Originally written: July 2015
Today my back started vibrating. Yes, you heard me correctly—vibrating. To the point where I kept checking my purse to see if it was my phone or my vertebrae. I felt a little bit like a dog chasing her tail—looking over my shoulder and peaking in my Vera Bradley backpack (phone or back? Phone or back?). Walking around Hallmark, playing this game with myself, I realized how ridiculous this really was. What are things coming to?
In addition to the vibrating phone in my back, I can also send sensations up or down my spine (can’t decide which one it is yet—it happens so quickly) whenever I bend my neck downward. I’m beginning to think I’m the newest act in the traveling circus.
I haven’t talked much about my symptoms or what it feels like to live in my body. I remember waking up in March and wondering exactly what was happening to me. Looking back now, I wonder how I didn’t freak out—that I must be a freak not to have been more concerned. The doctor at the Cleveland Clinic did mention that athletes are often very in tune with their bodies, but they are also very used to dismissing issues. I was trained for thirty years to overlook pain, to push through anything unusual, and the chronic pain in my legs is something I’ve dealt with for so long it is simply a part of everyday life. Some numbness and tingling— “It’s nothing,” I told everyone. “I’m fine.”
When June hit, I felt like a pro with the legs but the torso and hands were something new entirely. My torso has been the least annoying, although it was the most numb. I checked it every morning when I got out of the shower and put on some lotion. The odd sensation was like having a child, coming out of the epidural—I could feel my hands on my body and yet I couldn’t.
The hands, however, are another story entirely. They have by far been my longest lasting symptom—we’re going on two months as I type these words—and also the most discouraging. No doctor has been able to assure me they will ever return to “normal.” They tingle all the time—I can rarely think of a reprieve. At times they ache and sometimes they downright hurt. The sensations are most distinctly focused in my fingers, beginning with the tips and permeating upward, at times all the way to my elbows. In terms of prayers, I ask again and again for healing in my hands. I want them back so badly. I want to catch a basketball with certainty, teach my sons and daughter how to shoot without fear of losing the ball. I want to play my girls in a game of one-on-one (never mind that I can’t win anymore—I just start with the ball, make sure I get the first point and then say next bucket wins. It works every time—or at least it did when my hands were at full strength). I want to rub lotion on my children’s soft little bodies and feel their skin without interruption. I don’t want to drop Peyton’s Mini-Wheats or the box of blueberries as I’m getting them out of the refrigerator.
I just want to feel normal for awhile.
There are symptoms that could be much, much worse—symptoms I may someday have to face. So for now, I try to marvel at the body’s oddities. I can marvel at them, I suppose, because most of them have gone away. I confess so surely that I do not ever marvel at my hands. Perhaps someday…one could only hope.