Sticks and Stones

...may break my bones because it turns out I have osteoporosis, and boy, howdy, do I have it bad apparently.

I'm exactly a week out from having minor surgery to remove one of my parathyroid glands that was the bad actor who put me in this predicament, and I underwent a "DXA" scan, which is essentially a bone scan (or maybe it's exactly a bone scan - heck if I know) to try and determine if there had been damage done in the time it had been malfunctioning. My sister-in-law told me it'd be the most straightforward test I'd ever take, and it was very much like Star Trek-level tech, and she was right on both counts.  Maybe a bit bulkier than the handheld devices "Bones" used on the show, but it's still among the many incredible machines I've been subjected to these past several weeks as I navigated through my first real long-term health issue as an adult (everything else, let's face it, has been griping for the sake of griping and hoping y'all would relate and join in because misery does love company). The test ran about ten minutes - about a tenth of the time it took me to commute to the location and back, but hey, it got me out of the house. They told me it would be two days before I received the results.  But they amazed me there, too; it took less than two hours to hit me with the news. And honestly, hit me it did.

I get it. In the bigger scheme of things - keeping in mind that a biopsy is still being done on the tumor on the gland that was removed - this isn't a big deal and a lot of people are struggling with so much worse. But please forgive me, it's still taking some time to wrap my head around. It's not something that can be cured, and my life, in the time it took me to log in and read the results, changed from a woman who was aging but healthy to one who is aging with a lifelong condition that I have to learn to spell so I can list it on every medical history I have to fill out from here on out. It's manageable, and I've never broken a bone outside of some toes, which was many years ago, and has everything to do with my tendency to go around barefoot when I shouldn't and nothing to do with a lack of calcium, so I'm not panicking or thinking I'm suddenly a female Mr. Glass (for all you M. Night Shyamalan nay-sayers, you can Google him to get the reference), yet I woke up thinking of myself one way and I'll go to bed realizing I'm another, and I can't just shrug that off.

I think about my mom at times like these. She was, in my opinion, overly dramatic when she got her Parkinson's diagnosis. And, of all the laundry list of things that she had going on, it always remained the thing that gave her the largest pause, and she struggled with the most mentally, even though it was always controlled well by medication and when you met her you would be very hard pressed to even know she had it. (Granting that by the time her Alzheimer's diagnosis got handed down, she was not capable of processing that one, or else I'm sure it would have taken over the pole position.)  She used to tell me, "You know, Parkinson's is fatal." It's not, but she used to tell me my cat was going to suck my baby's breath out of her too, so her medical knowledge was a little outdated (and this was a Registered Nurse talking). I was smart enough to know it can be a serious disease nonetheless, but, again, it was well-controlled in her case, so whenever she bemoaned the condition or tried to illicit sympathy or special treatment because of it I would tend to ignore it or eye-roll my way through it (had I been smart, I would have leaned into it when I was trying to get her driver's license away from her). But tonight, I am more sympathetic to the mental gymnastics she was going through, and I wish I'd been a better source of support and more present for her in those moments.

What I think we all have to know is that the one relationship we cannot divorce ourselves from is the one with our own bodies and minds. If my partner cheats, I can decide what to do with his cheating ass. Forgive him, drag him to couples counseling, or kick said ass out. If my body betrays me, I'm still stuck with it no matter what.  Even if the betrayal is maybe no more than, say a flirtation, which is probably akin to my diagnosis, there's still a moment when you realize your love affair is less than perfect and will never be the same as it was, and there's some trust that's eroded. That's where I'm at mentally. But at the end of the night, I gotta take this body upstairs and go to bed with it, even though it let me down, and I'm a little pissed about it.