning, I’m tackling blogging first before any of those other things uses up my brain. I’m also giving myself permission to talk about all the things in scattered pieces instead of expecting myself to pull it all together into some sort of narrative whole.

Wedding planning is alternating between “this isn’t so bad” and “wow this is a lot.” We’ve decided to solve a lot of the logistical problems by finding local family-run wedding businesses and handing them money. This means we won’t be scrambling on wedding day the manage decorations (the venue is pretty enough it doesn’t need them,) food, or photography. Even with hiring professionals and eliminating some of the time-consuming traditions that have no emotional resonance for us, there is still a lot to handle. Much of the “things to handle” have more to do with the physical and emotional readjustments to switch into being spouses. They’ve been remodeling spaces so they can move in together after the wedding, discussing bank accounts and finances, etc. I’m part of all the wedding logistics, but much of this more important foundational work takes place between them where I can’t see. Which is as it should be.

We launched our most recent Kickstarter earlier than we would have preferred. We like to have the book completely ready for print before the launch so that we can deliver to backers more quickly after the Kickstarter closes. Financially, we needed to run this Kickstarter in June or July. Instead we spent the summer in massive upheaval where all my time went into home improvement projects and Howard struggled to find enough normality to keep up with the daily comic. Then in October I did the math and realized that if we wanted our Kickstarter to conclude before the onset of the holidays, we had to launch right away. (The holiday season between Thanskgiving and New Years is a terrible time to run a Kickstarter. There is so much else going on that Kickstarters get lost and don’t fund as well.) Now we’re in the last week of the funding period, and I’ve been spending a lot of time making noise on social media to bring attention to the project.

I finally reached a point in home restoration where I can declare it done. I gathered all the receipts and photos then submitted them to the insurance company. A small additional amount of money will be coming our way. I’d hoped for more, but noticed a phrase in the contract “additional money available if incurred” I was pretty frugal in my approach to replacing things, so I don’t think we incurred enough expenses to get some of that additional money. Which is a wash anyway. If I got that money it would only mean that I’d pre-spent that money, not that I could use the money to fill our financial hole. I have pictures of the restoration on our stairs, but that is a post all by itself.

A month ago one of my kids made the hard decision to drop out of college and focus on their mental health instead. Today we’re going to the school to make that official. Depression is like that, it can take weeks to follow through on a decision because each step feels daunting or impossible. Around the same time my son decided to move back home and also drop out of college so he could focus on working and personal projects. So we’ve gone from two college students to zero. Me scrambling to help them try out college was the right thing. They both learned important things about themselves and about how college works. Now I’m helping with the paperwork clean up after the fact. The next time either of these kids wants to try college, they’ll get to own the process more fully. I will do less scrambling because I’m learning that scrambling on their behalf deprives them of the opportunity to rise to the challenge of scrambling for themselves.

On that note, my high school junior is no longer on track to graduate. He’s pared back his schedule to what he thinks he can handle without my help. So passing the few classes he has is all on him. I no longer track his grades or assignments. This is on the advice of his therapist who says he needs to learn how to track his own things. Instead of me coming at him with lists and schedules, I am standing back and having conversations about how if he wants to graduate, he needs to do the calculations to figure out how many packets he needs to do and how quickly. If this kid graduates it will be because he decided to scramble and work hard. Graduation will be his triumph, rather than because he was slid under the wire by well-meaning adults who don’t want him to fail. I have a whole series of thoughts on the public school system and the societal pressure to keep kids “on track.” Perhaps I’ll be able to collect those thoughts into a cohesive post sometime soon.

Later this week I’ll be heading out to California to visit my parents. The plan is to help them with some household projects that they don’t have the strength or energy to do by themselves. My daughter and son-in-law-to-be are both coming as well. We’ve frequently joked about how we’re taking a vacation from all the things-to-do and renovation by traveling 12 hours to do different things-to-do and renovation. We do plan to take a day off and go tidepooling. They may also run off and see Muir Woods. It is going to be a good trip, after which we’ll come back and dive into the holidays.

That hits the highlights for now. Hopefully the trip away will give me new thoughts and some time to process them in writing.