CHAPTER NINETEEN
BURIED, CRUSHED, AND ATTACKED BY WOLVES
I think I’m having a heart attack.
I can’t die right now. I haven’t sent Jeffan email with all our passwords.
The kids cannot grow up with this loss.
Just take some deep breaths.
If I don’t change some things, I’m not going to see the boys get married and I won’t get to be a grandma.
These are the thoughts plaguing me at 3:11 a.m. Early in my perimenopause, I was not yet waking up to go to the bathroom or from some random dream or nightmare. I just woke up with a brain full of anxiety. During the daylight hours, it was business as usual for me with not a hint of the worries that kept me up. But most nights I would lie in bed unable to fall back asleep while my brain ran through its playlist of “Topics to Keep You Awake and Anxious.”
My mortality was top of the list. Without warning, I would be wracked with fear about my impending death. I lay awake and imagined scenarios where I could die unexpectedly. Car accidents. Heart failure. Attacked by wolves while walking in the park. In my head, I mapped out a conversation with my husband where I tell him we should never put ourselves in a situation where, if something disastrous should happen, our children would be left parentless.
“Maybe we should start taking separate flights,” I suggest in my mind.
He looks at me like I’m crazy and then concedes that we need to at least appoint a guardian. I’ll reconsider and point out that it’s good that we only ever go on vacations as a family because if the plane goes down, at least we are all together. Then he’ll pedantically point out that we still need to appoint a guardian in case one of the boys survives while the rest of us perish. Oh, and we should also take care of getting our wills done. Then I glanced over at the clock and discovered this imaginary conversation took 16 minutes to build in my head, including revisions and alternate locations.
If I felt a twinge of new pain in my breast, I worried about breast cancer. If my poop came out skinny, I talked myself into believing I had rectal cancer. On more than one occasion, after I passed poop tinted with red, I sat for an extended period of time on the toilet, searching for the symptoms of stomach cancer. It’s only after I’d spent a fruitless half hour unable to match any of my symptoms to those online that I would remember my lunch the day before where I had a salad with generous amounts of roasted beets.
I worried about going deaf and blind. I agonized about blood clots travelling from my calf to my heart. I fretted about a spate of headaches especially when, in my entire life, the number of headaches I have had can be counted on both hands. If I sneezed or coughed, I was concerned that I might throw out my back or dislocate my shoulder, as happened to a good friend of mine a few days after she turned 45.
When I finished mentally scrolling the list of ailments from which I might die, I would transfer all that anxiety and fear to my husband’s mortality. I would run through the same list and imagine his death from any of these scenarios and add a few more: being crushed by a rogue front-end loader on a construction site, getting buried alive in a building collapse, or being involved in a car accident as he drove to work at 4:30 on a dark, snowy winter morning.
The anxiety was on replay all night long. Try as I might, I couldn’t silence the beast. I tossed and turned. Occasionally, I would actually feel tears start to fall when I thought about life without my husband. Earlier that same day at dinner, I wanted him to choke on the butter-soaked corn on the cob he was slurping and chomping.
At 3:57 a.m., the dog came into the room, tail wagging. She had clearly heard my weeping/restlessness/moans of frustration and calculated in her canine mind that I needed some comfort. She jumped onto the bed, finding her place right alongside my sweaty body. She’s an 85-pound dog, so when she shimmied her way closer to me, she pulled the comforter with her. I had a warm, cuddly dog on one side and an exposed, cold leg, hip, and upper arm on the other. In four minutes, I’d want to pull the cover back over me, but if I did that, the dog would growl, waking my husband, and my nighttime anxiety would be exacerbated by guilt that I woke him up 44 minutes before his alarm went off.
So I dealt with it and pet the dog, taking comfort in her soft fur and loving her so much for knowing exactly when I needed her. I lifted my head off my pillow and peeked at her adorable face. Her nose was nestled in the comforter, nuzzling my upper abdominal jelly roll. From this vantage point, I could see the white fur creeping over her face. She was eight years old, a senior by dog standards. I closed my eyes, and continued petting her, letting my hand settle on the scruff at the back of her neck. In the midst of that satisfying connection, I started to feel sadness. I was imagining life without our beloved dog. How many years of quality life did she have left? If she got really sick, would we opt for treatment or end her suffering? Why was I even thinking about this? It’s the menopausal mind, set to autoplay.
On a different night, I lay in bed listening to the rain. A major storm moved into the area and a clap of thunder shook the house and woke my husband and I. The boys, now teenagers, did not stir. As the fat drops hammered the roof, I started panicking about money. We knew the roof was going to have to be replaced, but we were not ready for it. I wondered if the basement was flooding. I worried the DRICORE sub-flooring we installed when we renovated would fail. If it did its job, any water that found its way into the basement would drain under the flooring and leave our carpets and walls undamaged. But what if the water was at higher ground and started running down the walls from the first floor? The worry wormed into my brain and wouldn’t let go. Our bank account was not flush, we didn’t have significant savings or a rainy day fund. If shit went sideways, we were screwed. And broke.
As the rain eased up, my mind inevitably turned to my business. I thought about where I wanted to take it, how I could bring in more revenue, whether or not I was still in love with what I did every day. I worried about my inadequacies. I reflected on the great clients I have had over the years. I freaked out when I thought about all the things I might have forgotten: emails I didn’t answer, bills I forgot to pay, projects I sent out into the world that were unfinished. The business voice in my head was messing with me, whispering cruelly that I had forgotten to add footage to a video, or that I had sent a client the wrong blog. I lay in bed, attempting to convince myself that there was nothing I could do about this at 2 a.m. and I would check things in the morning. Except I don’t. That asshole who is living rent-free in my cerebrum manipulated me into getting out of bed and heading downstairs to my home office. l fired up the computer and checked everything, discovered I didn’t colossally screw up and went back to bed, hoping I had quieted the anxiety enough to get some sleep.
But it doesn’t take long for the next anxiety-driven symptom to show up. Without warning, my heart starts palpitating. It’s pounding inside my chest with an irregular rhythm. I run through the mental checklist of the other signs of heart attack: jaw pain, arm pain, indigestion, difficulty breathing. I think maybe I feel some pain in my left jaw, but as soon as I focus on it, it disappears. I have no other issues other than indigestion, which is almost chronic at this stage in life. It’s purely a menopausal coincidence that the spicy hot and sour soup I had at dinner has decided now is the time to reassert itself. The palpitations don’t last long, just long enough to make me circle back to item number one on my mortality checklist: heart attack. As an obese, middle-aged woman whose activity level is slightly less than moderate and sometimes close to sloth-like, it’s a valid concern. As I lie in bed, staring at the popcorn ceiling, I make promises to myself that I know I won’t keep the minute a plate of crispy, salty bacon is in front of me.
You’d think all this thinking and planning and worrying would exhaust me. It does, but that doesn’t mean I am going to sleep anytime soon. I turn over onto my left side and look at my husband’s outline underneath the covers. I hold my breath, waiting for the rise of his chest. I cannot imagine life without him.
Breathe, damnit.
Jeff has mild sleep apnea, and tonight he has decided to forego his CPAP machine. Without the machine, he will stop breathing many times during the night. It can be fatal if left untreated, not just for the sufferer, but for the 50-something spouse lying next to him in bed hoping that she did not miss his last breath.
Breathe, damnit.
I wait, taking small, short breaths of my own, and pray.
Breathe, damnit.
Just as I am about to reach over and wake him, the characteristic gasp and gurgle erupts from his mouth and he takes a breath.
Phew.
He will not die tonight.
He will live another day to do something that irrationally annoys the fuck out of me.