I suppose I'm far enough away from this to be able to write about it. And if Don Lauria can face his grief with his shoulders squared, well, I'd be proud to try to emulate his bravery. Don shared this photo with me last week:


So back to Brandon's post on Fear:

There was no impending danger, no weapon involved, no one threatening me, no cancer nor one single moment in time I can point to...but I had spent the last 10+ years sliding...down.

I'd been fighting depression since I was little and had recognized that other kids weren't sad. I had learned to put on a game face to hide my vulnerability. I had wrestled with myself to just barely crawl out of my teenage years. I had fought and fought and fought to not get pulled under throughout my 20s. I had a pit in the bottom of my stomach that never went away. When was I going to get over the hump? I had persisted, believing that with enough deep introspection and effort, I could change whatever was wrong with me.

Some time in my early 30s the tailspins started becoming more difficult to counter and I was having trouble righting myself. I was faltering...and failing. I worked harder than anyone else around me. I exercised, ate a healthful diet (whole grain everything) and tried multiple antidepressant medications and innumerable supplements. I read voraciously about anxiety, depression, self-defeating behavior and self esteem. There had never been a time that I could remember that I wasn't hiding how I was really feeling. (I had been told repeatedly, with no restraint as to scorn that I had nothing to be depressed about -- I had a job, I wasn't dying, I wasn't hungry...had a roof over my head. Who was I to be complaining about anything? I had so much, and was still ungrateful. Look around -- there was so much real suffering.) I was convinced I was fatally flawed.

I got fired the day before I closed on selling my house hundreds of miles away, where my former life had been. I had nowhere to go. I was living in a state and area where I knew virtually no one; I had moved there to start the job. The rug pulled out from under me, I went into a tailspin the likes of which I had never experienced. I tried to find work, but I knew the few interviewers I had spoken with could see that I was broken. I had no energy. No will. At one point, if I walked to the mailbox, it took me two weeks to recover. Doctors said I was depressed. And why not? I had lost my job, just gotten out of an emotionally abusive long-term relationship...I was advised to lower my stress levels. That's not it, I shook my head, doctors have been telling me that for 20 years.

I found a bright light...volunteering with a children's organization whose mission it was to impart life skills to kids using sport as a platform. If I wasn't coaching and volunteering, I was practicing or playing. I went back to waiting tables as I had in college to barely make ends meet. I was in my late 30s, and had to periodically borrow money from my parents to pay the odd bill, but I was keeping my head above water. Okay, maybe I had finally found the place I was meant to be. I stepped in as an interim executive director of the local chapter, and then proceeded to be pummeled by the most undermining, brutal treatment I never could have imagined. My pay was withheld when I wouldn't back down from implementing policies to protect the program's minor participants and the non-profit organization itself. I was leeringly threatened. I resigned. The light went out.

Playing golf with my best girlfriend one Friday evening, I met my future husband. We tried to wave him through, but he politely asked if he could play with us. We thought he was crazy. When my friend pointed out the NYY on the side of his hat, I was determined to keep my ball on the opposite side of the course. Nothing worse from the perspective of a rabid Sox fan. But he was persistent. I had sworn off men and had simplified my life down to two things: golf and baseball. I thought he might have been in his early 20s, except that he was remarkably emotionally and intellectually mature. More than that, he could hit the ball longer than me (niiiiice!) and understood the place from which I approached the world. Puzzling. Someone to keep at arm's length.

I slid down further, utterly bewildered. I could barely get myself dressed to work at the restaurant. Ironing my shirts was exhausting. Within a few months, I could barely get out of bed to get to the sofa, where I would go back to sleep. I had no money. I started selling off what I could. I lived off of the pantry I had amassed (to the consternation of family members, I've always had this thought in the back of my mind that I should be prepared for the unknown), and it kept me alive with no cash in my pocket. My car was repossessed. Everything was in collection. I became a turtle, turning further and further into myself. I was trapped. And a failure. My friends used to affectionately call me the energizer bunny or ricochet rabbit. My God, what was wrong with me? Why couldn't I just get it together?

I was persuaded to get married again (my husband wouldn't give up on me) and the muppet was born. The first six months of my pregnancy were spent horizontal; I was on an anti-nausea drug normally given to chemotherapy patients. At every check up during my pregnancy I told my doctors that I felt really awful, and that something wasn't right. The canned response was, you're pregnant...what do you expect? I suspected they thought I was a chronic complainer, so I stopped complaining. I spent my days curled up in a ball, so grateful when my husband came home and held me.

During labor, I told the doctors, nurses, midwives...whoever would listen, that the baby wasn't able to get out. They would nod and say that what was going on was perfectly normal. No, I kept thinking, if there's one thing I know, it's my body. I had grown up swinging from trees and monkey bars, doing gymnastics, skiing, swimming, windsurfing, and later lifting, running, blading, doing yoga, etc., and I KNEW every iteration of how my body worked and didn't work. (Plus, I'm kinesthetic, which is really hard to explain.) Suffice it to say that I could feel her turning over, rearranging her limbs and turning her head to make the move, and then she would collide with something, relax and rest again.

The medical staff was perplexed. They just kept telling me to try harder, so I did. They asked me if I had ever been a swimmer. WTF? Yes, 20 years ago, why? Apparently they were concerned about how long I was holding my breath. I finally told them I had only a little bit left in me and if that didn't work, would they finally give me the C-section and put the two of us out of our misery? (Did I happen to mention that they didn't feed me? I hadn't eaten in over 27 hours. Where was this effort supposed to come from?) My best friend was there, thank the great cosmic bus (that's for you, Mel!), and even she started to talk, encouraging me to just keep trying. Okay, so even though I couldn't imagine having anyone else watching, well, you know...the fear came on strong. It was over quickly, but not before something physically snapped. (I've never heard that sound before, having never broken a bone, but it was an awful sound.)

My daughter didn't cry. Pages made, people running into the room, my daughter surrounded...we waited. They were all hovering, poking and prodding, and finally, the supervising doctor came in and announced that not all babies cry, people, she's fine, nothing broken. A moment later, she let out a gentle, perplexed hoot. And then I was looking down, into her eyes, completely overwhelmed. I thought of my birth mom. I thought of her gathering her things in a quiet hospital room, looking around, taking stock, and then walking out the door to go home...alone. I put my nose down and inhaled...my beautiful, little girl. I would try to find her and thank her, if I could.

After my daughter was born, I continued to slide. I could barely move. But now I had unbearable pain, too. Everyone told me to get moving, that it was my responsibility to suck it up and keep going. Women had been having babies for eons. In fact, did some women not give birth in the fields and keep working? Did I think I was special or something? I tried. And tried. Why was everything so up-side-down? I started researching pregnancy-related injuries. I went to doctor after doctor after doctor. Not one could find anything wrong. We moved in with family. My world had shrunk to the space of our bedroom. I was in so much pain that I cried and cried. My husband did an about-face and was distant. I finally dragged out of him that his mother (who once studied to be a doctor) told him that she knew that I was faking everything, that the symptoms of which I complained weren't real and that I just didn't want to go back to work...I was taking advantage of the situation, and worse, him. He believed her. It wasn't the rug that had been pulled out anymore, it was the earth beneath me.

Hope was slipping away and there was nothing I could do to stop it. My world shrunk to just the minute by minute survival of the muppet and me.

When was it going to end? Hadn't I worked hard enough in my life to achieve, be a good person, correct all those numerous character flaws and other things that were wrong with me? Had I not been humble enough? Grateful enough? I was frightened. I was fighting something I knew in my heart was there, but that I just couldn't see.

More doctors. No answers. Moved in with family 45 minutes away. Smaller room, smaller world. I looked fine, so why wasn't I working? Why wasn't I out looking for a job? Why didn't I go to sleep at a decent hour? Just get it together, that's what I had to do. And we were in the way. What was a 40-something wife and mother doing cooped up in her room? I was in pain, and I couldn't sleep.

A few months later, I packed up the car and the muppet and I moved in with family back home in New England. We lived in the basement. There were rules and constant disapproval. Constant opinions about everything I was doing wrong. Hostility and superiority. I obviously didn't appreciate what was being done for me. Ungrateful mess.

We moved again, into a house that would be unoccupied for a few months while a family member was away. The muppet and I had some room to breathe, but it was all I could do to get us out a few times a week to walk to the grocery store. I had been a vegetarian for 22 years before intentionally including meat in my diet again around 2006 when I really started feeling physically terrible, so at this point I turned to a vegetarian diet again, which only made things worse. Mostly, I just felt like I was in the lowest place I could imagine and was barely keeping it together. If things didn't get better, how much longer could I live like this? I looked at the muppet and thought she deserved so much better, but she was stuck with me.

We had to pack up again and move back into the basement. Then back to the vacated house. Then back into the basement again. All this time since moving back to New England I had been voraciously researching health matters, and when I ran into a dead end, I turned to voraciously researching anything I could find on my birth origins. Why didn't I contact my birth mom and ask about health matters? Oh, and that would be a fine way to interrupt her life. IF I contacted her, the idea of which scared the pants off me, it would be to thank her, nothing more. Well, that must have meant that I didn't really want to get better and wanted to be sick, if I really even WAS sick. @#%*&!.

Fear, as I continued to slide, permeated every moment of my life at that point. How was it even possible for things to be getting worse?! What if I never got better and had to live like this for the rest of my life? Who would ever hire me? What if I never got my independence back? These prospects made everything inside me just shake, like my stabilization muscles were attached to an electrical outlet. I desperately needed sleep. My stomach hurt; I wanted to curl up in a ball and disappear. I could barely look anyone in the eye. I felt invisible and alone.

Talking with my dad (a physician) one day, I told him about the muscle spasms in my back that I'd had since my 20s, but that had gotten so bad that they were constricting my rib cage and making it hard to breathe. I had been reading about the importance of sleep, during which HGH is produced and the body repairs itself. I had had insomnia since my 20s, too. I was lucky if I got 3-4 hours of sleep most nights, and others I didn't sleep at all. Here, feel the knots, I said, they're real.

My dad came home a few days later and said that he had spoken with a pain specialist, who was a runner, too, and that the doctor had agreed to see me as a favor to my dad. The idea was to have the pain specialist inject or dry needle one or two of the worst muscle spasms to see if that might work to relieve the pain. You know, maybe I'm not ready to write about all of this (shoveling break!).

I went to see the doctor. At that point, it was embarrassing filling out the necessary medical history forms; I had seen so many doctors. I think I brought a spreadsheet to avoid all of that. First, he just wanted to talk with me. He looked me straight in the eye, even when I started explaining why I was there and listing the things that were wrong. Until then, my experience had been that doctors would look at you when they asked a question or two, then look away. My eyes welled up with tears; he wouldn't look away. He was listening intently. I was embarrassed about my physical condition and explained that I wanted so badly to have my life back. I couldn't run. I couldn't do anything to get rid of the stress in my body. I felt trapped, and so sad...I had this pit in the bottom of my stomach that never went away no matter what I did...and I was so scared. I didn't want a prescription; I wanted help. I wanted to know what was wrong, so I could do whatever I needed to do to get better.

The doctor told me that he could still see my athletic build underneath and that he believed I would be able to run again. We talked about trail running. He squeezed this and that, pressed here and there, said that there was a good chance that I had fractured my tailbone and/or something in my hips during labor, and then said he wasn't going to touch me. I needed to see doctor so-and-so, who was the preeminent fibromyalgia specialist, the guy that writes the books (and whose wife also suffers from FM). I started to cry...I didn't want something that nobody believed was real. He assured me it was real and that he believed that the specialist could help me. He didn't charge me.

It would take over 3 months to get in to see the FM specialist (and that was with the help of my dad having his practice at the same hospital). I couldn't do it, though. The prospect of making it another 3 months of feeling so badly was more than I knew I could withstand.

I've carried a small card covered with clear tape in my pocket since my mid-20s with a quote attributed to Fred Mills that says:
**
"The wonderful thing about the game of life is
that winning and losing are only temporary...unless you quit."**

I'm not a quitter, I thought. I'm not. My birth mom wasn't a quitter. I'm not a quitter. I'm not giving up, not now. And I went back to marathon research, bouncing between FM and trying to learn about my birth parents.

http://www.supertopo.com/climbing/thread.php?topic_id=1552874&msg=1552874#msg1552874

A couple of months later, I stumbled upon several articles that referenced anecdotally that a gluten-free diet had helped some people with FM. (This was actually preferable to the drugs typically prescribed for FM from my perspective, despite my love of Nutterbutters. I could give up Nutterbutters if it meant that there was a chance I could feel better.) I researched further and gathered a list of recommended supplements (supported by research) for FM, as well as for those on a gluten-free diet. A week later I gave up all grains (July 2011).

My body did not like a gluten-free diet. It wanted what was missing. I felt like walking death for the first couple of weeks. (See, my family argued, proof that it doesn't work and it's not so simple. Stop the nonsense.) I dug in my heels, confident in my research. I was up in the middle of the night eating copious amounts of fruit salad and giant spoonfuls of almond butter. Note that I said up in the middle of the night -- I had started sleeping. (I should also note that I had started using a Philips "blue light" which was timed to turn on 45 mins. before I wanted to wake up.) Three, four, five weeks went by, and I was out walking, a lot, and was taking on huge hills with the stroller. (Purely coincidence or placebo effect, another family member retorted. Obviously, I wanted attention with my special diet.)

I think I've written about the rest elsewhere, but the bottom line is that I was diagnosed with celiac disease through blood work 7 weeks after starting a no-grain diet (after being taken by family to a restaurant that had absolutely nothing gluten-free). I saw the FM specialist at the end of August 2011, shortly after the diagnosis. He diagnosed FM (a syndrome, not an illness) and "prescribed" non-impact, aerobic exercise at least 45 minutes at a time at least 3-4, if not 5-6 days per week, getting a good night's sleep every single night, eating a healthy diet with lots of good fruits and vegetables and simply just making good choices.

I took his prescribed "Golden Rules" and treated them just like a written prescription. I moved back into the house where we could live alone for a few more months later that year. At the end of February 2012, I started to work again. On March 16th, 2012, I learned that my birth mom had passed away, and on March 19th, I learned who my birth dad was.

http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/1818126/Speaking-of-statistical-improbabilities

On Thursday last week, I went for the 1.5 year follow-up with the FM specialist and that's it! No more doctor's visits necessary. No more pain; the pit in the bottom of my stomach I've had my whole life is GONE. No more fear.

I still need to write up a TR about my trip to CA with the muppet for the Oakdale Climber's Festival and more, and I'll try to do that soon. I'm in a much better place now, having taken some time to process.

A special thank you to everyone here from my heart. It wasn't all that long ago that things looked bleak from where I was standing, and now...well, now I'm whole.

LilaBiene

P.S. I didn't realize that I had made it so difficult for folks who wanted to read these stories (I'm still shy, what can I say?), so here are a few links:

http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/1821718/The-enigma-that-was-the-Dolt

http://www.supertopo.com/tr/Longest-6-months-6-days-of-my-life/t11710n.html

http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/1993044/In-memory-of-Bill-Dolt-Feuerer

http://www.supertopo.com/tr/Interim-TR-on-the-journey-toward-acceptance-of-a-world-without-the-Dolt/t11790n.html

http://www.supertopo.com/climbers-forum/2058830/I-curse-you-GLEE-Howl