His words...

"Stop that right now!"

Tell me to stop thinking what I am thinking or feeling what I am feeling and I tumble into the nadir of despair.  I am trying so very, very, very hard to learn new things, to learn new thoughts, but doing so is like climbing Mount Kilimanjaro.  And I am disabled ... needing a wheelchair for any real length of being out and about.  Seemingly impossible.

The cardiologist said Hal (yes, he used my monitor/communicator's name) shows the leads are fine.  He would be alerted if either of the two leads data reports were abnormal.  Hal also showed that it is not actually ventricle pacing that I am feeling.  But he does not know what it is.  Maybe, just maybe, it was the accelerometer, but he is not sure and I do not understand what that does.  He turned it off.  He turned off lots of features, stripping my 6-cylinder engine into a 2-cylinder one.  He also set my heart rate low threshold down to 50.  Already, I can tell you, I loathe that change.

I have felt my heart for years now, compliments of dysautonomia.  I hate it.  It is distracting and discomforting and often disturbing and disruptive to sleep.  I have felt it significantly less since the pacemaker.  I have felt it significantly more since the setting change.  When I move, especially roll over, my heart jumps.  I feel it ever so much more jumping from 50 than from 60.  My next appointment is on the 7th and I am hoping that he will change that setting back.

The pain ... wait and see.
The answer I was expecting.
Not the answer I was wanting to hear.

I have so much pain that I ignore quite a bit.  The hard part of this is the added pain, a proverbial straw that broke the mental camel's back.  But, too, if I mention pain, it is because I am concerned something is wrong.  I remain concerned that the placement of the pacemaker is too close to my left arm.  But  I will wait out the month he asked me to give him ... to allow time for more healing.

I was feeling a tad less hopeless until his nurse came in and chastised me with a fair amount of ire over my feeling as if I am a bad patient.  Telling me that everyone is bending over backwards just to accommodate me doesn't help.  Raising your voice with me doesn't help.  Telling me to stop thinking and feeling DOES NOT HELP.

I have spent the hours since then just broken and hopeless.  The things I think were sown more than 40 years ago ... most of them.  Rooting them out seems impossible, especially the more I learn to see those wrong thoughts even though I still think them.  Heck, I still believe them.  Recognizing them and knowing I am trapped by them is much worse than ignorance of them.

"It's going to get worse before it gets better."

I have heard that before, with counseling.  But I never got this far.  I never spoke the things I have spoken.  I have never remembered the things starting to creep in ... mostly into my dreams, reliving them whether I want to or not.  The tales I told were always the "safe" ones to tell.

Honestly, I don't know how to survive "worse."  Today, for me, was the worst day since I moved here, fleeing months and months of worse.  I made poor choices.  And I want to quit everything.  It all seems so pointless to me, because healing from trauma depends on me ... and I am so very, very, very weak.

When I was in the seventh grade, my mother dragged me, literally kicking and screaming, across town to see a psychologist.  To this day, I do not understand why, since I was the quiet one who hid in books.  My siblings were getting high and drinking.  I was the "good" one.  The man she took me to was a predator.

He threatened to have me committed if I did not agree to see him.  I did.  And for the length of his "therapy," I had lessons in how and why some little girls were created to serve men who have special needs.  It was a horror to me.  I knew no one would believe me and no one would help me and I was terrified of him putting me away somewhere where it would be much, much, much worse than just what happened in his office.  But what happened was a terrifying, shameful, painful education about my body and the male body and how I could help men like him.

There was a girl who rode the bus with me, Sarah Lily.  She was a year younger.  She had waist-lenght brown hair and glasses (I think).  She was tiny and a bit of a bookworm dynamo.  I told her what was happening.  She didn't tell another adult. I don't know why.  But what she did do was strategize how to distract the "therapist" from hurting me.  She made up the most fantastic dreams for me.  I wish I could thank her, for being a port in a storm.  So ... matter of fact.  It was okay for me to tell her what was happening.  She didn't flinch from it or judge me or anything like that.  She just listened and tried to help.

I dreamt of him the other night for the first time.  I was right there in his office, hearing those words again.  His words.  Words that made so much sense in my life because there were other men.  A couple of years later, when my sailing lessons turned into further sex education, I was guided by the words he spoke to me whilst he was ... hurting me or making me do things that I fill me with such horror and shame.

I dreamt of him again last night.

I hear his words and I believe them, even though the adult me knows what he did was wrong.  I hear his words and they make sense to me, when so much else in this world does not.  I hear his words and I am rooted, deeply, in fear and shame and silence.

I want the dreams and the memories of the young Myrtle to STOP.  I could handle the ones of the adult Myrtle, but the young Myrtle has always been kept safely at a distance.  Up close and personal is devastating to me and causes me to want to quit this life because I do not know what to do with such magnitude of shame and fear and pain.

When the nurse told me to STOP THAT IMMEDIATELY, I was afraid.  But I was devastated because I know that I am not capable, at the moment, of stoping what I am thinking and feeling.  I fail.  And I fail.  And I fail again.  I know this just as I know that I am no longer fully capable of managing my medications.  Such knowledge leaves me awash in a hopelessness that I have not yet known.  A hopelessness that has its own fear to bear.

If shame is saying that "I am bad," then my shame is telling me that I am so very bad that I do not deserve to live.  Whilst I know that is not true, it seems true.  It feels true.  It makes the most sense to me.

My counselor said that the only way to get through this is to first learn to ground myself.  That is step number one.  To focus on everything around me, what I see and feel and smell.

The only light in the room is coming from the roaring fire, the Christmas tree, and the candle.  The room smells a tiny bit of smoke, where logs have fallen forward as they collapsed and some of their smoke escaped into the room before I pushed them back.  It smells more of balsam and cedar from the candle.  I no longer can smell the Christmas tree.  I hear the hissing of the sap in the wood, the roaring of the flames being caught in my wickedly strong updraft, and the cracking of the fire burning.  My back is cold from the air slipping through around the large bay window, but the room is warm from the hours of burning logs in the fireplace, warm air that is being trapped in here because the pocket French doors to the dining room and the French door to the parlor are closed.  I see GREEN all around me because I am dressed in it from head to toe and am huddled beneath my weighted blanket.  My FROG ring is on my finger.  My heating pad is on my swollen abdomen.  And my head is resting on my Fluffernutter, who is, at this very moment, snoring like a drunken sailor.  I am not back with that monster.  Nor am I trapped with an unhappy nurse.  I am here, in a mansion I still cannot believe is mine and I am with the most amazing canine in the universe.

Still, I hear his words....