It's a warning

‘A stroke is the worst of all,’ my GP said to me once many years ago.  Her words have stuck.  ‘Imagine it,’ she said.  ‘You’re alive, but paralysed.  At best you might get back your ability to walk, to use a knife and fork, to speak again, but at worst you’ll sit like a vegetable, brain damaged and unable to care for yourself for the rest of your life.’

My older sister takes good care of herself these days.  She meditates first thing in the morning.  She eats a balanced diet, does not drink too much, or smoke, and is physically active.  Recently she started to feel dizzy to the point she dared not even drive her car.  

Next a visit to her GP who told my sister it was lucky she had arrived at the doctor’s surgery when she had.  She could have suffered a stroke.

 Besides the dizziness, my sister’s blood pressure was up.  The doctor then urged my sister to take blood pressure reducing drugs. 

This then is story one: my sister’s blood pressure, and given she is my sister I go out in sympathy with her.  I watch as my head starts to feel dizzy and my blood pressure rises.

Story two:  my sister in law who last week took herself off for her regular two yearly visit to the optometrist.

‘There are signs of a stroke, here’ the optometrist said to my sister in law after he had examined her eyes.  Best you take yourself off to your doctor to get it checked out.’

My sister-in-law’s doctor then sent her off to a specialist for tests.  She’s yet to get the results but her GP had tried to reassure her that these are signs only, not facts.  Besides people can sometimes have tiny strokes and not even notice.  Still it’s a warning. 

A warning of what? I have this tendency to identify with people and their ailments. In any case, I’m off to see the doctor tomorrow to check out my own rising blood pressure.

I bought a blood pressure monitor from the chemist so I could take my blood pressure myself away from the anxiety producing doctor.  ‘White coat hypertension’ they call it.  You see the doctor and the minute she applies the cuff around your arm and pumps up the monitor your blood pressure increases. 

Now it’s happening to me.  I can feel my heart race as soon as I consider the possibility of trotting off to the kitchen to check my blood pressure.  And it has not registered at 138 or less systolic since I started checking a week ago.  So now I’m panicking.

Story three: my mother’s heart began to fail over eighteen months ago now.  Medication has kept her going but there’s only so much more her heart can take before it gives out altogether. 

The blood pressure monitor sits on the kitchen table calling to me.  It calls to me, ‘come now and try again’.  You never know it might be normal once more and then you can sigh a sigh of relief and when you go to the doctor tomorrow you can tell the doctor it has been high at times but it has also been normal.  And the doctor will say, these things happen, not to worry. 

Or the doctor, my doctor, will be like my sister’s doctor and whack me onto blood pressure reducing medication. 

I’m happy to self medicate from time to time with alcohol.  I’m happy to buy over the counter herbal remedies, but I do not enjoy the thought of taking the medication that western medicine produces unless it is for short term purposes.  Nothing of the long term variety for me and yet I know there are times when it is essential.

Until ten years ago my mother boasted that she needed no medication whatsoever to keep her going.  Even in her early eighties apart from a calcium supplement and the occasional use of painkillers to help her with her arthritis she took nothing.  Now she takes lolly bags full of the stuff, pink and blue, yellow and green, large pills and small, morning, noon and night.  

There are worse things could happen, says my optimistic self.  So what if you need medication to reduce your heart pressure?  But the me that prefers to have a body that goes on regardless, that needs almost no attention whatsoever beyond eating, drinking and sleeping, and the occasional walk or exercise, hopes to be spared.  

My mind split off from my body however, is a different matter.  It needs all the attention it can get.  

Clutter, clots, clogs and chaos.

The other day I read about a workshop that explores sleep disorders and I toyed with going, not because I have a sleep disorder but because I am curious about what it is that causes some people to suffer sleeplessness hour after hour.

I decided against going.  For one thing I do not have the time to spare, nor do I know the orientation of those who would be taking such a workshop.  I fear too much emphasis on behaviour and the superficial.  Such an approach would drive me potty.  

Worst of although I fear attendance at such a workshop might put the mozz on me and suddenly if I allowed myself to think too long about it I, too, might begin to suffer from insomnia. 

Sleep is such a fragile thing.  It comes in waves.

We looked after our grandsons last night while their parents went out to dinner and drinks for one of our other daughters' birthdays, the first outing my daughter and her husband have been alone together since the youngest was born eleven months ago.  It comes into my mind now thinking about sleep.

Around 9.30 pm I pushed my nearly one year old grandson's pram up and down the corridor willing him off to sleep.  Up and down the corridor I pushed his pram but he was determined to stay awake.  Eventually he could not keep his eyes open and dropped off.   The pram’s movement was irresistible.

My mind does not want to work this morning.  I tell it to think about sleep but it is too cluttered with thoughts of the day ahead.  All the jobs I have to deal with, including a visit to my mother early, because we are having a dinner for the same daughter’s birthday – multiple celebrations for a birthday that fell last week while she was away.

 See how cryptic I can be, avoiding the use of personal names so as to avoid identifying those who might not want to be identified. 

My heads a clutter with ideas, and prohibitions.  The other day I heard about the three Cs of anxiety, ‘clutter, clots and clogs’.  You can read about it here.  They relate  to hoarding, but my interest is in its less pathological manifestations, as something I can get into not only literally – if you could see the junk room in my house you’d know what I mean – but metaphorically, in my head.

The idea is that a degree of clutter is part of the stuff of life. We need stuff to live and in a family of several folks, young and old, you will find lots of things, in use, put aside, open and available at the same time.  

The kitchen table is covered in condiments, open school books, unfinished sewing, shopping lists and more besides.  A lived-in house.  On the other hand, there are areas where the stuff gets piled and is not used regularly nor removed, though it could be if someone put their mind to it. 

An example of clutter that borders on chaos.  I'm the one in white.  

The stuff that stays for months on end becomes a clot.   And finally, there are the areas in the house that can spread one clot after another into a serious clog, serious to the point that activities must be curtailed because there is no room to move. 

You can’t even open your doors for the stuff.  You can’t use your table or bench top for the stuff.  In other words you can’t live. 

I once visited the house of the artist Mirka Mora and her place was like that, only her stuff was mostly art works, great gorgeous canvases and stuff she used as still life, dolls and taxidermic animals and post cards.  An amazing place and some how it did not offend me in the same way a really cluttered, clotted, clogged place might. 

When I was young and worked as a social worker I went from time to time to visit an elderly man who lived alone in Carnegie. The local doctor had referred him because he was concerned about this man’s life style.  The man refused to throw anything out.  The hall way was lined with newspapers in piles and empty tin cans.  There was not an open space in the entire house.  I could only interview him in his bedroom and I was reluctant to sit on the one chair available beside his bed because it too was piled with newspapers. 

He must be dead by now, and I wonder what happened to his stuff.  Did it wind up somewhere on a tip, the useful and the junk all blended together into one unusable mass?  

What news today?

The beginning of the year and the newspapers are at it already. The headlines read: ‘Retail splurges put heat on rates.’ So now again we must panic. The news sensationalises. If the retail sector had been slow over Christmas, the headlines would read something like, ‘Confidence low as retail takes a nose dive.’

Panic. We must all panic. Every day we become overwrought that doom and gloom is just around the corner. The newspapers feed on misadventure, despair, and anxiety or on the occasional report of treacly sweet goodness: 'Child rescues baby sister from house fire'.

Years ago when I joined a class on non-fiction writing where the emphasis was on techniques of journalism, I found the simplicity of it all 'under-whelming'. The philosophy held we must report the salient features of an event first and run down the peripheral details point by point in an ever decreasing spiral of significance so that it mattered not whether the first sentence alone were published. Only the first and maybe second sentences mattered. They provided the bald facts. Thereafter all details became mere embellishments and the editor would use his/her discretion as to whether they remained in the published report.

This discretion it seemed was based on competing news reports. The value of news was rated for its sensational qualities and also on the pressure to advertise. If someone paid more for their advertisement of course it would be given pride of place against the news of the day, which did not pay in itself. The news however was intended as a money spinner in that it was reported in such a way as to draw in readers, and more readers encouraged more advertisers. Those who bought advertising space wanted as many of their advertisements read and acted upon, so the news itself became a saleable commodity. I imagine all of this still applies today, even perhaps more so.

Generally, I read only the front page every morning first thing after I have picked up the plastic covered newspaper from the driveway and brought it inside. I unwrap it from its Gladwrap as I walk down the corridor, that is when I can. Sometimes the Gladwrap refuses to unstick and I must take to it with a knife. It is a morning ritual akin to the business of making that first cup of tea or coffee. It is the business of waking up.

Once, not so many years ago, I read the newspaper in a cursory sort of way. I peeled the pages one from the other and scanned each article. Some I read through from beginning to end, most I only skimmed.

I have never been a newspaper reader, except on weekends when I like to pore over The Age and The Australian’s Review of books. Here I find something of interest. My husband on the other hand, even as he might complain about the thin quality of newspaper reporting, will read the newspaper from beginning to end every day.

‘What news today?’ I might ask and sometimes he will oblige me with an answer. Other times he will tell me that if I want to know I should read it for myself. My husband hates to have his brain ‘picked over’. Fair enough, I say. Lazy people like me who cannot be bothered trawling through the so-called news of the day might look for shortcuts, and ask their partners for a summary, but should they be so indulged?

Our children tend to read the news on line, as does my husband, more and more. This is particularly useful for updates on events as they happen. Even I have taken to reading the news on line. This time last year when the bushfire season had begun, I focused on the areas in Healesville, in Badger and Chum Creeks where my husband’s family live.

The selfishness of my newspaper reading is obvious. I will always read if it pertains to me and mine. But I cannot abide the sensationalising of news, particularly on such massive events as the economy, which is not simply driven by local events but by global events. More often than not it feels completely outside of my control. I am not a frugal person.

I am one of the wastrels. I should be more careful, but I cannot be bothered to get into penny-pinching and miserliness. Life is too short, I tell myself, to worry too long about the debt we will be left with in our old age. As long as we can work and earn enough money on which to survive, we will survive.

It is a blinkered view I know, but if I allowed myself to worry about all the things I could worry about daily, I doubt that I could go on. I doubt that I could allow myself to spend the few precious hours I use each weekend on my reading and writing. I doubt that I could allow myself to celebrate my children’s birthdays. I doubt that I could allow myself to enjoy good food and wine. I doubt that I could have allowed myself my recent trip to the Writers House for a week of reading, walking, writing and writerly conversation. I doubt that I could allow myself to tend to all the things in this house that currently need repair.

The list goes on. The list is endless. And finally to my list of all the things I would not do were I to allow myself to indulge in thoughts of not wasting a thing in this life, of not indulging myself in any excesses, and instead worrying about all the things that are wrong, I doubt that I would be able to blog as I do.

Blogging swallows time. It is almost purely self indulgent and although I can claim that I learn many things on line through other people’s blogs and that I have met many wonderful and fascinating people in this virtual world, which has its underpinnings in the real world – most of the bloggers with whom I communicate are real, however well concealed their identities – I cannot claim that the activity of blogging is essential to survival. Though it does assist the quality of my internal life, I am not sure it helps much else.

I have talked myself into the hole of non-existence when I allow myself to speculate like this. After a while it gets me nowhere and so I must stop before I persecute myself further. My guts begin to ache, the well of anxiety in my hips – that’s where I feel it most – rises to the base of my stomach and eventually reaches my mid sternum, by which time I must take a deep breath and change topics.