Gettin’ Hit When You’re Down

It’s hard to get a hit when you’re vulnerable. Even a soft punch hurts a lot when you’re not in a strong place.

It’s been a long November for me. It was a day or so after Halloween that I got some sort of cold virus. I had the sorest throat for about three weeks. Drank gallons of tea during teaching and therapy to keep the voice up and the coughing down.

It’s not very sensitive to be hacking while someone is courageously working up the energy to tell you something important and close to the heart. I get that. It’s so rude to interrupt the moment with horrible noises. So. Not.Cool.

So…I know that one just has to ride these things out…get a bit of extra rest when possible and wait for it to be over. The daily schedule continues on, and I continue with life, dragging this cold around with me as I go. Couple of false starts where I thought I was feeling better, and realized by the end of the day, that it was just wishful thinking. But by week’s end last week, there was no doubt the end was in sight. I could sleep the night through without any choking…I was on the mend.

Except Saturday morning I woke up with my eye gunked shut. Sorry to gross out readers with a more sensitive stomach, but it wasn’t pretty…very red eye. I took out my contacts as a precaution but decided that this couldn’t be anything…I was over my cold now and was healthy. I declared that if my cold was getting better, I was better, and this couldn’t possibly be anything. I went about my plans for the day, and as the day wore on, I realized I was fooling myself that this was “nothing”…it was tearing, and burning, and felt like I had an eyelash stuck in it permanently. By late afternoon, my head hurt from the effects.

By now, all I wanted to do was go to bed…but I dug deep and went to a walk in clinic. The guys at the Portage Ave. Walk In Clinic by Polo Park were FANTASTIC…I was in and out in half an hour. The doctor diagnosed “pink eye” and gave me a prescription. (and to all clients who I might see this week…I’m washing my hands regularly and its gotten a lot better already–I won’t infect you!)

He asked about my health, and I told him about the cold that was just finishing.

He nodded knowingly and sympathetically, explaining to me that this was quite common…to have something like pink eye show up when the immune system has just been challenged by something else. We are vulnerable to further illness when our body is already stressed and weakened.

Life is like that too, huh? It often seems that when a life challenge comes, it’s a struggle, but a do-able one…trying to find strategies to meet the challenge, having difficult conversations, experiencing the stress and so on. Really working hard to handle the situation…and actually pulling it off. Maybe not easily, but gettin’er done. It’s exhausting but the light at the end of the tunnel starts to show,

and then,

Something blindsides you in the middle of the vulnerability of getting to the end of something big and it wipes ya out.

This pink eye thing on the weekend was like that. I felt a little bit like that poor coyote in those “Road Runner” cartoons. You know the one I’m talking about. That poor coyote keeps getting beaten up, blown up, dumped down cliffs, etc. The part that I’m thinking about is that he would go through so much, get up, brush himself off and continue his life, and then at the end of the episode, he’s be sitting there dazed, tired, bruised, beaten, and worn down in defeat…and that roadrunner would reach over and gently tap the shelter he was under with his beak. And the few pieces of wood over him would crash on his head. It was no big deal really…after all he had been through, this was peanuts. Except that is when he would fall over, in utter defeat. End of show. Remember?

Just seems that we can rise to big challenges, work hard to meet them and feel the triumph of prevailing…and then, as we start to relax and look forward to some respite, something little can come along. The little thing is a piece of cake compared the big thing comes at a vulnerable time. The memories of having conquered the big thing don’t inspire the handling of the little thing…the worn-out-ness means that the little thing just finishes a person off.

So, on Saturday, after pushing through a rather nasty virus that affected my head, throat, chest and body for three weeks without a break in routine, I was broken by one moderately irritated eye. I could carry on regularly for 3 weeks during the nastiness, but on Saturday, the “pink eye” did me in..I took the night off, stayed at home, and cocooned. I couldn’t deal with “one more thing”, even if that “thing” was minor…because it was one more straw that broke my proverbial camel’s back.

Like:

• going through months of major cancer treatment, with recovery from surgery, enduring grueling chemotherapy and radiation treatment, and making it through…and then the inconvenience of a fender bender unhinges a person
• grieving the ripping agony of the death of a spouse, leaning into the grief, dealing with all the endless paperwork of the taxes and will stuff, establishing a new life very deliberately and courageously…and then the cat dies, too

It’s not always so apparent that the way something takes the wind out of our sails is often related to not only the incident itself, but the previous stressors too.

Those are the times when we need to take a step back, extend ourselves grace, and rather than berating ourselves for how something so insignificant could knock us down, support ourselves with the understanding that even something seemingly insigificant is “one more thing” on top of what the rest of life has held for us.

That view has a gentleness and understanding to it…something that means a lot when life has given us a one-two punch.