Tick Tock

A spring of wake-up calls it's been. Back problems since college, creeping arthritis, destroyed feet--these sorts of physical problems have stalked slowly, incrementally (like a cat, then, with prey scented, sighted, and within reach?). Suddenly, though, there was a cascade of immediate, urgent problems; not new, exactly, but coming boiling to a head and demanding immediate attention. Care, and attention.

Eyes--I'm still not clear on why the issue appeared to manifest as if sudden, for the manifestation was sudden. One evening I was in Los  Angeles, taking a walk with my son, mountains in the distance clear and sharp. By the next I was back in New Orleans, finally retrieving my car from a friend's, setting out to make a stop or two and then drive home . . . realizing I could not read the huge green highway signs until I was right under them. This was terrifying: had I somehow forgotten hitting my head, injuring my optic nerve? Had I (as a helpful friend suggested later) suffered a stroke? What the hell had happened, what was going on?

And there were no answers. There was only driving home, in the dark, cautiously, carefully, more slowly than usual, squinting to focus. There wasn't really much traffic, thank god--nothing like the godawful night drive in driving rain just after Christmas, in much busier conditions. The route is a familiar one. The answer, or at least solution, came about a week later, finally: cataracts had worsened enough in nine months that the old contact lens prescriptions were doing more harm than good (but why was the effect of that not apparent during the whole trip abroad? the evening before?); I'll have to have surgery eventually, but for now my vision is still correctable to 20/20.

Then, in the miasma of pollen that is spring, I (foolishly; yes; I know) in desperation self-prescribed a regimen the doctor had had me on for the bad bronchitis early last winter: Claritin and Zyrtec both in twenty-four hours: one at noon, one at midnight, in other words. Since they're completely different drugs, it isn't an overdose of either one. 

I first noticed my heart racing when I'd lie down for the night, in the dark and silence. I'd had arrhythmia before, when my children were very young. Sometimes it was very bad, and frightening. But eventually it went away, and I put it down to the extreme stress of that time (though I didn't have it years later in the madness that was graduate school, work, child-rearing, divorce, come to think of it, and that was far more stressful). Then it was racing and/or bumpy, erratic beats. Then it was frequent. Then, in the wee hours of one Saturday morning, for three and a half hours I had, not a beating heart, but a fish flopping aimlessly in my chest. Terrifying, again. Lots and lots of time to think, to pre-emptively mourn all I hadn't accomplished.

A few days later, while wearing a heart monitor, a friend and I, on the phone, began tracking down information on the Internet. Condense it all down to the fact that both Claritin and Zyrtec have heart arrhythmia as a potential side effect. Cold turkey (letting fear of heart failure easily outweigh difficulty in breathing--for the moment), I stopped them both. It took some thirty-six hours for them to be gone from my system, but then, miraculously, gone also was the arrhythmia.

So I'm doing what I should have done years ago: undergoing a regimen of desensitization shots. Two shots, every other day, roughly (over weekends it's longer). Learning to give myself, needle-phobe that I have always been, the shots. Envisioning the fun it will be traveling with syringes and two little vials of serum that have to be kept cool (oh, yes).

Doing what I should have done years ago (not fully there yet, but trying and trying). Using the good china. Not caring what people think. Trying to see what's really important (to me), and let the rest go. Because I could go, at any time.