This Is Forty

Working with kids who have only been alive for roughly a third of my years has its advantages, perhaps the most important being that when most of your shirts are dirty and you decide to wear the school-issued uniform polo because it’s clean, they sometimes confuse you for a student.  The week of my fortieth birthday, it happened twice.  Happy birthday to me.

However, to keep me grounded firmly in my aging reality, I had to renew my driver’s license the same week, which meant a new picture.  Anyone who knows me understands that my poor, light-sensitive, blue eyes ruined my shot at a modeling career because a flash immediately makes me look like a crazy stalker trying to suck your soul out with my startling wide-open eyes.  (For photographic evidence, you can check out the “Crazy Eyes McGee” photo album on Facebook, or the collages from my dear friend Nicole.)  In addition to the crazy eyes, I also have fair skin, for which I should wear sunscreen daily.  I did not wear said sunscreen last weekend at my kickball doubleheader, and ended up with a sunburn resembling raccoon markings on my face, topped off with a nose bright enough to rival Rudolph’s.  Those same dear students looked at me in horror, asking repeatedly either why I was mad all day or if was I sunburned.  Suffice it to say, between the eyes and the red, I will only be going places that do not require a photo ID for the next decade.

Such is the dichotomy of forty, at least what I can gather from this new phenomenon.  And the good part is that I’m settling into a place in life where I can take both in stride.  Maybe this is due to the major life construction that happened in the last decade, where I finally found my city, my career, my person, and just my general footing in a way that has given me a more solid foundation.  Or maybe I’ve learned to care less about things that don’t matter or that I don’t have control over in the first place.

Take, for instance, my body.  I know that some of you will want to punch me in the throat for this, but hear me out.  I have always been thin.  Like never went through an awkward adolescent larger stage, didn’t have to try to have abs, still have 7th grade girl arms to this day, thin.  My friend Stu always used to tell me that my metabolism would get the better of me around 26.  Then he changed it to 28.  Then he said 30.  Then he said he hated me.

Well, he was about a decade off.  My body has definitely begun to shift and change.  The business of teaching a new grade almost every year for the past few years, which means creating and learning new lesson plans for every single lesson, meant less time for yoga or running.  This, in turn, meant my pants started feeling funny around the waistband, and for the first time I thought about getting rid of clothing because it didn’t fit my stomach.  My abs started merging from six into one.  My hairline started creeping back ever so slowly.  Instead of six chest hairs (each of which had their own individual name), I had twenty-six (or too many to name).  I had to start trimming my nose hairs, but I could finally grow a somewhat respectable beard without being ridiculed.  I got weird rosacea on my face.  The skin on my thighs changed texture to resemble tanned leather.  I stopped being able to sleep through an entire night most of the time.  Before I knew it, I was like a stranger in my own body.

At first, this was disconcerting.  I got frustrated with my body for not responding the way it used to.  It’s not fair to be one way for almost four decades and then up and change, right?  This is where I would’ve broken up and said it’s not me, it’s you.  Or I would have fired it for not meeting expectations.  But you can’t dump or fire your body, you’re stuck with it.  So now what?

In a wild, and probably too-rare, attempt at personal growth, I decided to make friends with my “new” body.  First, we needed to get acquainted, like dating.  I started learning how getting off my phone by 9 p.m. meant a better night’s sleep.  I found a good moisturizing lotion to use daily that helped my skin.  I started using aftershave.  I noticed that my body was regularly communicating with me about what it needed if I would just listen.  And I found a balance between letting go of demanding my body be its 20-year-old self and still working on the parts that I had control over.

My body is just one example of learning to be more at ease in the world around me as I round the corner into my forties.  I’m trying to apply these same lessons to other areas like daily moisturizer, with varying degrees of success.  But I think this is going to be a more forgiving decade, so I’m excited for years where I know who I am, I know my place, and I know my purpose.

Now, if I could just find a way to make peace with that driver’s license photo…

Chapter Six: Getting Krunk at the Krankenhaus

In the last blog, I talked about experiencing the most embarrassing that can happen to you when I was in Germany.  Not long afterwards, I experienced the worst thing that can ever happen to your mom when you are studying abroad: I got sick.  Really sick.  Like had to be carried and or wheeled around sick.  Ten days in the hospital in a foreign country sick.

I’m not sure when it started.  I’m guessing it was that really bad pizza I ate in London, or maybe the questionable McDonald’s in Paris.  Regardless, my stomach declared war on the food, and then it declared war on me for the next few weeks as punishment.  Being my mother’s child, I came fully prepared with an arsenal of medicines for any possible ailment, ranging from bee stings to bubonic plague.  I started with a barrage of over-the-counter drugs I was confident would end the skirmish before it really took off.  I underestimated my foe.

Interestingly enough, I might not have been the only one suffering gastrointestinal battles, as around the same time my journal starts mentioning my stomach hurting regularly, it also mentions the “Great Fart of 18:39” from 9/12 on a bus through Germany.  Apparently, it was the “WORST THING I’VE EVER SMELLED” and wiped out 8-10 rows of us – even the one who committed the foul deed was choked up by the noxious fumes.  I won’t mention the specific party by name, but his initials sound like a fast food chain that serves roast beef…

The next day’s journal entry mentions the war with my stomach ratcheting up a few notches, with diarrhea six or seven times that day.  It got to the point that my drugs clearly weren’t doing the trick, so I phoned in reinforcements in the form of a family doctor back home.  He gave me some advice, and I marched on confident of a swift victory.  Again, wrong.

Three days later, my journal said it was the “WORST DAY OF MY LIFE” (Can you say drama queen? Why was I always yelling in my journal?).  Not only was I having severe diarrhea regularly, but now I was having severe cramping.  I called Dr. Mitchell back home, and he said I needed to go see a doctor in Vienna.  Our sponsor had the contact information of an American doctor, and so he took me to see him.

Before I talk about my diagnosis, I want to mention some questions I’ve thought about in retrospect that I should’ve asked then, such as: 1) Why are you practicing abroad and not in America?  2) Are you still allowed to practice in America?  3) Did you do anything illegal/unethical that caused you to take a trip abroad and just never come back?  4) Are you actually a doctor of medicine, or do you just have a doctorate in philosophy and a Mayo Clinic book?  You see the foreshadowing here.  He was clearly a double agent working for the opposition.

My diagnosis was that I had a bacterial infection, a fever, and I was dehydrated.  He gave me a shot in the butt, some antibiotics, and sent me on my way.  I was so exhausted, I didn’t think I’d make it home.  That night, I was so feverish that I just laid awake shivering under the covers.  I still was getting up “every five minutes” to go to the bathroom, and the last two times I had blood in my stool.  I looked at the mirror in my reflection and got scared because the battle had taken its toll.  I looked pale and gaunt, but my cheeks were flushed with fever.  I missed my mom because she would’ve been there with a cold rag to help assuage my condition.  I finally fell asleep.

As it turns out, Dr. Quack had given me drugs that killed all the good bacteria in my intestines and left the bad bacteria to take over and crush my will to live.  A few nights later, I was physically unable to move to go to the bathroom any more, exhausted from not sleeping much, dehydrated, and still feverish.  And so, on 9/20, I waved the white flag and asked to go to the krankenhaus (hospital) because I was very krank (sick).  I remember they had to physically carry me down to the cab because I was too weak to walk, and was worried that they would speak enough English for us to communicate at the hospital.  The rest was a blur for the next few days.

My only memories of my first 48 hours in the krankenhaus were a mix of the snoring of my two roommates (whom I named Dr. Buzzsaw and Herr Hairball), having to be wheeled to the bathroom on the regular, and awaking once in my own mess.

Sometimes, I would wake up disoriented because it all seemed like a dream between the unfamiliar place and everyone speaking German.  I actually started dreaming in German because I was so submerged in it.   The doctors spoke English when they came to check on me, and most of the nurses would try with their broken English, but the only regular mother tongue I experienced was when I got well enough to go down the hall to the room with the television.  If I turned the sound up over the dubbing, I could get Cartoon Network loud enough to hear the English dialogue.  I’ve never been so happy to hear Foghorn Leghorn’s southern drawl or Shaggy’s cowardly retorts to Scooby.

I also vividly remember that it was a teaching hospital like on Grey’s Anatomy.  Why do I remember this random detail?  Well, I’m a touch needle phobic from a traumatic childhood injury, and so I remember a very nervous intern approaching me with a needle about day four.  He needed to put in my IV for the day, and he was shaking as he reached for my arm.  I have very skinny arms and very giant veins, so a blind nurse could get an IV in my arm, but he missed four times.  I almost threw up, and finally told him that he was going to have to get someone else before he made me sick.  I felt bad, but he needed to go find another pin cushion without childhood trauma to learn on.

In addition to my first experience with a teaching hospital, it was my first interaction with socialized medicine, which was fascinating to me.  While one of my roommates was a burn victim – watching, and smelling, dressing changes was not so wonderful – the other was a younger man who would leave every morning, and then return in the evening, get medicine, and then go to sleep in the bed at night.  I wished I could’ve spoken enough German to ask him what was going on, where he went every day, and why he needed to stay in the hospital overnight when he seemed fine to come and go as he pleased.  I realized that they are much more cautious with sending you on your way under this system when, after I was feeling better a few days in, I was informed that I would be staying ten days total before I would be released.  Um, say what?   By the end of the experience, I was leaving in the morning, going all the way back across town, attending class, grocery shopping, eating pizza at my favorite spot, and then coming back to sleep there at night like my roommate.  In America, I probably would have been there two nights and then sent home.

The thing I remember the most about my hospital stay, however, was the care and concern shown to me by so many people.  Lindy Adams, one of our sponsors, was a saint and came to see me every day.  Her daughter, Liz, made a card for me and had everyone sign it.  Most of my travel mates came to visit me, some very regularly.  They brought me little gifts, like a cactus or a bucket of Tichy Eis (ice cream) to share, or they dressed up to make me laugh.  My mom and dad called every day, and it was all everyone could do to keep my mom from hopping on a plane to be with me.  My grandparents called regularly, and many friends from school called to check on me back when international calls were not so cheap and there was no Skype.  My mom sent a giant care package that I was sure to note in my journal cost “$117!!!” to ship.  I was in no short supply of love, and that assuredly helped me heal more quickly.

In the end, I reflected in my journal that this experience had taught me patience.  In retrospect, I think I learned that I need to take care of and listen to my body instead of pushing it so hard.  And, most importantly, the Austrians and their socialized medicine seemed to know something that us Americans don’t always understand: healing takes time, even when you look fine on the outside, so take your time at the krankenhaus.