working together

I am still struggling with the "depths-of-despair" debris floating around me.  So I made it through some pretty tough chemo regimens - no depression.  I made it though surgery - no depression.  I made it through more chemo, more scares, more set-backs - still no depression.

Give me five weeks of easy going radiation, and I can barely scale out of the 'despair-hole' enough to see sunlight.....

I suspect physically, my radiation got together with my inept bone marrow and are having a bit of a party on my dime.  I suspect mentally, radiation kind of clouds up your brain even more, for a while at least.  I hope it is indeed "for a while".

Physically and mentally, I can see it, grasp it, deal with it.

What I cannot deal with oddly enough, is the other fallout from radiation - the start of lymphedema.    Apparently, radiation can "trigger" lymphedema.  Because as I've told them 156 times, "I didn't have this swelling before", and they tell me that yes, radiation damages things even further.  So the corded lymph gland I was dealing with all along, is now an angry-corded lymph gland.  I just asked it to do more than it is capable.

It was at full over-worked-underpaid capacity before radiation.

Now, it's a surly employee.  Like it says "mess with me at all woman, and I can just quit on you".... Or as the case is, swell.

My Physical Therapist says my muscles have "memory" and so after they work on me, I am to 'not jerk', or 'lift' or sit in front of a desk for longer than an hour or do anything other than my stretching exercises with my left arm for 48 hours to keep my leftover lymph glands struggling to work make everything swell up again.

My mind and lymph glands are having a full out little hissy-fit fight within.  My mind says sarcastically "H. E. double toothpicks NO! we do not want my muscles and lymph glands "remembering" how to swell.  Why no, that would mean they would have to get busy and work!"...... My leftover lymph glands that have had to take on the brunt of the work of fifteen lost lymph glands say "fine!  you want to know how hard we are trying to keep things moving here - we can stop any time!"

And my arm swells.  And the chest wall beside that arm swells.

I would lay awake at night designing a tight-bandage-shirt that would be tight in the under arm area, tight around the shoulder and chest wall, as well as being a tight sleeve.  The sleeve they gave me only caused the very upper part of my arm that was not in it to swell.

I was pretty sure I had a million dollar idea.

So my favorite PT in the whole wide world, who has magic thumbs that loosen lymph gland cording and unfreezes shoulders told me to stop at Dick's Sporting Good's store and get a compression shirt.  Long sleeved.  Two sizes smaller than me.

Somebody already made that million.

While I struggled in the dressing room to put on this tight rubber band (and yes, visions of watching my mother put on her girdle did come to mind immediately) my arm would shoot out because I wasn't strong enough to stretch it enough to get it over my head.  So folks waiting outside would hear a "woomph" on the side of the wall as my hand would break loose from the spandex and hit the wall, coupled with some mumbled *words* that I hope they don't remember; plus a lackluster sales staff, all added together made Dick's one of my least favorite stores, ever.

Scott had to help me get it on that night.  If I were in a funnier mood, I might have laughed with him, but as I stated above, this abyss doesn't so much allow errant laughter.

But I slept in it, and it was the best sleep I've had for a long time.  She also gave me a foam pillow to keep inside the shirt under my arm to further compress that swelling in my arm and chest wall, and it's been my friend ever since.

She told me I was having muscle spasms in between my rib bones, behind my shoulder blade and in my upper arm, which was news to me, because all my body has been telling me is that there is NO muscle left anywhere.

But that lady can stretch a corded lymph gland like no one else.  She can release a muscle spasm like no one else.  I told her I loved her, and wanted to move onto her street - next door.

All the PTs are pretty awesome there, and they have brought me a long ways, all of them - my range of motion in their opinion is "awesome" - I just can't get the lymph glands that were cut and those left to cope back on board the bus.

But then I see Fazio, and my lymph glands and spasming muscles give up the fight and melt under the pressure of her thumbs and fingers.

For a bit.

***

This whole journey through *cancer-land* has been long and arduous and crazy and -- so, so blessed.  I would not wish this on my vilest enemy, but I so recommend it.  Many, many things, issues, beliefs have been brought before me, forcing me to examine them, turn them over, and file away for future use, or discard.

Like, I didn't realize when I was walking through life that "this is it!"  I always thought I had more time, or another time to "become", or "do", or live razor sharp on the edge.

I didn't realize that this was it.  You only get one decade to live your twenties.  You only get one decade to live your forties.  You only get one chance to enjoy and envelope your children when they are young.

You only get "it" once.

All these comments about second chances, second go-arounds, second anything are mostly not true.  Yeah, you get a second chance when you blow it, when you are wrong, when you realize the proverbial error of your way and try to correct it - you might call that a second chance, but in all reality, it's not.

In all reality, there are no "do-overs" in life - life is more like Ebenezer Scrooge second-chance-wise.

When we realize that we have lived carelessly, or worse, "disengaged", and are mindful to change it, we don't get that wasted time back.  We don't get to rewind.  We don't get a clean slate - just like Ebenezer, we have to realize our hurtful ways, our wrongs, our regrets, then set about correcting them.  But you don't get to do it over.  You can start anew, you can turn over a new leaf, you can decide to live differently, but that's about it.

There's no do-overs when we look to the bottom of the bottle.  Or barrel.

And for the most part, I lived my family life with that fully in mind.  I loved raising a family.  I loved being home with my kids.  I loved the different stages, the growth, the nurturing.  I diligently read and learned all I could to make myself a better mother, a better spouse, a better family-person.

I loved it all - well I did eventually have teenagers (wink, wink), but taking it all in a bundle deal, I did love it all and deeply grieved it when it was all over.

But, um, if I want to be flagrantly honest here, I was not so *engaged* in my work life.

I viewed work as something I needed to do to put food on the table.  None of the jobs I took were my "chosen profession".  I took them to get paid.  I viewed it all dispassionately.  After reading my Bible and realizing that I needed to "do my work diligently as if I were working for the Lord", I did try to do that.  But it was still, something I *did*.

When I was a lab technician for an orthodontist, many days over lunch I found myself reading his medical books on the shelf in his office.  (Secretly -- I was there alone two days a week... smile)  I loved the exactness of my work there, but not so much the same thing over and over and over again.  So I of course did the thing that comes so naturally to me, I pulled books off of a shelf and read them.

I can identify 6 different mouth cancers because of that study.  But other than learning about springs in retainers and the laws of occlusion, the laws of sterile, which wires to use for which mouth appliance, my formal education there was a little limited in my eyes.

Then I went to work for the veterinarians.

These people have almost a whole day's work done before most people drink their first cup of coffee in the morning.  Before 8am each morning, surgery animals have been dropped off, blood drawn for their pre-surgery workup, any concerns addressed and the day started.

We could be drinking our third cup of coffee waiting on the blood machine to spit out results.

I counted up one time, and I think that even though I may have missed some, I had worked with over 20 different veterinarians during my fourteen years there.  So I more easily recognize all different levels of professional.  I more easily recognize all different levels of knowledge.

Some doctors are brilliant but don't know how to share that.  They usually end up being surgeons - they don't do well with patients but do their job superbly.  Some doctors know the best thing for your pet and yet will allow themselves to be talked down by a client and not follow the best course of treatment or prevention - all under the umbrella of "saving them money" or "the client refused it", when in all reality, they couldn't sell a beehive to a field of clover, and that clients dog is in danger of rabies or heartworm or whatever it was that the client printed off the internet to support a crazy argument.

I've seen them all - all types of doctors maybe - and realize now how lucky I was.  Because, it makes me listen to doctors differently than other folks.

But even more-so, because, sometimes, if you are really, really lucky in life, you get to work with a doctor that is both brilliant and loves to teach.

And that's not an easy thing, because as I mentioned, it is a long busy day, and there is just not time to teach others what it is they desire to know.

But my education started in earnest the first day I started at the veterinary clinic while Dan Fulk still owned it.  I learned how to say veterinarian.  He told me "it's 'veter' - like 'better'".  The accent was not on the "vet" part.

His wife Carolyn taught me how to keep their books - this was before computers and spreadsheets.  Another veterinarian there at the time kindly told me that she had missed some of the 'accounts-education' and showed me how to run the tape that they used to balance the accounts once or twice a week.

I think more than a few times, I lost several years off of my life tracking down twenty-five cents.

Shirley, the other lady that worked there on evenings and Saturdays, showed me how to mop, clean all the cages in the cage room and do up sterile surgery packs like a woman possessed on steroids.

She is old enough to be my mother, but could run circles around anyone, any day.  You have not lived until you have seen little Shirley muscle a contrary big dog recovering from surgery out of a cage, get him happy and on a leash wagging his tail for his owner to take home.

And trust me when I say this - it was pretty impossible to become bored.  The daily routine varied greatly - which helps my greatly ADD brain stay engaged.  One day I would be settling accounts, the next day watching the anesthetic machine during surgery.  One day I would be sending out collections letters, the next day checking culture plates to determine infections.  One day I would be double checking the scheduling, the next day I would be ordering drugs.

Or, more than likely, and more honestly, that all happened in one day.

I learned so much.  Even now, seven years after I left that job, I still kind of know what an elevated creatnine level means, but better yet, when looking it up I have a good working knowledge of the whole picture.  I can meander my way through blood work results and get the general idea.

Before the invention of smart phones, the veterinarians would radio back in and ask me to read them the blood work results.  I got to the point of knowing what their heavy sighs meant on some reports, and what their relieved voices meant on other reports.

And I oddly found my "gifting" in life - I found that I have a nose, or an art of smelling - that some envy.  I could tell you when one of the veterinarians coming back in from farm calls had worked on a cow with ketosis.  I can smell it.  I could tell you when a culture plate smells like strep - or a person's breath.  I can smell it - whether it was incubated in a little oven on a culture plate or in the warmth of someone's tonsils, I could identify strep.  My family always looks at me kind of dimly sideways on this, but in the veterinary field I was told that I was pretty remarkable.

Few people understand this, so I walk through life with my excellent gift of nasaly (nosely?) identifying different medical maladies mostly unappreciated.  (imagine my hand to my forehead, followed by a heavy sigh)

I worked with a couple of guys that loved to show me things - before I was diagnosed with nerve damage, lymph nodes, cancer, all those good phrases that have been thrown my way this past year - but before I heard these terms at OSU, I knew them.  Better yet, I had seen a lot of them.

I've seen a nerve thread.  I've seen intestinal tracks - both healthy and damaged.  I've seen cancer growths removed and cut up and put in jars and sent off to labs.

When they told me last winter that my digestive track had taken quite a hit with my nine months of chemo, I pretty much knew what it probably looked like.

But even better than the medical information, I finally had something that I had not experienced before - a "work-family".  I found that when you are sequestered into an office, a building, a business with the same people for long hours every day, you can learn to watch each other's backs.  You can learn to support each other.  You can learn to help each other out.

Because if you don't, most of your work-life is spent in misery.  And if most of your work-life takes up more than 8 - 12 hours a day, it is most of your life.  

I had never worked in that type of work environment before.

There were some ladies at the large animal veterinary clinic that have forever changed my life.  For the good.

They are what I call *my-ag-ladies* - not only did they work at the clinic, but they also had farms and businesses related to agriculture that is kind of a different world from the rest of working America.

You will never wake up earlier than these folks.  You will never work harder than these folks.  You will never understand the value of good business principles more than these folks.

They can work earlier, longer, harder than anyone I have met in my life - and yet still have the best life.

I have never laughed harder than when I worked there.  I have never seen life through a prism of helpfulness, goodness, right-thinking than when I worked there.

I have never been stretched further in my intellect, than when I worked there.  As I stated before, I was intellectually lazy when it came to my work/jobs.  Any initiative or idea I had previously in a job was either scorned, envied, stolen or just plain old beat out of me.

But here, suddenly, I had to "wake up", use it, know it.

Under new ownership, Fred leaned on me pretty hard sometimes - and it was for good reason - I was used to being intellectually lazy.  I had worked hard - you had to there - but didn't get a lot of pats on the back for initiative.  I was used to just giving enough to get by and get paid. Used to not flaunting any "smarts" because I was a woman.  Because I had not gone to college and therefore had not earned the respect to attach to those smarts.  Because it had not done me any good to intellectually excel in a job until then.

And by then, I had become pretty good at being status-quo.

Fred didn't care about any of that - all he wanted were results - and he respected me enough and gave me the needed push to get out there and do what I was capable of doing.

Finally, I had landed in a job where there was not any discrimination on any level, in fact I was expected to do more than I knew what to do.  And I did it.

Mostly.

I remember my amazement when I left the veterinary field to find in my new job that there were four people working to do the same thing I had been doing.  The veterinary field is like that - you stretch your money, stretch your people, stretch it all to get the best medical care around without any insurance paybacks, no medicare, no medicaid.  The total cost has to be covered, and you learn to do it cheaply with excellence.

While I was learning the ropes of a new position within the clinic, there were some awesome, wonderful women that hedged around me, protecting me, helping me, supporting me, and always, always encouraging me.

Shirley says often how she "has never worked with such a good group of honest, hard-working women that got along so well together".

There were bumps.  There were some fallouts, but on the whole - I could not agree more.

Connie taught me how to laugh.  I would come into work some days totally downtrodden with the cares of my life - which were pretty heavy at times - and she would tell me "Karen, God has not forgotten you".

I was pretty sure He had.

Then she would tell me maybe fifteen hilarious stories, and we would laugh and laugh, all the time getting large portions of work done.

She taught me how to laugh during grief, how to keep walking when you want to dig a hole and live in it, how to grapple with rage at the hurt someone has poured over your family and give it to God and sort out the right and wrong in the whole matter.

Then Shirley would come in for the evening hours and we would all take some minutes to talk if we were able, and Shirley taught me more about sticking out the longevity of life, than anyone I know.

Margaret was in our office often with her business, and we would all spend time talking, empathizing, kneading each other's brokenness at times.

Throughout it all, Carolyn would stop in and talk.  She knew our work and sometimes would help out or stand beside us in the pharmacy or at the sink while we washed up surgery packs and tell life stories and events.

I still laugh remembering the time she helped me stamp over two-hundred statements needing to be put into the mail in short time.  I told Shirley she licked stamp after stamp and never missed a word.  She can weave a story with great skill and has a strong sense of wrong and right coupled with great empathy.

We all had pretty extreme hurts and life-torments to live with, and live through.

And we all laughed like hyenas most days.  We had to, otherwise we would all just cry the day away.

We knew intuitively we all had to hang together, or we would all hang separately.

These ladies all had beautiful homes - like Country Living, Southern Living and every other magazine you just drool over has nothing on them.  Their taste is impeccable.  We would plan a progressive dinner stopping at each home over Christmas each year, so we could see each home decorated.  It was such great fun, and usually the biggest snow storm of the whole year.

They were "ag-ladies" - a little bit of snow and ice didn't deter them one mile.

They were all sincere gardeners.  Well, almost all.

When I was going through some traumatic life-events, I started digging flower beds.  I told my kids that "digging helped take out my meanness", and they mostly agreed.

I didn't have money to hang out in greenhouses to get great plant starts for these gardens.  And come to find out, I didn't have to, my ag-ladies set me up better.  They would bring me starts and tell me how to plant them, and when I killed some of them, they would bring me more.

I still have a red-twig-dogwood bush that Shirley started for me.  I have four more started around our home because she taught me how.  I have oregano plants from Connie that I have dug up from house to house to house in all of our moves and carried with me.  I have some day-lillys that came from a tiny start from Margaret, and some columbine and our all-time favorite - ***** (sorry - for three days I have been trying to remember this flower's name, but can't....)

We have beds full of blooms and I remember these friends fondly every time I gaze on them.

I didn't realize the treasure I was obtaining all those years ago.  I didn't know that the people, the work, the learning would impact me for the rest of my life.

***

During my radiation treatments, the ladies decided they were going to drive me.  Since I stayed most of the week in Columbus, each Friday one of them would show up in my driveway to drive me down and back for almost four hours, just for a twenty minute treatment.  I was doing so well in radiation, I didn't think it was necessary, but they insisted.  And to tell you the truth, round about Friday morning, about 11am, I was so glad they had.

I was tired.

Scott wanted to know if they were on time.  I told him they were my "ag-ladies" - they were early. It was some of the best one-hour-and-forty-minute drives one way I have ever had.  I remember Carolyn pulling up to the STOP sign when getting off of 71 on our way home commenting "wasn't that the fastest Columbus trip we've ever had?"  And she was right, the talking, the catching up, the laughing, the love all bundled up to make the trips so easy.

Except for Shirley - she truly drew the short-straw weather-trip-wise.  The first trip she took me down it rained heavily part of the way, and the other part had really poor visibility.  Like, everyone on 71 even slowed down.  The second trip, we encountered 4-6 inches of snow once we hit the Delaware exit above Columbus.  Apparently, Columbus city had decided to not plow or salt until the snow storm was over.  It took us over an hour to do the usual twelve minutes on 315 - everyone was going 25mph.  Thankfully, because the lanes were an invisible mess.

We drank coffee after my treatment hoping to see at least one snow-truck before starting back.   There was none.  So we started back in the same maze of nothing but white roads loaded with snow.

People asked me if I was scared.  I tell them they have never ridden with a woman who knows how to drive a tractor, drive a truck, drive a herd of cows, if they have to ask that.  She has lived through far worse in her life and is pretty unshakable.

Not to mention, she can even drive a pretty hard antique deal as well.

Even though I could travel the road to OSU/James/Stephanie Spielman Center with my eyes closed, I missed pointing out the exit to Connie.  And this is just a credit to a steady-handed-driver - I yelled when I saw that exit sign out of the corner of my eye, and her steering wheel didn't waver one centimeter.

When I started driving myself to my treatments in January in Columbus, I missed more than a few exits, and had developed a bit of working knowledge of the roads in Columbus because of that.  So I instructed Connie to take the next exit.  She did.  I had her turn the wrong way.

Two more times.  We ended up in Hilliard, and proceeded to drive back around...... I apologized profusely, especially with the whole idea of $3.85 a gallon gasoline swirling around in my brain, and she laughed.  And we laughed, and drove on.

It was so good.  They were so good to me.  They don't view miles - they view trips.  Some of them had to drive farther to get into my driveway than most people drive five days a week in their work commutes.

***

When you work with people like that, your life changes.  I know their kids even though they don't know me.  I know their spouses, even though they don't know me so well.  They know my kids, my spouse better than my own family does.

We have shared each other's hurts, each other's calamities, each other's torments, cried with each other, and laughed with each other.

Someone remembered the times that I brought my son with me to work.  He had become quite adept at skipping school, and I had told him that when he missed the bus he was not going to get to stay home - I went home and brought him back to work with me.  He sat in the backroom with his school books and drew cartoons.

But they remembered those days and reminded me how Fred and John would walk in and find him and say "Oh, Dude, not again!"  They all understood it was a phase, and something we were just going to get through, and while he grew to like school better than a storage room at the clinic, they all accepted him as well.

There were a lot of life-events like that, and since I was the one with teenagers in the home at that time, these people helped me pick through that briar patch of life, and enjoy the fruit along with the thorns.

Each of them had lived through something harder, something more painful, and because of that I was not left to wallow in the "why me?" syndrome.  I could not face them and live in self-pity.  I could not wish my life away.

We all make our life choices, and many times don't want to live with them.  These folks showed me how to live with them, and make them advantageous no matter what they looked like at the moment.

***

They all took me on a road trip last week.  We had the best time and I sat in the vehicle in the front seat with the warmer and was named "navigator".  I glared at the Garmen woman speaking to me and told them honestly what I thought about her. They didn't think I was dumb or lacking or anything but "there".  They were ok with the chemo holes in my brain.  They laughed, we all laughed, and we shared our knowledge on such things as GPS units, of which I had none.

But since they had made sure I got the heated seat in the front, I was handed "garmen-lady".....  It immediately took me back all those years ago to the time when we had all helped each other before, talked it out on how to do it best, and just did it.

It took me back to the point where they had all before showed me how to do the job quickly and well, and how to be an actual *participant* in my work-life at any given moment.

My reticent lymph glands and muscles could learn a few things from them....

Like I said, I never realized you don't really get to have a second chance.  You don't get to work the same fourteen years over again.  You don't get to develop work relationships with those people later.
 
I didn't realize at that time that "this was it!"  I didn't realize that God had developed a working family about me that was more than a group of people I saw everyday, they were a hedge, a help, a support, a group of folks like no other.

And I am so glad that I was "awakened" enough to realize it some then, and even more-so now.  We don't see each other often, but when we do it's like we were working together just yesterday.  We all know each other's hurts and pains, and we all know each other's delights and glory.

And to be honest, it doesn't get much better than that.

That group of people taught me a lot about God's idea of community, caring, helping, and supporting without ever sitting in a pew.

They lived it.  And I was one of the lucky ones that got to be there.