Authors: Tilda Shalof
Thinking about the problems of health care have put me into deeper gloom and doom. Why don’t more nurses stand up to protect and speak out for Medicare in this country? Nurses are so close to the reality of peoples’ lives and know the effects of poverty and inequity on health. We should be the loudest advocates of all for quality health care for everyone.
I sit, mired in my thoughts, fretting over the health of the health care system. The kids are busy, getting ready for hockey practice.
“What’s wrong, Mom?” Max asks, coming over to check on me before they leave.
“I’m worried about the health care system.”
He pats my back. “Don’t worry,
bubbelah
, the health care system can take care of itself without you for a while.”
The next day I go back to see Dr. Morse, who suggests I take an antidepressant.
We all have our own mythologies, the stories we tell ourselves to get through hard times. My story is that I should be strong enough to overcome depression with my own willpower and determination, that relying on drugs is the easy way out. Yet, I have never passed a similar judgment on a patient. I have great sympathy – even affinity – for patients with mental illness. It’s just another example of the perplexing dichotomy between how I care for my patients and how I care for myself.
“Why not take meds?” a friend says. “Everyone’s on them these days. The stock market is a disaster. There’s a financial crisis. It’s enough to make anyone depressed.”
That reasoning I don’t get. Antidepressants are for depression, not life’s challenges. For me, the only thing I ever found depressing was depression. Sure, stress and real problems can lead to depression, but that’s not my situation. Are medications the only way to way to feel better? All I know is that I can’t fix this by myself.
I’m listening to a cryptic telephone message from Janet: “Meet us at the farm. Be there or be square.”
What farm? Where? Why a farm, of all places?
“No questions,” Janet goes on, anticipating my thoughts. She only gives me directions and the admonishment, “Just show up.”
Janet, Jasna, Stephanie, Kate, and Edna are waiting for me, greeting me at the entrance to Pine Farms with its rolling hills, trees in autumn colours, a pick-your-own apple orchard, and a country kitchen serving homemade soups and pies. They present me with a huge bouquet of flowers and I accept it with a deep bow, like I’d just performed a recital at Carnegie Hall. How women excel at making moments special.
“Lots more people wanted to come,” says Janet, “but I said no. Too many cooks spoil the brew.”
“There you go again,” Stephanie says with a chuckle, “messing with these classic sayings.”
“It’s too many cooks spoil the broth,” I correct Janet.
“Maybe your people made broth – chicken soup,” she says with a flounce, her bright blue eyes twinkling. “Mine made brew. My grandfather had a booming business during Prohibition. He cooked hootch on a homemade still.”
I try to laugh but can’t pull it off. I hope they can’t tell I’m not in my usual good spirits and don’t enjoy the silly banter as I usually do.
Before we leave, Janet pulls me aside. “What’s wrong? You’re not yourself.”
Of course I tell her.
“Take the meds,” she urges me. “Why the hell not? Do whatever it takes to feel better. What’s your problem? You wouldn’t treat a patient like this. Depression requires treatment as much as a bone fracture or a thyroid condition. You wouldn’t neglect those conditions. Why the double standard?”
And so, because I adore her as a friend and respect her as a professional – and in my heart, I know she’s right – I take Janet’s advice.
They say it takes a few weeks for these pills to kick in, but on the way home I fill the prescription, take one, and within hours I feel an effect. A shift. My spirits have lifted. By the next day, I can smile, move my body with ease. Life is back into perspective; it’s manageable. My old confidence is back.
Robyn hears it immediately on the phone. “You sound better, Til. It’s you again.”
“When are you coming back to work?” the nurses had asked me at lunch and for the first time since my surgery, I can see myself returning to the hospital, being a nurse again. Is it friendship, family, meds, or simply “tincture of time” that has healed me?
I even hunt down the Cardiac Patient Handbook that I’d left under a pile of unread newspapers and take another look:
“Some patients find their sex drive is low during the recovery period after cardiac surgery,”
That’s rich. How about nonexistent?
I thought upon reading that when I came home from the hospital, but now, ten weeks later …
I feel differently. I read on: “If you are able to climb two flights of stairs without fatigue or shortness of breath, you may resume sexual intercourse … the best positions are on your side or with the person who has had surgery on the bottom …” Mmm … Sounds doable. I look at Ivan and think it over.
At dinner, we eat leftover chicken soup. Max watches me with interest, an idea in his eyes. “What would happen,” he asks, pointing his fork at my chest, “if I were to open up that incision of yours and pop a matzah ball in there?”
For some reason, I find this hysterically funny. We all do. Is it the goofy joke, the medication, or life itself pulling me back in? I don’t know, but what fun it is to laugh again!
By mid-November my blue funk is completely gone. The spring is back in my step. Energy and joy have returned. I’m a player, back in the game.
First thing, I reach out to friends I’ve been avoiding or to whom I was rude or unfriendly. Instantly forgiving, they welcome me back and we plan lunches and get-togethers. Next, I reconnect online, ploughing through my backlogged inbox, getting in touch with colleagues, even enjoying silly email jokes sent to me, like “Surprising Animal Sex Facts” with such arcane tidbits as “a snail’s genitals are located in its head,” “a pig’s orgasm lasts thirty minutes” and “the swan is the only bird with a penis.” (That’s “some pig!” – the phrase woven into the spider’s web to describe Wilbur in
Charlotte’s Web
– comes to mind.) I have arisen from the couch and turned off the
TV
, though occasionally I still indulge my guilty pleasure of the glamorous L.A. tattoo artist, Kat Von D., who has taught me how body art can tell a story, commemorate an event, or
express a belief. This may be obvious to anyone who has a tattoo, but it’s helped me to grasp the meaning of mine. My scar tracks my journey from feeling wounded to being healed. This cracked, broken place has made me stronger. I won’t be covering it. I’ll wear open necklines – my big reveal. I’m going to rock this scar!
I’ve rejoined the local gym for physical workouts and the synagogue for spiritual ones. I’ve passed the major milestones – off all painkillers, made it through my first sneeze, have resumed driving, and now into vigorous exercise.
“Why not start out slow?” Ivan asks when I tell him about my new spinning classes where the teacher pushes us to our limit.
Ivan – always a model of balance and common sense! But gentle aerobics or restorative yoga is not what my body craves. It needs to stride, run, stomp, jump, climb, push, kick, dance, hurl, heave, and roar, because now I can!
He shakes his head wearily. “Does the phrase
everything in moderation
mean anything to you?” Having lived with me so many years, he knows the answer.
When the cardiac rehab centre calls to tell me there’s an opening in the upcoming class, I turn it down, but only because I have devised my own rehab program.
At the gym I have found the teacher and class for me. It’s cycling on a stationary bicycle to pumped-up, high-voltage music – everything from rock, pop, classical, country, techno, to disco. Zooming from head-banging Metallica to bubblegum “Build Me Up, Buttercup” to Amy Winehouse’s “Rehab,” Steve switches to “You Lift Me Up …” and Josh Groban’s soaring tenor voice pours over our sweaty, panting bodies.
“Nice work, Karima,” he calls out. “Faster, Tilda! Way to go, Dejeanne! You can do better, Massimo, push yourself!” Without
warning, he changes it up to group karaoke with Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” When he makes his way over to me and points the microphone in my direction, I find myself belting out, “You probably think this song is about you” for the whole class to hear.
“Let me ask you to do one thing,” says Steve, who offers personal reflections along with fitness tips. “When you’re pushing yourself and you’re in pain, go toward it. Push through it. Another thing – say out loud and clear what you’re feeling: ‘It hurts!’ It will help you to express what you feel, identify your emotion.”
“How’ya doing?” he asks us a few minutes later with a big grin that’s a heads-up that something bad is coming. “Feeling good? In the groove?” We nod, riding hard, in the zone, unable to answer. “If you’re in your comfort zone … Get out of it!”
He’s as good as any of those
TV
New Age motivational speakers – and, with his middle-aged but firm butt and glistening baldness, to me anyway, much hotter. Afterward, I compliment him on the class and tell him about my heart surgery.
He looks surprised. “Aren’t you a bit young for that?”
That’s the perception of cardiac surgery, but not the reality. “It can happen to anyone, at any age. Everyone should see their family doctor for checkups.”
And I’ve made a surprising discovery: exercise is an ideal time to pray. Yes, at last, I do permit myself to say and to feel prayers of gratitude.
I pick up Max after school and we drive to our favourite Middle Eastern spot for takeout shawarma and falafels in pita, all dripping with hummus, tahini, and hot sauce. (The diet component of my cardiac rehab program will start soon.) It’s great to be driving again, behind the wheel, master of my destiny!
“Don’t forget your seat belt, Mom,” he says, buckling me in. “We wouldn’t want anything to happen to Dr. David’s hard work now, would we?”
As I’m about to leave my parking spot, I see that I’m boxed in. The guy blocking me gets out of his car and patronizingly tries to guide me out of the tight spot he put me in. The nerve of him! “I wouldn’t have this problem if you’d left me enough space,” I shout at him and he gives me the finger in return. I honk back at him. “I just had open-heart surgery, you know!” I call out as I turn the wheel left then right, then left, inching out slowly.
Max is enjoying this scene. “Still playing the cardiac patient card, I see.” He looks proud of me. “News flash: Mom’s back!”
“I can’t stay long,” Stephanie warns us as she arrives at the bagel shop early on Sunday morning. She takes up her bar stool seat at our high, round “reserved” table. She rests her knapsack on a nearby table and stashes a lumpy, large plastic bag underneath. “I’m beat. I’m going to have to eat, knit, and run.”
“Shorty’s in a hurry again,” Janet chortles. “Not
Eat, Pray, Love
, it’ll be Work, Bagel, Sleep.”
“Is it legit for me to attend this meeting when I haven’t worked?” I ask, suddenly feeling shy, all rested from sleeping in my bed and they’ve been working all night at the hospital. I feel like I haven’t earned my place at the bagel shop this morning.
“We’ll overlook it this time,” Stephanie warns, “but if you want to keep your spot, you better come back to work soon.”
We weave back and forth from our usual topics of mortgages, motherhood, and menopause, wayward teenagers, and bladder control issues (a more common problem in our demographic than you might think), and of course, we soon come full circle, back to the
ICU
. After finishing their bagels, they pull out their knitting.
I recall how each knit and purl threatened to number my days and myself, a dropped stitch. Fear made my mind so out of control that I imagined them like
tricoteuses
, the knitters who frequented the public beheadings of aristocrats in Paris during the French Revolution. Most notorious of all was Madame DuFarge in the Dickens’s classic
A Tale of Two Cities
(another classic that, coincidentally, Janet is currently reading). She knitted and laughed as heads dropped from the guillotines. It had felt like mine was on the chopping block, too. (This must be where the phrase
spinning yarns
comes from, and I admit I do have a runaway imagination. Luckily, I have sensible friends to bring me back to earth.)
I help Jasna untangle a ball of yarn.
“Hey, Tillie, you were
MIA
there for a while,” Janet says. “We were going to put out an Amber Alert on you. Oh, I bet you were in the
sin-ee-gogue
for the Jewish Holidays, right?”
Under my tutelage, they have learned about the Jewish holidays in sound bytes – and edible bites, too: Fried potato pancakes at Chanukah represent oil in a lamp found in a synagogue desecrated by an enemy army. In late winter, there’s the Festival of Purim when here, in this bagel shop, they’ve sampled the three-cornered prune or poppy-seed cookies Eric bakes to symbolize the pointed hat of a would-be assassin whose plot to annihilate the Jewish people was foiled by Queen Esther. They know the reason that the bagel shop is closed at Passover is because only unleavened bread is allowed in remembrance of the haste with which the Israelites fled Egypt to escape the Pharaoh who tried to kill their first-born. What a joyous history my people have.
Bon appetit!
“Hey, what foods do you eat for Rosh Hashanah?” Janet asks.
“Apples dipped in honey to symbolize a sweet year ahead.”
“What about Yom Kippur? What’s on the menu for that one?”
“Nothing! We fast all day to atone for our sins.”
“Well, you better get cracking. You’ve got a lot of work to do.”
“Yup, and a lot to be grateful for,” I say, looking around this very table.
Stephanie reads my mind, or at least my emotions.
“Don’t get all sentimental on us now. We’re here for bagels, not bawling,” she says, trying to be stern with me. “So, are you feeling better these days?” She peers closely at me, but they all see that I am. You’re back to yourself. Your spark has returned, they all say. There’s light in your eyes again. “You’re looking good, Til,” she says.