ever-fixed mark

About six weeks before my first surgery, I decided to start running again. I’d been sidelined for over a year with a weird groin injury that never really healed despite a course of physical therapy and a long, long rest. It was difficult for me to describe the pain to my doctors. I would be tooling along just fine and then suddenly something would give. Sometimes this happened while I ran, but just as frequently it would happen while I was doing some household chore like loading the dishwasher. (My friend C: “Obviously you need to stop doing housework.”) I would say that it felt like my femur was popping out of joint, except that I know that couldn’t be it; the initial pop wasn’t that painful, but then it would ache for days. At one point, I couldn’t walk without limping.

As the months went by, I noticed I was limping less. I really wanted to run; I thought it might make me feel less broken, and I figured that, even if it hurt, I couldn’t make things much worse. I thought that getting into shape would help me recover from surgery more quickly, and setting my sights on the Yankee Homecoming 5K, one month after surgery, would be a good motivator for recovery.

I ran/walked for a few weeks, a process painful both mentally and physically. It took forever to work up to a consecutive mile, and then I was just willing myself through it. It wasn’t fun at all.

One day, over lunch, I was describing my ordeal to my former boss, and he advised me to change my gait. He said he had been reading a book about running, Born to Run, that advocated a more “natural” running style, whatever that meant. I couldn’t believe that the doctors, the physical therapist, or I hadn’t thought about changing my biomechanics before. No one had ever taught me how to run. I was probably doing it wrong!

I went home and Googled “how to run” and came up with a whole bunch of conflicting advice. One common theme was to avoid a hard heel-strike, landing instead on the balls on your feet. I tried three miles like that, essentially running on my tiptoes, and two things happened: first, my calf muscles tightened up in two permanent charley-horses, and second, my lower back pain disappeared. I didn’t even realize that I had constant lower back pain while running until I noticed its absence at mile three.

So: intriguing, but I couldn’t really run on my tippy-toes, could I? I consulted my new boss, a triathlete, and he advised me not to worry so much about where my foot struck, but to concentrate on rolling as quickly as possible through the ball of my foot and pushing off powerfully with my toes. The Internet offered some additional advice to lift my knees a bit more, and after a bit more experimentation I had a gait that not only enabled me to run without groin pain, but also made me run much, much faster with less effort. Now I found it easy to increase my miles, and within a few weeks I was up to seven. Then, I remembered something I had forgotten about running: after mile 5, you really start to get out of your head.

I finally picked up Born to Run myself and discovered, to my surprise, that it wasn’t a “how to run” book but a story about a tribe of Indians in Mexico who run for hours and hours just for the fun of it, and the American ultramarathoners who want to know their secrets. This was my favorite part:

…Vigil had become convinced that the next leap forward in human endurance would come from a dimension he dreaded getting into: character. Not the ‘character’ other coaches were always rah-rah-rah-ing about; Vigil wasn’t talking about ‘grit’ or ‘hunger’ or ‘the size of the fight in the dog.’ In fact, he meant the exact opposite. Vigil’s notion of character wasn’t toughness. It was compassion. Kindness. Love….. That was the real secret of the Tarahumara: they’d never forgotten what it felt like to love running…. Distance running was revered because it was indispensable; it was the way we survived and thrived and spread across the planet. You ran to eat and avoid being eaten; you ran to find a mate and impress her…. You had to love running, or you wouldn’t live to love anything else….

To me, what this is saying is that running is supposed to be fun. You don’t do it because you have to lose weight or tone your legs or log a certain number of miles; you do it because it’s fun in and of itself. You don’t run in a gym, on a treadmill, bombarded with stimuli from 25 different TV sets like a mouse in an experiment. It’s not about doing the time, it’s about enjoying the ride.

Minor has been querying me about the time all summer long. “Is it morning still?” he asks at twilight, at 4 a.m., or at noon. I’ve come to the conclusion that this kid has no internal clock. When he crossed the international date line on his way here, some setting got permanently fouled.

After a few halcyon weeks during which I was bragging that my baby was finally sleeping through the night (”Wonderful, how old is he?” “Only four and a half!” “Months? That’s great!” “No, years!”), Minor resumed waking up at least once every night. On a good night he wakes, goes to the bathroom, and then crawls in with us and goes back to sleep. On a bad night he does this but then thrashes in bed for a few hours. On a really bad night he thrashes, then protests, “I’m not even sleepy!” and wanders around the house searching for the most comfortable bed. If this starts at 5 I may get up with him and make cookies or take him for a bike ride. Last night, he was up from midnight until 3. I could only weep.

The night wakefulness has no apparent rhyme, reason, or pattern. It happens when he’s had a lot of physical activity, or a little, when he’s sick or well, when he falls asleep early or late. One doctor suggested he had sleep apnea, but with no real evidence. Another just shrugged and said “it’s just how he is.” Husband is convinced that he’s just exhibiting pre-industrial sleep patterns.

Luckily, he’s cute.

The squinchy wink is his new picture-taking thing. Here it is again…

And again.

All that fresh air and exercise, and he only sleeps 4 hours at a stretch.

Harpers’ Index-style, that’s the number of lymph nodes removed from my body vs. the number found to be cancerous. The tumor in the thyroid had grown and was also completely resected, but no metastases were found.

Yay, me! I just had a lot of unnecessary surgery! (But, Catch-22 style, there was no way to know it was unnecessary until I had it.)

The next step is to measure my calcitonin in a few months. If it’s undetectable, then we can assume that all the cancer is gone. If it’s stable, then we’ll repeat the test in another few months. If it’s gone up, then we’ll go looking for metastases elsewhere.

Meanwhile, the good news is that the synthetic thyroid hormone I’m getting appears to have revved my metabolism up a notch. I’ve been eating a vast quantity of expensive cheese before every meal and homemade cake with decadent icing three times a day, and every morning when I weigh myself I’m a few ounces lower than I was before.

I don’t think for a moment that our country’s public schools do an adequate job of educating every American child, and I believe that parents should be able to direct their children’s education if they so choose. Why, then, does the concept of homeschooling evoke such a visceral, negative response in me? Forthwith, a tour through my prejudices:

Professionalism. I earned advanced degrees in secondary education and English literature and went through two semesters of supervised practice teaching before I entered a classroom, and even then I was only comfortable teaching a single subject to a narrow age range. On what basis does your average parent feel qualified to teach all subjects to kids from five to eighteen? I’m not saying it’s impossible; many parents are well-educated; some are trained teachers; and an autodidact could make up the difference, but how often does that occur? To me, becoming a good teacher is a full-time job, and not one you’re likely to fulfill if you’re caring for infants and toddlers at the same time you’re preparing for and teaching elementary, middle, and high school.

Feminism. First, the feminist backlash told us that good mothers stayed home during their kids’ formative years. Next, attachment parenting told us that we had to be glued to them at the hip, day and night. Now, we’re not even allowed to take a break during the school years? Do I need to move to college with them, too?

Efficiency. There is research indicating that smaller class sizes are better, but one teacher for two to four kids seems like a colossal waste of resources.

Isolationism. One unfortunate effect of the homeschooling movement is that my kids are less likely to be exposed, through the public school system, to children of parents who hold radically different political, religious, or educational views than we do. Meanwhile, all the rich kids will be at private schools, and all the poor kids will be in districts with cheaper housing. That’s so boring. How will all these kids ever learn to get along wth anyone different than themselves?

With that said…have you ever read Tiffany’s blog? Her homeschool sounds incredible. I am thinking of quitting my job and applying to the Ard School to finish my Ph.D.

What do you think?

I have a huge gash in my neck, a slice through scar tissue, live muscle, nerves, and soft tissue, that bothers me not a whit. I can turn my head, cock it, do thirty-two fouettés en tournant without so much as a Tylenol. No, what’s getting me down is a very unfortunate side effect of the calcium I’m taking to bolster my poor parathyroid function.

We shall draw a veil over the events of the day, but my GOD can I just state that this is the worst physical ailment I’ve ever experienced? The list is admittedly short but includes two operations for a rare cancer and many exotic parasites, including this and this

I understand that this happens sometimes to children, who then must undergo the same…shall we say…treatments that I just endured. If anything like that has ever happened to your child, then that kid deserves a pony. Go take care of that, would you?

When I spent the night in the hospital after my first surgery, I was dismayed to discover that the TV set in my room had no capacity for earphones. I was in and out of consciousness, and I had intended that the TV would keep me company in the late hours, but since my roommate could hear it I was obliged to turn it off early. Anticipating some such inconvenience, I had inquired about a private room, but instead of being double the cost of a semi-private, it was something like $10K more than a semiprivate room–completely out of the question. This time, accordingly, I brought my computer to the hospital, where I could stream movies through the wireless. So while I’m not exactly liveblogging my surgery, I’m able to record impressions right here from my hospital bed that are as fresh as my incision.

It was all such a cakewalk this time, compared to the last. I was up sooner and felt better more quickly and hurt less and worried less. I made a big fuss about putting the IV in a different spot, and the new location was much better. I suppose I knew what to expect, which helped. The surgery was also less extensive this time, so I wasn’t under for as long. And last time I refused pain medication because I wasn’t really in pain, but this time I accepted it because I was nauseated from walking around and thought it would be good to get some sleep. I didn’t sleep, because my roommate had her TV on full blast, but the hours after surgery were just so much more comfortable this time than last.

I ate some ice cream, tolerated a visit from the children and then tried to read, but the TV was quite annoying. Around 8:00 I watched a movie on my computer with headphones in an effort to drown out the sound. Around 9:00 the nurse came and told my roommate that whatever issue they had been following up with her was resolved to their satisfaction and she could be discharged if she wanted, and I breathed a sigh of relief. But then she called her people and apparently decided to stay after all (unwilling to lose a night with the hospital’s superior cable package?). At 10:00 my movie wrapped up and I asked her to turn down the volume. At midnight I went to the lounge and tried to sleep there. At 1:00 a.m. I asked the nurse to ask her PLEASE to turn off the TV, it was the middle of the night for Christ’s sake, this was a hospital not a casino, and wasn’t I entitled to FIVE MINUTES of peace and quiet after major surgery? (That’s what I said in my head; to the nurse, it was more like, “Would you mind terribly asking my roommate to turn off the TV?”)

The nurse approached my roommate, but there was a language barrier, and the woman became agitated, so the nurse went to fetch an interpreter. My roommate called her mother and carried on a shouting, complaining conversation for ten minutes or so. The interpreter came and also talked to the mother on the phone and left, and then about ten minutes later another person came in, tapped my shoulder, and said, “We’re moving you to another room.”

Seriously? I’m moving just so she can exercise her God-given right to watch television all night long? But I was happy enough to do it. Two nurses helped me collect my gear and within minutes I was ensconced in my own room, sans roommate.

After about ten minutes I realized I had left my purse in the nightstand, so I crept back to my old room to get it. The TV was off.

Husband’s friend K. has always been, comme on dit, a very special restaurant customer. Yes, he has questions about the dish; he’d like to substitute risotto for pilaf; he wants the eggs cooked extremely well, but the toast should be more buff than beige; hey, how ’bout we go off-menu here? The last time we dined with K. when the server asked, “How would you like that done?” Husband quipped, “In the most complicated manner possible.” He was not incorrect.

My friend C. is also a difficult diner, but where K. is Baroque, C. is ascetic. She wants it plain, with everything on the side. She can’t eat mushrooms or shellfish and won’t eat much else except salmon, beef, or ice cream. She’s lived and traveled around the world so it’s not like she’s ignorant of more varied cuisines; she’s just not interested.

K. and C. are both single, and I’ve often wondered what would happen if they found themselves on a blind date. Can you just imagine the flurry of special requests being relayed to the kitchen, hastening the harried water to an early, medicated retirement? I can see it now: “When Sally Met Sally.”

Last night, K. stopped by on a business trip, and as we walked downtown to grab dinner we ran into C. I realized immediately that this was a rare opportunity to observe two master practitioners of the fussy arts in their native habitat, so I invited her along. I’m disappointed to say that the waitress’s teeth did not fall out from gnashing, nor did the chef quit on the spot, torching the kitchen as he escaped through the side door. You let me down, guys.