Aging Gracelessly

I turned 47 in late May; my employer’s fiscal year also ends at about this time. So I’m very used to considering this time of year as both an end and a beginning. I even graduated from both high school and college on my birthday, so this time a year is a natural transition. And I welcome it. This last fiscal year of my life has been rough. It has not been one of the worst years of my life1, but it has been one of the hardest—a year of constant struggle and discomfort.

One rather fascinating thing about the difficulty of all this is how it all seems to flow seamlessly from the previous difficulty: my chronic back problems lead to repeatedly spraining my leg, lead to my cluster migraines swallowing my entire trip to New Orleans, lead to four grueling months of physical therapy, which prepared me for my trip to Italy where I got heat exhaustion, which weakened me up for a sprained knee that has had me limping recently, along with the the lupus flare that I’ve been suffering since I returned, and the cluster of heart palpitations that I’ve been going through for the last couple of weeks.

It’s been a hard year, and it’s hard just to type that all out and know how easy that paragraph is to skim through and gloss over. It was a long year of struggle and pain. But it wasn’t just that. It was also friendship and joy and good food and great friends and my lovely cats and even lovelier wife.

But you know what joy feels like, I hope. You may not know about struggle and pain. One of the founding principles of this blog is to talk about the harder parts of illness. I find that even as a chronically ill person I can struggle to understand what my fellow travellers are going through, and that’s part of what makes it feel so lonely—that we all both know what pain feels like and have no idea what each others’ pain feels like.

My recent days have been filled with heart palpitations, which are a particularly difficult thing to describe. They’re very uncomfortable, but they’re also intensely aggravating because they’re so damn difficult to describe in a way that feels accurate. There’s no external symptoms, and they rarely even show up on an EKG. My heart palpitations are an intense feeling of wrongness. Of being off. Every once in awhile it feels like a flutter or spasm of my heart. It’s awful. Years ago I started using the German word unheimlich to describe it, which is generally translated as “uncanny” but the literal meaning of the word “un-homelike” feels most accurate. My heart stops feeling like my home for awhile, like it no longer belongs in my chest..

Heart palpitations aren’t fatal—though they can be a symptom of something fatal—but one of their key symptoms is “feeling like you’re going to die.” So they make trying to work, relax, or go to sleep very difficult. It’s very hard to have the courage to do anything, especially close my eyes, when I feel like this. At its worst there’s a real feeling that this very moment might be it; I wonder if I’ve said my last words to everyone, and if I should say something, just in case this is the last thing my wife hears from me. Remembering that I’ve gone through this before, that I’ve felt like this and survived, is some comfort and helps me through it.

That feeling of pain and despair that I nevertheless pushed through and continued working on was the guiding feeling all through Physical Therapy as well. I started Physical Therapy in January with a solid deadline: I needed to be healthy enough to go to Pompeii at the end of April. We had plane tickets to Rome, train tickets to Naples, and a solid plan. I could get a taxi or take the train everywhere else in Italy, but we were going to Pompeii, so I needed to be strong enough to walk in and out to a place where I couldn’t call for help or get a cab.

So I started Physical Therapy up again for the first time since the delta variant surged. And I hated it. It was useful and I saw results and I hated it. Every session was precise and excruciating movements that made me detest the experience of having a physical form at all. I hated it I hated it I hated it. It was exhausting. It helped. It gave me hope. It made me despair and doubt myself and consider canceling my trip entirely, and I hated it.

The first month was by far the worst, because it was all pain. I was sore and felt less mobile than when I started out, and felt so off and sore and painful that I wondered if I was making things worse. Being in pain meant I was constantly thinking at every moment of my limitations. It meant I was constantly thinking I was falling short of my goals—which were quantified2 and on a timer—and made me feel like I should just give up. Why should I put myself through so much pain just to fail? Why not just give up and fail comfortably on the couch. The days where I had Hope were some of the worst—because the next day was invariably where I encountered some hope-crushing setback that left me feeling worse.

Physical Therapy was so hard on me because it really threw me up against the limits of my body and how I can’t trust anything about it I can’t avoid expecting the worst, because sometimes I’m right.

I’m constantly afraid that I’m going to injure myself, because I have so many times before. I spent the sessions constantly flinching away from the pain I expect to hit me at any time. Sometimes I was right. I couldn’t just tell myself I’m being paranoid. It was all so exhausting, and now that I’m past it and it worked well enough for me to walk into and out of Pompeii, and see almost all the buildings we intended to, I can see that it was worth it.

But I’ve been left still recovering from this trip two months later—lupus flare, heart palpitations, sprained knee and all—and I knew that once I recover enough I have to get back to doing my exercises. That the only way through this life is to keep pushing myself harder than I want to push myself, to be sore in some way. I don’t think that’s ever going to stop. It feels like there’s always going to be part of me actively broken, and that’s exhausting. Knowing that I did it helps, but I have no confidence I’ll always be able to. I just have to keep trying.

In honor of my soreness and pain, one of the great music videos of the 1990s.