Mary Sunshine versus Gloomy Eeyore

In the same week my book club handed out our March read, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks---a story involving a woman who died of cervical cancer---one of my Gathering Girls pals announced that she has stage one cervical cancer. That announcement came within days of me reading, “Doctors examined her inside and out, pressing on her stomach, inserting new catheters into her bladder, fingers into her vagina and anus, needles into her veins.” How's that for dark-side serendipity? In my friend’s case her lady parts had been removed a month prior but at the time she was being vague about the reason for the hysterectomy and dumb me, cancer never entered my mind. It wasn’t until she’d had the first of six chemo infusions that she was ready to talk about the “C” word to anyone. She had to process the information herself first, she said. 

Other than my dad who died of lung cancer in 1999, I’ve never known a single person with cancer and over the seven months between his diagnosis and his death, Dad often doubted that he actually had it. He choose not to get any treatments and other than being on oxygen his life didn’t change much over those months except my brother and I set up a share-care schedule to give him a lot more oversight and help around his house. My friend’s son and daughter have also stepped up to the plate to give her the kind of support that anyone in that situation couldn’t help but be grateful for and proud to get. Or maybe mothers just expect that kind of pay-back as their due and why not. I’ve never been a mother but I’ve seen enough of them in action to know how much time and energy goes into raising good kids. 

All of my Gathering Girls pals have kids and all but one of them lost their husband’s when their kids were young and they never remarried. The ‘but one’ lost her second life-partner last year but he'd been living in a nursing home a long time. Sadly, I doubt our little social group will still be around in five years. One lady is diabetic and does dialysis at home, another has Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, a third has been known to pass out for reasons the doctors can’t pin-point, one lives with chronic back pain and, of course, there’s our newly anointed cancer patient. I’m one of the two left, and neither of us has serious medical issues going on. But at our ages, we’re only a fall away from a broken hip and ending up in a nursing home like a woman I asked about recently who was absent from the monthly lecture series. (Her kids sold her condo so she can't go back and she was such an active, vibrant woman.) Egads, I'm doing it again! I'm borrowing trouble from the future, but I do wonder if I'm doomed to wander the earth looking for new friends like Eeyore looking for his lost tail. Am I going to be that person who hangs around the lobby of a senior-care facility with an invisible sign around my neck that reads: Will you be my friend?

On the other hand, I love how Winnie-the-Pooh tells Eeyore, “You can’t stay in your corner of the forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.” It’s basically the same thing Ann Landers told me when I wrote to her advice column back in my twenties when I thought I’d never meet my forever-guy. I could probably find her letter to quote accurately if I bothered to look in my old diaries but as near as I can remember she said, “Get out and do things you enjoy doing and it will happen.” So I signed up for every leisure time class I could find and I joined a bowling league. The rest is history. And then a few years ago my forever-guy died and I was off again, looking for friends. This time down at the senior hall and the Gathering Girls group was born. Like Eeyore rebuilding his house in the forest that keeps getting knocked down, we have to keep rebuilding our social circles. It never stops. I wish I could see that in a sunshiny way but I can't.

Eeyore’s Poem (by A.A. Milne)

Christopher Robin is going.

At least I think he is.

Where?

Nobody knows.

But he is going –

I mean he goes

(To rhyme with “knows”)

Do we care?

(To rhyme with “where”)

We do

Very much.

Christopher Robin was presumably going off to school but the lesson in the story could apply to any loss of friendship or love. Back when I first set up this blog I found that lesson in the Winnie-the-Pooh quote that is at the top of this page: “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.” Little Miss. Mary Sunshine couldn’t have said it any better. But today it’s raining in my Eeyore-like world. Processing the “C” word---even in others you care about---can do that to you. ©

Here I go Again!

 

This past year and a half since we formed my Gathering Girls group, who’ve been meeting twice a month, I’ve been happy with my social life. Throw in a couple of lectures, the Lunch and Movie Club, an occasional Red Hat Society tea, my monthly book club and I’ve had enough contact with the outside world to keep me from turning into an eccentric character straight out of central casting. (Scene 2, take 4: As an old woman with wild white hair and wearing a ratty bathrobe wanders the street looking for lost dogs to hoard a hitman on the eighth floor pushes his mark out the window, the body landing several feet in front of the woman. She screams.) But things are changing. More precisely, our health is changing. One of the seven in our original Gathering Girls group has all but dropped out because she's on dialysis now. Two others have severe back issues effecting their mobility, one has breathing issues and another has digestive problems---all things that keeps them from roaming too far from home. And the oldest in the group keeps passing out for reasons her doctors can’t figure out. What used to be all seven of us getting together twice a month has dwindled down this summer to three or four and not always the same three or four. Nothing lasts forever and my inner Eeyore is retreating into the Gloomy Place in the Forest.

I know, I know, I’m mourning the loss of friendships before they’re even gone. I blame my own health scare for that…the one involving my failed elbow surgery from 1999 that I wrote about last month. I can live with the clicking sound of the erratic bones when I move my arm a certain way. I can live with the pain if it doesn’t get any worse. I’m learning how not to stress that arm and I can live with the plan the bone doctor and I cooked up to keep me out of surgery. (He’d have to cut off the bones in my lower arm and rebuild the entire elbow area---a long surgery, with a long rehab.) That’s our last Resort Plan. Since the anti-inflammatory drug he first gave me---prednisolone---helped so much his theory is that the failure of the screws in my elbow didn’t just happen and that I did something jarring recently to my arm that agitated the already messed up area. But you can’t stay on Prednisolone, so part of Plan A involves getting on a mild pain medication that I can do long term. I was happy with Plan A until the drug he prescribed came in the mail. Yikes, I’m not taking that stuff! Why risk a stroke---the number one side effect---because of a little pain? I haven’t called the doctor back to set up Plan B---the laser energy wave treatments---because I want to run all this by my internist at my bi-annual appointment next month, see if he has an alternate drug to recommend. The laser energy waves are not covered by insurance and they aren’t cheap.

It’s like everything in my life is lining up and pointing me towards a major reality check. It’s telling me I need to downsize again and move closer to my family while I still can do the work required. My hard earned social life is what mostly holds me to this end of town but how much longer will it be around? So this week I listed my first collectible on eBay in three years. I lived on eBay after Don died and I sold so much stuff it makes my head spin thinking about it. It was just one listing this week but enough to help me to relearn the ropes at eBay. Next up is a cap gun from the ‘40s that should sell for upwards of $700. It’s emotionally hard to sell off parts of your life, the prizes from treasure hunts. The day my husband found that cap gun at a toy show, he was over the moon happy. The one he grew up with---the one that helped him and his brothers ‘win the west’---was lost in a tornado that wiped out the entire family farm. Yup, he spent his adult years searching for and buying back parts of his youth. It’s a common MO for toy collectors.

So here I go again! I’ve been on Zillow.com looking at condos and manufactured home parks and I narrowed down my relocation search area to a bedroom community that is in the path that my nieces and nephew take when they come out of the boondocks to occasionally shop the malls on the south end of town. (I'm on the northern edge of town with over a million people in between here and there.) I’ve already found a knitting club and a library book club in the area and if I end up in a manufactured home park they both have a 24/7 pools and workout facilities. I could probably start a movie and lunch club in a park like that. But picking a condo or park has to also work for Levi. I won’t move without him and the last time I went through this 'gotta-move thing' they wanted to interview Levi before they'd even let me put an offer in on a condo. Stopped me cold to the whole idea of moving. Over the next few weeks I’m going to tour the two parks and several condo communities in my target area, talk to managements to rule them in or out for Levi before getting serious about shopping listings for sale within them. If the places in my target area get ruled out I’m going to throw a mini pity party before regrouping my brain cells. I feel like Eeyore setting off to look for a new tail, hoping that by this time next year I’ve found one. Except that Eeyore isn’t known to be an optimist, is he. ©