Control: the Grand Illusion

I’ts VERY hard for me to ask for help. I’ve never been good at it. But there’s nothing quite like a stroke to knock you right down to diapers, lying around waiting for people to do stuff for you. At least since I had my first kid at age 21, I’ve always been a nurturer, a caretaker. But then I read this quote from Ram Dass, the 1960’s guru, who had a stroke in 1997 and has almost no use of his right side:

“I had gotten power from helping people, and now I need help for everything. That was the grace. The stroke happened to the ego, and when I could witness the pain, my life got better.”

Ouch. Painful, but probably true. Maybe all that nurturing wasn’t entirely altruistic. Maybe it was also about feeling in control—feeling I had some power. And those of us who are less than enlightened tend to define ourselves by what we do: I am the woman who was always in control, who knew who she was, who took care of others, who sang, who knitted, who danced, etc. But I’m having to come around to the idea that since I’m still here and NOT doing any of those things right now, “me” must be something else. Maybe my self-definition was wrong. Ram Dass calls it a "fierce grace." I get it.

But clearly, the Universe didn’t believe I was getting it. So last Thursday, I ended up back in the hospital, this time in our Little Town hospital. I went in for a follow-up GP visit after BS, and my BP was so high that they took me straight to the ER and loaded me up on IV BP meds. Let me tell you—the ER is NOT a place to go to relax and lower your BP. They scared the bejeezus out of me. They didn’t say it, but I could tell by what they were doing that they thought either another stroke or a heart attack was imminent. Thank heaven my body was just toying with them. And with me.

Three days later, I’m home again with a new cocktail of meds. The good news is that my left side is getting stronger, I’m getting some fine motor movement back in my hand, and the new meds make me just relaxed enough to take the edge off the panic attacks that can sometimes plague me when I start obsessing over BS and my brain’s betrayal or my own mortality.

Ray and my mom continue to be the best caretakers a person could ask for. Ray always says that when someone asks if they can do something for you, you need to let them—it's your gift to them, really, because they NEED to do something. So I’m learning to let them—my beautiful friends are ignoring my pigheadedness and tendancy to isolate and are coming anyway, bearing flowers, cards, scarves, and soup. Yes, like Ram Dass, I am slowly re-defining myself, learning to trust my body’s amazing ability to heal itself, accepting the fierce grace of this transition in my life, and reluctantly letting go of the “me” that believed it was EVER in control of ANYTHING.