To Bee

October 15, 2014 – To Bee

(Part 1)

I don't often write about having rheumatoid arthritis. When I think about it I feel like saying as Jennifer Aniston’s character in Office Space said, “I don't really like talking about my flair.” So I wear RA the same way she wore those buttons-- without wanting to acknowledge them. But not wanting to talk about it doesn't mean that those obnoxious buttons aren’t there, that arthritis isn’t there.

RA is a thing, a disease, a disorder I've lived with for the last eight years. Right or wrong, I’ve treated myself with a variety of natural solutions and sometimes high doses of ibuprofen. The past two years have been especially hard. My old natural tricks no longer worked to curb the chronic inflammation and pain. Weather, stress, food, and the wear and tear of life affected me in ways that were hard to predict and avoid. As each day dawned, the background noise of pain was already risen to a fever pitch. Each night I fell asleep to some varied degree of hurt. I swallowed over-the-counter painkillers when I woke up and before I went to bed to take the edge off, to be able to function.

One day, my Nashvillian friend Sarah asks me, “What are you going to do?” What am I going to do about the pain? What am I going to do about the inflammation? What am I going to do about my future? What am I going to do if things just get worse? What will happen if my joints fuse and I can no longer use my hands?

What am I going to do?

It’s a question I've been putting off answering. There seemed to be too many insurmountable considerations: health insurance, money, paperwork, checkups, doctor visits, x-rays, blood work, a life of medical surveillance, and the idea that if I really thought about it I’d have to finally move past denial and get on the hard-core RA drugs like a sensible person. I’d have to admit I was a person with a disease. Now Sarah's question forces me into a reality check. However uncomfortable, I needed that push. I realize 1. No one should live with this kind of pain, and 2. To not get relief-- traditional medicine or otherwise-- is foolish.

On the strength of that impetus, I begin to call rheumatology offices, hoping to bypass what I feel are unnecessary steps and get in straight to see a specialist. To no avail. Over and over I am told the same thing, that I’ll have to get a referral from a general practitioner. I'll have to start from the beginning.

A handful of calls later, I phone my mom to vent my frustration.

“What about bees?” she asks. We’ve talked about bees before. Several times. I’d even tried to find an apitherapist in Dallas at the beginning of the year with no luck. My grandfather, her father had cured his gout by being stung by bees when he was a beekeeper in the 1980s. If it worked for one inflammatory problem why not another?  

I query the Internet for Nashville apitherapists. The search yields no results but gives a list of naturopaths and chiropractors. Carried on by this whim, I begin calling them. Most of the receptionists have never heard of bee venom therapy. But then I get one who offers me a tidbit of hope. “I don't know,” she tells me. “The doctor is with a patient right now but I'll ask him if he does that.” She takes down my number and promises a call back.

Hours later my phone rings. It’s the doctor himself. “How did you find out that I do bee sting therapy?” he asks.

I explain my internet search.

“I helped my friend heal bursitis in his shoulder,” the doctor reminisces. “Back when I had my own hives.”

“Do you still do sting therapy?” I ask.

“I know someone who has a few hives. We could drive there from my office and get you some stings.”

We talk cost and then I schedule an appointment for the next morning. Sarah is able to loan me her car so it’s all set. I’m excited. I’m nervous. I feel bad for the bees.

The next day, I arrive early to the doctor’s office. He’s sitting at the reception desk making phone calls trying to find a specific bottle opener to buy as a wedding present. He’s having about as much luck as I was trying to get in to see a rheumatologist without a referral.

“Are you the high school student?” he asks me when he hangs up the phone.

“Um. No. I’m here for the bee sting therapy.”

“Oh, right,” he says. “I thought you were the girl here to follow Mark around.”

“No…,” I say, trailing off.

“I’ve got to find this opener,” he tells me. “It’s for a wedding. I thought I’d ordered it, but it says it’s on back order.”

“I know I’m here a little early,” I say. “I can wait.”

Twenty minutes and ten phone calls later, he gets up, grabs his keys, and we head out to the car.

The bee hives are at a walking park five minutes away. The hives are just off the path in the grass with a backdrop of shrubbery and trees, just around the bend from the parking lot.

“You wait here,” the doctor tells me, “and I’ll bring the bees over to you.”

I stand back, about twelve feet away, and wait as I’ve been told. The doctor kneels next to a hive and tries to capture a bee. Finally, he succeeds and brings the bee to where I am. I hold out my right hand and he places it on my skin and the bee stings me.

“Thank you, little bee,” I whisper. “I’m sorry.”

Three more bees, three more stings. Two total for each hand.

We go back to the car and drive to the office. “It was really nice to be around the bees again,” the doctor says. “They have such a good energy.” He tells me a story about a friend of his who was an animal whisperer who’d whispered to his bees. The bees told the whisperer that they wished the doctor wouldn’t work on their hives in the hottest part of the afternoon, it made too much work for them to have to clean up. I listen to the story while I’m watching my hands, while I’m trying to evaluate how my body is responding to the venom. I’m not going into anaphylactic shock. I’m okay.

“How did you find out I did bee sting therapy?” the doctor asks again as he pulls into the office parking lot.

I’m beginning to think he’s a space cadet. I shrug to myself. So long as he will administer the stings, I can deal with that. “I did an internet search and your name came up.”

“Oh,” he says, nodding.

He keeps me at the office for twenty minutes to make sure I don’t have an adverse reaction and, when I don’t, I pay for the session and drive back to the house.

That evening the doctor calls to check up on me. He’s rambling some, but the gist of the conversation is that he’s not sure bee venom therapy is covered under his chiropractic care umbrella, he’s found a supplement that he thinks will help me, and that I should eat a mostly raw food diet. He takes the time to list all the ingredients he’d put in his own breakfast smoothie that very morning and which would be good for me to incorporate into my diet.

I take down the supplement name, thank him, and work my way off the phone.

The euphoria brought on by the mellitin and the apamin in the venom has worn off. This was a one time deal, I think with disappointment. It did feel a little too good to be true.

I’ve been down the supplement path before. I’ve been down the raw food path, too. I wanted the bee venom cure. I take a deep breath and let it out with deliberation. I’ll have to start over again in the morning. Rheumatologists. Health care assistance. General Practitioners. Drugs.  

I get in bed and pull the covers up over my shoulders. Wounded and sad, I cry for the pain in the world. I cry for the circle of life. I cry a little for myself. And I cry for the bees.

Where Have All the Summers Gone

September 7, 2014 – Where Have All the Summers Gone

I've started to hear people say things about how glad they are that fall is nearly here. They've begun talking about pumpkin spice lattes and Halloween decorations while I wonder where my summer went. I've lost the sense of the seasons. This has been a problem for me this whole year. For once, winter was too short. Spring I handled begrudgingly, sloshing through the melting snow of the Wyoming wilderness and cursing the rising temperatures. But then I blinked and spring was gone. When summer rolled in, wasting no time, I had no specific goal for it except to avoid the Texas cocktail of heat and humidity.

With that in mind, I went northwest. I spent a month of summer in Oregon, watched fireworks from the top of a hill on the Fourth of July, cooled my feet in the river, grilled zucchini and mushrooms on an open fire, drank blended icy lemonade on the back porch with sweat beading designs along the contours of my face. All those were summery things to do. But in retrospect they feel like brief moments from some past life, some past summer long ago.

Maybe this is because I got lost in the time between library visits. I got so wrapped up in reading about history that the future too quickly became the present then the past. All too soon, I returned my stack of library books and bid goodbye to Oregon.

By invitation I gypsyed on to Tennessee. I braced myself for the inevitable heat, humidity, and mosquitoes that come with Southern living. It wouldn't be Texas, not nearly so hot, but I prepared myself for the worst. I was pleasantly surprised. Summer in Nashville has been the pianissimo to forte fortissimo crescendo of the cicada song, the background hum of crickets. Thunderstorms and dark-edged clouds. Soft breezes that shift the humidity into ghostly, nearly tangible forms. Dragonflies hovering over fresh cut grass. Mornings spent on the front porch steps with the kitty for company. More books read. Day passing into new day.

Summer has vanished as I’ve come to grips with my year-long existential crisis and become slowly reacquainted with hope. Hope for all kinds of things. Leonard Bird in Folding Paper Cranes said, “Hope is everything.  …hope is a process, albeit not always a logical one. Hope is integral to the psyche.”

And maybe the psyche is integral to this fragile, beautiful thing called life. Maybe it's even simpler than that. Maybe it's as simple as the phrase I picked up from my dad in which he says, “Where there's life, there's hope.” It’s just a matter of recognizing it.

Maybe it’s as simple as knowing that this summer might be well gone, but there will be another one. And another one after that. Summer is vanishing, there will be pumpkin spice lattes and the observance of Halloween, and I’m okay with that. Fall has its charm. Summer may disappear, the seasons will change, and I'm already looking ahead for winter to come.

The Con Game

July 9, 2014 – The Con Game

Writing a book has been compared to having a baby. There’s the idea's conception, incubation, and eventually (and hopefully) the birth. My experience has also included postpartum depression. After months or years of work, after the research, the writing, the editing, the critiques, and the revision of the editing, the completion can be hard to handle. Of course there’s an initial relief and joy. I’ve finished! I’ve done it! It’s a book! But then reality sets in as I write query letters and send them out to potential agents. Reality bares its teeth and shows its mean streak as the inevitable rejections come rolling in. The daunting task of beginning a new project, of starting that whole process again from scratch is not so easy with reality breathing down my neck and whispering horrible publishing statistics in my ear. Maybe there will never be a payoff.

I finished a book just after the first of the year. In the past, before starting the next big thing, I’ve given myself a few weeks as a vacation from writing as a reward and as a way to recharge my creativity. In the past I’ve recovered from my post project depression without much ado. In the past I’ve been excited to begin writing again.

This year was different.

A series of unfortunate events, one after the other, rocked my emotional equilibrium and scared away the voices in my head. Any one of the events on their own would have been easy to forget, but altogether they felt hard to ignore. I’ll get over it, I’ll be fine, I reassured myself. But time fell down on its job of healing wounds. Time passed by. A month and then two were gone. I played ball with Oscar the dog. I read. I babysat. I cleaned house. I did yard work. I cooked. On April Fools’ Day, I left for Wyoming to caretake a secluded, wilderness property. How ironic, I thought, to finally be in the perfect, undisturbed location for writing and not have any stories to tell.

For the first time in my life there weren’t words streaming into my head like a radio set on scan. No character voices arguing with each other or me. Just a blank quiet interrupted by “normal” thoughts. What will I eat for lunch? I hope the coyote shows up today. I need to do some laundry.

The scariest part of this was that I didn’t even seem to care that the stories, words, and characters were all gone. Apathy is a horrible thing. I didn’t force it away.

 

“Do you think you’ll write again?” my mother asked me on the phone after reading one of my terse and phlegmatic blogs.

“I hope so,” I said. I didn’t know. Most of the time I didn’t care except to ask myself, If I’m not a writer, what am I?

Then finally, on April 18, I made my first non-blog journal entry since… I don’t know when. I wrote: It’s as if my soul has been breathed back into me. I want to write about being the White Witch—always winter and never Christmas, of the gorse bushes (what else would they be?) growing up out of the snow along with the red reeds. I have no idea what this stuff is.

Then the silence came back. But it wasn’t as empty, it wasn’t as hopeless. My thoughts had room for growth. Maybe. At some time in the future.

I began to play with an idea. I gave a character a name. Then I fell back into the silence. I left Wyoming and went to Oregon. Back in civilization where the libraries are, I began to read. Tentatively, as if afraid to commit myself to the work, I began to call that reading research.

Last week I read a friend’s blog. At one point she says, “Recently—like within the last five years or more—I’ve had a bout of what I’ve been calling writer’s block, but, in all actuality, I think it’s more of a loss of self-confidence where writing is concerned.”* It was then that it hit me. I’d lost my confidence. At some point I’d traded the brash belief in myself, in my writing, and in the inevitability of good coming from hard work for a jaded and cynical outlook. I’d lost my sense of humor which happens to be directly linked to my creativity. I had a severe case of despair.

But, as G.I. Joe said, “Knowing is half the battle.” So I’ve decided to run the ultimate con game on myself. A confidence game where I con myself back into confidence. A confidence scheme so good that I trick myself into writing and discover that I love it again. Because after all, writers write.

*Read Kari's full post here: http://kariwolfe.com/doing-regain-writing-confidence/

The Art of Decompression

June 30, 2014 – The Art of Decompression

It’s early summer in Oregon. The garden spiders are still infants, the clouds only break after two or three days of steadfastness, and the nights cool themselves off with light, chill breezes. I’ve been here twice before. Once in the fall, and then again last summer. It’s a place where time seems to stand still and sleep comes easy. A natural transition point from wilderness isolation to peopled places.

That’s what I’d thought when planning my summer. But after nearly nine weeks of being a city of one, I’ve come to a town of 58,000 and the shock of that contrast throws my adaptation gears into high motion. I had no memory of it being so loud. The place I’d remembered as quiet after leaving the bustle of international travel and then Dallas, suddenly roars with noise. Traffic, the airline flight paths tracing through the sky, the helicopters, the long, drawn out horn of the trains, human voices, sirens, slamming doors, the whir of passing cyclists. All the background sound that humanity creates is a far cry from the noise I’d so recently lived with. The rushing of the river, the creek’s chirping, the shrill warning call of the ground squirrels, the rustling wind in the trees.

I feel a little like a deep sea diver stopping along the rope to decompress on my way up to the surface. If I go too fast I’ll get the bends. If I go too slowly I’ll run out of air. What I wonder is, can I stay in the depths? Or, in this case, go back to the wilderness? Would more solitude aid or disease my already reclusive soul? Henry Thoreau made it work.

It’s not that I’m anthropophobic. I’m not. But I’ve found that I crave the loudness of nature over the silence of cities. That I understand the eat or be eaten mentality of animals more than the money-driven aspirations of people. That I like being alone.

This is all true. It’s also only one aspect of a complex personality. My own. For additionally, I want to observe people, behavior, actions, passions, and motivations. I want to visit new places and make new (human) friends. I want to eavesdrop on conversations and spy on interactions. I want to spend time with the people I love. All these things become difficult when I’m living by myself in an isolated valley.

I go up to the next knot on the decompression rope and glance at my watch as I wait for the inert gas in my blood to dissipate. It’s now late June in Oregon. The spiders are perfecting web design. The clouds give way to blue sky and sun more often than not. The nights are playing with temperature control. I spend a lot of my time in the backyard, as I’ve always done when I’m here. It’s a world filled with insects, plants, the occasional cat, and the sound of wind chimes. Maybe not so far removed from the wilderness. Just beyond the fence, is that other world. The world where I can walk to the library and bring home stacks of books to research an idea I have. The world where fresh fruits and vegetables are only a mile or two away (though having to pay for them is a bit more painful than simply walking back to the Lodge from the root cellar with a bag filled with food). The world where it’s easy to make or receive phone calls. The world that’s the stepping off point for my next adventure. 

 

I go up one more knot. 

I wait. 

The art of decompression is the art of going back and forth between two different worlds and not being destroyed by either one.