Beltane Beltane Moon
The hits just keep on comin’. Now, in addition to the biopsy this Thursday I have lowering oxygen saturation. This is not good. It can and does destroy brain cells and my brain is my favorite organ. So, I have an appointment with Lisa Gidday sometime in the next three weeks. Geez. This all converges with long standing, but well-managed issues (right now) like high blood pressure, cholesterol levels too high or too low, stage 3 kidney disease and others like left ventricular hypertrophy.
Now, I choose to see this all in a positive light. I have some chronic conditions that are common to many people and the dietary and pharmaceutical solutions to them have been successful so far. The kidney disease and left ventricular hypertrophy (LVH) are not good, but they both seem stable.
Unless. The LVH ends up reinforcing the lowering oxygen saturation. That’s for the follow-up to my appointment with Lisa.
My sense of myself, in spite of all this, is that I’m healthy and strong. Doesn’t feel like denial. I know about each item here and its implications. My choice is to take positive and aggressive action where I can and to accept the limitations or ultimate consequences in those instance where no action can be taken.
Two different streams of thought have lead me to a calm place. The first, experienced immediately after the beginning of the prostate journey, involved facing my actual mortality. We maintain throughout most of our life a subtle innocence about the probability and even the possibility of our own death. In my opinion this attitude is the reverse of unrealistic. In fact it is protective of our need to get on with living in the face of an inevitability about which we can do nothing.
The prostate findings lifted that protective innocence from me. There was death peeking over my shoulder, the agency of its coming perhaps revealed. This shook me. Hard. Finding my way into it, not running away, took the better part of a week and a half. Then, I realized that, if not this, something. If not now, sometime. With that frame and the palliative effect of taking the actions I could take, I became peaceful again.
The second thought involves living until I die. This has always been intention, not to run away from life or problems but to embrace them. Make choices. Take action. If I see a problem that affects me deeply, my tendency is to move toward it, see if I can do something. The realization here is that no disease, no condition can stop me from living until I die. I will, in other words, continue doing those things that matter to me. As I have done. Death cannot defeat my life, just end it.
So far these two thoughts: something, sometime will kill me and death cannot defeat my life, have helped me see that I am in no different situation now that at any other time in my life. Nor will I ever be.
