Monthly Archives: June 2023

The chair looked so familiar.  How many times over the years had I gone into a room like this with My Sweet Mama and she was the one on this chair?  I would get to sit on one of the small chairs by the side.  This time I was in that chair.  The side chairs were empty.  I felt sad.  Memories of her were crashing around my heart as I waited.  Eight years ago we were waiting and watching as our indomitable mother lived her last weeks on earth.  I looked down at my feet.  The veins and the bumps and the shape of my own wide feet were so reminiscent of hers.  And the pain.

The door opened, and Mama’s beloved Dr. O came in with his usual smile.  We had many encounters in a room like this over the years, and he felt like an old friend.  “It’s good to see you,” he said.  “What brings you here?”

I look down at those offending appendages and say ruefully, “Well, Dr. O, I’m afraid I inherited my Mama’s feet.”

The X-rays had already been taken, and he casually went over to look at them while talking about one of his favorite patients. “Your Mom was amazing,” he said.  “I could hardly believe how she kept going with the way her feet were . . .” his voice trailed off and then he spoke of how long she has been gone, and marveled over the length of time it had been, and talked about a number of different things, as he studied my offending X-rays before him on the screen. And then he turned abruptly.

“You are absolutely right,” he said.  “You did inherit your Mama’s feet.  They are really bad!”  (yikes!) “And I hate to tell you this, but we cannot fix them  The left one is exceptionally bad, and the right one could possibly be helped by surgery, but probably not because of how damaged the joints are in there.  I wouldn’t even try it, really.  So.  What do you think we should do?”

My heart felt so heavy.  The path my mother had taken was prednisone shots as often as she could get them and a heavy dependence on pain medications.  I had purposed that I would not live as she had and though I did not want surgery, I wanted other options!.

I guess that I knew things were going downhill over the last year.  There was so much to occupy my heart and my hands that demanded much from my feet, and I often didn’t really take time to think about how I was walking or how often I was choosing to grab the golf cart instead of trekking to the chicken house to find Certain Man.  I resented when people alluded to my “limping.”   But what I couldn’t ignore was the comments from the little grands concerning how Grammy was walking.  In the honesty of children, we sometimes can hear what adults aren’t saying. What they said was humorous, but sometimes I would see pictures of myself, and see that there was constraint on my face, or feel so clumsy and disabled in comparison to my peers.

. . . and then there was the very real component of the increasing pain.  Pain and this Delaware Grammy have an adversarial relationship.  I do have an exceptionally high pain tolerance.  (I once had a doctor tell me that because of the high tolerance, I needed to pay better attention to pain because one day I would ignore it too long and it would have serious consequences).  People, listen to me.  I’m not bragging.  There are no heroics here. The strange thing is, I honestly do not feel pain until it’s pretty high on the scale. Those rating numbers? They confuse me.  I have to stop and concentrate to decide if I even have pain unless it’s about an eight. “What is your pain today?” puts my head into a tailspin. 

“Well, maybe I’m not having pain today.  Well, yes, I am. But it’s not too bad.  It was when I was walking, though. I could hardly walk for a bit coming in. But it’s not too bad now!  So maybe that’s a four!  Yes, it’s a four.  I tell them a four.”  And so I would!

“And at the worst?” 

This one was easier for me because there is a level that I reach when I would reluctantly take a stronger pain medication than Ibuprofen and acetaminophens.  About two or three times a week, when things got hard and I needed to do something, or I needed to sleep, I would reach for it.  That was when things were an “eight.”  Sometimes I would be tempted to think “nine” or even “ten” but honey chil’, I’ve been there and this wasn’t that!  Eight keeps you awake at night.  Eight makes you want to sit on your chair during the day.  Eight makes you want to not go away from your house. Eight makes you look at chairs with scrutiny before sitting down in them so that you will be able to get up without making a spectacle of yourself.  Eight was happening entirely too often.  I wasn’t increasing the use of the extra pain medication, but I often wanted to.  And Eight makes me sad.

In these days I often talk to Mama as I contemplate this place to which I have come.  I tell her “I’m so sorry, Mama.  I just didn’t know.  I didn’t understand how pain affects our personality.  I didn’t understand how much you hated the things that could have helped you that felt like an admission of decline.  I didn’t understand why you grasped at so many things to fix it.  And I often felt like you needed to be more active and invested in the lives of the people around you.  I just didn’t know.”

And I think of the physical and soul pain of people I love in my family and beyond, some younger, some older than me.  The losses of loved ones, the inroads of chronic pain and disability associated with mysterious diseases, broken relationships, cancer, aging, and so much more.  I’m suddenly aware that “I just didn’t know.” (But boy, howdy, am I finding out!  Especially that aging bit).

This recalcitrant foot pain?  It can be temporarily treated, but there is no long term fix.  Dr. O put shots in both feet, and they definitely feel better.  I finished my day happily doing some gardening, picking my tea bed, stripping tea leaves for concentrate and getting them steeping for the night.  I took care of correspondence, and then finally went to bed around 11:30.  At almost 2:00 I was suddenly wide awake.  My feet didn’t hurt, but they were hit with what my Grandma Wert would call “the fidgets” (or Restless Leg Syndrome).  Incidentally, my Mama inherited her feet from her Mama.  My Grandma Wert often complained of her feet hurting her.

And I’m still wide awake.  Prednisone, the all-purpose fixer upper does wonderful things for me.  Usually, anyhow.  The effects are rapid, and often last much longer than predicted as far as helping.  The short term is not as pleasant.  I do not understand how a shot in the foot can make me wide awake, have a flushed face, feel hot, and in general disrupt my equilibrium.  I don’t have any anaphylactic reactions, just annoying.  I really want to sleep.  I don’t like getting flushed.  I don’t like getting the “fidgets.”  They make me feel like a four year old that wants to get into something, and I especially don’t like feeling restless.  The symptoms are often less noticeable if I get up and do something.  And so you got this very self-centered post that I wrote between 2:30 and 4:30am.  Now you know.

But there are reasons for grateful praise.  I’m realizing more and more that while this kind of suffering is not “suffering for Jesus,” how I respond to it can be a part of the perfecting of His image in my life.  This “suffering” is because I am part of the Human Race, and life isn’t going to be perfect.  There are sometimes miracles that fix things, and modern medicine has in its hands wonderful solutions to a myriad of problems, once unfixable and terminal.  But there are some things they cannot fix.  And some things God chooses not to fix. My response to this God who suffered for me, loves me even in my questions, and keeps His Promises cannot depend on whether He decides to do what I want, when I want it, how I want it and where.  He is to be trusted, even when my questions don’t have answers.  Someday, if it still matters, I will know why.  But I wonder if, when I’m in the very presence of a Holy God, forgiven, clothed in the righteousness of Jesus, it will matter at all.  I think not.

And so for Grace to figure out how to maneuver this journey, for the love of my husband and family, both immediate and extended, for a church that helps to hold me steady, a neighborhood full of people I love, a world as mesmerizingly beautiful as ours, and even for this moment when I wish I was sleeping, but am not–

My heart gives grateful praise.