My Gum Band's Got No Snap!

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The 90th birthday celebration for my mother-in-law is officially now more than a week behind us. One would think I suddenly have all the time in the world to blog, read, and not the least of which is to catch up on all the Oscar nominees I couldn't see before the actual ceremony (I have done some of that: I can now discuss Poor Things and American Fiction with you if you're so inclined). But the reason I was lazing around watching movies after the party and the furious prep for it was over is part of a hard lesson I've had to learn about aging: one does not snap back easily once in the 60+ age bracket from illness, injury or just in general exhaustion. I have qualified for all three so far this April.

The two weeks leading up to the actual event were brutal. No one's fault.  Bad karma maybe, and definitely rough timing, but nothing anyone, including myself, set me up for. But the hits, once they started, kept coming. I ended up first with a brutal migraine that lasted well over 48 hours mid-week the week before. Then the grands came to stay for a couple of days, and I picked up something from them - likely because I was already sleep deprived and vulnerable because of the migraine. Flu? Maybe. I can tell you it wasn't COVID because we tested for that, thinking we might actually have to call the party off. All I know for sure is that by Easter Sunday I was the sickest I could ever recall being, and by Monday it was worse. Tuesday took it to a new low, and I ended up racking up the highest temperature I have ever had in my life, all while Mother Nature was hammering the entire region with freezing rain that flooded our basement and hit us with snow squalls when it wasn't raining.  By the Wednesday before the party, which was scheduled for the coming Sunday, I couldn't quite believe I was still so sick, but between whatever I was sick with added to the cold weather, absolutely everything ached. My head, my back, my legs. My toes hurt. I wasn't rebounding. Which meant that walls weren't getting patched and painted from where my mother-in-law bashed into them with her walker like it was a Sherman tank on the way to the Battle of the Bulge. Bathrooms weren't getting cleaned and spring flowers weren't going to grace our visitors as they walked up to our door. My husband in the meantime had his hands full with his mother 's care and keeping the water creeping into the basement at bay.

I sound like I'm complaining but seriously I'm not.  I probably was at the time.  My sense of self-pity was pretty refined at the worst of it.  But it's more that I just can't quite believe I couldn't push through it and will myself to be better. 

As a working mother who has always suffered from migraines, I adopted over time a Han Solo like toughness: never tell me the odds. I could power through - miserable and half-assed but still upright - just about anything. By Wednesday I realized my ability to snap back and gut it up through an illness coupled with miserable weather wasn't going to be a happening thing. I thought about the old rubber bands I'll come across in my office from time-to-time. So old they've lost their elasticity and they're just brittle. I felt that defined me in that moment: just a brittle old gum band ready for the trash.

In the end, everything pretty much did get done. The fever broke, and I wasn't a physical threat to anyone who came that Sunday. The sun even came out and it was a pleasant, mild day. And my mother-in-law truly loved her party, which of course was the whole goal, but the next day both she and I were exhausted.  I tried getting back on the Peloton for the first time in almost two weeks that morning and could only handle 20 minutes. Badly, I might add. More than a week later, I'm still not back where I was.  There's no life in my legs. I still have a cough that racks through me after I ride, and I still tire easily.

Is this what it's going to be like moving forward? Things will hit me hard and fast, but leave me only slowly and with a fight? If so, I think of all the things I've faced in the post 60-yr old landscape - wrinkles, gray hair, weird bumps on legs and arms and veins that look like a map of Middle Earth carving across my skin - this loss of bodily control is the hardest. Not just physically but mentally. 

But, for anyone else who has gone through something like this, I will offer what I always said as a migraine sufferer: the one upside is you would never appreciate how great just feeling normal is unless you get taken down by a migraine at least once in your life. I can appreciate that same sentiment now. Just sitting here now without every inch of my body aching is worth being thankful for.  Maybe there's some snap left in the old gum band after all.