Walking….full circle

There is one more day left in 2011.  As usual, I bundled myself up like a penguin (white jacket and black leggings) and was on my 7-miler route this morning.

The streets were calm at 8:30 in the morning, not much traffic, semi-hybernating/partying week: the week between Christmas and New Year.  I started to retrace my steps in 2011 as I was stepping forward in a fast-paced power-walk mode.

Where do I start?  let's start with my lupus--a very good place to start.  2011 has turned out to be the year of my regular and on-going visits to UC Davis' Cancer Center for leukopenia--low white count.  As I have grown almost too painfully accustomed to bad news, it was a bigger blow than usual.  The sight and the smells, the patients and their ashen countenance proved to be a grueling exercise to walk in there and not be "moved".  A lovely East Indian hematologist greeted me and now we are fast friends.  She is young, warm, engaging and the best of all, encouraging at every turn.  Just as we thought I needed hormone treatments, my blood would do an about turn and the white count would be inching up.  Then down, up, down, up….and then the red count would take a nose-dive, then up, down, up, down....  My red count and white count have been playing on a swing all year--24/7--it does not seem to abate.  And so I have learned to live with yet another medical routine, and another doctor in the docket. 

Another lupus issue in 2011 is this pain predicament.  The very reason the walking and this blog started.  Please do read my past blogs to get more details.  Yes, I started to fight pain with walking (very painful at first).  Honestly, I can say I have traded one type of pain with another.  Power-walking leaves me extremely sore whereas lupus just tortures me with unrelenting pain everywhere in the body. 

June of 2011 marked a significant time for me and my entire family.  Our son graduated from high school and decided to go to Berea College in Kentucky in the fall.  We became empty-nesters and I am loving it.

My walking has turned into a time that I guard and treasure.  I recounted this morning my journeys to Montreat, North Carolina in June, then Berea, Kentucky in August, and the countless drives to Daly City, California visiting my mother.  I can declare that I am walking to think,  I am walking to calm, I am walking to quell pain and most importantly, I am walking to be sane.

I calculated that by now I have set my footprints over 350 or so miles of pavement.  Every footprint is intentional and purposeful.  My legs became re-aquainted with the former marathon runner (moi) and the muscles are back.  There is more a spring in my steps, there is power in my stride.  And it is high time to consider "walking" a marathon in 2012.  

My heart is full and my legs are pumped! 

Walking Wounded

"I have a pain in the butt!" I said. "And I will BE a pain in the butt if I don't rest up now!"

My husband is used to hearing these words from me.  My sciatic nerves are shot from the trauma of the two total hips replacements and hips revisions.  The pain in the buttock is no laughing matter when it comes to walking or simply being just upright.

A month ago I decided to give it up and called the doctor for another slow/long-acting epi-dural injection of steroids.  This Friday morning I am going in to be poked.  Hopefully this will ease up the protestation and the revolution in the behind for a another couple of years.

It is an archaic attempt to live with pain anymore, by all technological and medical standards.  By that I mean that the medical establishment has created, invented and then re-created and re-invented so many solutions and drugs to pain-control that anyone choosing to live with pain is either a martyr or a moron, so I thought.

Well, I live with pain, non-retractable, relentless pain.  So I am either a martyr or a moron.  I am both.

I am a martyr not by choice, but by my genetic make-up (now the pandora box of genes is open).  Mother nature has predestined me to a life of lupus.  A life that is full of pain.  Mother nature has also designed my digestive system to only accept certain foods and chemicals.  When my stomach finds certain pain meds repulsive and starts a revolt, I am back in pain.  When my body continues to ignite and inflame itself, I am in pain.  So the martyrdom is half self-inflicted without cognitive agreement.  The moronic part is the way I have chosen to make my own pain relief--by walking.

Due to limitations to what I can do physically to make endorphins, I chose walking.  When I walk at least 2 hours a day, my pain is tolerable with help from Tylenol.  It is super time-consuming.

I do have another choice.  The choice of lying around and doing nothing--much like many other lupus patients.  I have given this choice a lot of thought.  At times this choice is so alluring that I am actually "good" with it.  The unacceptable drawback of this choice is:  ONE WILL HAVE NO LIFE.

Life to me is immensely more than pain or lupus.  Life is more important than May Tucker or Walking Butterfly.  Life is a philosophy that echoes a footprint in the sand: it shows that someone has made an impression on this earth, however ethereal.  My footprint is only one in billions.  But it's mine.

I want to step out and be counted.  I want to feel the ocean hitting the shore with my feet.  I want to build my own sandcastle.  I want to bask in the sun and feel its warmth.  I want to taste the salt of the sea. I want to swim and laugh.  I want to party with my friends and family.  I want to have a picnic and then some.  Lastly, I want to have my corner on this earth and make an impression with the writing from my heart.  Nothing, not lupus, not anything else can take that away from me.

So I am the walking wounded.  And woundedly I walk.