Mark's Ponderous Posterous

Random thoughts of an anger management patient

Race Day Tomorrow - and Heart

Tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, will be the third race that I have run - ever.  Each one carries significance because of the coronary artery disease that could have killed me - that we discovered and treated last year.

I began with a 5k, went to an 8k and tomorrow, am running a 10k.  No problemo, right?

Not so much.

Six weeks ago, I severely sprained and then re-injured my left ankle.  I was forced to stop all activity involving my ankle, which is to say virtually all cardio activity until last Friday.  What's ironic is that the day before I snapped my ankle and fell on my face, I had printed out a six-week training plan that

Heart1
would have put me right on target.

The good news is that I have been medically cleared to run the race.  The bad news is that I had six days to prepare, not six weeks.  Just finishing in and of itself could be considered victory, but what's on my mind is a little different. 

I have to wear a brace on my left ankle, which, when I run, hurts like hell.  I will likely exhaust my cardio training at some point before I finish.  And then I will have to rely on my heart.

Not heart as in the one that I need to pump (I felt good about that in the last race), but I will have to see how much HEART I have.  Can I run all the way through without stopping?  Can I gut out the whole thing?  Can I muster the heart to push through everything?  We won't know until about 10:00 tomorrow.  I need this.  I need to, once again, prove that I am a victor, not a victim.

I sure hope that I can have the heart - and the heart - to do it.

Mark

More Disney Pictures

More Disney pictures!

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Disney pictures

Disney pictures.

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Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party!

Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party!

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Various Cambridge/Boston pics

Various Cambridge/Boston pics.

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Fun (and medals!!) at Féis Culkin

Fun (and medals!!) at Féis Culkin!

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On Becoming an Adult Orphan

I want this post to be so little about me as possible, so I will start with some context and them move on to what is really on my mind and what I think is important.

And I have written this with Allen, Doug, Jennifer, Amy and Tinu in my mind.  

When I was 39 years old, my children were three and one, and my mother contracted lung cancer. It was nine grueling months of chemo, radiation, blood clots and one infection after another.  She succumbed after the battle in April of 2004, six days before Mother's Day.

In those final moments and days after her death, I had a strange thought.  "I am a 39 year-old orphan."  My father died when I was 15.  So while I owned a house, was building a family, a career, carving out my place in life, I went from being the child, to the caretaker, to the parent-like role and decision maker and finally to the orphan.

What is inspiring my thinking this morning is the plight of several of my friends who have of late endured what many people call the "sandwich generation."  As I was writing this post, I got a text telling me that the father of one of my friends in high school passed away last night. So this is horriblly prescient.

As I experienced it, as you are busy raising young children, building a career, doing many new things, all of a sudden, there is either a slow, gradual or shockingly fast transtition from being a kid to being an adult.  It's agonizing.

Sure, we know if our heart of hearts that we are adults.  Our driver's licenses and numbers of candles on the birthday cake say so, right?  But for many, your MOM IS YOUR MOM.  YOUR DAD IS YOUR DAD.  And also for many, those individuals, no matter how they may age, can turn you into a 10 year-old with a word or a phrase.  Even if you are 40+, you still seek advice, comfort and approval.  

Then there is the subtle, creeping change.  There may or may not be a diagnosis of something wrong.  The phone calls or in-person visits turn from casual conversation to medical reports.  "My blood numbers are this, my doctor said that, the MRI showed this."  For many, these words and situation are so overwhelming that it's hard to process:  "Oh my God, I am becoming the parent." You may have a surviving mom or dad who is so paralyzed that you end up as the unwelcome decision-maker.

Again, for many, when parents get older and scared, it's the children who make the appointments, battle with the docs, take copious notes and do tons of Internet research.  Again the slow march of time like water washing over a rock unsideously and slowly progresses the transistion from ten year-old to the One In Charge.  The lack of sleep, caring for a family, focusing at work often make one unaware of the encroaching leadership role that none of us want.  It's impossible to process.

Finally, when the last days come, at least for me up to my mother's death and after, I WAS the parent.  I was the adult in the room.  I had responsibilities.  I had people who still needed me, an employer who had been more than patient, tasks that had been frozen in time as this transformation progressed.  Yet I was still the Man in Charge.  Somehow, I quickly went from kid to Family Patriarch.

Then, there is the moment.  

"Oh, my God.  I am an adult orphan."  

We all will go through it, but somehow, even in one's 40s or 50's, it is life's final indignity in a march to adulthood.  We don't want it now any more than we wanted a parent's disapproval when we were 10.

One of my favorite photos of my son was when we was about four.  It's a picture taken behind us, and we're holding hands, walking down a path in a park.  He's looking up to me - literally, as if asking for bits of wisdom, advice or approval.  I look at that picture every day because of what it represents. In his formative years, I will hold his hand and get him started down the path of life. He has and will hopefully look to me for guidance on how to become a man, go on a date, do well in school or athletics.  And enjoy life. Then I'll let go and he will continue down that path on his own, just like I did before him.

And God willing, as we separately but together continue all down the path of life, he and his sister will be there when we come to the point at which it's their turn to hold my hand and walk me down the final steps on the path of my own life.  And become an unwanted adult.

It's abrupt, it's cruel and it's insidious.  But it's the path that most of us have to take.

Allen, Amy, Jennifer, Doug and Tinu:  I am so sorry that you had to walk down that path.  It's gradual yet fast.  It's sobering and responsible .  It's insidous and cruel.

God bless you.

Mark

Why I Am Doing What I am Doing

I am sitting here writing this at 6:30 in the morning on a Saturday.  Today is the day that I go skydiving and is the day after I was cleared to start running on a badly injured ankle, just 2.5 weeks after going down in a painful heap.

I have had a pretty steely determination about doing the things that I knew that I always either wanted to do - and didn't have the time - or was hesitant to do because they seemed to hard or to dangerous.  That all changed.

That all changed on February 23, 2011 when I was put under anesthesia at George Washington Hospital in DC, knowing that someone was wrong with my heart, but not knowing what the solution would be.  Would I wake up with a clean bill of health (unlikely)?  Would I have arterial blockages (more likely) that necessitated stents?  Or would I wake up long enough to get wheeled into another
operating room where they would perform bypass surgery - on a 46 year-old man.  I came out of it with the second-best scenario, three blocked arteries and two stents (the third had been blocked for so many years that arteries had grown around it).  My heart was working normally again.

I am NOT the person in this picture anymore.

_hospital

So what does this have to do with running, injuries and skydiving? Everything.

Hearing words, over and over again like "heart attack," "heart disease," "bypass" and thinking of my two young children changed my perspective for what I hope will be forever.  For sure the mental shock of that, followed up by my third bout with pneumonia, kept me in the fetal position for a few weeks, but when I emerged, I vowed to "live like I was dying," like the Tim McGraw song.

I would not be a victim, a victim of my own making nor a victim of the genetic predisposition to heart disease that came crashing down on me that day like a tsumani.  I would not give in.  Like nearly everything else in my life, I would fight my way to where I needed to be.  I am a black-and-white person, and there are two outcomes:  victim or victor.  I choose the latter.  

Weight loss?  Down 45 pounds as of this morning.  Cholesterol?  Down 140 points.  Blood pressure? Both top and bottom numbers plummeted.  Some of that is due to the zillion pills that I have to take every single day, but even my own cariologist told me that the better numbers that are extracted from my blood stream are the result of hard work and determination.  "It's not just the meds," she told me.  Damn straight.

So why did I take up running races as a 46 (soon-to-be 47) year-old man?  Sure, it was the path to health, but finishing races gave me a sense of accomplishment and pride at having rolled back the clock on Father Time a bit.  Why did I fight so hard to come back from the injury?  Because again, I choose not to be a victim of any circumstance, but to marshal all of my will to overcome anything that is possible.  If I can roll back heart disease, than I can deal with a busted ankle.

And skydiving?  It's actually part part of the Tim McGraw song that I mentioned (about a guy in his 40's who gets some bad medical news and decides he's going to go skydiving), but the bigger point is that, once again, I am giving the middle finger to death.  Sure, I'll be scared when the door opens up on the airplane and I am given the ironic "thumbs-up," but the victor whom I want to be will take the risk.  The victim would think about it and make excuses about how he has no time.

I suppose for me, the bottom line is that I was blessed - yes, blessed - with a life-threatening illness that I can impact - not 100%, but I can do something about heart disease with exercise, diet and more importantly, lifestyle change.  There are other people stricken with much worse diseases, who despite the same iron will and courage, fall victim to the cruel fates of health.  One of my biggest cheerleaders has been my friend Jennifer Windrum's mom, Leslie Lehrman, who has been battling lung cancer (and no, she never smoked) for years.  She has fought, and fought and fought. Mrs. Lehrman's struggle is being determined by some harsh chemicals, radiation and other tough treatments and how her cancer decides to react to that.  It's that simple.  No amount of running, diet or skydiving will change that.  

I have become close to Jennifer, and by extension to her mom, because they are lovely people. But I also feel a tinge of guilt because I was handed a health crisis with a solution.  Not everyone is that lucky and not every case is so clean.

So I choose to push myself to the limits of my physical endurance because I can.  And I must.  I choose to skydive because I can, and in so doing, that's how I can prove that I am alive, my attempting what others call "death-defying."  And yeah, it is.  I AM defying death.  And at some point around 1:00 today, I will turn to the camera filming my descent and give it the middle finger. Not to the cameraman (I'll explain this in advance to him), but to the Grim Reaper.  I choose to live life, the way that we were intended to live it.  I choose to embrace my own mortality and seize the opportunities that come with it.

That's why I am doing what I am doing.

Mark

 

 

 

This means a lot to me

This means a lot to me.  The boy is talking about a family heirloom;  a ring that was given to my grandmother upon hers and my grandfather's 50th wedding anniversary.  We now own it.  Very cool.

The Boy showing off a family heirloom

The Boy showing off a family heirloom.

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