Women Over 40 Rock!

What do you do when you’ve lost it? What do you do when you think you can’t take it anymore? What do you do when you feel trapped or that you want to crawl out of your skin and transport yourself somewhere else, like a beach in Mexico with a double salt Margarita. What do you do when you have lost all your reason and focus and you don’t know what the next step is. You just can’t seem to get a grip to see through the fog in front of you so you know where you are going and why. Why am I taking this step in this direction when maybe it should be that other step. Your head is spinning, spinning out of control. What do you do when you feel like screaming forever from the tip of your pedicure needy toenails, through your worn out body and out your mouth to the heavens above. How do you relieve the pain when you do not drink, smoke, do drugs or drink coffee and the one bad habit of eating chocolate isn’t enough?

YOU GO BUY A SOFA!

Sound crazy? I totally agree. I thought of my partner, Claire Callaway’s blog about THERAPY SHOPPING and it sounds all too familiar. Well I could certainly use a dose of therapy shopping today. I love running to a thrift shop or Target or TJ Max and finding a wonderful treasure for $5 or $10. It is mostly just putting my mind somewhere else that helps. But today is different. Today is off the charts stress. This is mother load stress and I want to buy a SOFA! Yes you heard me. I have the desperate unrelenting urge to buy a sofa. It just popped into my head. I just want to hop in the car and buy a SOFA. Irrational?! Insane? Yes! BUT the stress of today and the last year has been insane.

My son has been very sick for the last year and a half. I actually have a lot of days like this. But it is nothing compared to my son’s suffering. And I get mad at myself for wanting to escape and buy a stupid sofa when he can’t escape. I can escape my surroundings but he can’t escape the body that has turned on him and also won’t allow him to get up and out to enjoy life again. I won’t go into specific details but it has been a horribly long, complex and winding journey of this “YET TO BE DIAGNOSED ILLNESS” and how it is has continued to spiral out of control and affect other parts of his body while they do the myriad of tests without finding definitive specific reason for the progression and evolution of this illness. Watching my son suffer the way he has and knowing all that he has lost (missing his senior year, missing prom, loosing friends) and feeling so helpless is enough to drive any mom around the bend. You never think your child will have a serious illness. You hope and pray everyday that will never happen. But if it happens and the doctors can’t figure it out and cannot diagnose the problem for almost year and a half of trying- what do you do? Well…you buy a sofa! And I’ll say the doctors made me do it.

There are 3 doctors’ faces that my son and I have come to dread. You too may have seen these faces. But if you haven’t, trust me these faces are bad enough to make you want to buy a sofa.

• Number 1: the look on their face when they don’t have a clue what the hell is going on and are lost as to how to move forward.
• Number 2: The look on their face when they want you to disappear because you are just a reminder of their failure and their ego can’t deal with it.
• Number 3: The look that you are a bossy over reacting hysterical mom / woman. It is the look of mommyism and sexism.

The worst grievance of all and the most stress inducing is the lack of caring. The down right cavalier perhaps unintentional “your son’s suffering is not a priority” attitude that you deal with day in and day out especially when you can’t reach a doctor or a nurse. When they take their bloody time calling you back, despite how many desperate messages you’ve left, it doesn’t seem to matter that you are waiting by the phone and rescheduling things so you don’t miss that call and the stress that causes. They don’t seem to realize what the consequence is to their patient when it takes 5 to 10 days to return a call or give a test result. The consequence is that the doctor who is supposed to be helping relieve the patients suffering ends up causing more suffering to that patient and the mom (caregiver) ends up with all the nerve endings in her entire body fried like a MacDonald’s Filet of Fish. And then when they do call you back they of course are bothered by having to do so and have too little time to talk so you panic and lose your train of thought, forget the list of questions and points you wanted to make and you are left dangling with a horrible sense of incompetency for having blown this incredibly important opportunity that you could wait another 3 weeks for.

Of course there have been some good medical personnel along the way but today I am not thinking of them. I am thinking of my son and all he has been through and how brave he has been. I am thinking of yet another incident with a doctor that ruined the day. That made us all feel so unimportant. And all I can think of is that darn new sofa I want to run out and buy and have delivered this very day even if I have to strap it to the top of my little Honda Fit. There is no good reason I can think of to buy a sofa. I don’t even need a new sofa. I guess it is just the kind of stressful day where nothing but a big-ticket item will do.

However, since writing this blog the urge has gone. Let’s call it “therapy writing” instead of “therapy shopping”. I will call my mom or one of my dear friends instead and bend their ear a while. I will give my son another hug or maybe hundreds. I will kiss my precious doggies on the tops of their heads and give them a doggie cookie and I will feel clearer and more hopeful again. I will probably eat some chocolate and then I will fight to gain my focus and my strength back so I can forge ahead to MAKE the doctors care more deeply about solving the mystery of this illness so my son will be cured sooner rather than later. That is what moms do. And I will do it all without rushing out to buy a brand new sofa. Hopefully.

Debbie Zipp, blogger for IN THE TRENCHES PRODUCTIONS, The First Entertainment Website Celebrating the Power and Beauty of Women Over 40