Permutations

photo: @dtait_photography

This week I had a weird health scare. I had a blood clot in my arm over twenty years ago; it was a freak thing. I was only twenty-seven, and I had a fairly rare condition called thoracic outlet syndrome. It’s where the space between your top rib and your clavicle is too small, and the vein that runs through there (the subclavian vein) gets clamped a little each time you lift your arm over your head. I think it’s less rare than we think; it’s just that people don’t often do such intense and repetitive overhead arm movement so as to discover it. A little clamping here and there probably never hurt anyone, but clamping again and again with all the shoulder and arm muscles firing—for a five hour surf session—that’ll cause a problem. For me it was an eight-inch long clot that ran through my brachial, axillary, and subclavian veins. It was sitting four inches from my heart.

I remember the surf being ridiculous that day. I was out at a place called Peaks on the island of Hawai’i. It was SO good. I also remember the crowd thinning to three people whom I knew had been out a long time. I remember being pleased with the idea that if I could just outlast them, I could report to everyone that I’d had Peaks by myself on one of the best days of the year (it was only January, but no matter). My arms were so tired, and I do remember wondering if I could do any damage by exerting myself to this extent. It felt like the bones in my humerus could just snap as I dragged my hands through the water, scratching for wave after wave, but I felt pretty confident that this was not actually a possibility. Your vascular system is not really something you consider when you’re in your twenties.

When I got out of the water, my whole upper body was pumped up (as it will be after a taxing surf session), but even after the 15 minute drive home and a warm shower, the swelling in my left side (upper arm, shoulder, even upper chest) had not subsided, whereas the right side was back to normal. When my husband came home from work that evening and had a look, he simply said, “Uh, we’re going to the ER. That’s not right.” I have to admit I resisted a bit. It just didn’t hurt that much (a little shifting kind of ache and the discomfort of the swelling was all I could identify as symptoms), and I felt normal otherwise. But he was insistent. That night in the ER, which was deserted except for us, a young doctor was inclined to send me home with a couple of ibuprofen (which could have had a deadly impact), but, he said, he’d had an experience the week before that gave him pause. He had treated an elderly ocean fly fisherman down in the South of the island with a rare condition—yep, thoracic outlet syndrome.

On the off chance that what I had was the same, he chose to call in the emergency on-call radiologist who happened to live in Hilo, a three hour drive away. He was apologetic and kept reassuring himself and us with truisms like “better safe than sorry, right?” Close to four hours later, I was in the dusky room listening to my own blood flow in the echo of the ultrasound, finding out that I had a deep vein thrombosis. “What does that mean?” I asked.

“Well,” said the doctor, who happened to be the father of one of my students, “it means you’ll have to be admitted.” My mind rummaged through the different applications of this particular bit of vocabulary and landed on the only one that fit this context, as improbable as it sounded.

“You mean I have to spend the night here tonight?” At this point it was already close to 1am.

“Yes. And the next night, and the next night—” He wasn’t trying to be flip. Just real. It was pretty hard to get my head around. That was the beginning of seven days on the ward at North Hawai’i Community Hospital, which was followed, shortly after my discharge, by an emergency (unconscious) trip back to the hospital and a five-day sojourn in the intensive care unit there. That was brought on by sepsis that nearly cost me my life and then my arm. Clearly I held onto both, but just barely.

The experience of nearly dying did not feel like a very big deal to me in the moment. It’s the same as everyone says. I was super peaceful. I could see everything happening in the room, even though I was unconscious and flatlining in the hospital’s ER. I was simply heading out…kind of up and away. No fanfare. It was the sight of my poor husband, only five years into our marriage, weeping, that brought me to my senses (literally—to my senses, like a sudden memory of having a body: Oh right, that’s mine, I should stay in it. Stay here. For Dwaine). So I did. It was a long, slow recovery, made slower by the fact that we’d just decided we were ready to try for a baby. You can’t be pregnant while you’re on blood -thinning medications, and I was on coumadin for nearly that whole year.

It was over 11 months of treatment, a TON of blood drawn and thinned, and a surgery to resect my top rib (yeah, that means saw it off—the clot had hardened and become part of the vessels, so the doc thought he’d open up some space in there for the collaterals to pick up the slack). I wasn’t finished being active yet. I wouldn’t be having any more five-hour sessions, but I definitely didn’t plan to give up surfing, and my doctor was committed to making sure I didn’t have to. Finally, in December of 1997 with only a sweet little scar along my clavicle (through which no one would guess 2/3 of the existing muscle and my top rib had been dragged), I was taken off of coumadin and told that we could try for our baby. I will forever be grateful for the speed with which we conceived; by March I was pregnant with our first son. The care I’d received at Stanford Medical Center was top notch, and I had a healthy, full-term pregnancy with no fear of thrombosis. A 1998 baby (only just…he is a Sagitarius) intead of a 1997 one.

That blood clot was the reason I started doing yoga (some time in the fall of 1997, still being treated for the clot, I actually popped in a VHS cassette—my mom’s Sports Illustrated exercise video that had Elle McPherson doing some yoga-based stretching). I still remember the way Elle McPherson said “happy baby” and also thinking, “I guess this is the kind of thing you do now.” It seemed boring and bland compared with the extreme sports I was used to pursuing, but it was about my speed at that time, and there was no denying this.

A lot of things were pushed around by that experience actually. It dictated the timing of our first child’s arrival in the world. It forced me to explore yoga and, naturally thereafter, meditation. In fact, my time in and out of the hospital in Hawai’i included stints with energy healers, lomilomi and la’au lapa’au practictioners, and a Hawaiian healer named Papa Henry Auwae. These experiences also started me on my own path to practicing energy healing. I remember being in the hospital that first time on a heparin drip (I hadn’t even had my near-death experience yet) and saying to my dear friend, “You know, when I get out of here, I’m going to be different. How could I ever go back to being the same?” She had rather sweetly (though cynnically) said, “But you will.” She was clearly speaking from some experience that was her own, and I remember being a little disheartened. But her experience was not my experience, and sure enough, nothing was ever the same for me again. I was still challenged by some of the same things and still fell short in some of the same ways (I wasn’t miraculously advanced to spiritual sage), but nothing—truly nothing—was as it had been.

I think we choose the challenges and hardships that we face in this life—based on how our spirit wants to grow. Things don’t just happen to us—we choose them. Even the worst ones. It’s not a cognitive decision but an agreement made out in the ether…before we take our bodies in this lifetime. We agree to the things that will grow us, and as we know, all growth comes with some degree of pain—and the faster it is, the more intensely it hurts. Being pregnant and giving birth is a perfect example of this.

I experienced a loss at the age of 18 that nearly undid me. I would never have chosen it on a conscious level. But that loss informs my love for my husband and my children to this day. It is so intertwined with who I am, so much a part of how I love, I can’t imagine who I would be had I not experienced it. That boy who died my freshman year in college, whose love was hard and fleeting—he must have agreed to teach me about losing in that way. And I must have agreed to learn it…and to teach him whatever thing it was he had it in his spiritual heart to learn from me. That’s a core belief of mine.

Similarly, this year of fear and health challenges and intermittent pain…it was a year of growing and shifting. One that changed me on a profound level. One that, alongside that 18-year-old-girl loss, forever informs the way I love and the way I see my life. It showed me how we can participate in our own healing…or not. And it unlocked something in me that has to do with Spirit. I don’t know any other way to describe it.

So this week we went on a long paddle, my surf lifesaving team and I. Four women in a canoe and paddling as hard as we could. We were aiming for a tiny, sea-lion inhabited island I was eager to see from the water and close up, but the wind kicked up, and we had to turn back. We weren’t in danger, but there was no time for resting. I could feel my arm swelling a bit, but it wasn’t a time to be carried by the other women in the boat. We just had to keep paddling. Plus, my mind was firmly set on blood clotting being a thing of my distant past. To make a long story short, my symptoms that evening and the next day were quite similar to those of twenty-two years ago, though not as extreme. Six hours in the ER resulted in blood tests that revealed I did not have a new clot. Just the old one and a lot of very tired collateral veins. But the conclusion was that I would no longer be able to paddle.

I was loving doing that. It was making me feel so alive, so invigorated, and stronger than I had felt in a long time. I was connecting with other women here in New Zealand, where I am only beginning to know people. And I was competing again…something I hadn’t done for many, many years. I realise, now that I am 49 years old, that I was never a competitive person. My family used to say I was extremely competitive, and because they said it, I believed them. But it wasn’t beating people that I enjoyed. It was doing my best. Yes, I liked to win (who doesn’t?), but the competition was always with myself. In the surf canoe, I was competing against my self…my own fitness and endurance and strength were what was on the line. That and coming through for my team.

So it’s done. No more paddling for me. I’m old enough that I don’t feel the need to resist the situation. I can give up this thing without too much agony. Just a little disappointment. Giving up surf canoe paddling is different than it would have been to give up surfing when I was 27. For so many reasons. I like to think, though, that the wisdom of age is not least among them. I am old enough to know that a “setback” is completely relative. It might even be a misnomer. Perhaps I’ve simply been “set over.” Shifted slightly in my course. Not by anything outside of me, but by my own plans for my spiritual self. It wouldn’t be the first time.

How like a handful of wet sand this thing must actually be—the way the space from which it is removed immediately fills in with more and other water and sand. It is impossible to say what new permutations will present themselves in this new set of conditions, different only (so far) in the absence of this one activity. Who knows what this rearrangement of elements will actually yield. It’s exciting to think about. And I know from experience that I have only to keep living, keep being open to the knowing, to find out.