Wake Up Calls

I’ve been so resistant to writing lately - things are so jumbled up in my mind, it’s hard to focus on one thing long enough to put anything down. Actually, whether for better or for worse, I’ve been resistant to a lot of things lately. And I have no idea about what to do about it - if indeed anything can or should be “done” at all.

When I first got back to Austin, I thought I would be here until May or June and would then hit the road again. I wanted to be here for the birth of my first great-grand-twins. I wanted to be here to help my daughter and granddaughter. I wanted to spend more time with my mom. I wanted some good Mexican food. I wanted to rest a while and get some kinks worked out of both my body and my motorhome.

Having experienced both the intense fears and joys of the twins’ birth in January, once they were more or less settled into their lives, I was ready to start concentrating more on my health and take care of some things that had started bothering me, both physical and mental.

For the last couple of years, my sleep patterns have gone from one extreme to the other. While I used to be able to sleep for 12 hours at a time when I had the chance, now getting more than 2 hours at a time became the challenge. I tried various “PM” medicines and they worked okay at first, but finally quit working at all. I can generally get to sleep pretty quickly, but within a couple of hours, I’m awake and can’t get back to sleep for at least an hour, when the same pattern begins again. Needless to say, I don’t get up in the morning feeling rested or refreshed, no matter how many delta sleep or meditation CDs I listen to during the night.

Of course, I felt like my lack of energy, as well as feelings of depression and anger, were related, and wishing, praying and hoping it away was not working. After a couple of friends mentioned that my symptoms sounded hormonal, I got to thinking. It occurred to me that when I very first started having symptoms of depression was when I started going through menopause around 1999-2000. While I used hormone replacement therapy early on for hot flashes, I got off them after a couple of years thinking that was the best thing to do. But now I wondered if hormones weren’t the magic answer for me.

Having read of some of the dangers of synthetic hormones, I wanted to try the more natural, bio-identical hormones. A friend recommended a nurse practitioner who specialized in such issues, so I made an appointment, grumbling all the while about how expensive it is not to have health insurance. Never mind that was a conscious decision I made when I started fulltime RVing. Hell, it’s expensive both to have and not have health insurance. And it’s easier to go without insurance when you’ve always been incredibly healthy than it is to forego a dream that might slip away if you wait for “perfect timing.”

She started me on a hormone formula that had no effect after a month. When I went back for the blood rest results, she said that my levels of progesterone, testosterone, and DHEA levels were okay, but estrogen was virtually non-existent in my body. I couldn’t help but think that God managed to get these delicate levels perfectly balanced until we’re past that natural stage of life. Then when man starts fooling around trying to replicate them, it’s hit or miss until the “magic” formula is found, if ever.

Maybe I shouldn’t even be fooling with this. But she gave me another compound to try and would call in a few days to see how that was going. She said I should have a pap smear, but I wanted to hold off on that. I used to have one faithfully every year with never a hint of a problem. Nothing nasty related like cervical cancer ran in my direct family. But she kindly insisted that I have the pap smear and, because part of the resistance was because of cost, she included it in the price of that visit.

When she called a few days later, I complained that the new formulation of hormones was not helping me sleep or feel better. I don’t even remember what she said about that, because her next words were about my pap smear showing some cellular abnormality. Okay, so what exactly does that mean? They won’t know anything definite until they do a procedure called a “colposcopy” where she looks more closely at my cervix and takes a tissue sample to test for malignancy.

Now that was a wake-up call, for sure! At this point, I’ve done some research, and I’m trying not to freak out until I know for sure what I’m dealing with. The colposcopy will be done on June 23rd. And for now I’m resistant to thinking about the future, whether good or bad.

I don’t know when I’ll be traveling again at this point. I’m certainly not willing to say or even think that I may never take off again. All I know for sure is that I’m so grateful that I started when I did. I’ve had seven tremendous years of being blessed to see things I never thought I’d ever get to see in my life. I hear from so many people lately who say they’ve planned for years to fulfill their dream of fulltime RVing, but now their house won’t sell, or gas has gone up too much, or their own health problems keep them from it now.

If I were to die tomorrow, I would have no regrets about following my travel dreams. When I took off in 2001, my first gas fill-up was $1.37/gallon. People were telling me I was crazy to start traveling with gas prices so high. When I took off for Alaska in 2003, gas was $1.74/gallon. I was advised to wait until gas prices went down, because surely they would. I’d love to see a gas station sign with $2.49 now, the highest price I paid the entire time I was exploring the Canadian Rockies and the wonders of Alaska.

So I still affirm that dreams can come true, despite the wisest counsel or statistics of any well-meaning nay-sayer. My advice: don’t wait - you never know when your wake-up call will come.