Catt Scratches

Only I could turn a vacation into a quest. I’m like Kim Novak in a foreign land finding intrigue and peril and nearly getting killed instead of getting a tan. Other people go away to sleep on the beach, drink and eat to excess. Me, I go away to test my physical endurance and capacity for pain.

As I write this, I am waiting for the Aleve to kick in and make me forget about my left hip and leg. Which brings me to my first fear.

Seven and a half years ago, I had back surgery: spinal decompression and fusion. It was the culmination of almost a year of excruciating sciatic pain and experimentation various pseudo medical sciences. Somehow I had developed pain which began at my hip and eventually stretched down the back of my leg to the base of my calf. I could not walk 25 feet without having to sit down. I could not stand for five minutes without an electrifying current of pain shooting down from my left but cheek to my foot. My life was seriously challenged by this pain. I woke up crying a few times. I couldn’t attend any function where a chair was not readily available. I could not travel comfortably for more than five minutes or fifty feet. It was not easy trying a case with that limitation. Indeed, it was not easy to get from the parking lot to the court house with that limitation, or for that matter, to even get out of bed. For the next year, I tried all manner of quackery to ease my pain: chiropractors, acupuncture, massage therapy, pressure point and deep tissue massage, cortisone shots. I even flirted with prayer. Nothing worked. Finally, three out of four doctors said I needed back surgery and I surrendered.

I decided that I would do everything the doctor told me to do for post surgical care and the long and the short of it is that I recovered. But it was a process I would never want to go through again. I would never want to spend five days in a hospital again, I would never want to have a home health care nurse come to my house and change my dressing and make my meals again, I would never want to ride in a wheelchair through an airport again, I would never want to wear a back brace under a blouse again, I would never want to have to depend on friends to drive me grocery shopping again, I would never want to take any opiate based painkiller again. And I would never want that pain again.

So when I run, that fear runs with me. Every time I feel a pain in my hip, or my leg or my back, that fear jumps out and holds a knife to my throat and says, “Listen Bitch, you’re mine. And when I get you again your gonna cry and beg for dope or your mother or death! And there’s nothing you can do about it!”

I see him next to me when I run. He’s either got a grim reaper cloak or a cabbie hat with a leather jacket and greasy gabardine pants. He doesn’t shave. He has cheap wine on his breath and dirt under his nails. And he looks over at me. And he tells me, “That hip pain is gonna get worse. You’ll be with me then.”

Fear’s pretty articulate, isn’t it?

I try to run through it. I can’t always. Some times I am undone by thoughts like, ” Oh, no. The hospital. The poking, the prodding. The noise at 3 o’clock in the morning. The bedpans. The morphine hits. ” But I don’t think it’s the pain but the fear of the ordeal of corrective surgery that is worse. Because pain isn’t all that bad. Pain is a signal from your body that something is out of whack. I always j know that when the pain gets seriously terrible, I will pass out or die. I don’t fear death and my tolerance for pain is high. Physical pain that is. Emotional pain paralyzes me. I stay away from emotional pain, which is really another face of fear. Huh. I just realized that. (And the fear of emotional pain will obviously be the subject of at least one future blog. Or several future blogs. As soon as I get over the fear of writing about emotional pain.)

So fear is what I fear. Terror. Uncertainty. Lack of control. Loss of dignity. There must be a way to deal with fear. Maybe acceptance is one way. Accept the consequences and know that I’ll adjust. No one’s really going to stop me. And even if I became broken, I’d survive and I’d figure out how to make it funny. Because it is all just one cosmic joke. And life, for all of it’s changes, challenges and complexities, is over before you know it. Like Pink Floyd said, life is just a short warm moment, and death is a long cold rest.

I also fear that I won’t finish. This is only Fear of Failure and her, I can deal with. She doesn’t have a knife. She is just sitting at home in her pjs reading a book and drinking Irish Whiskey, saying “You’re never going to be able to do this.” She nags me every few minutes and I can’t kill her but I can ignore her when she shows up. She’ll be with me the whole run, but once it’s done, she’ll find something else to tell me I can’t do. As soon as I find my next impossible dream.

As for this dream, I decided that I was going to shoot for ten miles and I decided that I was going to tackle the toughest part of the run: miles 15 to 20. And I just took a look and realized that I wasn’t quite right. The toughest part is the stretch consisting of five of the last six miles. What kind of sadist would make the last six miles the hardest! Whoever designed this course must have been a writer of mystery novels: things get tougher and tougher until the climax in the last few pages. Okay, be that as it may, I picked 15 to 20, mostly because the Somes Sound Tree is at 15. It’s just beautiful there. It’s like the jewel of the run. Like when you run there, you feel privileged. Like the planet is a beautiful place and you fit right in with the best of it. I started to run with a backpack that had a 4 oz bottle of water in it. I didn’t like the feel of it. I also didn’t like running with an IPod. I don’t know. I had a good song on, CC Adcock and the Lafayette Marquis. But it didn’t feel right to run with it. It’s okay on the track in the gym I guess but outside, it’s not me. Funny, right after I took it off, I heard some bizarre bird calls, so I figured it was like an omen. The hippie girl that I still am wanted to have the sounds of nature. And the birds wanted to talk to me while I ran. I’d like to think they were gently encouraging me. Perhaps, they were taunting me. After all, even a 3 minute mile doesn’t beat flying.

I ditched the bottle and Ipod and ran the first mile. The weather was cool and I was dressed for it. I like the first mile even though it’s a little uncomfortable. You just get used to doing something different. You have it all in front of you. The story of this run isn’t written yet. You play with your pace. You tune in to where you are. You feel your feet and your body temperature starts to adjust. Next to me on my left is Somes Sound which is just enchanting. There are stones bordering the left side of the road and forest rises to a great wall of rock and greenery on the right. I can see the lobster traps floating and once in a while, a cormorant swoops, grabs a wriggling bit of dinner and soars upwards. The sound and smell of water soothes.

The first mile goes okay because it’s all new and you don’t expect much. The second mile is the fear’s universe and you just have to shake it off. “Fear, I will have none of your nonsense today. Go away!” I say in my best schoolteacher voice. The second mile fear is just a bully and it skulks away as long as you’re strict with it. If you give it an inch, you’ll be home eating grilled cheese and potato chips before you know it.

During my first mile, a car passed me with two older women in it and it had Maine plates with the license plate number “1.” Just the number “1.” I thought, Maine’s got two woman senators, I wonder if one of them is driving. It was awesome.

I had a good 3rd and 4th mile. Usually the hip pain kicks in around the fourth mile. Today, it didn’t. It was all woods and some private houses in various states of repair or disrepair. Maine is eclectic; a mansion on one side and two hundred yards later a tar paper covered shack with car skeletons out front.An occasional restaurant or tourist service or boat repair shop. It’s all eye candy to me; I love to look at everything – beautiful or homely. I ran up hill most of the way. There were some dips down, but they were few and short. I didn’t like running down hill which I find odd. It plays with my pace too much. Maybe I’ll get used to it. Occasionally during the run, I felt a breath of raindrops but nothing significant materialized. Toward the end of the fourth mile, it got a little too steep and after it crested, I had to stop for a few seconds. I was on my way promptly and pretty authoritatively through the fifth.

I turned around to go back after the fifth and after I was into it, I had the opportunity and the need to use a rest room so I did. I kept running through the sixth and in the seventh the hip pain hit me. So from that point, I kept stopping and walking a few yards, then back to running. I stretched a bit. I probably ran a total of 2 out of the next four miles. But I don’t feel defeated. I feel like seven miles in Maine is 12 in Illinois. Of course, when I do the Mount Desert Island marathon, I will be doing Maine miles so I just have to work at it. I’m not going to let fear stop me.

Fear is nature’s way of telling you your brain is working. It’s not a barrier. It’s a sign. Fear can rule you if you let it. I remember spending a whole year of my childhood being afraid to be on the second floor of my house alone. It stopped at some point and I don’t remember how. but it ruled me. It made me ridiculous and there was no reason for it other than that I allowed it to win rather than challenge it. When I challenged it, I didn’t even feel proud of challenging it. Just embarrassed that I had let it trick me for so long. Probably, the fear moved on to something bigger and said, “The second floor. You coward! I wasn’t going to really do anything to you!”

This fear is based on loss of power. I have to increase my strength to sap the power of this fear. I have to keep working I have to run and work to weaken this fear.

I am past the point in my life when I can waste time on fear. It’s just a reaction, a signal. From now on, I will disect it. I will examine it and analyze it. I will make fear take its clothes off, take a bath and go into rehab. I will challenge its reason for being. I will sit down and have a meeting with fear, examine its agenda and find out what it will take to make it go away. Because I have things to do.