p i x e l s c r i b b l e s – Page 11 – the thoughts and experiences of Heather Meadows

CHF Recovery: Day 2

Here’s what I did on Thursday, September 15:

Drank protein shake and took morning meds
Got dressed in workout clothes
Walked for 30 minutes, this time hiking down to the river
Sat on the couch and rested for awhile while talking with Mom and Connor on Skype
Fried myself an egg and made a piece of toast, still on Skype
Ate my second breakfast and finished the Skype call
Hung up the jackets I’d left lying on the floor yesterday
Took a shower and dressed normally (jeans and t-shirt, like yesterday)
Rested for awhile
Ate lunch (the second serving of the HelloFresh meal I made yesterday)
Rested some more (I thought about doing things but I felt tired)
Figured out what I could eat from Shane’s Rib Shack to stay under my sodium limit; went there with Sean to pick it up
Ate dinner and took mealtime meds
Watched 30 Rock
Wrote a couple very short stories
Took my bedtime meds and went to bed at 11:30

CHF Recovery: Day 1

Here are the things I accomplished on Wednesday, September 14.

Drank protein shake and took morning meds
Organized my closet a little (took the pile of jackets off my workout clothes)
Dressed in workout clothes
Went on 30-minute walk through neighborhood
Rested
Took a shower and dressed in regular clothes
Cooked a HelloFresh meal (it took three hours due to needing to rest throughout, but it came out great!)
Ate meal and watched Back to the Future
Set up MyFitnessPal with custom protein and sodium limits
Cleaned kitchen and started dishwasher
Napped for about an hour, until Sean came home and asked what to do for dinner
Relaxed while Sean made tuna sandwiches and creamed corn, since those things kept me under my sodium limit (I was pretty tired at this point)
Ate dinner and took evening meds
Watched The Clone Wars (finished the series) and otherwise relaxed for the rest of the evening
Took bedtime nutritional supplements and went to bed at 10:00

I left the jackets on the floor next to the hall closet. Never had the energy to hang them up. Sean thought this was hilarious.

Exercise: 30-minute walk, Sodium: 1923mg

Congestive Heart Failure, Take Two

That’s right, kids, I have congestive heart failure again!

Thursday night, September 8, I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep, but the pain and pressure in my chest was making it difficult to relax. I was also having trouble with breathing—air was going in just fine, but it felt like I wasn’t getting all of it, somehow. I’d had these symptoms for a few hours, and thought I was just stressed out (I have been stressed out a lot lately), so I hadn’t really done anything. But finally I asked my mom what she thought, and she told me to go to the ER.

I was given an EKG right off the bat and taken to a room in the ER pretty quickly. I spent several hours there, leaving only for a CT scan. They brought a portable X-ray machine right into the room, which was neat. I also had blood drawn and they took a urine sample. Since I was having trouble breathing, they put me on oxygen, which helped my chest pain a lot.

When the test results came back, they showed pulmonary edema. They decided to admit me at 4am, and got me into a room by 5:20. (It was now Friday, September 9.) I tried to sleep, but people kept coming in and waking me up. Eventually I was taken for an echocardiogram, which showed an ejection fraction between 25 and 30, just like the last time I had CHF. (I did not actually learn this until Saturday.) Later that same day I was taken for a cardiac catheterization, where they stick a catheter up the femoral artery to look at the arteries and heart. This confirmed that my arteries were fine and the problem was the heart muscle. It was also terrifying, because I had never had that done before, and I sort of started freaking out in the operating room. Thankfully, they gave me some sort of drug that made me very sleepy and blissfully ambivalent, and I didn’t feel anything thanks to the lidocaine.

After the cath I was finally allowed to eat. I hadn’t had any food since dinner the previous day, and dinner the previous day was a Lunchable because I was too stressed to cook anything. (I had at least had Shane’s chicken tenders for lunch.) Dinner was fantastic—I don’t know if it actually tasted that good or if it was just because I was starving. Due to the cath I was not allowed to raise my head, so Sean had to feed me, which was funny but also sweet.

One nice thing about this day in the hospital was that I was allowed to have cran-grape juice. It was delicious. Overnight someone brought me a bagel and some pudding because I was hungry, and that was good too.

The next day, Saturday, September 10, I was on the “cardiac diet,” which is low sodium and low sugar. Tastes as good as it sounds! Thankfully, I only had to endure one such meal, as I was released at 11:30. I will probably remember those cardboard pancakes for the rest of my life.

After being released, I basically tried to rest, as I was not allowed to drive or carry more than 10 pounds. I saw my doctor for an outpatient checkup on Tuesday, September 13. My instructions from her are as follows: 1) take my medication; 2) check my weight daily and call her if it changes rapidly; 3) get 30 minutes of moderate exercise each day; and 4) limit my sodium intake to 2000mg per day. I started with the exercise and sodium-watching yesterday, Wednesday, September 14. I’m using MyFitnessPal to track my weight and my food, and RunKeeper to track my walks. For now, I think walking is probably the best moderate exercise for me.

I cooked a meal yesterday. It should have taken about half an hour, but instead it took three hours, because I kept having to stop and rest. Having CHF is very frustrating. However, if I work hard, I will be able to strengthen my heart muscle and live normally again, so that’s my goal.

I am thinking I will make short posts each day to check off my accomplishments. Maybe I’ll include a note about how I’m feeling, maybe not. I just think it would be nice to have a record of things I did, to show my progress.

Anyway, there you go. I have CHF again. I was foolishly assuming that since I’m no longer obese, I wouldn’t be at risk for it anymore, but I guess I’m predisposed. This time it wasn’t even set off by an illness like last time; it was apparently caused by stress. So I may end up taking heart medication for the rest of my life. (A small price to pay to avoid hospitalization, though!)

The Book of Life Self-Knowledge Questionnaire

I stumbled across this questionnaire this morning, thought I’d take it and see what it thinks I am. Actually it seems rather accurate:

SHYNESS

Part of you is gripped by the fear that you’ll launch into something and completely mess it up. The upside of this is wise caution: people are indeed often too rash, whereas you know, by instinct, that holding back can save you. Probably, you feel shame and self-disgust a bit too much. But when you do feel in your element, you act with a wisdom and sensitivity never found in people with thicker skins.

AGGRESSION

One part of your character is anger in all its forms: frustration, outrage – and when anger is suppressed – bitterness, grumpiness, and bodily aches. Fundamentally, frustration comes from hope: you get upset because you expect your life will be more than a valley of tears. One way to deny aggression is to direct it inwards, as self-criticism. But you’re at your best when you acknowledge anger, and act it out clearly and in a focussed way, with honour.

PLAYFULNESS

You are good at seeing what’s funny, at relaxing and finding the pleasure of the moment. Play is random, whimsical, fantasy-driven behaviour which releases internal tension. Because it is detached from some pressures it allows you to act on weirder, perhaps neglected, parts of yourself. The downside is that it is no help in sticking with things that are not much fun but which need to be addressed. So it is well complemented by its opposite, Stoicism.

Recommendation for vendors at the Atlanta Ice Cream Festival

Sell sizes other than “huge”.

Seriously.

There are a ton of vendors at this thing. And it’s a festival about ice cream. Wouldn’t you want people to be able to try as many different options as possible?

Offer inexpensive “tasting” sizes so people can sample more of your flavors.

Sure, you can continue to serve up enormous mounds of ice cream in giant cups for people who want that. But give those of us who want to try more than one thing an option too. Please?

I don’t want to become a “member”, I just want to give you money

Don’t make my only option setting up recurring payments that “can be easily canceled later”.

Don’t send me a giant welcome packet with branded swag.

Don’t continually send me mail.

Don’t keep asking me to “renew” my “membership”.

Just let me make a donation, and then use that money to do whatever good thing your organization does.

That’s all I want.

Moving the goal posts

Hey so check this out.

Here’s what tab 3 of my 2016 writing spreadsheet looked like when my monthly word count goal was 10k and my stretch goal was 15k:

Buuuuuuuuuuut look what happens if I change the monthly goal to 2k and the stretch goal to 5k:

LOOK HOW GREAT I’M DOING

Stuff

Sometimes I come out of my depression enough to think about all the stuff I’m not accomplishing, and why that might be (gee, maybe depression? But also: I’m a lazy fuck).

This morning a friend was mentioning that they have fallen behind on their word count for the year, but that they’re not too far behind and they’re impressed they made it this far into the year without falling behind until now. I literally had nothing to say to that. Back at the beginning of the year I worked with them on creating spreadsheets that track word counts in a variety of ways, and I was really proud of my version of it, but I haven’t actually used that spreadsheet since February.

2015’s spreadsheet was broken up by month and required me to create blocks for each week and take up a ton of space:

2016’s spreadsheet was designed so I could simply enter anything I wrote into rows on the same tab:

and then the other tabs would track whether I was meeting certain goals. The second tab just checks to see if I have written anything at all in a given week.

Then the third tab tracks monthly goals. My baseline was 10k words per month, and 15k was a stretch goal. (Obviously I never met either of these.)

And finally, on the last tab, I just wanted to tally what kind of writing I was doing. There were no goals for this tab. I was just thinking it would be neat to see what projects ended up getting the most word count. I separated “ficlets” from “fanfic” because I wanted to differentiate between tiny stories (200-word drabbles, five-sentence ficlets) and short stories, even though my short stories tend to be so short that other people might call them ficlets as well (under 4000 words).

So yeah, the spreadsheet is pretty cool, and I get a certain amount of pride looking at it now, even though I barely used it for its actual purpose.

But the point is, I haven’t met any word count goals this year. I have written things beyond what I’ve tracked, but not much. Maybe I’ll go through and fill in this spreadsheet with everything I’ve written since February, but I’m not sure I want to see how little I’ve been writing.

I realize this is an extremely rough time for me and I shouldn’t expect myself to be perfect and shit, but I just feel like a failure. Most times when I try to start writing something I am filled with extreme reluctance. Occasionally I’m not, and something comes out. But I feel like I should just push through that reluctance and force myself to write things, and that because I’m not, I’m weak and lazy.

Loss

A week into my “Dad’s dying” visit home, my iPhone decided to stop working. Mom and I took it to the Apple Store, but they couldn’t make it work either. I had fortunately copied all the pictures off it earlier in the week, but that meant, since I don’t use iCloud for photos, that particular week’s pictures were unsalvageable.

I can’t remember if I had taken any pictures of Dad that week.

The next week, he died.

I took some pictures with my replacement phone, and those were saved. But when I finally got home and restored my phone from backup, I lost everything else I’d done during that time. Actually, I lost everything since December, since that was the last time I’d backed up the phone. No pictures, but notes I’d written. Text messages.

I keep thinking about how the last text messages with my brother Ben had been “You need to come to the hospital.” And how there were other texts, evidence of my trip to New York in January. And diary-type stuff I wrote in notes, gone forever.

You’d think I’d be used to losing things by now.

fucking

why did he die?

life was just happening like normal

and then suddenly it’s like

okay your dad’s dying

okay your dad’s dead

(you watched him die)

seeing a picture of a backyard, not even your backyard but close enough, makes you want to cry

mother’s day makes you want to cry

you think about father’s day coming up and making some sort of happy father’s day post with a picture of his cremains because that’s all that’s left, right? that’s funny, right?

all these plans, all these what-ifs, they weren’t supposed to be needed so soon

mom planning to move

no more backyard, no more basement, no more house

it’s all gone anyway, everything’s gone, everything’s changed

you said things you can’t take back and ruined it all

you want to erase this entire year, almost

no, you do, you want to erase it all, even the good stuff, because it’s overwhelmed by all the bad stuff

you’re so selfish

and everything’s about you anyway isn’t it

everything that happens to anyone else, you make it about you

specifically, about how you are Wrong and Different and a Failure

how you don’t fit in and never will

how you should disappear

but it’s not even about you, it’s about them, even when you’re hating yourself you’re fucking self-centered

and you think about how you are when you drive

and how arrogant you are with other things

and how you’ve been blaming it on inheritance, but it’s yours, those are you, you’re the one doing them

every day you choose to be pathetic.

Ugh

Nothing is normal. Everything’s different. Why can’t things just be normal?

Alone

I’m sitting in silence, the most complete a silence can get in this apartment—only the soft hum of the refrigerator and the whir of laptop and file server fans and the clacking sound of my own typing breaking the stillness. It’s so still, so quiet.

I’m alone.

On Skype, Sean’s status is green for online, and so is Kathryn’s. They’re here, but not really. Sean is at William’s, and Kathryn is hundreds of miles away from me, where she always is. Earlier I typed at length into Sean’s window about a story idea I am working on, but he didn’t respond. He and William are likely in a game. Kathryn is quiet, but available: she spoke first, and we spent some happy moments imagining what we might do if we were actually in the same room. I would like to watch The Last Unicorn with her. It’s been on my mind lately, and all weekend I’ve been listening to the soundtrack, and tonight I browsed screen captures and quotations and fan art and was brought nearly to tears several times.

Today was aimless; I did laundry and read and fed myself. I had planned to read Bloodline, the new Star Wars novel, but instead I read fan fiction. Both times I ventured out for food, the day was bright and beautiful, the sun blinding and the trees vividly green. The air was warm but not hot and there was a cool breeze and it was perfect. When I got home the first time I opened all the blinds and saw that our patio bistro set is completely coated in pollen.

I’ve been opening two of the blinds in the sunroom every day, for the peace lily. I just searched Google for “funeral flowers” because I couldn’t remember what it was called, and I scrolled past dozens of arrangements that were so obviously meant to stand near or on a casket, and then I started seeing names spelled out in flowers: Lee, Granma, Mum. So many Mums. And finally, Dad.

The peace lily was given to us for Dad’s memorial. We received several beautiful arrangements and plants. When I first came home, after he died, after the memorial, I didn’t bring any of them with me. I was sure I would kill it. But I soon went back to Kentucky because I wasn’t okay, and I stayed a little while longer, and when I came home again I brought the peace lily too. It’s big, and it looks good on my dining table in the sunroom.

There’s so little stability now. But I can take care of this plant, at least. Right now, it’s just me and it.

Untitled

I’m glad I gave Dad a backrub.

Not the one I gave him in the hospital, while he was staring wide-eyed at nothing, mouth open, breaths forced into him by a machine.

The one from the week before, when he sat up on his own on his couch and I sat next to him and rubbed his shoulders and back like I’d done so many times before, all my life, since I was a kid.

Don’t read this

This post is about how my dad died and it is not pretty and you should probably just avoid it.

Dad’s death was not quiet and calm and in his sleep. He stopped being able to breathe on his own so they put him on a CPAP–not a respirator, he didn’t want that. But the CPAP was the only thing allowing him to breathe, forcing air into him. And he stayed like that for hours while we all gathered to say goodbye. By the time we were all there he had been lying there staring at nothing for I don’t know how long, mouth gaping open. He never blinked. I don’t know if he knew the dog was there but I hope he did.

Then we had them give him morphine and take the CPAP off. And then he died. But it was an interminable death. Long moments would pass without breathing and then he would gasp again. He was still staring at nothing with his mouth gaping open but his tongue would move. Nothing else moved. When he gasped those breaths there was a pained croaking sound. AJ told him he could rest now. I didn’t say anything, except “I love you” a few times.

I don’t know how long it took but it was so horrible. Mom and AJ and Ben and Connor and I stayed in the room and everyone else stayed outside. I’m glad Logan stayed outside.

I feel like he was already gone by the time we gave him the morphine. But I still feel like we killed him.

After

“It’s so bright out!” Mom said as we walked out onto the pedestrian bridge leading from the hospital to the parking structure. “It seems like it should be nighttime.” She expressed the sentiment again later, as she turned the Explorer onto Conn Terrace towards Limestone. “It should just be dark.”

We took Limestone to Waller, crossed the railroad tracks, and turned left onto Broadway. It was late afternoon and the sun was directly in our eyes. “That folder in the visor is all Dad stuff, medical information and the handicapped sign,” Mom said. “You can take that down and flip the visor down. And we can just throw it all away when we get home.”

Broadway turned into Harrodsburg Road as we made our way back to Nicholasville, a route Mom has taken innumerable times over the past week, and months, and years. I unlocked my phone and told Sean and Kathryn that it was over and we were going home.

“There’s a place in Brannon Crossing called Legacy or something. We should call them,” Mom said. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t really like funerals.”

We finally got to the house and the couch was still at the end of the driveway. “If it’s still there in a couple days, we’ll take it to the dump,” Mom said. We went inside to where the adjustable bed from hospice, made up fresh that afternoon and never used, sat in the newly rearranged and cleaned family room. I put the folder on the kitchen table and dragged Mom’s luggage to her bedroom, where I threw all the syringes and masks and tubing and other medical supplies into a bag and then hid that bag away in the small guest bedroom, laid Mom’s clothes out on her bed, and put away the shirt and pants Dad was supposed to come home in.

“You’ve done everything,” Mom said, even though she was simultaneously putting away the clothes I’d laid out. She turned to the closet. “And there’s all his shirts,” and her voice almost turned into a wail, but she hugged me and drew a deep breath. “When Lee passed, family from Oklahoma came and took all the man stuff away,” she said. “I think that would be good. We can put everything in bags and give it to Cedar Lake Lodge. Do you think I should ask the boys if they want anything first?” I agreed that this was probably the best idea. “I just feel like I’m full of adrenaline,” Mom said. “Like I have to do something right now. But I don’t have to do anything right now.”

We left her bedroom and went into the kitchen and started dumping all of Dad’s medicines into the trash.