I was running away.
I knew, in the darkest recesses of my mind, right where I shove everything else I don't want to deal with, that I was running. I had a veritable list of Things going on in my life, and plenty of reasons why I should have stayed home that particular weekend, but I'd had enough. I was sure that staying home would have been the worst course of action I could follow. Some of the Things I was running from were good - we had (still have) a baby lemur we're hand-rearing. We just acquired a new kitten (one who literally came running up to us and our four dogs right through our fenced-in backyard). I have a vegetable garden that needs attention, not to mention all my other pets. And, of course, Jared. But there are bad Things too, and it was those I fled from.
I ran from midnight feedings for both the lemur and the kitten (who was way too young to wean). I ran a little into my husband's second week of venomous snake bite recovery, where he didn't quite have full use of both hands. At the end of April, right when I was poised for a visit home and some much-needed family time, one of our cats died from a disease she should not have had. Heartbroken and in no state to drive, I stayed home. Then had to deal with the terror of the disease affecting our other cats, and I ran from that too. Mostly, though, I was running from myself. I have not been in a very good mental state for the past few months. I've been moody, anxious, high strung, and generally on-edge waiting for the other shoe (how many more can there be??) to drop.
If I'm being honest with myself, I've been feeling off since the autumn. It started with mood swings and headaches, then abdominal pain like I haven't felt since I was a teenager, before I was put on birth control. Then came the bleeding. And I, like everything else I don't want to deal with, ignored it. For weeks. Until it was to the point where I was coming home from barely getting anything done at work to crawl right into bed without dinner, trying to sleep it off. I was terrified, and kept my fears to myself until I couldn't anymore and confessed to my husband that I was scared I was sick, or maybe even pregnant or miscarrying, despite having an IUD. Pregnancy is not for me, and has never been on the table of circumstances I'd be happy with. I don't want a baby, I don't want to be responsible for someone else's life, and I never have. Thankfully, Jared is on the same page as I am, and we had a discussion regarding what we'd do if my terrors came true. But we couldn't do anything without knowing for sure. Finally, I made an appointment.
Turns out I was not pregnant or having a miscarriage, but I was having trouble with my birth control. I've had an IUD for years, and apparently after so long in rare cases some women react to them. Want to guess who one of those rare women might be? I was dealing with a hormone imbalance, which caused my mood swings, headaches, severe cramping, and near-constant bleeding. So I was given a course of hormone therapy and told to come back in three months if no change. I was back in three months. My dose was adjusted, and I was told to come back in a couple months. So I went back.
I'd like to point out it was now spring, six months after I first started having problems. While the medications stopped the cramping and the headaches, they did nothing for the mood swings or the bleeding. When I became resigned to the fact that the meds were doing nothing else, I turned to healthier eating and daily exercise to try to at least get my mood under control. And wouldn't ya know, it actually helped. I felt marginally better, and even lost some weight while I was at it, though that wasn't my main goal. But nothing helped the bleeding. So when I finally went back in to see my doctor, we discussed alternate forms of birth control. I basically wasn't a candidate for any of them, for various reasons, except perhaps permanent sterilization. And then, to my immense surprise, I was told we could do that. I've been asking my doctors for years (for real, for at least the last eight or so years) about sterilization, and have always been told I'm too young, I'll regret it, I'll change my mind, what if I meet the right guy and he wants to have kids (that last one stopped when I married Jared). I've heard it all, and switched doctors more than once because of it. Apparently it takes a medical issue and for me to bleed for six months straight before someone was willing to consider it for me, but hey, I'll take what I can get.
Another month's worth of appointments, meetings with the surgeon, and tests to make sure I was a candidate for both a tubal ligation and ablation (sterilization and a procedure to make it so I won't bleed any more), and suddenly everything fell into place. I was having surgery on the last Tuesday of May to make all my problems with birth control go away. And you know what? I was running away from that, too.
Not the surgery itself. I was dead set on that happening no matter what. No, I was running away from the anxiety of never having had surgery before, of not knowing exactly what to expect, of the surrendering of control that would be required for me to get it done. I left, the weekend before my surgery, to go to a happy place both physically and in my own head. Of course, things didn't go quite as planned while backpacking in the gypsum dunes of White Sands National Monument in New Mexico, but that's a story for another post. At the beginning of my trip, it was enough to be running away.
There are three more parts to this story, so check back every Sunday for each installment!
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