The Darkness Before The Dawn

I haven't written a blog for a while because my medical situation went from tenuous to quite bad, and I have only, in recent weeks, been slowly 'coming back up for air'. It has been frightening, to say the least, and there have been points along the journey when I, frankly, did know whether I'd was going to 'be around' for much longer.

First Surgery, Then A Blood Clot

As I noted in my previous blog, I had surgery for a melanoma cancer, on my arm. The surgery took out a chunk of my left forearm, but thankfully the dermatology doctor called the following week to let me know that 'all the edges were clean', meaning that they had successfully removed all the cancer. He stressed, though, that given that melanoma is a serious cancer, he wanted to 'keep track of this situation' with regular visits.

The surgery resulted in a major wound, which took 3 months to fully heal, and my arm still is very sore and has not recovered fully. Within two weeks, though, I had another major setback. I woke up early one morning in mid-October, and upon trying to stand up, nearly collapsed on the floor in excruciating pain. There was severe anguish in my left leg [almost all my medical issues have occurred on the left side of my body] and I could not walk, at all, without the assistance of a cane. My left thigh was swollen. Two days later, with the condition not having resolved itself, Linda [my partner of 8 1/2 years] took me to the ER on a Sunday evening. After a 7 hour wait (and they call these 'emergency' rooms?), we were admitted and the doctors determined that I had a blood clot. After another 5 hour wait, I was given an observation room. A couple of hours later (it was now mid-morning of Monday), they were going to give me some anticoagulant medicine and send me home. But I was having some major fears about the medicine [both because I have significant problems with almost all medications, and because I had major anxiety about ever having another blood clot], my internist recommended that I be admitted to the hospital; it took another 6 hours until I was finally given a patient room in the hospital.

I was in the hospital for 3 days, with the doctors running various tests and interviewing me about those anxieties. Eventually, I was given, to start with, an anticoagulant drug [Xeralto] and sent home, but by then I felt much more 'at ease' with the medication and the seriousness with which the healthcare system took my fears. I was on the initial 15 mg. dose twice a day for 3 weeks, but then they wanted to transition me over to a 20 mg. dose once a day 'for the rest of my life'. However, upon taking the 20 mg. dose, it felt like someone had slammed my head with a sledge hammer and my intestines went into peristaltic cramps for two days. Clearly that was not going to work. I called the doctor's office, asking if I could take 15 mg. once a day instead, but their concern was that I would be in a 'less than optimal' medication situation, so over a couple of weeks they suggested two other anti-coagulant meds, neither of which were satisfactory (the side effects were too severe and debilitating, even after one dose). I even tried to take 10 mg. tablets of Xeralto twice a day, but the accumulated effect was just as debilitating as taking a 20 mg. tablets once a day.

Hence, I ended up with a situation where I was not taking any anticoagulant medication, therefore not having a method of counteracting the blood clot. That was quite simply unnerving, because I knew that having a blood clot without a safety net was foolhardy and extremely dangerous, and could result, potentially, in a stroke or pulmonary embolism. This went on for 2 months; I had to wait until I had a scheduled appointment with the doctor in the Hematology Department before I could move forward.

I sank into a very fatalistic mood, and became intensely concerned about my morality. I started reading a lot of books on 'end of life issues', fully expecting to either end up medically incapacitated or dead. In my attempt to gather further information, I searched the Internet and asked several medical colleagues from my congregation about what was possible. One person suggested an inferior vena cava (IVC) filter and I engaged in some major research on that. While I was afraid of having a device in my veins, I also didn't want to die (not just now, anyway, knowing that we all die eventually, from something!).

Finally, I attended the appointment with the hematology doctor in late December. After a most tortured conversation (I had high anxiety about the whole of the situation), the doctor said, first, that a vena cava filter was not a good option, due to the many complications with the device, and that he was agreeable to my initial request that I take the 15 mg. dose of Xeralto once a day, agreeing that the 20 mg. dose, while therapeutically advisable, was not something that was tolerable. Plus he emphasized that the real danger to not taking any anticoagulation was either the threat not of a stroke but a pulmonary embolism, or the very real possibility of chronic veinous embolisms that would make walking quite painful. After an initial period on that dose, wherein I experienced a couple of hours of intense nausea each day, within about a week I began to 'acclimate' to the medication. It has now been 3 weeks, of what the doctor said would probably be a 3 - 6 months period of having to take it. He also agreed that taking it 'the rest of my life' was not advisable, in my case, given my hypersensitivity to medication -- and that taking it long enough to assist my body in dissolving and encasing the blood clot would be sufficient. I'm now feeling far more 'confident' about 'having a future' and a more or less 'regular life' for another decade or more.

The downside of this positive news, at least temporarily, was that just as my cancer surgical site had fully healed (it was somewhat delayed due to the anticoagulant medication) and I was looking forward to the opportunity to get back into swimming exercises, I was hit with a significant bronchial virus, which has kept my activities limited for the past two weeks. People who've had it say it lasts, including aftereffects, for about a month or more. Coughing, wheezing and a chronically runny nose are not pleasant. Yuck!

A Positive Corresponding Development

After having polluted all of my underwear and getting down to the point of having only two pairs of shoes and three pairs of jeans to wear (plus one dilapidated belt that was tolerable), I was in a heightened state of anxiety related to my hypersensitivity to materials. My initial reaction was to ask the assistance of a medical allergist. After running through a number of possibilities, she suggested that I might be suffering from Mast Cell Activation Syndrome, and ordered some tests to determine the efficacy of such a diagnosis. At first that felt like a 'valid answer', though I was quite anxious when she described the medically required method of counteracting it -- mainly, ingest some fairly toxic medications, which even at pediatric doses were going to be difficult to tolerate. Two weeks later, her office called and informed me that MCAS was not a viable possibility.

By this point, though, I had, in my desire to find some modality which would be effective on the materials hypersensitivities, asked a female friend, who teaches yoga, if she had any suggestions. To my surprise and delight, it turned out that she specialized in 'yoga therapy', with some recent experience with a client who was suffering from Bosnian War-related trauma. She suggested that the yoga therapy could be helpful in dealing with my PTSD issues, which my MH therapist believes are quite likely the cause of my materials anxiety.

Hence, when I had the followup appointment with my allergist, and she gave me the news that MCAS was not the cause of my symptoms [which, she said, was good, because the treatment was admittedly quite harsh], I noted that in the meantime I had started engaging in yoga therapy. Her face brightened considerably, and she exclaimed "better health through natural medicine!" She was quite enthusiastic about that approach and wished me well.

Both Linda and I have been engaged in the yoga therapy since late October, after I had returned home from the hospital [Linda wanted to actively  participate in my healing, and felt the yoga would also be helpful for her]. On a daily basis, we engage in various breathing exercises, poses, mudras, and yoga. My yoga therapist, Pamela, suggested that we start with upper body stretches, to get the body into a shape that 'let it know that help was on the way' [fully being aware of the way in which the body retains its own memories and that the most effective way to assist it in releasing those memories is through movement and meditation]. We have slowly moved from the head to the upper body, and, starting tomorrow morning, we are going to begin moving into the stomach/pelvis/genital region, which constitutes the body's 'core' and is likely the place where my body has retained the memory of most of the sexual trauma experiences I was subjected to as a result of my parents' dissociative behavior. She has warned me, though, that when we start working on that region "plenty of emotional pain may arise", which is why we are going to go very slowly.

The Most Effective Way To Go Beyond The Pain Is By Going Through It

What I have learned, after 30+ years of mental health therapy related to PTSD issues, as a result of being a survivor of sexual rape and physical torture in childhood, is that the best way to get beyond emotional pain is by going through it. It can be [and often is] intensely painful, but there isn't much of any other way to heal from the pain except to release it. This is especially true for someone, like myself, who experienced much of this trauma in infancy, before I either had verbal communication skills or suffered from a quite normal development limitation of 'infant amnesia'. Because much of this occurred before my limbic system had fully developed an ability to construct clear cognitive memory retention, the 'memory' of the abuse was retained in my body tissues. And it is those body memories which I have, for good reason, avoided most of my life [due to their horrific nature and the fears that they evoke], that I am now having to confront in order to move beyond these materials allergies and a lifetime of terrified reactions to what most people might consider to be 'normal' experiences.

And it is all part of the 'dark night of the soul' that I have been confronting for the past two years. The very nature of that journey is that using ones cognition to predict the eventual outcome is the last method that is helpful; it is far better to allow meditative practices which set aside the ego and allow the 'body to speak' though a 'witnessing' process. It requires one to 'listen' in an intuitive manner, because the body, not having an audible 'voice' of its own, speaks to us in a quite different manner. It requires, a priori, that one 'set aside' a cognitive analysis, at least long enough to allow the body/mind to generate the information we need to assist our moving forward on a healing pathway. I still allow myself to write down the information that arises through meditation, so that I can 'document' my enlightenment for later review. But I've learned, though trial and error, to set aside that 'ego awareness' long enough (sometimes for a couple of days of more or less continuous mediation, but at the least 20 minutes of mediation twice a day) to allow the 'witnessing part of Self' to listen to the messages my body is generating about what occurred, so long ago, in my infancy.

It has required -- as a former girlfriend, with whom I still have a warm and positive friendship, often said to me -- "to allow the Universe to have an opinion". The very nature of a 'dark night of the soul' is that one must step back from ones intellectual urge to use cognition to answer most of the questions of life, either through extensive thinking and/or research, and intuitively 'listen' to the ways in which the body speaks to all of us. It's about 'emotional language', not 'verbal language'. And while it is not easy to achieve, its achievement is critically necessary in order to heal from traumas that occurred before the cognition had a chance to 'remember' anything, in the way we normally use the term 'memory'.

Along with the deep meditation daily, the yoga movements assist the body to release its memories. In addition to other positive and healing messages, I have been motivated to finally confront the lifelong discomfort with my male gender, which was generated by the combination of mixed messages resulting from the sexual trauma long before I had any 'mature' notions of 'what love meant', and the dysfunctional messages my parents generated due to their own confused concepts of love and gender acceptance. It has been difficult overcoming the 54 years of internalized gender confusion that was the outcome of that trauma, but I've finally been able to start re-conceptualizing my self-acceptance and, in the process, apologizing to my body for the ways in which I discounted it and often hated it for the confusion that had resulted. That alone has been most enlightening, and has already generated some serious gender enlightenment, which will, no doubt, assist the process of releasing many of the 'core' body memories.

Hence, that's a recapitulation of the events of the last several months, since the most recent MMWI blog. Where it will all go from here is anyone's guess. I know some intense memories are going to start arising from the yoga therapy; while I'm a bit anxious about that, I know from past experience that that is the only way to move beyond them, so I'm fully prepared to face them (or at least am willing to face them, knowing full well beforehand that while the experience may be enlightening, it may not be pleasant). And in many ways, as I have emphasized, it is anyone's guess and has to be so, because to 'know the answer beforehand' will limit what needs to be fully known for healing to take place. The 'dark night of the soul' has its own internal logic and pathway, and one has to allow it to unfold organically.