Lately it seems that I spend a lot of my time worrying.  I tell myself I’m not going to obsess about my heart rate and then I check it twenty times a day.  I worry it’s too slow.  I worry it’s too fast.  I worry, if it seems to be beating steadily, that something will go wrong.  I worry that the medication will stop working.  I worry about what we’ll do if the medication stops working.  If I’m feeling good, I worry that I’ll stop feeling good.  If I’m feeling bad, I worry that means that another episode is on the horizon.  I’m spending so much time obsessing and worrying I feel like I’m not doing much living.

For the record, my heart rate is fine and my heart is functioning normally.  My heart is healthy and my heart rate is strong and steady.  Yes, sometimes it is faster than others, but it is no faster than anyone’s heart would be if they were exercising or undergoing stress.  The medications I take seem to be doing the job admirably well.  Now, if only they could give me something to shut off the worry gene, everything would be golden.

They say that when you have a lesson to learn the teacher shows up.  I guess, in this case, afib showed up to teach me that I can’t control everything.  I have to learn to go with the flow and deal with things as they come.  A very wise friend gives me this advice often, and I want to take it, but I also want to say “yeah but”.  As in “yeah but that’s easy for you to say, you’re not dealing with this.” Or, “yeah but, you don’t have almost 5,000 dollars of debt from unexpected hospital stays.”  Or, “yeah but, I’m doing this all by myself and there are times when I get scared”.

The reality of the situation is I can’t control this.  I can do everything right, lose weight, take all my medications precisely on time, avoid stress, exercise to make my heart stronger, and think positively, and it might still happen again anyway.  There is no magic bullet, there is no special pill and there is no guarantee.  The thing is there’s no guarantee on anything in life, and I’ve been living my life as though I expect one.

I guess it’s time to take some chances and maybe trust a little in the benevolence of the universe.  Maybe, just maybe, if I believe that the universe wants me to have only good things, like good health, in my life, that’s what I’ll have.

Right now, this moment, my heart is healthy and functions perfectly with a strong, steady beat.  There’s no reason to assume that won’t continue.  So, from now on, I’m going to plan on good things happening and let the rest take care of itself.

As far as I’m concerned, that’s what settling or more is all about.

Yesterday I said I was going to try some relaxation techniques and concentrate on making myself less crazy.  I’ve been having a lot of trouble with the unknown lately.  I worry about what my heart will or won’t do all the time.  Sunday is always one of the hardest days for me.  I think a lot of that is because when I schedule things for the weekend they usually happen on Saturday.  So, on Sunday I’m left mostly to myself and I have a lot of time to think.  That can be a recipe for disaster.

Yesterday, which was a Sunday, was different.  I woke up and had breakfast and exercised.  Another of the things I discovered was that I wasn’t eating enough.  I’d been getting the shakes a lot which was contributing to feeling stressed.  When I eat a more substantial meal the shakes go away and I feel much better.   I think I took the whole eating better thing a little too far.  I’m now rounding out my meals a little better and I can feel a change.

I’ve also started putting the heart rate and blood pressure monitor away in a cupboard.  Before it sat right out on the coffee table and every time I got obsessive I would see it and take my blood pressure.  Good readings were comforting for a while.  High readings just ratcheted up the anxiety.  As a result of being somewhat obsessive, I decided to put the monitor away. The monitor only comes out when I want to take a reading, and I try to limit myself to one in the morning and one at night.  Again, that seems to help.

The relaxation techniques seem to help some too.  It’s a bit early to tell, but I tried some of the tension reducing techniques and I did feel less tense.  If nothing else, some of the techniques do serve to redirect my mind, which does help.  So I’d say that’s a win.

The one problem area now is sleeping.  I woke up last night at about 2:30 and immediately checked my pulse, which felt fast to me.  That kept me obsessing for the next two hours.  In the morning I checked my pulse with the monitor.  It was perfectly normal.  So, obviously, trying to sleep gives me too much time to think and obsess.  I guess I have to work on that next.

If anyone has any strategies for relaxation and/or derailing negative thoughts I’d love to hear them.  Part of settling for more is having a joyous life, and right now I don’t feel like I’m meeting that goal.

Lately, I’ve been having trouble sleeping. That’s not exactly a new thing for me, I’ve been an insomniac for most of my life. It tends to go in cycles, but the last week or so has been really bad. Until the last few days I was sleeping only a couple of hours a night. It really wasn’t fun.

I as concerned that the lack of sleep might have a negative effect on my health. Being tired all the time certainly didn’t encourage exercise. It also made me more prone to stress out about things. Fortunately, the lack of sleep didn’t seem to have an effect on my heart rhythm. That kept along as steady as a metronome. I’m grateful for that.

Here’s what I’m not so grateful for though. When the sleeplessness had gone on for a while, I e-mailed Regular Doc and asked about my options. I didn’t specifically ask for pills, I just asked what the possibilities were. The e-mail I got back said that I should try melatonin, which I have tried before, and which didn’t work, or I should schedule an office visit so we could discuss “lifestyle changes”.

I should say here that I’ve had some doubts about Regular Doc for a while. This is after all, the woman who let me wander around for three months before we found out by accident that I was in afib. She never seems to be current with the reports or med changes from Cute Cardiologist. Regular Doc also generally seems a bit scattered when I see her. I understand she has lots of patients, but I’d guess I stand out from the crowd a little, and I’ve certainly seen her more than most. You’d think she could remember at least the bare details.

In any case, I found her suggestion that we get together to discuss “lifestyle changes” a bit insulting. I’ve made a lot of lifestyle changes recently. I’ve adjusted to the fact that I have afib. I’ve undergone three hospital stays, without benefit of family support. I’ve adjusted to a lower paycheck when I miss work. I’ve lost twenty pounds so far and stepped up my exercise routine. I’m looking for a condo. I’ve worked at becoming more social. I’d say, right now, my life is all about change.

I’m not sure what really angered me about her e-mail, I’ve seen the lifestyle changes advice numerous times before. I guess, in this case, it just seemed kind of glib at a time when I really need people to recognize that I’m going through a lot of stuff. I don’t feel like my family recognizes that. I certainly know my employers don’t recognize that. Now, I feel like my doctor doesn’t either. That a bit disheartening.

I wrote a post on the second about how I had experienced an episode of Afib but it was now done and over.  That apparently was premature.  I woke up in Afib again the next morning and spent the next three days in the hospital.  It has been, needless to say, an interesting week.

One of the things I’ve find most preplexing about all this was something that I touched on indirectly in my last post.  My life can, if I let it, become defined by my health.  In other words, my life can, if I let it, become defined by something I can’t really control.  My body and my heart will do what they will.  I can take the meds, and eat exactly right, and exercise every day and lose weight and avoid stress and I may still have episodes of Afib.  That’s now my reality.

I’ll admit up front that I’m a bit of a control freak.  I’m also have a bit of magical thinking syndrome left over from my childhood.  When I was a kid I always thought that if I was perfect and did everything right my biological dad would stop drinking and my parents would be more responsible.  In reality my behavior made no difference at all.  In my head, I had the power to change the world if I could just do everything right.

So, fast forward 20 years, and I’m facing a similar situation.  I can, as I have been recently, do everything I’m supposed to do and still not get the result I want.  It may not be fair and it may not be right, but that’s how things are.  There’s nothing that can be done about that.

So, I guess what I need to do is learn to control how I feel about what’s happening, while accepting that whatever happens is going to happen.   I also have to stop thinking all the nonsense about “fair” and “right” and “perfect”.  Things happen, and it doesn’t matter whether I’m a “good” person or a “bad” one.  What matters is how I react to the situation.

The day I can internalize that belief pattern is the day I really will start settling for more.

Last week I had a stress test/echo-cardiogram.  It has been scheduled ever since I left the hospital and was supposed to tell us if anything else was wrong with my heart.  The good news is that the test came back fine.  No additional episodes of afib.  No blockages or problems.  My heart is still a bit enlarged, but that should subside as I lose weight and exercise more.  That’s all good news, and I was happy to hear it.

Since then, however, I’ve been struggling a bit.  Part of me was so focused on how to deal with these new health issues that finding out I don’t really have any new health issues has disoriented me a bit.  I’m also doing a bit of second guessing about the whole experience.  Were things really that bad? Did I really have to be hospitalized and go through all the attendant stress?  Was it really all worth it?

This whole experience has taught me a lot of lessons.  For one, I’ve learned that I need to form closer relationships.  I’ve been so focused on being independent that I’ve pushed people away, or neglected to form relationships that would be supportive when I needed support.  That’s something I need to correct.

I’ve also learned that my body is more of a friend to me than I thought it was.  For years I’ve always had a low level disdain for my body.  It itched, and broke out in rashes, and my eyes don’t work right, and my heart doesn’t work right and there always seemed to be problems.  Now I’ve learned that my body is much tougher and more adaptive than I gave it credit for being.  I put my physical being through three months of hell and came out the otherside none the worse for wear.  That’s pretty amazing.

Another lesson from this experience has been that I need to start deciding what I want my life to be and moving toward that goal.  I am healthy, and should stay that way, but I do already have some health issues.  I may have 50 more years to build the life I want, or I may have half that number.  Whenever my life comes to a close, I don’t want to have regrets about the things I didn’t try or didn’t do.   There are still a lot of things I want to experience. 

I guess, after any experience of this kind, there will be moments of happiness and moments of sadness.  It is hard to feel that you have changed and everything else has stayed the same.  That, I suppose, is part of what I’m struggling with at the moment, the feeling that I went through something momentous and everything should be different as a result.   Still, overall, I’m here, still breathing, and healthy. 

I’ve got to feel good about that.

As I write this, I have my sleeve pulled back and I can see the enormous bruise on my right forearm.  I have numerous smaller bruises too, and quite extensive bruising on my stomach from shots I was given there, but the bruise on my arm is the one that bothers me the most.  It looks as if someone grabbed me quite brutally and left a mark.  That isn’t, of course, what happened, but in some ways it feels as though it is.

Strange as it seems, it has only been two weeks since I checked in the hospital with an irregular heartbeat.  In that short a space of time it doesn’t seem possible that an entire life could change, yet I think it has.  Not, perhaps, in the outside essentials.  I still have the same job, I still live in the same place, I still wear the same clothes and talk to the same people.  So, in that sense, things are pretty much as they were.

The changes, and there are some, are on the inside.  In a paradoxical sort of way, I’ve come to value myself more.  My body, which I’d always rather disdained as weak and hard to deal with, kept me alive and unharmed in a situation that could have had grave consequences.  I’ve learned to love my body, warts and weaknesses and all, which is a very new feeling for me.  I’ve also learned to expect better for myself, which means I have to be willing to make some demands, or at least some requests, of my friends and family, something that isn’t easy for me.

I think the hardest part of this whole experience has been the bruises that can’t be seen.  The one on my arm, however alarming it may look at the moment, is already starting to change color and fade.  The bruises left by my hospital stay, bruises caused by being alone and scared, by realizing I have a condition which could have serious consequences, and by having to manage things by myself yet again, will take longer to fade.  It doesn’t matter whether the bruises were caused by my insistence on being independent, or by the carelessness of others, they are still there, and they will take time to heal.

If there is a silver lining to all this, and I think there is, it would be this:  I have learned from this experience, and I will make changes in my life.  My version of settling for more has never included settling for being alone.  It was brought home to me in these past weeks that alone is very much what I am.  What is comforting about that fact is the knowledge that being alone is a condition that can be changed and, if I’m serious about settling for more, is one that will be changed. 

On the 11th I wrote that I feared I might have CHF.  It turned out that wasn’t the case.  What I do have is something called atrial fibrillation.  Basically what this means is that my heart has a sort of epilepsy.  A normal heart receives instructions on how to beat from something called the sinus node.  The sinus node sends out impulses and the heart beats and pumps blood.  My heart was receiving impulses from many different places.  It couldn’t sort out the instructions, so instead of beating, the upper chambers just quivered.  It is a pretty dangerous condition, and I had, apparently, been walking around like that for a while.

The good news is that all of the bad things that could have happened didn’t happen.  I didn’t have a stroke or a heart attack.  I didn’t pass out while driving and crash.  The less good news, or the more challenging news I guess, is that I now have this condition for the rest of my life.  As of right now, my heart is beating normally.  I have medications, and will make lifestyle changes including diet and exercise that will hopefully keep things on an even keel.  There are no guarantees though.  My heart is now a three time loser, and who knows what could happen next.

When I started writing about settling for more, I didn’t really realize what I meant by that phrase.  Now I think I do.  I spent the last week in the hospital with a lot of time to think.  What I realized is that nothing is guaranteed.  I may live a lot more years and be perfectly healthy.  I may live a lot more years in uncertain health.  Anything can happen. 

What I’ve come to realize is that we only get one life.  God, or the Universe, or my Higher Power or whatever I choose to call it, gave me another chance.  It is up to me to decide what I do with that chance.  My heart is still hanging in there, doing the best it can, even though it is a bit battered.  It seems like it would be ungrateful of me to do any less.

I don’t generally say it this bluntly, but I’m fat.  Usually, when discussing my physical appearance, I say I’m voluptuous, or zaftig, or curvy.  I am all those things, I’m naturally built so that I will never be stick thin.  I will always have boobs and hips and curves, even if I get down to exactly the ideal weight for my height.  That’s just the way the women in my family are built.  Other than some minimal difficulty finding clothes that will accommodate this shape, I’m not unhappy with that.

It seems to me that I’ve always been overweight, but I know from looking at pictures of myself that this wasn’t the case.  The first four years of my life I was decidedly thin due to a heart defect.  Unlike most pleasingly plump baby pictures,  mine resemble nothing so much as a baby chimpanzee, all spidery limbs and big eyes.  Most of my pictures throughout grade school and junior high show a person who weighed about what she should for her height.  I was  a reasonably active kid, although I far preferred reading, writing and dreaming to anything that involved working up a sweat.  

If I had to pinpoint when the weight started to appear, I’d have to say freshman year of high school.  This, codincidentally, was also the year that I was first molested.   I’m not naive enough to say that one thing was solely the cause of the other, but it did play a part.  Fat is often about unhappiness and fear.   It is also about keeping unwanted advances, particularly sexual ones, away.  In this particular case, it didn’t work.  In later cases, it succeeded much better.

Over the years I’ve come to realize that being overweight has become both my excuse and my fortress.  Everything that doesn’t work in my life becomes somehow tied to my appearance.  Everything that scares me or makes me uncomfortable can be avoided because I’m fat.  I use my weight as a shield and a barrier.  I may not like being overweight, in fact I don’t like it, but I’m comfortable with it.  I’ve provided myself with a tidy excuse for everything I don’t want to face and don’t want to do.  I’d almost say I’d been quite clever, if I weren’t so unhappy in my fortress of solitude. 

I’ve suspected for years that another women lived inside the fortress I’ve made of my body.  She’s thin and sexy and funny and outgoing and fascinating.  She likes to do new things and go new places and she enchants and enthralls.  This woman is brave and bright and brimming with confidence.  She expects people to like and accept her, and she likes and accepts them right back.  This is the woman I want to be.  This is the woman I think I can be.  

The days of the fortress of fat are coming to an end.  Part of settling for more is becoming the best that I know I can be, which isn’t the person I am now.  I have a lot of fears and some doubts, and I don’t expect that this journey will be easy.  I only know it is a journey I have to take. 

In the next few days, I hope to set up a blog which will detail that journey in more detail.  If I had to make a guess I’d think that most of the issues that I will face as I tear down my fortress, and most of the reasons I built my fortress of fat in the first place, are reasons that are shared by others.  Hopefully telling the story of my journey will be of help to those people.  I’m sure it will be of help to me.

I’ve discovered that settling for more means recognizing when you are failing to work in your own best interests.  Being fat served me well for a long time.  It kept me protected when I needed it, and allowed me to feel safe when I wasn’t sure that safety was possible.  Now, however, the usefulness of my fortress has ended and it needs to be taken down.   I’m hoping something great will go up to replace it.

Fashion is not my thing.  I’ve never been a tomboy but, for most of my life I’ve been unable to master the art of dressing like a girl.  Give me something with ruffles and I’ll tear one.  I rip the hems out of pants.  Pantyhose invariably get a run.  Put me in heels and I’ll either (a) break one or (b) fall off them which will generally cause me to (1) sprain an ankle, (2) make a fool of myself or (3) do both.  

All my life I’ve struggled with how to dress.  I entered adolescence in the 80’s which was the age of big hair, shoulder pads and leg warmers.  There are pictures of myself that I probably should have burned long ago.  It should be noted that I tried to master the fashion rules of the era.  I wore shoulder pads and looked like a very voluptuous linebacker.  I wore tastefully draped scarves and ended up dropping one end in my soup.  I didn’t have the patience for big hair, unless you count the perm I got in 9th grade.  Given that I had copper red hair at the time, and my hair had plenty of curl to start with, I ended up looking like I was either getting ready to star in the musical version of Annie or to stand in for bozo the clown.  It was not a look I would recommend.

As I grew older I decided simplicity is best.  If my shoe closet were a wine list from which you had to pick by number it would read as follows:  (1) brown loafers, (2) black loafers.  I eschewed anything with patterns, glitter, sequins or ruffles.  I had several pairs of pants in neutral colors.  I had several tops, and fewer blouses, also in relatively neutral colors.  Cardigan sweaters for winter, linen jackets for summer.   Basically I subscribed to the Katherine Hepburn theory of fashion, find something that works, buy it in every color and don’t get fancy.

For the past several years that theory has worked pretty well.  I may not be the best dressed or most resplendant person in the room, but I’m neat and clean and reasonably color coordinated, and that works well for me.  Or it did.  As part of the whole idea of settling for more, I’ve been examining my wardrobe and also paying more attention to the clothing I really like in catalogs and the outfits other people wear that I really admire.  I’ve discovered I like draped shawls and sweeping scarves.  I’ve found several skirts that I think are very cute.  I admire shoes and boots with heels, although I still don’t imagine I could walk very far in them.  In short, I’ve discovered that I’d prefer to add a little more flair for fashion to my plain Jane wardrobe.

My problem now is that part of the reason I have always dressed the way I do is that I felt I couldn’t carry off anything else.  I always wanted to be one of those women who swept into a room looking unique and glamorous and undeniably sexy.  The inner me always wanted slinky black dresses and silk blouses and cashmere shawls, but was just afraid that the outer me couldn’t carry it off.  I guess I’m still afraid of that. 

For me, part of the journey of settling for more is being who I really am.  My gut is telling me it is time to try some different wardrobe styles, to dress more like the woman I want to be and less like the woman I think I am.  I probably will feel awkward at times, and I may even fall off my shoes and sprain my ankle, but I also might find that dressing differently makes me feel differently about my body and about myself.   If nothing else, it will certainly remind me that I’m a long way from that awkward teenager who used to drop her scarf in her soup. 

At least now, if I drop my scarf in my soup, I can laugh about it instead of feeling mortified.  Anyway you look at it, I’d say that’s progress.

My body did not come from the factory in great working order.  I was born with a heart defect.  My skin is extremely sensitive and I spent most of my childhood and adolescence battling eczema.  My eyes, I have been told, owe quite a lot to my brain, which somehow rewired things to let me see as well as I do.  Given that, with corrective lenses, my vision in 20/20,  I can’t complain about the migraines that sometimes occur.   I’ve had two open heart surgeries to correct heart problems and everything, knock wood, seems to be working well in that department.  I’ve also outgrown the eczema that plagued me when I was young and, with a strict adherence to non scented lotions and soaps, experience nothing but small breakouts. 

If this is starting to sound like the blog post of a hypochondriac, it isn’t meant to be.  If anything it is more a segue into a discussion of why I’m not a hypochondriac.  I have always been a firm proponent of mind over matter.  Some part of my body or another has been in revolt for most of my life.  If I gave in to all the itches, headaches, respiratory infections etc. that plague me, I’d be nothing more than La dame aux camellias wilting gracefully onto my bed with a consumptive cough.  I’ve always chosen not to be that person. 

Still, every once in a while my body throws up something weird, and I suddenly have a Physician’s Desk Reference in my head.  All I can do is catalog the latest possibilities, which become more dire by the hour.  Take the latest for instance.  Today, while changing from work clothes to something more comfortable, I noticed I have a dent in my leg.  It is on the outside of my left leg, right above the knee.  The skin is puckered inward, rather like someone had shot me with a bullet and left a scar.  The knee is not swollen or discolored, there is no bruise or particular pain, there is just a dent.  It is vaguely disconcerting.

 Of course, my first thought was blood clots and twisted tendons and horrible things.  Then I realized I’d been walking around all day without pain or difficulty.  If the tendon were twisted, I imagine it would hurt.  Same with a blood clot.  First, I don’t have and have never had a tendency to throw clots.  I’ve had enough procedures to know if I did.  Second, if it were a clot, it seems as though there would be some tenderness or discoloration around the site.  There is neither.

My best guess, if I had to make a guess, is one of two things.  Either that dent has always been there, and I just never noticed it before, or I’ve put a dent in my leg because I spend so much time with it propped up on my other leg, holding the laptop on which I am typing this post.  Neither supposition is impossible, and either is far more likely than the first dire scenarios I conjured up.

I guess part of settling for more is learning when my body needs care, and when I’m making mountains out of molehills.  Times when my body needs care would include last week when I went to the doctor after several days of a cold and after having what felt like an asthma attack.  That turned out to be a severe respiratory infection which can be cured with an inhaler.  I’m breathing easier, both because I have an inhaler and because I have piece of mind.   

Other times, like the dimple in my leg, I simply need to step back and get a bit of perspective.  Most likely the dimple will work itself out in a few days.  Possibly it won’t.  Part of settling for more is learning to treat my health as important, but not to obsess about it.

After all, I may be held together with scotch tape and glue, but I’ve made it this far.