Save Laurens Heart

Slow and achy today.  Having a lot of trouble getting started.  Been awake for awhile now and only left bed for a light breakfast.

I believe it’s because I have been eating outside of my normal diet.  I feel really sucky because it’s my own fault. Sigh.

Ok, back to veggies and dark bread today.  No more dairy and sugar (I’ve been indulging here and there for the two weeks I’ve been away so far).  Turns out, self control is hard here.  Feta cheese YUM, Tzatziki sauce YUM, fresh honey RIDIC.

Gonna yoga stretch the sleepiness out of me and see how this goes…  it may be time for a painkilller if I can’t get through it.

Will I ever see the day healthcare works in the US?  Preventative, Not-for-profit healthcare please!

http://www.nih.gov/news/health/jul2009/nccam-30.htm

Of course we spend billions on Alternative Medicine out of pocket! Not only is it expensive but you, US healthcare system, have failed us in so many ways we’ve had to find our own way.  When will we ALL be able to have acupuncture and massages and yoga?  Isn’t it clear yet these therapies should be covered by insurance across the board?

What makes me most sad is that on the contrary to this article (“38 percent of adults use some form of CAM for health and wellness or to treat a variety of diseases and conditions”), I still go into the offices of all my “traditional” doctors and hear them poo-poo alternative therapies.  They still believe it’s a bunch of BS.  For example, I dare not speak about say, acupuncture, at the rheumotlogist because I will definitely get a sideways look and a chuckle that equals “oh you silly girl”.  And really, who needs that again.  So backwards.

It took me two years to figure out how to somewhat manage my illness and I am still not sure.  There were so many questions every traditional doctor wouldn’t touch that my alternative healers did.  They were the only ones who were paying attention in the beginning when most of the docs (who i DO NOT see anymore) were letting me wither away.

Things were becoming a bit too intense.

For the past year and a half now I have completely immersed myself into my illness and everything I could possibly do in my power to heal myself.  I am grateful and lucky for many things, the Fundrager last year being at the top of my list… mostly because I have had the opportunity to make healing my priority.

Seeing that I cannot work, healing has been the full-time job.  I filled my calendar with appointments every single day.  Doctors, more doctors, homeopathic doctors, acupuncture, yoga, energy healing, nutrition counseling, this is my life.  It’s no secret I’ve become obsessed.  And while I need many of these things to function at this point I took a step back a couple of weeks ago and I didn’t know who I was anymore.

Everything I do every day is a constant reminder of my illness.  The sadness is palpable. It is quite often the topic of my conversations, the people I see most are the ones healing me or working with me.  Even when I am with friends there is no way I can enjoy the moment… my illness and my heart is all I think about.  Distracted isn’t even a good word for it, neither is obsessed.  I have been becoming someone I don’t know and I am not sure how to deal with it.

One thing I did know and decide was that I needed to get out of my routine. Stat.

I decided to take a sabbatical from NYC and mostly from my routines over the summer.  We would stay with family everywhere we are so I do feel safe and filled with love.

This was a huge deal for me. Anxiety took over my body before leaving … I haven’t been without any of these things for a year or more.  Acupuncture once a week has become a drug I can’t get enough of.  I am convinced if I miss I will get sick. Don’t even get me started on other things like energy healing and therapy and my eating habits (other addictions that need cooling).

The truth is, I’ve never been so neurotic in my entire life.  I may look calm on the outside but the turmoil inside was becoming too much to bear.  I forced myself out of my comfort zone, my apartment was becoming my cave and I didn’t like leaving anymore other than to go to appointments.  I needed nice weather.  Days that would call my name with the sunshine and waves crashing against rocks that summoned me to get my ass out into the world.

So here I am out in the world for awhile.  I feel brave and I feel optimistic.  I am so proud to have even gotten this far.  I try not to overanalyze my health while being aware.  I take good care, take my medicine, and eat what’s right for me.  I still need to throw down a xanax to sleep most nights (it’s when everything is quiet and it’s only me and my heartbeat that I tend to freak out the most).

Overall, I am becoming familiar with a thing called balance.  Something absent from my life for so long now.

I do know I couldn’t go on the way I was.  It was becoming an illness within itself.  I need out of my head.  I need some faith.  I need nature and nice weather.

Of course, I am mixing business in with pleasure.  I plan to see some researchers in Sweden in August at the Karolinska Institute.  I am looking to see what sort of trials I may be able to partake in.

To wrap it up, I was recently thinking about how I’ve always sort of laughed at someone (whether in the movies or real life) who may have said something like “I am on a journey to find myself” or “I need to find myself again”.  It always seemed overly dramatic to me.  But now I am sympathetic.  I know what this is like. I need to find the new Lauren.  The post-traumatic, 25 lbs lighter, slap-in-your-face aware of mortality Lauren.  What do I even identify with anymore?  And who?   It’s been tough to even hang with my friends in the haze I’ve been walking around in.  I feel like I have nothing in common with them, like they could never truly understand no matter how amazing they have been (and they have been amazing).  But that’s a different post all together. 

I just want to take a breath.  Take my time, have wild nights with blank Word documents, my laptop, and my mind.  And when I come back to my home, my city that I adore, I want to be ME.  100% me. No judging myself.  No being hard on myself.  Just me. At all times.

(title from Holiday in Spain Counting Crows)

Every once in awhile I manage to grasp the illusive afternoon nap.

Napping is an art that must be balanced to turn out right.  Not too long (just under an hour) and long enough to get into dream mode (45 minutes seems to be the best time).  It’s also best not to be in complete darkness, and a light breeze through the window = perfection.  Bonus points if you can hear the ocean.

You wake up easily like the sun rising with a slight smile, eyes puffy, stomach growling.

I love the times I manage to get it right.

Delish.

This article below immediately grabbed my attention. I’ve been waiting for someone to write about this penomenon:

http://saladandcandy.com/post/147075008/the-vita-mix-calls-the-mandoline-black

It’s no secret I have become obsessed with food.  I never ever thought about food in the way I do now.  That is, until I read tons of literature on curing oneself by eating raw vegan or almost raw.  Turns out not such a great idea for me to be a vegetarian at this point of the healing process (learned that lesson last year) but I have created my own diet that I suffer with day in and day out. It is little to no meat (chicken or fish only and grass-fed antibiotic free please), lots of greens and veggies, no dairy, sugar or white breads, etc..

After I decided I would cure myself by eating green and clean I tried so many different things.  Part of it is fun:  you are on this adventure to create things out of specific ingredeints, within guidelines, and also adhering to a careful balance.  Most of it is frustrating i.e. when I started out I thought “everything I actually LIKE is “bad” for me.”  Some has been fascinating (I learned that I am basically allergic to dairy but not in an obvious way that I could have ever known without eliminating it). I also feel TONS better than ever before. But the major problem that doesn’t seem to go away is that this has taken on a life of its own.

And as I sit down to honestly think about it you can even call it a sort of “disorder” I’ve developed.

I cannot eat a single meal without going over it again and again in my head and if I have eaten something “bad” I feel guilty for hours.  I feel like if I eat sugar or dairy or cave in and have a cheeseburger once every few months (grass-fed organic only of course), then I am directly contributing to my illness.  It’s simple in my head: Lauren, you eat bad, you are the reason you will be sick.  Paranoid, guilty, ritualistic… sounds like a disorder to me.

It sounds pretty hardcore as I type it out.  Only T truly knows the extent of this because he lives it with me.  I struggle to find balance.  I struggle every day.

I am not vegan enough for the vegans. I cannot read most of their blogs or listen to their podcasts because it makes me feel imcompetent.  I found this part most interesting in the article because they are in fact, a movement and I am lucky to live in a neighborhood where vegans abound so that I do have choices and can make them easily, BUT it is a circle where you have to be one hundred percent IN IT to be one of them.  There is even a specific language to how these slender clear-skinned folk speak.  I hear it in the colonic place, in the health food store, in the organic raw shop down the block from my home… If I spoke in the manner most of them do my friends would laugh in my face.

I am not allowed the carefree existence of my friends and family and I often watch them piling food into their mouths as I think about the havoc it is reaking on their bodies.  Buzzkill. So, most of this stays internal monologue because who wants “that girl” at a BBQ?  It is another ancellary problem that my illness has created. Awesome. More noise in my head.

And so, I try to get in bed and I can’t stop thinking about the pasta with butter and lemon I allowed myself tonight.  “It’s a slippery slope” commenters on the vegan blogs often echo, “you stray a little, and then a little more, and then before you know it you are feeling sick and it’s hard to get back to eating the right way.”

Big Sigh.

Even eating has become difficult these days. There isn’t much I can do with a clear head.

I have written an entire post dedicated to this great one below.  I came across this and immediately got busy typing.

saladandcandy:

The appeal of raw veganism lies in its freshness, its expensiveness, its popularity amongst models, its rarity, and its ritualized restriction.

I’ve maintained an interest in dubious diets ever since I came upon a copy of Tom Wolfe’s The New Journalism Anthology in high school. Robert Christgau, the “minimalist” of the bunch that includes such authors as Terry Southern, Norman Mailer, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion, was included with his essay “Beth Ann and Macrobiotics.” First published in 1965 for New York Magazine, it tells the tale of Beth Ann Simon, a heroin addict from New Jersey-turned-Greenwich Village housewife who suddenly decided to go macrobiotic – practically overnight. She rarely strayed from Macrobiotic Regimen No. 7 (whole grain cereal only), soon developed scurvy, and died of starvation nine months later after losing fifty pounds.

The story haunts and fascinates me still, particularly when I walk around Tompkins Square Park, noting the macramé hangings in windows, debating between a Buddha Bowl or a Sesame Sea Salad from Quintessence, eyeing the frighteningly lean, black-clad, middle-aged men who float down Avenue A.

It’s easy to become obsessed with a subculture that boasts life-changing results endorsed by beautiful people. It’s easy to succumb to the temptation of buying little vials filled with gold flecks suspended in “magical” Mayan liquid. I understand all this and am very much victim myself to such marketing and zealotry.

But what does not sit well with me is the underlying dishonesty that seems so loud and so impossible to ignore. Raw veganism, superfoodism, macrobioticism. Very rarely are these lifestyles anything more than sublimated eating disorders. The typical transition from S.A.D. (Standard American Diet) to vegetarianism to veganism to raw veganism to restricted raw veganism (less fruit and nuts) is really nothing more than the slow spiral into anorexia. What was once a mere entry in the D.S.M. is now an ethical movement. The accounts of almost all raw vegans share similar miracles: mental clarity, extreme energy, a feeling of lightness.

From my experience, these are little more than the early and highly addictive symptoms that accompany the early stages of anorexia. Raw veganism is Anorexia Lite (ha!), a sickness dangerously protracted and cloyingly acceptable. The obsessiveness and dogmatism of raw vegans is indistinguishable from that of anorexics. Of course all raw vegans are not disordered eaters, but I’m sure that the overlap is very high, and I do not understand why this is never talked about.

That said… Off to make a salad!

—Alice

Hey my soul sister don’t you look so sad
It’s time to stop thinking about what you ain’t got
And see the things you have
Now don’t you go and throw it all throw it all away
Tomorrow doesn’t have to be just another yesterday
Ride the storm, life goes on, life goes on, ride the storm
‘Cause I can’t watch you drown away, drown in your own tears
Everybody gets hurt sometimes and everybody has fears
You say you want to end it all, but don’t you get that rad baby
‘Cause if you want the good things, you got to taste the bad sometimes
That’s how it is
Ride the storm, life goes on, life goes on, ride the storm
‘Cos I know that life can get hazy
But don’t let this world drive you crazy, hear me baby…
So don’t let your world turn a permanent shade of blue
You’ve got to learn to kick the habit baby
Before it starts to kick you yes it will
Don’t you know you’re bold enough and strong enough to fight
Someway somehow you know it’s going to be all right, that’s how it is
Ride the storm, life goes on, life goes on, ride the storm.

Ride The Storm (Life Goes on)

Carl Kennedy vs MYNC Project Feat Roachford

I cannot wait until we find the right treatment for my heart!

News like this keeps me hopeful

Until then, we keep looking.  More on that soon…

Even when I am feeling generally awesome (probably the best I have in a long long time) it still takes me almost two hours to get going when I wake up.

When I open my eyes the only thing I can think or say is “OUCH”.  Every joint and muscle in my body feels tight and painful.  As if while I was sleeping someone packed me into a really small space and I slept in a zippered up carry-on luggage.

A really good visual of this would be the Tin Man from the Wizard Of OZ.  He needed oil to get him moving.  I have to move super slow, really take good care of my body and do stretches and yoga.  Yoga is my oil can.  Everything has to be done with care and very slowly for many reasons —one being that my heart medicine lowers my blood pressure so if I get up too fast from a stretch I could faint.  I see white spots in front of me all day long but more so in the mornings.

My Tin Man routine was a good one today.  It was especially hard to get going.  It was a two hour ordeal this morning.  But now, as I have started my day I realize that I actually feel good!

This body of mine needs so much attention and care and I am finally beginning to be OK with that.