Acceptance and Letting Go

It’s day 14 today. I’m feeling a bit better physically, the plan is to go back to work on Monday. The mental blank is also receding, and unfortunately, negative thoughts have started to whirl around in my mind once again.

Last night was hard – I wanted to drink. I became so caught up in the idea that my husband ought to be looking after me better. He hasn’t really helped me much as he’s been too busy with work. So during the day, I have pottered slowly round the house, washing pots and cleaning in fits and starts, and going back to bed in between. The iron I’m taking is clearly working though, because I didn’t go back to bed at all yesterday. Progress!

I wanted to drink in the evening, because all my romantic notions seem to have been shot to bits. You see, I thought that due to my diagnosis in hospital last week, and because it could have been so much worse than it is (tumour markers are higher than normal, but not so much as to indicate cancer), I thought Mr W and I would feel so much closer. I thought that he would immediately realise just how much we mean to each other, and that this would in turn give me so much strength to get through even if we find that we are infertile. But no. Everything feels….so normal, so flat. I’ll have to have surgery – possibly more than once – to deal with what has happened to my insides. And for now, I feel uncomfortable and very aware of what is wrong. So I felt pretty rubbish last night.

But I didn’t drink, and I started reading. I downloaded a Wayne Dyer book (Real Magic) onto my Kindle app. As I read about opening yourself up to the idea of living at purpose, rather than at outcome (goals orientated), I started thinking. If there is a reason for me, for my life (which I seem not to have discovered yet), then to be open to that, to be receptive to understanding – or trusting, if I don’t understand it – then I have to let go of my idea of what my life should look like. After all, my thoughts about how my life ought to be have a fairly limited frame of reference. I see how others’ lives are and I think* that should apply to me too. Immediately reducing possibilities for myself, both of what I should be, and how I ‘fix it’ if it’s not happening the way I want it to.

Now, this sort of made the word ‘acceptance’ start rattling around in my brain. I don’t like the word; to me it feels negative. Like awful-tasting medicine that I’ve been told I must take. You wanted something else, but that’s wrong, wrong, wrong for you and you can’t have it. So here’s what you can have – suck it up. That’s what it feels like to me. BUT. If I think of it in terms of letting go which is almost like the flip side of the coin, it feels freeing, a release, a relief.

I said to someone the other day in a comment on their blog ‘just let go of the idea that you need to drink’ or something along those lines. I desperately want her to see that drinking isn’t all there is. Yes, it’s hard to be sober sometimes, but I think it becomes easier if I can let go of how I think my life should be. For example, I think I should be able to drink if I want to? Let that go, and there will be room for different thoughts, better thoughts. I think my husband should behave a certain way towards me? Nope. I’m making very narrow demands… I let it go (and I stop nagging!) and I leave room for something different and better.

Acceptance? For the moment I can’t cope with that, it seems. But looking at it from another angle, letting go might be just what I need to do. There may well be something better just around the corner that wont come into my life just by my thinking about it.

*We have a saying where I’m from, which is very apt: ‘You know what thought did? Followed a muck cart and thought it was a wedding.’ Mr W likes to remind me of this occasionally 😉

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Climbing mountains

Hi all. I haven’t been able to write for a few days now, because I haven’t had the energy. Let me start the story from last week…

On Tuesday I went to see the GP with pains in my side. I was worried about appendicitis, and also slightly worried about looking like a hypochondriac. I left work at 9:30am, with a cheery ‘I won’t be long’. Famous last words. The GP was great – very thorough. He felt that as my pain score had gone down to a 2 or 3 over the course of the weekend, that it could be self-limiting appendicitis – I assumed this meant that my body had a handle on any infection that was present – and he was deliberating whether or not to take a ‘wait and see’ approach. But I saw his mind change, and he reached for the phone to call a surgeon at hospital. Typing the letter of referral as he spoke, he then handed it to me and said they were expecting me. ‘When do I need to go there’ I asked, innocently… ‘This morning’, he said.

So I called work, again saying that I wasn’t expecting to be long??!! Managed to catch my sister before she went off out for the day and set off with her up to the hospital. After much waiting around, I was sent for an ultrasound scan, which showed I have two large cysts – endometriomas – on my ovaries, one of which is huge. Perhaps a shade smaller than my fist. Bit of a shock, that was. So they took bloods, I stayed in for three nights and had an MRI scan (the noisiest thing in the world, and I spent five or ten minutes beforehand quizzing the nurse about hydrogen atoms, electrons and that terrifying magnetic field – would my fixed brace behind my bottom front teeth REALLY be OK in there???) – which also showed a fibroid in my uterus, and, what is most worrying me, thickening of the fallopian tubes. Oh, and the blood tests showed anaemia, too, which could be the reason I was tired all the time and feeling very low.

The good news is, I was able to come home fairly quickly, as again my pain score is low. It’s a lot to come to terms with (my MRI scan results said at the top of the page ‘A very complex picture’!) and I was very tearful over the weekend. The doctors can’t tell me what this has done to my fertility, plus we don’t get the results of Mr W’s test until a week today. So that will have some sort of bearing on what treatment I’ll have, I think. If his operation was unsuccessful, I think they will be more aggressive in removing everything, rather than just seeing if I can cope with the cysts as they are. I don’t know fully, it’s hard to have a proper conversation with the consultant when there are two other people stood there saying nothing, and on the other side of your curtain are five other patients, nurses, healthcare assistants, random people from pharmacy etc etc. I think that’s why I just sort of took it on the chin initially, and it was only when my Dad brought me home on the Friday evening, I was in the house alone when he’d gone and I just lost it.

But for the immediate future, I’m waiting for a biopsy of the fibroid (‘Just take some pain relief an hour before you come in’ – great!) and trying to…well what? I’m not trying to do anything because even the smallest thing feels like climbing a mountain. I wonder if, because I now know I’m anaemic, I’ve surrendered to it. Instead of feeling wiped out but carrying on anyway – I’ve stopped fighting it. I’m sleeping so deeply, both during the day and at night. And I’m taking iron tablets three times a day so hopefully they will start to make me feel better soon.

Another good thing is, I have absolutely no desire to drink. Alcohol is nowhere. Mind you, I’m not really thinking about much at all anyway – my brain can’t cope with very much at the moment. I feel rather blank. That’s it, I just need to press publish, because I’ve gone blank again. <sigh>

Fail

Well that was a big fail.
By Friday afternoon I’d been feeling sooo wound up and I didn’t really know why. Not necessarily because of quitting the wine, but other things, life related things. My husband had been reminded by a friend that he had promised we would all go out to a local karaoke night on the Friday. He’d forgotten all about it and booked loads of work in on the Saturday morning so we couldn’t go in the end. But his friend was all ‘mate, you’ve let the side down! ‘ etc, and I guess that’s understandable if someone is letting you down… but I was so annoyed by the whole thing… that Mr W had expected I would just tag along in the first place. And then I couldn’t stop thinking that any kind of social event with us is about drinking, and I was fed up to death of having to consider all of that any time I want to quit drinking.

Also, nothing seems to be right at home. With Mr W being so busy at work now -his job is seasonal, it gets crazy busy in the winter- it feels like I get even less help at home with the general everyday stuff. Not that he helps much anyway,I might add. And we’re still in disarray after the loft conversion – his work seemed to get busy right after his recovery from the operation.

so I was sat at work on Friday afternoon, after a day of running  around whilst my colleague had been at the computer all day, thinking, mm,  I fancy a glass of wine. The stupidity! Because then husband phoned and asked what we were doing for tea, and should we have some wine, and of course I said yes!
So I basically had a bottle of wine over Friday night and last night and I feel rubbish. Giving up so easily hasn’t been my style so far. Doing 100 days turned into 400 and I was pretty pleased with that. But for some reason, there was something that was making me so tightly wound, I just gave in, as if that would be the answer to all the problems. Now I’m annoyed with myself.

I’m also feeling a bit rubbish physically –  the wine can’t have helped, for one thing- but on Thursday night, I was awake for about 3 hours with a pain in my right side, just by the hip bone. Now my stomach feels off, and I’m wondering about googling the symptoms of appendicitis. (Again! ).

I can start again today though. This can be another day one.
I’m going to meet my friend who had the baby this afternoon. Her partner has the day off so it means she can come by herself. I thought I’d better take the opportunity. I think she really needs a friend, she seems a bit lost. This seems to be the pattern of our friendship… I don’t feel supported by her (I feel she is insensitive regarding my fertility worries) but she needs me.
So I don’t know how it’s going to work out today, but I can give it a try I guess. Wish me luck.

God I feel awful. 😦

I’m back

Thanks for all the comments on my last post. Since then I tried quitting a couple of times but I was too lazy to stick with it, and every time Mr W suggested a drink I caved in.

But this time, today is my new day one. I’ve just spent the half term holiday doing lots of decorating, and I was a bit distracted generally so I didn’t seem to have the focus to get sober. But I’m back at work tomorrow, and even though there is the possibility of some bonfire night socialising, I feel like I’ve got a good opportunity to get into that sober bubble this week.

Why sober again? Well, I think I’m just not suited to drinking. I’ve been ill with a hangover after the odd night out in the last few weeks, which was awful. I’d forgotten how bad it makes me feel! And even after just one glass, the acid feeling in my stomach was horrible.

I thought I was looking for an off switch when I picked up the wine glass again – I wanted to escape from the world and from myself. But now I realise I miss the predictability of being sober. No ‘will we have wine tonight?’, ‘how much will I drink’, ‘will I feel ill/guilty/bad in the morning?’. Far from being boring to be sober, I missed that sense of calm I had because I already knew the answer to those questions when I was sober. All I had to do was not drink, and every day that came and went, did so unaffected by alcohol. It was freeing to live that way – I haven’t enjoyed being tied to drinking and all the thoughts and physical effects that go with it.

I know I have felt down both whilst drinking and whilst sober….that’s just something I have to deal with, it’s part of being me. But why would I want to add another layer of difficulty of top of that by choosing to continue to drink? I’ve come off the antidepressants at the request of my husband. He didn’t want us to be trying for  baby with me taking drugs. I spoke to my GP after quitting them, and she said they aren’t actually the worst things in the world to be taking in that respect. But I hear what he’s saying, so I’m doing without them. But our fertility test is looming, and my emotions are more and more haphazard. So that’s another reason why I want to go back to being clear and not befuddled by wine.

There is a tiny part of me, also, that is starting to think that I deserve for my life to be better. As in, in every way better. It’s down to me to ensure that I am happy, nobody else, and perhaps for the first time, I’m thinking that I really deserve that.  That is would be a big mistake for me to not pay attention to that feeling. What was that quote? Don’t do what makes you ‘a success’, do what makes you come alive – because the world needs people who have come alive. I guess my particular context here is not necessarily career, but the whole of life. I want to feel alive and happy, and I want to be able to deal with whatever we are told at the fertility clinic. I don’t want to feel ‘useless’. That is what my mind has been telling me lately and I do not like it.

So there’s a lot to do, a lot to think about, and I’m ready 🙂