Am I Lying?

May 8, 2013 at 7:14 pm (Chronic Pain, Disability, Hospitalizations, Living, Living With Chronic Illness, Mental Health, The Journey Towards Diagnosis) (being of use, being the new kid, choice, chronic illness, day to day living, dealing with detractors, depression, disability, divorce, elementary school lies, existing, getting out of the house, Gods, infection, is del tashlin lying, Johns Hopkins, living with disability, Loki, lying, lying to yourself, medical advocates, mental health, metal leg stories, Ninja, outreach, pain, telling the truth, wound vac)

It’s been a difficult time. This past trip to Johns Hopkins has left me running on very low energy. There’s been a lot of sleeping, a lot of powering down, a lot of what I call “spoon banking”, times where I purposefully go into low energy mode because I have a lot of high energy commitments coming up, and I want to feel as good as I can when they happen. I’m looking at one of them this weekend, going to an event I’m kinda nervous about for a lot of reasons.

It’s been hard. The wound VAC experience hasn’t been as wonderful as no one told me it would. Basically, to be a little graphic, three times a week a nurse comes to my house to rip out foam that’s been stuck inside my wound, under negative pressure, which has partially adhesed to the wound. It hurts, each and every time, and it was only my mentioning that they used lidocaine when I was in the hospital that the nurse even thought of it.

I’ve started many blog posts, both for here and my other blog, but none of them have grown into anything worth posting. I usually only have a few paragraphs in me before I start to fade, or when all the drugs I’m on kick in and I get all fuzzy and it becomes very hard to focus. I know that people are interested in what’s been going on, have been waiting to hear how I’m feeling and how I’m recovering, but I don’t know how to make a meaningful post out of ‘Ow, sleepy, more ow, more sleepy.”

But even when I’m not actively blogging on a regular basis, I still do check in with WordPress. I read some of the other blogs I subscribe to. If I feel like I need a kick in the pants, sometimes I took at my stats. Mostly I just look at the numbers as they slowly decrease – and that makes sense, as less people read my blog when I’m not writing anything – but I also enjoy reading the search terms, the phrases that people put into search engines that lead them to my blog. Most of the time I find them either educational (I may actually write more about my experiences about both panniculectomies and hernia repairs, as many people come here looking for information about them), or humorous. My most favorite of all time is “If I eat a crow, will I get sick?”, which I assume lead the person to my post about going gluten free.

This week, however, I had a search term that made me ponder. I read it, and it made me think. It said, very simply, “Is Del Tashlin lying?” (I added the capitalization to my name.)

I am not as surprised as you might think I am. I have detractors, and I’ve written about them before. I’ve always been the kind of person that people either really like or really hate; very few people meet me and think, “eh, whatever”. I never delude myself into thinking that there aren’t people out there who have had extremely bad experiences at my hands, or reading my words, or being a part of my life. I know I’ve hurt people, I’ve alienated them, I’ve done or said something that made them think I’m a terrible person.

I honestly believe that’s true of just about anyone. In fact, sometimes it’s easier to find people who think a specific person is a terrible, awful human being, than it is to find someone to stand up for them and speak to their strengths.

When I first met the now STBX, I asked around about him. I didn’t know him very well, and we didn’t have any friends in common, so I was hoping to find someone I could trust who would calm my fears about dating someone so far outside of my social circle. And as the story goes, he had a few friends who I knew tangentially through others (gamer geek circles tend to overlap) who told me he was a stand-up fellow, and I decided to date him. He even admitted to me on our first real “date” that he had cheated on his first wife. I took that to mean that he was willing to be honest with me about both his strengths and his weaknesses, and that was attractive to me. I admire someone who is willing to offer up a full picture of who they are when you’re starting to get to know them. Usually, we’re too busy trying to put our best foot forward, to look as attractive as we can, in hopes of roping the suckers in. It meant a lot to me that he was so honest. It gave me hope.

And before we jump to the end of the story, there was definitely a middle. There was struggles and successes. I refuse to lock all of my good and uplifting memories of our relationship into a box and only focus on how things ended. I am doing everything within my power to continue to see him as I did in the beginning; someone who is neither all-bad or all-good, but a complicated person with as many successes as failures in his life.

In that vein, I’ve asked my lovers, family, and others close to me to keep their thoughts and feelings about the separation to themselves. I have asked them to be civil with him and his new family when they find themselves in social situations with them. Even though many of them are as hurt as I am, feel personally betrayed by the whole situation, because they bought into much of what they saw and felt about him as being not just a good partner for me, but a good person in general. But I think part of what makes that complicated, is that we all try hard to see our friends and family-of-choice as being generally good people. We try to downplay the parts of them that we don’t agree with, or aren’t as pretty or good or civil. How many times have you been in a relationship where you’ve done something to hide your partner’s lesser qualities? I think we’ve all been there, whether it was me explaining away the rampant anti-social behavior of my first husband, making excuses for the anti-semitism of another lover, the untreated alcoholism of yet someone else, etc. I don’t claim to be perfect, and I don’t date perfect people either.

In fact, when I fall in love with someone, I try as best I can to fall in love with their weaknesses, their imperfections, the things that most people would see as negative. I don’t go rooting around looking for them – I know they’ll show their face in good time – but when they become apparent, I open my heart even harder and tell myself that if I’m really in love with this person, I’m in love with all of them – even the parts that embarrass me, or that aren’t socially acceptable, or the parts they hate the most.

Sometimes this can be healing: I’ve loved many people’s bodies when the owner of that body couldn’t. I’ve loved people’s fight with their sexual orientation or gender identity. I’ve loved them as they made choices that would turn out to be bad for them, or bad for both of us. I strive to love beyond just the good parts, the hidden parts; to me, that’s the ground where real intimacy lies. When you can look into someone’s inner monsters and tell them they are loved.

How does any of this have to do with whether or not I’m a liar?

I used to be a really big liar. Growing up, lying was like breathing. I remember telling kids in the new school I found myself in, 4th grade, that I had a metal implant in my leg. Whenever I felt ignored or left out of something, I would go to one of them I had spun this tale to, and would say something like, “My ‘ML’ hurts!” and they would immediately leave whatever they were doing to spend time with me.

I find that story funny now, for somewhat obvious reasons. Now a days, I am terrified to talk about the depth and breadth of my disability, specifically for many of the reasons that I lied about it when I was 11. I don’t want people to be my friend out of pity. I don’t want people to stay away from me because my chronic illness makes being my friend/lover more difficult. I don’t want to shake the “I’m in the hospital” banner too often, lest it start to feel like a child crying “wolf”, and not being able to rally support when I really need it.

I also had to face a big challenge from Loki during my shamanic crisis. One of the things He demanded from me was that I never lie. I can bend the truth, I can embellish for storytelling purposes, I can avoid talking about something or omit details: some people see these things as equitable to outright lying. And maybe it is. But the promise I made was that I would never say something that was out-and-out untrue.

I am not perfect. When I am upset, especially when I am in an argument, I am apt to say whatever comes to mind in the moment, including things that are said merely to wound the person hearing them. Frequently, these things are untrue. In the moment, I find it extremely difficult to hold back from doing that; my passion takes over and my desire to hurt the person who is hurting me takes over. I hate it, it’s a part of me that I see as imperfect, a part of me I would hide from people if I could.

I sometimes know what I have to say in order to get a certain response. People who see me in the hospital sometimes comment that maybe the reason I run into problems with pain management is because I can look at a doctor and calmly tell them I’m in 9 out of 10 pain. I’m not crying, or rocking back and forth, or breaking down. I can be emotional about some things, but pain is no longer one of them. I deal with pain so often, almost always, that it is totally possible for me to truly be in excruciating pain and still have a calm demeanor. With these new bandage changes, I would be completely wrecked every other day if I let the pain take me to such an emotionally rendered place. I need to stay stoic so I can get up, go on living my life. If I let all the pain I feel all the time control my emotional state, I would very likely never get anything done ever, and would spend every single day in bed falling apart.

That’s part of what has made the last two weeks especially difficult for me. I’m not far from that. The bandage changes are Monday/Wednesday/Friday, first thing in the morning, and I find that at least for now, those days are basically “survival” days. I’m happy if I do more than just watch streaming video and use the bathroom those days – feeding myself is a victory. This weekend will be a test, to see if I can heal enough from Friday’s change that by Saturday, I can have a little fun and teach some classes. I’m totally up for the challenge, and I have to be: sometimes wound VAC treatments can last more than three or four months, and I have a very deep, very big wound. On the brighter side, I am showing some small signs of healing already, but it’s not going to be a short journey. I will be working in and through this for a long time, and I know that I am going to have to start making those days more productive if I’m going to get through this mentally.

I understand that I could choose to take more time off, to decide that this isn’t going to get any better and just close myself down until the wound is better. The problem is? I just did that, from August to February. I don’t want to do that anymore. I have a strong emotional and mental need to get out of the house, to get back to a semblance of a normal life, or as much of one as I can handle. I know I can’t be a superhero all the time, and that I will have to make choices all along the way to remind myself that I’m still not “well”, whatever that means these days. But I refuse to just sit in my house and feel sorry for myself and my pain for a year or longer. Seven months was enough.

I also accept that this is the new normal. I know a lot of people use the idea that “someday things will get better” as a way to keep their spirits up and hope alive. I have learned, through the last year’s experiences, that saying that to myself is lying. I struggled in my marriage to remind my spouse that there was no magical day coming when I would no longer have chronic pain/illness/disability, that there was no magic doctor out there waiting to give me a magic diagnosis that was going to fix everything. To me, where I am in the process, that sounds about as realistic as winning the lottery and marrying royalty and living in luxury for the rest of my life. I know that’s not my road, I know it in my bones, and I refuse to let anyone around me live in that illusion, so I have to start with myself.

I have to accept each moment as it is, not as I hope it could be, or how it might be someday. I have to accept that even if the wound VAC does what it’s supposed to and keep me from getting any more abscesses, it doesn’t mean that I won’t still have chronic pain, worsening diabetes, diminishing mobility, etc.

When I was in the hospital this last time, someone I’ve been kinda sorta flirting with came to see me. That was a big deal to me, because I still struggle with being completely open with potential lovers about the reality of my health situation. My STBX really made me gunshy about that; I don’t want to feel like I’ve sold someone a bad bill of goods by convincing them I am more healthy/painfree than I reall am, but at the same time, I don’t want them to think that every single day of being in a relationship with me will be about doctors and hospitals  and medical devices. It was hard for me to have my crush there, but it was also important. I needed to know that they understood that this is an integral part of my reality now; that for me, being in the hospital is a somewhat “normal” event, rather than the earmark of an emergency. I needed them to see what it’s like to wait for days as doctors try to figure out what they’re going to do, which is very unlike the image we get from television that doctors are obsessed with just your case and is putting all of their resources towards you until they have an answer. There’s a lot of hurry up and wait in the world of dating someone with a chronic illness.

It’s hard, because in some ways it’s like leading the conversation with your inner monsters. You don’t get the option of hiding it, or waiting until something happens to reveal what makes you less than perfect. From the moment you spend more than a few minutes with me, my imperfection is brutally honest with you. It’s there, in a way I can’t lie about.

Am I lying? Man, I wish I were. I wish I had the luxury of making all this shit up, when in actuality I’m in great health and having a wonderful time day to day. I wish my life was full of all the things I wish I could have, the things I expected I would be doing at this age. I wish I could go out tonight to a bar, have a few drinks, hang out with my friends, and go dancing. I wish I could create a world where this wasn’t my day to day existence, believe me.

But I will always have detractors. I will always have people, for whatever reason, who feel the need to either highlight the honest imperfections I have (which I don’t mind so much), or make up shit to make me look bad (I mind a bit more). But in the end, the only weapon I have to win something like that is to keep on keepin’ on, living my life as honestly as I can, and prove them wrong by just being as open and honest as I can.

So in case you Googled “Is Del Tashlin lying?”, the answer is yes. Every day, Del Tashlin is downplaying how much pain he is in. He is pretending to be totally okay with all of his chronic health problems, and that his disability never depresses him or makes him angry. He lies to himself, all the time. But to you? That’s up to you to decide. Google won’t know the answer.