Running on Low
Have you ever waited until the gaslight on your car came on before you actually got gas? Did you try to push the boundaries and see how far you could go before you became so close to being stranded on the side of the road?
Do you ever feel like you do that to yourself? To your body? Your mind?
I’m doing it now. I’ve only been getting 5 hours of sleep per night this past week. A mix of staying up later than I usually do and waking up at 3:30 AM a couple mornings. I’ve been immersing myself into different projects, activities, and plans. Anything to keep myself busy right now. I like being busy, mostly when I’m looking to cope with something negative. In this case, we are less than a week away from the one-year anniversary of Ian’s tumor hemorrhaging.
That time of our life feels like yesterday for me. It’s hard to believe it wasn’t. And yet, I can look at Ian and recognize how far he has come in his recovery and know that that isn’t something that happened overnight. To be honest, it just feels like I’m constantly in the Twilight zone. And I’m doing my best to get through each day. It’s hard to not feel stuck in the past when you’ve had something so traumatic happen to you. It’s hard to move forward and not let the fears of what happened affect me. But somehow, I do. We all do.
I make sure to take in the feeling of Ian’s hug before he leaves me in case I never get one again. I read him his bedtime story on the couch in the living room because if I do it upstairs, it’s harder to leave. I’m constantly worried that when I tuck him in, he won’t wake back up. I panic if he’s out, whether with a family member or at school, and one of them calls me. The trauma of that time in our lives is still very real, and my body remembers it. Your mind has a way of blocking things out when it’s too much for you. To protect you. But your body doesn’t.
This is my version of PTSD. But I don’t want to sound ungrateful. How can I? My baby is here, and he’s alive and doing well considering everything that happened to him. Everything from that day played out in a way that saved his life. If Ian had been asleep when that happened, he probably would not have made it because he would’ve bled into his brain all night. We would’ve thought he was asleep, with no idea that it was actually unconsciousness. We had just been to the hospital earlier that same morning, we thought we knew what was happening. But luckily, the ER doctor recognized something more was going on, ordered the stat CT scan, and that’s when we would discover that the tumor was bleeding. Bleeding into his brain. Blocking off the ventricles and causing intercranial pressure, as well as a stroke. Ian had the classic signs of malignancy, and somehow, some way, it wasn’t. It was still low grade. The chance of that happening… we were told was only 2-3%. And even Ian’s inital diagnosis of the brain tumors came with its own divine intervention when he had his first convulsive seizure in front of the neurologist. If there’s a time and place for that to happen, it was then. I’ll never forget either of those days. One day, losing my faith. The other, clinging to it because it was all we had.
I mentioned earlier that I’ve been keeping busy. And I recently recognized I’m doing this to avoid the feelings of last year flooding my brain. I know I shouldn’t take on more than I can handle. I know I should leave time for self-care and rest. But coping mechanisms can be hard to stop. Bad habits, hard to break. I can feel that I’m running on low, but I’m afraid if I take the time to rest, the depression will consume me. I don’t want to hit the low. I want to keep pushing myself to stay on the high. Ride it out as long as possible. I feel better when I’m busy.
I’m self-aware enough, though, that I recognize you need the lows in order to know what the highs are. I’m just not ready to surrender to it this time around. At least not yet.