Rainbows & Lightning Bolts A Story Series Part 2

Photo by eMMe

I probably could’ve dog paddled above my Great Sea of Nothing for the rest of my life and not ever fully-realized how hard my body was working to hide what I didn’t want to remember. That might’ve been a minuscule amount of time given that a couple of organs had already skedaddled and a lightning bolt had stripped my brain of memories, however briefly, at that party five years ago…

If you missed the last newsletter describing this event, you may read the beginning of the story HERE.

…It’s true that all the blood can drain out of people’s faces when they are shocked. My partner’s hair literally stands on end and his voice squeaks as he gathers our coats from the pile on the couch at the mummering party. He asks if we should call a taxi (Uber wouldn’t establish in our area for a couple more years) since I am the designated driver and he and the other guests have imbibed enough to be the fool to perform for their supper on this frigid and typically boring February night.

Again, I trot myself through the stroke course, tongue to left and right, ABCs now said out loud, mapping the turns that will lead us home—though I do not mention I have no idea what our address is even if I know how to get us there. I watch him anxiously root through the pile of coats for a missing glove, now fully comprehending that my brain is malfunctioning. From the mysterious stroke filing cabinet, data continues to spew forth…Can I recall the names of my kids? Do I have kids? Oh yeah, I think I do. I easily count toward a hundred as my partner alerts the couple we’d driven with that we need to head home.

The car fob seems oddly familiar, the interior of the dash apparatus a bit strange, the parking brake is in the wrong place, and the knowledge for if it is engaged doesn’t arrive. My partner watches me intently when after a few stumbles, I start the car. As we begin moving, the rest returns as rote, a repetitive action like blinking or breathing and as long as I don’t try to think it through my body does what is necessary to get us all safely home.

Inside a house we have lived in for twenty-plus years, I am mildly surprised we have dogs, though the surroundings are strangely not strange. By the time pajamas are on and my partner has asked and been answered “no” several times to a question about an emergency room visit, I know there are two children, what their names are, and that the man I refer to as “my partner” is my husband. I work as a manual therapist, regularly see a mental health professional, and clearly, this is not a stroke.

When morning arrives, I wake knowing what and where Great America is and something had happened beyond anything I’d ever experienced before and that it would likely upend whatever I thought normal was. Even without a diagnosis, pragmatism and decades of dealing with trauma and mayhem have educated my spidey senses to understand when lightning bolts strike, plan on being electrocuted.

Visiting my regular doctor a few days later, she and I discuss my physical status.

     “Your blood pressure is a little high.”
     I laugh.
     “Wouldn’t yours be if you’d forgotten what and where Great America is?”
     She grins.
     “I’d like to forget…but stop trying to make me laugh. This is serious.”
     Her face strips itself of mirth, mine remains empty of participating in this drama.
     “I don’t think it’s a stroke.”
     The doctor softens her tone.
     “I don’t either, but I recommend doing all the tests anyway so we have them as a baseline.”
     “And what would those tests be?”
     “An MRI and bloodwork.”

I agree to go through the motions while also decreasing hormone replacement therapy I've been dabbling in, in case it is causing weird side-effects. The MRI is scheduled for the next morning.

At a 6 AM appointment, I close my eyes sleepily as a young female technician slides me into the machine. Her last words before leaving the room are that she’ll be able to hear me from an overhead microphone once she reaches the command booth. In my hand rests a squeeze-for-help mechanism if I need to contact her. I’m not overly concerned about the twenty-minute test, figuring with my eyes closed I’d pretend I’m meditating, bashing the illusion when my snores are picked up on the sound feed.

Imagining myself seated on an empty beach, I take a long relaxed breath and release it, the expelled air bouncing off the nearby tube wall back into my face. Panic prods a burr in my psyche into alertness. Ancient shrieks of terror vibrate through my eardrums, faces bob behind my eyelids, and suddenly I cannot breathe.

Repeatedly pressing S.O.S brings no response from the technician. I chant a stream of words to calm my surprising hysteria.

Oh no. It’s okay. Just think of the beach. Breathe. I can do this. Where is that tech? Oh God, I’m gonna die.

My body pulsates as I resist the urge to open my eyes.

Don’t open them. Don’t scream. Don’t move. Don’t, don’t, don’t!

My brain is exploding, stroke concerns now seemingly true. Straps encasing my skull make it impossible to shimmy out. Warm, moist, cloying breath surrounds me, and suddenly, terrifyingly, I’m completely encased in a wool blanket, with the fibers scratching relentlessly.

Smoke Man has returned and won’t let me go.

The MRI tube tosses me into the Great Sea of Nothing to retrieve what I have forgotten, it sends me straight back to that house. It is the 1960s on a charming cul-de-sac in a sunny beach community, the Gidget horror story that was my childhood.

But at least my heart is breathing again, right?

Rainbows & Lightning Bolts—A Story Series

Photo by eMMe

Lightning bolts change things. They are an electric current. And when an electric current enters a human body it can kill or restart the heart if it has stopped. And if the person is A Me walking around with a heart that hasn’t emotionally breathed in decades, a lightning bolt will toss the life into the sky and no one knows if it’ll ever land to live semi-normally again.
          But at least the heart is breathing again, right? At least the heart is breathing again **[INSERT EYEROLL]**

It all started on a cold winter’s eve five years ago, in a room full of strangers with a few friends telling stories for their supper. This event had been modeled after a Newfoundland tradition called "mummering." Townspeople in Newfoundland communities dress in costume, perform the fool door-to-door and are served food and drinks for the effort.

In the frigid, boring extremes of the Midwest, we work to come up with things to do that don't involve expanding our bums or re-binging Longmeyer on Netflix for the fourth time. On these many, many cold nights, we could stay home having glorious sex, the kind we tend not to remember from our youth, but instead cabin fever sets in and we either stumble out of our comfy zones or take long winter's naps aided by vats of chamomile tea.
          At this February juncture, I’m in full-throttle zombie-mode, most days lost in very efficient to-do lists filled with tasks designed to make me appear as though all is very well in my neighborhood, conveying I’m one of the “good ones” and not a “bad one.” Taxes are paid on time, the leaves are meticulously collected from the lawn each fall, and when there’s laundry I wash it in private, drowning my dirty linens in memory bleach so as to never show my ass in public.

I am unintentionally-non-aware this zombie-state is killing me one organ at a time, my heart the choir director instructing each not-vital-to-existence member to suffocate right along with her. I misplace my uterus and gallbladder during this process, both holding hands until the end as the Great Sea of Nothing absorbs them along with their importance. The Great Sea of Nothing is what I call the place that takes what was once oh-so-very-important—hopes, dreams, fluid limbs, glorious sex, dancing for no reason at all—and hides them so they don't occupy thoughts that need to be engaged in perfecting a "To Do List Life."

Glug-glug.

My hair thins, I am perpetually tired, my skin dry, and a mysterious shudder can be felt deep in my core when I lie in bed at night. I tear the house apart searching for what is creating this vibration. It has to be the furnace, the washing machine, the refrigerator, the well pump, a dehumidifier…When these are found not to be the cause, I decide someone is illegally fracking in the area and my house will one day join my gallbladder and uterus in that Great Sea of Nothing via aquifer rapids eroding glacier deposits beneath my feet.

Swooooooshhhhh...

I am terrified nearly every moment of every day, the persistent vibration following me out of the house and into my car, to work, and showing up as I check items off my to-do list and good-person smile through my every day.

And so there I am, lounging on a pile of coats during another dreary February night, listening to life stories, poems, music, and comedy, performed by friends and mostly strangers when a lightning bolt soundlessly strikes—a vibrant rainbow jagger-splitting the woman speaking at an angle left-to-right.

I watch this curious event unfold as it slow-motion changes my life instantly. It is gorgeous and terrifying. My tongue reflexively moves back and forth in my mouth, I whisper the ABCs under my breath, my name...what is my name??? Some part of my brain has managed to remember the signs for stroke, though my name wanders in the Great Sea with my uterus. I stand up as inconspicuously as possible to move my arms and legs. Nothing aside from my old lady tits droops and everything works with regular-ancient creakiness. I sit back down as inconspicuously as before and resume watching the odd rainbow-hued lightning bolt.

The woman telling her story I have known since my twentieth year, back when my heart was still emotionally breathing and I believed there were eons of life road that would carry me off to many splendid things, most of them on sunny beaches and nowhere near a plain or prairie. The story she has been sharing is one I had known about, it having occurred around the time we met.

The lightning bolt sashays to a finish, all at once clearing me of the rest of what I know, the volt of electricity zapping what was before as though it a leaf on my meticulous lawn incinerated to ash.

The room full of guests applauds while I query my partner of nearly-thirty years about the friend (now stranger's) story.

“What’s Great America?”
He laughs.
“I have no idea…was America ever great?”
“No. I’m asking about the story…What’s Great America?”
The laughter ebbs as he realizes I'm not joking.
“You know, up in Gurnee, just north of here. Didn’t you take the kids there at some point? That amusement park.”
“What’s an amusement park?”

Those questions erupting from that one random lightning bolt moment on a pile of coats five years ago evaporated my To Do List Life. The old life didn't fall into that Great Sea of Nothing, that old life no longer exists. And at the same time, that rainbow-hued lightning bolt split open and illuminated my Great Sea of Nothing and I've been seeking and sorting through what's been quivering on the bottom ever since.

But at least my heart is breathing again, right?