Author: Carole Bass

What have you done for me lately?

~ Carole Bass ~ Leave a comment

“Stop Assuming I’m Lazy—I Have a Chronic Illness.” That’s the headline on an article I read last night by Esmé Weijun Wang, a writer with persistent Lyme disease. It’s not readers who assume Wang is lazy. It’s Wang herself.

Despite “fevers, moderate to severe nausea, weakness, fatigue, and a cornucopia of other symptoms,” Wang manages to work part-time and even travel on business occasionally. Yet even as she lies in bed, too sick to sit up, she fears “that I’m secretly slothful and am using chronic illness to disguise the sick rot of laziness within myself.”

Right now, Wang tells herself, her work is taking care of herself. But “I continue to live in a society that praises the art of getting things done over all else—including wellness and rest—and these are values I can’t seem to shake.”

Continue reading →

A time to sit

~ Carole Bass ~ 1 Comment

This morning I paced around my house, as I often do, trying to settle into my daily prayers.

Most days I’m distracted by my to-do list and the feeling that I should be getting on with the day. This morning, tired and achy and a little sad and lonely, I could tell that it was a day to take it easy. A day to quiet my mind—the voice pestering me to get things done—and listen to the slow, sad, tired voices of my body and my spirit.

It’s been almost a year since I quit my job and launched this blog to chronicle my journey. Inwardly, it has been a year of exploration and discovery, even revelation. A year of deep valleys but also some peaks, or at least foothills.

Outwardly, though, it looks like a desert year. A year of unemployment (semi-voluntary though it is). A year of illness and long-term treatment that is only beginning to show results. A year of slow progress on this Mary Oliver Challenge, the challenge of learning to be myself and to love what I love.

Continue reading →

From my narrow place

~ Carole Bass ~ 1 Comment
Mixed-grass_Prairie_in_the_Bowdoin_WMD_(13106269445)
Photo: Douglas B. Barbour/USFWS

Min ha-metzar karati Yah
Anani va-merchav Yah.

From the narrow place, I called: “God!”
God answered me in the wide-open space.
—Psalm 118:5

Life is a journey, they say, and that has never seemed truer to me. This phase of my life bundles so many transitions: from child-rearing to my daughters’ independence; from the job I left last summer to whatever comes next professionally; from perfectionism to a kinder, gentler approach to myself and the rest of the world; from nagging unwellness through diagnosis to (I hope) restored health.

Notice how I conceive of this journey. Each transition has a “from” and a “to,” a beginning and an end. A destination, if not a goal.

But that’s not how life’s journeys really unfold. Often I don’t know where I’m going, let alone how long it will take or what will happen along the way. Sometimes I don’t know where I’ve been until I’ve left it behind.

And now I’m learning what can happen when prayers are answered and a narrow place—an unbearably tight spot—gives way to wide-open space: confusion. New fears. Bewilderment, which sounds an awful lot like “wilderness.”

Continue reading →

Patient

~ Carole Bass ~ 1 Comment

A couple of weeks ago, we had glorious spring weather. The cherry trees blossomed. Then, last Monday, it snowed. Not the here-this-morning, gone-by-afternoon flurries we expect in early April, but snow, hail, and sleet that kept falling all day. After that came temperatures in the 20s. I took my long underwear back out of the drawer. I’m wearing it now.

hail and cherry blossoms.jpg
The hail and the cherry blossoms.

Hang in there, we tell each other. Spring will return. We just have to be patient.

And it’s true. February-in-April won’t last. It’s in the 40s now—not balmy, but at least the pipes won’t freeze.

Here’s my problem: this unpredictably nasty weather is a discouraging echo of my health. I’m feeling better—oh wait, now I feel crummy again. My fatigue has lifted. Nope, this morning I lay in bed for 20 minutes before summoning the energy to sit up. My back pain has lessened. But now my legs hurt. The memory problems are worse than before—as far as I can remember.

Continue reading →

Not so tough

~ Carole Bass ~ 6 Comments
Boelge_stor
Photo by Malene Thyssen/Wikimedia Commons

The last couple of weeks have been kind of rough. I started antibiotic treatment for one or more chronic tick-borne infections. (In my last post, when I called the diagnosis chronic Lyme disease, I spoke too soon. It’s probably another infection, Bartonella, and maybe persistent Lyme as well.)

As advertised, the antibiotics are producing something called a Herxheimer reaction. My body’s reacting not to the drug itself, but to the dying bacteria and the toxins they spill into my bloodstream. Typically, Herxheimer reactions intensify the underlying symptoms. In my case, that mainly means fatigue, muscle pain, sleeplessness—when the back pain keeps me awake—and headaches.

It’s all pretty yucky, but none of it is absolutely horrible. And it means the antibiotics and my immune system are doing their job, killing bugs. There’s no way around it; I just have to ride it out.

But that doesn’t mean I have to tough it out.

Continue reading →

The diagnosis

~ Carole Bass ~ 2 Comments

In 2012, I found a tick on my leg, got sick, and tested positive for Lyme disease. It was diagnosed promptly and treated according to the mainstream protocols, which supposedly means the infection was cured.

That was three and a half years ago. That’s how long it’s been since I felt healthy. Three and a half years since I felt like myself. Now, finally, I know why.

This week, I had a long-awaited appointment with a Lyme specialist. After hearing my history and my symptoms, he said I have chronic Lyme.

spirocheteCDC
The bacteria that cause Lyme disease. Photo: Centers for Disease Control

Chronic Lyme is an incredibly controversial diagnosis. Many doctors think it doesn’t exist; they don’t believe the bacteria can survive antibiotic treatment. So when I saw my brand-new internist two days after the Lyme doctor, I more than half expected to get a lecture about unscientific diagnoses and quacks who want to take my money and give me harmful drugs. Instead, she concurred 100 percent with the specialist’s opinion. I wanted to hug her.

I’m still sorting through my thoughts and feelings about this news. Treatment will begin in a couple of weeks, after my lab results are in. It will be a long haul; it could make me feel worse before I feel better; and it might not be a total cure. But I will get better.

Continue reading →

Cat and cow

~ Carole Bass ~ Leave a comment

My Grandpa O’Neil was a man of few words and even fewer stories. Although he lived until I was nearly 30, I can remember him telling only two stories. One, about the man who was so rich that he lit his cigar with a $50 bill, was quintessential Grandpa: always worried about money, and impressed by people who flouted that worry.

JohnJONeil1955
My grandfather, John J. O’Neil.

Grandpa’s other story gave me a rare glimpse of his mother’s personality. Catherine Kelly O’Neil was born in Scotland to Irish parents. When people would say, “Oh, you’re Scottish,” she would retort: “If a cat is born in the barn, that doesn’t make it a cow!”

I guess Grandpa’s mother knew who she was, and who she was not. But I wonder whether her identity had more layers than the cat-not-cow story might imply.

Continue reading →

Stone by stone

~ Carole Bass ~ 1 Comment
Davis_House_stone_foundation_ruin,_Gardiner,_NY
Photo: Daniel Case/Wikimedia Commons

“When you’re building a house from the foundation up,” my friend said, “each stone has to go in the right place.”

I loved my friend’s image of the way I’m trying to rebuild myself. Even more, I loved the empathy: the way my friend understood why this work is so hard, why it’s going so slowly, why it takes so much of my energy.

I am rebuilding my foundation, stone by stone. Sometimes the work is backbreaking. Sometimes it’s heartbreaking. Sometimes it’s mind-bending, and sometimes it just plain makes my brain hurt. Other people can help me find the stones, or help me figure out where to place them. But the actual rebuilding is my job.

Continue reading →

My false god

~ Carole Bass ~ 1 Comment

Chaplin_-_Modern_TimesI was on the phone with an old friend, catching up. He had read some of my blog posts and wanted to hear more about what’s happening in my life. And he asked some perceptive questions. Like this one:

“You’ve use the word ‘productivity’ a few times. Tell more about what you mean by that.”

Without stopping to think, I blurted out: “It’s my false god.”

Continue reading →

‘Soften where you feel the stretch’

~ Carole Bass ~ 3 Comments

 

beach yoga crop
Photo by Sarah Bass

One of my current favorite yoga videos is 47 minutes and 32 seconds of slow, gentle stretching—no strength-building balance poses, no sweat-inducing vinyasas. Just deep, relaxing stretches.

That’s not to say it’s entirely easy. The loud groans you hear coming from my living room are the sound of muscles reluctantly giving up some of their tightness and soreness.

Or rather, they’re the sound of my mind reluctantly giving up some of its impulse to clench those muscles—a subconscious impulse, born of the subconscious feeling that I need to defend myself at all times. Somebody might criticize me. I will certainly criticize myself. So I tighten my jaw, my neck, my legs, as if that can ward off the psychological blows. In trying to protect my “soft animal” from mortal injury, I trap it in an iron cage, where it is impossible for it to love what it loves.

Continue reading →