I have been working for several months now to reduce the amount of flailing involved in finding more balance in my life. I was working on this before the first heart attack on 4/27 and I’ve attempted to tromp on, one foot in front of another, since the second heart attack on 5/5.

I have been overwhelmed but a month or so, I thought, “Just work on changing one thing.” The change I worked on was increasing the frequency of my walks, which had slipped from five days a week to three days a week. Last week, I walked five times, helped by the long holiday weekend, but I do feel like something has shifted in a positive direction.

My meditation practice had also dropped off. My friend, Nancy, and I are now back to taking a walk to and from her house to the Frye Art Museum for their weekly free sitting meditation, which is excellent. I rarely get the chance to socialize with my closest friends let along exercise and meditate, too!

Someone asked me recently, “How is your heart?” I said, “I don’t really know. It’s not like when I had breast cancer and people were checking on my all of the time.” I’ve stayed at the hospital twice, each for two nights, and had a half-hour long outpatient appointment with a cardiologist on June 2nd. That’s it. I remembered something from my June 2nd appointment. My cardiologist asked me if I wanted to do cardiac rehab. At the time, I thought it meant going to group classes to learn stuff I already knew. Honestly, I wasn’t entirely ready to think of myself as a cardiac patient. I am still working on that.

Meanwhile, I’ve been considering seeing a personal trainer to reinvigorate my physical exercise. I would also like to work on my physical strength and stamina. My hesitation in working with a personal trainer is that I am a cardiac patient. Hmm, maybe someone who specializes in cardiac rehab would be helpful?

I checked the website for the Swedish Cardiac Rehab services. Yes, there are some classes but there are individual appointments as well as an individualized health plan. There are many visits. I called and will start after I return from the Mayo Clinic.

I am relieved. They will be able to help me gauge my progress. They will be able to tell me what losing 45% of heart functioning does to a person. They will help me keep on track.

I coped with breast cancer extremely well. (It still sucked, by the way.) I had a really good self-care plan. But I didn’t make all of my life changes at once. I had forgotten that.

Last Friday, I had a moment that I noticed. It was an intense feeling of well-being. It reminded me of moments I had as a child sitting in the grass, picking dandelions, and blowing the seeds in the air. There’s that blissful moment of watching them take flight.

I am reflecting back on that moment today as I begin a new week. I am holding on to the feeling of letting go.

As always, peace to you, friends.

-Elizabeth

So much of life is waiting for situations to resolve, one way or the other. I received a notification from my insurance company a couple of weeks ago. They requested a medical record review to determine the “medical necessity” of some scans I have scheduled at the Mayo Clinic as part of my diagnostic work-up for Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection (SCAD).

When insurance companies ask for a record review for the kind of procedures I do as a clinical psychologist, the review can take a very long time. When I received my letter, I thought, “Okay, this trip to Mayo may not happen in July, or perhaps ever.”

The Mayo Clinic won’t see me unless I am able to do all of the things they do to assess SCAD. Plane tickets and hotels have been reserved. My schedule is open for the week of hypothetical travel. As a self-employed person, that means I have no income coming in that week.  I’ve invested emotionally, physically, and financially in this trip.

I tried not to think about this too much and I was about 60% successful. My daughter is transferring to Western Washington University in the fall. This is good news but it presents logistical and emotional challenges. She missed the deadline for student housing and needs an apartment. I saw an opening in my schedule to take her for a few days to Bellingham, WA, near the Canadian border, to look for apartments. I talked to John first. He thought it was a good idea. My kid thought it was a good idea, too. I then cancelled three days of work and spent many hours lining up apartment visits.

Meanwhile, all of us were freaking out about the girl moving out, in our own individual ways. The girl freaked out about living on her own. So did hubby. To make a long story short, I was the only one ready to make the trip to Bellingham. I was mad, to say the least. But I wasn’t mad for long. I had a chat with John and told him that apartment hunting was a one-parent job, not a two-parent job, and that I didn’t need to be the parent in charge. He was happy to take over. Then I hit the road and decided to make the three days a personal retreat, something I wanted to do this summer, anyway, and had to cancel due to the stupid heart attacks. I had a great time and came back home refreshed.

Meanwhile, I was waiting on word from either my insurance or the Mayo Clinic. As it is, I used frequent flier miles to book two separate return tickets home. The first ticket is the “evaluation goes as planned” ticket. The second one is later, in case I need two days of extra scans and appointments. The Mayo Clinic suggested that I plan accordingly, so I did. I am hoping to return earlier not just to save money on hotels. The girls’ university orientation/registration/apartment hunting trip is happening on Monday, 7/24. I want to be there.

This is logistical complexity that stresses me out more than a bit. It gives me great empathy for the many folks for whom the logistics of healthcare dominate their lives. They have to live the rest of their lives on the edges, assuming that they don’t sleep through that part. Being sick is exhausting. Getting better from being sick is also exhausting.

I am a woman of some means and a hugely supportive network of friends and family. This experience makes me think about the rest of our country. What the hell, America? People are worth something. Healthy people are worth something, even if one is being selfish and crass. Oh yeah, this whole Trump being president thing is also a chronic stress for me. Imagine if I were an immigrant? Or any other marginalized person?

The good news is that I got my follow-up letter from my insurance two days ago. My scans have been pre-authorized. Some unqualified insurance employee has deemed that the Mayo Clinic can do their job and that I can benefit from their expertise. This is a positive outcome to a negative process. For now, I will focus on my trip to Rochester, MN.

Peace to you, dear friends.

I find myself quiet since my heart attacks. Although I am working about as many hours a week as I was before, I have reduced other responsibilities, which has freed up time and space. Further, my husband is working most nights right now.

At times, I find myself craving more to do, more to fill up the spaces in my life. At other times, I am thankful to have time and place to just be. When I was going through breast cancer treatment, my life was really busy with healthcare appointments but I also had significant amounts of time off from work to recover from surgeries. I did a lot of walking, writing, and thinking. Sometimes I got lonely but often I was in a mindful space where it was possible to feel and be and breathe.

There are more pauses in my life than there were before, especially when I was working my butt off in grad school, moving constantly, and adjusting to motherhood while building a career. The challenges between the pauses, however, are less predictable. Breast cancer at age 46. Almost exactly 5 years later I found myself hospitalized with two heart attacks. The heart attacks were even more surprising than the breast cancer. In terms of cardiac risk, the odds were strongly in my favor.  Even the report of the lipid profile that was run while I was in the hospital the day after HAVING A HEART ATTACK, has a summary at the bottom, “below average risk (female)”.  This estimate is not necessarily wrong, by the way. It does not read, “no risk” or “zero risk”.

When it comes to my physical health, I’ve had an unlucky five years. But I am lucky in so many other ways. One of those ways is the time that I have right now. I am headed to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota next month to have an evaluation for Spontaneous Coronary Artery Dissection (SCAD). I scheduled my appointments to occur when I had planned to take a trip to the beach, by myself.  The part of the trip that is staying the same is that I am going by myself, which is my choice. My husband will attend my consultation with the cardiologist by phone.

Although it is true that I have had more fatigue lately, I honestly feel about 80% of my old self, most the time. Most of the 20% reduction is due to difficulties with my sleep. The daylight hours are long this time of year and with lots on my mind, it is a bit harder to get back to sleep if I wake up from the sunrise or my husband’s snoring. I do, however, continue to have a day or two out of each week that feels like the air was let out of my tires.  Nonetheless, I have returned to working in my garden as well as to the pottery studio. I find both activities highly meditative.

Silence is very important to my healing process. Today I feel a lonely kind of gratitude, but it is gratitude, nonetheless.

I wear two rings, an engagement/wedding ring, which I’ve worn since 1990 and an anniversary ring, which I’ve worn since 2005. I had the anniversary ring appraised after I had it designed. However, I have not ever had my wedding ring appraised. It has been 12 years since I had the other ring appraised. I have NEVER had them checked by a jeweler. That is something that I am supposed to do each year. Oops! Last Sunday, I dropped my rings off at a jeweler to be checked, cleaned, and appraised. I will pick them up next Sunday.

I am re-appraising many things, not just my diamond rings. Most of all, I am re-appraising my lifestyle. It’s the same that happened when I was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2012. And guess what? Having two heart attacks, out of the blue, also gives me pause and time to re-appraise my life and how I live it.

I have been coping, so far, rather well. However, I can realistically tell you that I am uncertain. I am afraid. I think these are reasonable reactions. I am working successfully to enjoy each day. I have embarked upon another voyage of ambiguity. This time, however, I may have a quite rare cardiac disease. Fortunately, I have found resources through the breast cancer blogging community, which is connected to other health care advocacy groups. Unlike my breast cancer treatment, in order to find specialists this time, I’m going to need to travel out-of-state.

I am someone who deals better with adversity if I have some past experience dealing with it. I am not grateful for having had cancer in the past, but I’ve got to tell you that I learned a lot in that experience and I am drawing on it now.

Today, it is beautiful and sunny. I’ve had a good work day, part of which included time with a kindergartener. I came home to my loving husband. For now, I will meditate on that.