Post Number 51 - Feeling the Lows

I don’t even know how to start this entry.  Heck, it took every ounce of strength to even get myself to my computer and start writing.  I can’t remember a time in my life ever feeling so low, so checked out, so over life itself.  This week has been the worst by far. 

Back at College again and in to some quite heavy study, I thought I would start to feel that passion and sense of purpose again. Things were going so well and I felt like I was getting my groove back.  Mum settled in well and I had been planning meals and cooking great healthy food, ensuring servings for Mum were also in the planning, as she enjoys her main meal in the middle of the day, while we enjoy ours in the evening. 

In fact, things had been going so well, we all decided to spend the day at the beach last Sunday.  We carried armfuls of stuff to ensure we had adequate shade, seating, food & drink, clothing, towels and toilet facilities.  It was a hard slog for us all and even my 89yo mother had to carry her bags.  But we made it, setup camp and enjoyed the fresh air, cool clean waters and a healthy chicken and salad lunch.

Sebastian has been enjoying being back at school and thriving in his new class.  He has gone up two reading levels in less than four weeks, gone up a level at swimming and has consistently received high scores on his weekly spelling tests.  He is always happy and always ready to give me tons of hugs and kisses, his only demons coming up when he goes to bed at night.  His bedroom has constant reminders of his father.  His teddy bear made completely of Mark’s clothing, the car posters, the angels and the photos are all reminders of what he has lost.  Seeing him cry and pine for his Dad breaks my heart and is so painfully unbearable.  But he manages to find a way through it, sends his Dad a rainbow and is thankful for the butterflies and feathers that he receives each day.

I don’t quite understand why my world has come crashing down around me this week when everything has been going so well.  Maybe it is the lack of problems or distractions that has allowed me to finally really feel the magnitude of the loss.  Maybe it’s the stress of some really heavy content in one of my lectures, a 50% assignment due next week, a mid-year exam in three weeks’ time and a class presentation to prepare and deliver very soon.  I really don’t know why my body will not drop weight when I am eating such a healthy diet.  I also don’t understand why I feel so tired when I sleep solid for seven hours or why I keep waking up at 5am.  I don’t understand why my brain doesn’t function properly, why I seem to stumble so much on the keyboard and say “good-night” to Sebastian when I leave him at school in the morning!  For weeks I keep telling myself that it will get better and I just have to stick with it, but it seems to be getting worse.  I feel so helpless and paralysed, so incapable of making any big decisions and moving forward.  I feel stuck in quick-sand, but rather than calling for help, I just want the ground to swallow me up.

I have no tolerance for incompetence.  When links don’t work on my study notes, or when Centrelink can’t organise the simplest of things like a change of address, when within one organisation, one person tells me one thing and someone else says “oh no, that’s not the case at all”, I just want to scream!  Spelling and grammar mistakes are everywhere and it seems no one cares about anything.  It’s a “that’s good enough” society we live in and it drives me to screaming point.  Just today I watched an interview with two American M.D.’s that I admire greatly.  Dr David Perlmutter (author of Grain Brain & Brain Maker) and Dr Christine Northrup (countless books about women’s health).  They spoke of the things that I am passionate about when it comes to good health.  The gut microbiome, eating high fat foods over low fat, eating a lower carb diet and the scientific evidence that backs up all these things.  Christine mentioned that over 40% of people who have heart attacks do NOT have high cholesterol and yet we are constantly told by the media, by doctors and by literature that is put out by government health departments, that we should eat low fat, take statin drugs and lower our cholesterol and stop eating so many calories.  I sobbed and sobbed as I listened to them talk as I knew and understood their words to be true in Australia as it is in the U.S.  I look around me and everyone seems to be eating unhealthy, processed, packaged high carbohydrate, high sugar foods and I think to myself, I don’t know if I can really compete with all this.  It’s just too overwhelming, just too big a problem.  It seems the more I learn and the more my eyes are opened, the more I just want to close them and crawl back under the covers. Learning about vitamin supplements and how one vitamin stops the absorption of another, but they are sold together in a multi or combination supplement, seems absolutely ludicrous to me.  Surely these companies know this and yet they are allowed to sell them, even when they know they will have little to no effect.  How on earth is the average consumer supposed to know that Zinc is an antagonist to Vit C, when they are sold together in a tablet form or powdered form, labelled as “high dose” and charge you extra for this higher dose?  Who knew that slow cooking meat over several hours, depletes most if not all of the Vit B12 that the meat originally had before it hit the slow cooker?

It’s true, I feel in a state of hopelessness, a state of despair.  Maybe if I didn’t care so much, life would be easier. But I guess I just have to keep putting one foot in front of the other, in the hope that something will present itself to make it all worthwhile and meaningful.  Grief is something that doesn’t ever go away, it’s just something you learn to live with.  I still have a lot of learning to do in this area….a lot of learning.  There is no exam for this, no facts or figures, no set way that it will happen, it just manifests however it wants to for each individual that is going through it.  I’m not ashamed to say “I hate it”.  For a great part of my life I had been unhappy, felt unwanted, unloved and for eight amazing years I felt what it was like to be truly happy to the core, and now I have to learn how to live without this deep feeling of unhappiness yet again. 

Post Number 50 - The Holidays Are Over

Sebastian and I continued to enjoy every last minute of the school holidays.  Much work was completed in our “guest rooms” to prepare the space for Mum, who would be moving-in early February.  A new bathroom vanity was fitted, Mark’s old TV cabinet was modified to suit modern day TV’s, bookshelves installed, the air-conditioning was fixed and a new Ikea cocktail cabinet and lighting was installed to make for a mini kitchenette, complete with bar fridge.



Many trips to Ikea where made, which brought with it a load of stresses and extra costs, but the end result was finally worth it, once I stood back and looked at what I had designed and created.  The living space was beautiful, cleaned and ready.  Mum started to bring small boxes of things and she began settling-in, while also giving me some opportunities to go out in the evenings.  Everything was feeling right and I was looking forward to her being moved in completely.

Sebastian and I continued to keep ourselves busy in the last week of the school holidays.  We caught up with friends at the new Glenelg Playground, Bounced at Bounce, went to the movies, and played Skylanders after finding a heap of second hand items from a gaming shop.  I also enjoyed driving my new car, which I had purchased just after Christmas.  I was so excited to finally have a smaller car that was automatic, easy and light to drive and be able to listen to my favourite music playlists through my mobile phone.  I find that I drive much calmer and the travel is so much smoother and quieter and I no longer feel stressed when behind the wheel.

With only days left before school was due to start, we had an opportunity to visit friends in the Barossa.  The idea being we would camp in their back yard, have fun in their in-ground swimming pool and ride our bikes on the newly constructed bike paths.  Excited and looking forward to seeing our friends, camping and having the opportunity to ride our bikes, we eagerly packed our bags and gathered our camping gear.  But soon our excitement was crushed by severely bad weather.  It rained and rained and rained and the forecast described gale-forced winds!  So ironic when we haven’t seen rain for months!  Their backyard was flooded out and all hopes of camping diminished.  Disappointed, but still determined to go, we threw ourselves into Skylanders and hoped tomorrow would be a better day.

As the sun came up the next day, we decided to pack up and go.  At the very worst, we would still visit our friends and maybe get in a bike ride.  To our delight, the weather was lovely and we soon arrived and headed to Maggie Beer’s for lunch, followed by a dip in the pool.  We ended up sleeping in their motorhome which was a luxury compared to camping.  We had our own living quarters including a toilet, fridge and dining area.  The following morning we set out for our bike ride and I was so proud of Sebastian, who is still quite wobbly on his bike.  In total we rode nearly 10kms and he never complained once.  He was also quite proud of his achievements and the weekend was deemed a huge success. 

That evening, I organised everything for school the next day.  Lunches prepared and breakfast made and ready to eat (Jamie Oliver’s black rice pudding with mango and yoghurt), it was just as well, as we both slept in longer than we should have.  We enjoyed our delicious healthy breakfast, packed and headed for school.  Seb was so excited to see his friends and to start the school year not being the youngest.  We learnt where everything had to go, met the new teacher and after many hugs, I finally left him.  He never looked back and I had to walk quickly back to the car to hide the tears that were streaming uncontrollably down my cheeks.  Last year I was so excited for him and I remember Mark and I went shopping for a new mattress on his very first day at school.  I was so happy to spend the day with Mark, that I never felt sad about taking Sebastian to school.  But this year was so very different.  It was like losing my best friend all over again. 

I kept myself busy with housework, washing and grocery shopping, but eventually I just crashed.  I fell into the lounge and sobbed and sobbed.  Not really sure who I was grieving for, but I just felt so sad, so alone and so empty.  It was time to grow up again and start life.  Back to school, back to my studies, back to routine and back to being a responsible grown-up.  I had so enjoyed living in Seb’s world.  It had been so much fun, constantly talking about Skylanders or Star Wars and seeing the world through his eyes.  Sure we had some sad moments, but as a whole, our time together had been so special and I was so glad that I didn’t interrupt it with summer school studies.  But now that was over.

I started cleaning up my office which had become a dumping ground for “stuff” as I felt I couldn’t begin studying in such a mess.  I desperately needed filing space for all my college paperwork and the countless health articles I had gathered over the past two years, when it dawned on me that the entire second drawer of my filing cabinet had been dedicated to Mark’s paperwork, so began to go through it in order to archive, shred, sort and throw away.  Again I found a treasure, tucked away at the back of the cabinet.  A yellow envelope labelled Mt Gambier High School, inside, four SACE writing-based literacy assessments.  His subjects were English, Economics, Maths and Physics.  He had written about Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, The Parabola, Planned and Market Economics, but the one that jumped out at me the most, was the English assignment titled, “Mark Thompson’s Life Journal”!  Typed pages describing his lifestyle on the farm, his adventures in the Pine Forest (all alone at only two years of age), playing in the car dump, his first pee-wee motorbike at age five, moving from the farm to the township of Mt Gambier, going to the Drag Races with his older brother, the nerves and stresses of starting High School and his beloved new Amiga 500 computer.  He wrote in detail how his Mum didn’t believe he needed a new computer and how he had saved for months to accumulate $350 towards the $800 computer system and how eventually his Mum gave in and paid the rest of the money towards his dream computer.  In his last paragraph he wrote; “I enjoy spending as much time in front of my computer as possible, and I particularly like writing my own games when I have time.  In the future, I would really like to become a computer programmer, because programming is the one thing I really enjoy doing.”

While I am so happy that Mark fulfilled his dream of becoming a computer programmer, and I know he loved his work, one can’t help but wonder whether years of sitting in front of this marvellous invention caused him any harm.  I know there are theories out there about radiation from computer screens and television screens, however, I know of other brain tumour patients who worked in the building industry or on the land, so it is not responsible to say this was the cause.  I have my own set of theories as to how Mark might of become unwell and I believe there is no “one” thing that causes cancer or other serious illnesses.  I believe there are a list of different circumstances that together, can manifest into anything including brain cancer.  I believe our lifestyles, eating habits, work habits, thought processes and pollutants in our food, water and air, all play a part in our general health and well-being.  I wish I had all the answers to finding perfect health.  I myself am astounded by how sluggish my body is, when I eat a diet low in carbohydrates and high in nutrient dense food.  I sleep well now, and yet don’t feel refreshed in the morning.  My body aches and I have put on more weight that I care to admit, yet my eating habits haven’t changed. 

I’m told that grief can manifest in many ways, including weight gain, yet I don’t emotionally eat.  I only hope in time, my body will get back in to balance and with Mum living with us, I will have the opportunity to go out and run again in the mornings and practice yoga or some other such activity in the evenings.  The journey of grief is a long one however and will most likely continue for many years, if not forever.  The state of mind is so powerful over the body and it can change how the body behaves very dramatically.  So for now, I will put the bathroom scales away and keep moving in the direction of best health and keep taking life one step at a time.