Itsy Bitsy Spider

~ Linda Wright ~ 1 Comment
I tossed my bathing suit and towel bag into the back seat of the car, feeling refreshed and energetic after my morning in the physical therapy pool. In my mind, I was sorting out the day’s to-do list: grocery store, dry cleaners, and committee meeting in the evening. I barely noticed that when I opened the car door, it hit my left arm.
 
“Don’t even ask where I got it, let’s just say it was another automobile accident with a car that was not moving at the time.” I wrote to my cousin Barbara. “The bruise is deep and it took 3 full days to show purple on the surface. Then, I went into four days of denial, so I didn’t call the doctor for a full seven days.”
 
My cousin Barbara says she is going to start calling me “Cleopatra, Queen of Denial.” Denial is my favorite coping mechanism! Like most coping mechanisms it is not effective in the long term. Once I came back to my senses and could see the bruise without judging it or myself, I was able to admit that I needed to pay attention.
 
It is the refusal to let go of my ego that causes suffering, not the bruise. It is letting go of the plans I made, the expectations I have of my life and myself. Like the unsuspecting insect stuck on a spider web filament, I struggle to free myself from my entanglement.  The spider knows I’m there. It watches and smiles and waits until I am exhausted.
 
The bruise wraps around the upper left arm almost from shoulder to below the elbow. After two infusions of cryoprecipitate, it is now in that motley fading-out period and looks like a very large multi-colored tattoo. It doesn’t hurt anymore, unless I use the arm muscle.
 
I could learn a lot about mindfulness from that eight-legged crawly.

Fear of crying

~ Linda Wright
My roommate, April, had been throwing up and in distress by the pain. Earlier in the day, she had her appendix removed. Her parents and the doctor told her she would be fine. She was still groggy from the anesthesia when she realized she most certainly was not fine. I left the room to go to the nurse’s station, since I knew that pushing the call button by the bed usually yielded no response. The nurse reluctantly got up from the chair and sauntered off to check on April. It made me feel better to be of use to the novice patient. Besides, I was eleven at the time and felt very grown-up.
 
After accomplishing my mission, I wandered into the day room of the hospital, dragging the IV pole and trying to protect some dignity despite the hospital robe and floppy slippers. After 8:00 at night, all visitors had left and the brightest lights turned out in the hope that some would sleep.
 
Even the children who were my age or older had never been in a hospital before. For me it had become routine; I felt almost as comfortable in the dayroom as I did in my family’s living room. Long ago I had learned where they kept the graham crackers, milk and Jello snacks on the ward. I could help myself without troubling a busy nurse. I had also picked up the language spoken in hospitals, the cultural cues of what was acceptable behavior, and what was taboo.
 
The tropical fish tank gave a soft glow to the room and the lights of the city were visible from the large glass windows. I was glad for a little quiet time by myself and so I sat with my legs curled under me on a chair thinking about what I would do once I was released and home again. A
young man in a white lab coat, probably an intern, came in and sat in a chair. He didn’t seem to notice me; his eyes went directly to the fish circling slowly in the water. Whether it was perception or projection, I will never know, but I sensed that the young man was deeply sad. He sat and watched the fish for what seemed like a very long time. His shoulders drooped; I was afraid he was about to break one of those unwritten rules. I watched him intently, just as he was watching the fish, thinking about how odd it was to see a doctor looking hopeless. In my experience the staff of the hospital were all business, some did their jobs quickly, some were slow to react, some were comforting and good about explaining things but they never ever showed their own feelings.
 
More amazing to me is that on the few occasions when I have cried a nurse has leapt to my side offering medications to calm me or a Chaplain to bolster my faith when a simple “There, there” and a tissue would have been more appropriate. I doubt that the medical system would be weakened if crying was permitted. Who knows it might be healthier for us all.

How can I keep from singing!

~ Linda Wright ~ 4 Comments
The piano came crashing down onto the cement floor of the basement. One of the movers had let go of the rope when the piano was halfway between the hatchway and the cellar. Nonetheless the piano survived. The movers picked it up and set it against a concrete wall where it sat comfortably for many years.
 
The piano had belonged to my grandmother; the grandmother I never met. She died when my father was still a young boy and he remembered how she used to sit at the piano and play in the evening. Deep within the belly of that piano, I believed, was the soul of my grandmother, gentle, compassionate and harmonious.
 
Mellow and rich sounds responded to the touch of my fingers and I spun the round piano bench until it was the right height for my eight-year-old legs, stretching to reach the keys. I ached to learn how to make music on it.
 
When my father played the piano, he only used the black keys between the whole notes. It was fun to watch like a magic trick and it amused my friends, but I knew it wasn’t the way one was supposed to play a piano.
 
Piano lessons were expensive and my mother threatened me that if I did not practice faithfully the lessons would end. I played the scales over and over again, learning to read the notes on the printed book propped up and resting on the tilted music stand. Plunk, plunk, plunk, I hit note after note; my fingers held in the stiff posture, parallel to the key board and flexing only at the knuckle. It was not joyful, or rewarding, and it seemed to have little to do with making music.
 
I was ashamed that the four-year old girl, who lived next door, could pick out any tune she had heard with accuracy, using impeccable chords and rhythms. Day after day she proved that my problem was my own, not a flaw in the piano.
 
It was harsh to compare my piano ability to another’s, and it eroded my self-confidence. Eventually it led me to give up on the piano lessons. I thought of myself as unmusical. I carried this image into adulthood. At church when I could hear my voice bleat a missed note, I sang with less and less confidence.
 
So, a few months ago when a friend told me that she was taking singing lessons, I thought I might give myself another chance. If my grandmother’s piano could survive a plunge I mused, perhaps I can too. I’ve only had two lessons so far, and I am expanding my range, both in my voice and in my spirit. 

Trusting My Gut Feeling

~ Linda Wright

In late January of 2000 I was hospitalized for an extended period of time with a perforated large intestine. Diverticulitis had silently crept up without a warning. My internal organs were contaminated with infectious matter. Not a pretty thought. The doctor walked into my hospital room and grimly declared that the bleeding had been stopped, but without surgery to implant a temporary colostomy, the infection would not go away.

I know that given enough clotting factor for a long enough time, I can survive surgery. There was an inner voice, however, that disagreed with the gloomy predictions of my doctor.

“I’ll be fine, just let me rest.”

“No you won’t,” the doctor continued to argue.

“Look,” I said, “it’s my body.”

With that, he left with what sounded like a threat, “I’ll send the surgeon in to talk with you.”

The conversation with the surgeon didn’t persuade me to change my mind. In the coming days antibiotics, nourishment and clotting factor were all dripped into my veins. Each morning, when I awoke I would meditate; focusing on my breathing and listening to my body.

The surgeon would appear at my door. He would nod his head in acknowledgement, and I would return his greeting with a wave.

“Vulture looking for fresh carrion,” I commented to the nurse who had just come to switch my saline drip to the antibiotic.

She laughed. “He’s at the age where he needs a challenge,” she whispered. “You know most cases look routine to him. You don’t.”

“Too bad I have to disappoint him.”

My hematologist wasn’t as subtle as the surgeon. He stood at my bedside every afternoon and lectured me. It was clear that he was genuinely worried that I had made a fatal mistake. A friend called to tell me she had refused surgery at first for diverticulitis. She had several reoccurrences until she finally took her doctor’s recommendation. Since the surgery, she hadn’t had one more episode. My bravado shrank day by day and I began to doubt my decision.

Nevertheless, I continued to feel better and better. I noticed that the surgeon was looking at me with less interest each morning. I imagined that his nod was wistful.

It’s really hard for me to know now if I had in fact been so in tune with my body that I sensed something the doctors could not discern. Now more than a decade later all I know is that I recovered without the surgery and never had a relapse of the diverticulitis.

Symphony

~ Linda Wright ~ 3 Comments

Two tickets to the performance of the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra at the Ruby Diamond auditorium in Tallahassee last weekend was a gift. Otherwise, I confess I probably would not have gone. The newly refurbished auditorium now glitters with ornate trim. It is what people see, and what they talk about. Appearances don’t impress me.

The season ticket holders are given parking spaces in a lot across the street, while the rest park in the lot at the foot of the hill. It was raining hard when we arrived and my arthritic knees and ankles cried out with every step. By the time we reached the front door I glanced at the steep granite steps and began to grumble under my breath. No sign signified an accessible entrance. One step at a time I climbed, grasping onto the railing and muttering under my breath. The crowd of soggy music aficionados behind me was growing impatient with my slow progress. Reaching the top and inside at last I faced another set of stairs, this one leading down to the lobby. These were marble stairs that had become slippery from wet shoes. I turned to see a woman sitting in a wheelchair shaking her head. I wondered how she had managed to get this far. She seemed frozen by the choices. There must have been an accessible entrance, I thought, just no way to figure out in the dark and pouring rain how to locate it.

My post-menopausal testosterone load got the better of me. I felt enraged and indignant. I wanted to shout at who ever would listen that music should always be accessible.

It has been years since I attended a symphony concert. It is hard to compete with the experience of the symphony I had as a child. Mom would pack a picnic basket, Dad would drive a car-load of children from the neighborhood and off we would go to Tanglewood for the Saturday rehearsal. The woodwinds harmonized with the notes of the thrushes and sparrows. If we children tired of sitting on the blanket we could wander the lawn while listening to Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky, or Mahler. People, who found the sunlight too strong or the grass too difficult to navigate, took shelter under the umbrella roof. It was magical and it felt to me that the trees were singing to the clouds.

The music of the Tallahassee Symphony Orchestra had a magic of its own too. As the musicians simultaneously hit each note with precision and passion, I was overcome. In the third section of Brahms’ Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 83 I was actually sniffling back tears as the piano and the cello entered into a tender dialog.

If only we humans could be as good at listening to each other and responding.