Welcome to the very first edition of All Rose Knows!
I’m so glad you’re here! I would never presume to tell anyone what to do (I rarely, if ever, do what I’m told), but I will offer up a few casual tips which may increase your enjoyment before we dive into this new endeavor:
Make sure you’ve got a little bit of time to read— I never write twenty words when two hundred will do!
Grab a favorite beverage and find a comfy spot.
If you know me in real life, imagine I’m sitting across from you, telling you this story in person.
Unless you’re a family member. It gets a little awkward. You’ll see. In case of discomfort, please pretend someone you don’t know is telling you this story.
If you don’t know me in real life, HI!!! Feel free to imagine you’ve got a super-dramatic, enthusiastic but awkward, redheaded American friend living in Hong Kong who loves you like crazy sitting across from you, telling you this story. I hope we get to meet someday. I’ll be on my best behavior. Maybe.
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Okay, ready? Here we go…
We recently moved from one flat in Hong Kong to another.
The previous flat was home for four years, a record for our nomadic family. It’s only a fifteen minute walk between the old and new, but the complications and troubles surrounding the move felt greater than any of our international moves. Including the one where we moved from Los Angeles to Tokyo, on four weeks notice, with our ten-week-old first born child, back in the days before social media or text messaging…
As much as it pains me to admit, some of the troubles can be attributed to age. That move from Los Angeles to Tokyo twenty years ago? Sure, I’d just had a baby but I was twenty years younger and there was lots of help. People stumbled over each other to pack a few boxes for me if it meant they got to hold a newborn. This most recent move was done with a body that went on to have a dozen more international moves, another child, a back injury causing chronic pain, and two more decades of just regular rise and grind living, in the middle of a global pandemic — where even getting paid help was a challenge.
Beyond the pandemic, our transition between homes was complicated with a new job for my husband. The paycheck and employment security is amazing, but it ended our twelve months of enforced togetherness, where he was working from home, and then thanks to shocking to wide-scale redundancy notices, not working at all. Other couples drove each other crazy but we exponentially increased our teamwork skills, taking on so many little projects and doing everything together, from laundry to dog walking to prepping and cooking dinner.
For some foolish reason I believed my level of productivity with my husband’s constant presence would remain unchanged when he was absent for twelve hours each weekday and six hours every other Saturday. I was stupidly confident that not only could I continue the same pace alone, but I could toss in a move as well. My body rejected what my mind was asking of it, and after just five days of sleeping in the new home, I lifted something with my legs and not my back like a pro… but then twisted at the waist to set it down, causing fireworks of pain to explode from the muscles around my injured lower spine.
My husband had remarkably little sympathy for me when he got home from work that night. He knew that I knew better, but what could I say? Sometimes you’re surrounded by boxes and alone and still have to do laundry and make dinner and walk the dog. So I made a grievous error for which I paid dearly. I spent a few days slowing down to what I considered an acceptable speed to unpack, which in hindsight was still not slow enough.
One day I had a repairman coming in the morning, a locksmith coming in the evening, and not a thing to eat in the house. While the mid-day break wasn’t enough time to take a shower and head out for a therapeutic back massage, there was enough time to at least show some TLC to my feet, pick up lunch, and grab groceries for dinner before the locksmith arrived. I had the perfect window for a pedicure, so off I went.
There’s no easy way to minimize the gory grossness of what happened, so I’ll be quick: the technician used a razor blade in a special handle to slough off the dead skin on my feet, something common to every single pedicure I’ve had in Asia in the past decade. The difference with this one? Instead of just removing tiny layers of dead skin, she somehow managed to… well, the best description would be she carrot peeled off a giant hunk of my heel.
It was a very sharp pain and I gasped loudly. She realized what she’d done and sprayed rubbing alcohol on it, which added dull pain on top of the sharp pain. She quickly wrapped my foot in a white towel, which was immediately soaked in my bright red blood. She sprayed more alcohol on it and then wrapped it in a fresh towel.
She apologized profusely, said not to worry it wasn’t that bad, and put lots of pressure on it, followed by a bandage. Then she quickly painted my toenails and put my feet under a fan for the polish to dry. The missing part of my heel was right at a spot where I couldn’t see it without a mirror, so I had no way to gauge how bad it was. The sharp part of the pain began to wane and before she sent me on my way (pedicure free of charge for the inconvenience!), she put a fresh bandage on it. Her casualness calmed me, so despite the initial bloodiness, I assumed it was just a surface cut, not a big deal.
It hurt to put weight on it, so I limped my way into a neighboring store to start the grocery shopping and lunch takeaway before heading home to meet the locksmith. There was a constant dull buzz of pain but I’ve struggled with chronic pain my whole adult life (remember the back injury?) so I focused on what I needed and ignored the pain. Until a lady came up behind me and began to say just one word, over and over: Ma’am. Ma’am. MA’AM.
I’m not used to being called ma’am so it didn’t register it was me she was addressing. But when I finally gave her my attention, she pointed to the floor behind me, a streak of bloody footsteps marking where I’d been. I shouted in shock. And then quickly abandoned the shopping to limp home, leaving a trail of bloody footprints through the store, mall, sidewalk, and bus in my wake. By the time I arrived home, my blood-soaked sandal was ready to be tossed in the garbage. I grabbed a roll of paper towels and water and tried to clean up my injury best I could.
No matter how much pressure or elevation, the bleeding would not stop. When I removed the compress for just a minute to try and aim my mobile phone’s camera at it so I could actually see the damage, the bleeding was so fierce it started dripping on the floor of our new home. I then bent my body in half, propping my whole leg up on the dining room table, surrounded by bloody paper towels and a huge box of first aid supplies. This was the scene when the doorbell rang, announcing the locksmith’s arrival.
I didn’t dare stand up to let him in, so I just called out that it was unlocked and in he came, our front door opening right into the dining area. I choose to believe his extreme calm when catching sight of the bloody mess before him was a result of seeing similarly weird stuff in people’s homes during his long career as a locksmith, and not because he was afraid for his life owing to what clearly looked like a crime scene. And he was definitely calm. Unlike my Facebook feed after I’d posted about the event, and my husband, who was texting his alarm.
Wavering on whether it was really an emergency, because surely it would stop bleeding soon, I’d questioned in my post whether I should take myself to the A&E (local emergency room) at the nearest hospital. Two things stopped me from going.
First, I was very hungry. Miserably so. We’d only been in the new place a week, and I’d aborted the grocery and lunch mission when I noticed the trail of blood. The idea of not having any food all day and then going and waiting for hours at the hospital made me dizzy. Dizzier.
Second, getting there. It felt like super dramatic overkill to call an ambulance for a bad pedicure, but the alternative was taking a short bus ride, a long bus ride, and then a taxi ride, all while trying to keep my foot elevated with pressure on the wound. I was already flooded with guilt over the trail of blood I’d left around my little beach community which someone else was surely already cleaning up, how could I leave the house in my state, knowing I’d surely add more?
Later, as he walked in the door with some take-out for all of us, my husband went from simply being unsympathetic, as he’d been about the self-caused back pain, to actually angry. Not that I’d been injured, but over the fact that I didn’t immediately go to the hospital. After all, if this had happened to one of my children, I would have called an ambulance immediately. I said as much on my Facebook post, and I’d actually done it previously when my youngest child smashed his hand in gym class.
So why didn’t I do that for myself? The answer is long. Awkward. Complicated.
Shortly after I married, but before I had kids, I was in a terrible automobile accident. It was the day before the most important interview of my life, and while laying out my power suit and favorite silk blouse the night before, I noticed mysterious stains on my blouse. With no other clean blouse to wear, I hopped in my little Volkswagen pick-up truck and headed to the mall. At the same time, a teenage boy was grabbing a group of his friends and heading out for a joyride in the family car.
I started a legal left turn into the mall parking lot while a long single lane of vehicles waited for me. The teenage boy, impatient with the stopped traffic, pulled into the space between the curb and the cars, creating a lane of his own. He sped as fast as he could to get ahead of the stopped traffic, hoping to beat the non-moving cars into the intersection. Instead, he collided with the passenger door of my truck, going 40 mph (65 km/h), just as I was pulling into the lot.
The impact was devastating. It pushed my truck sideways into the curb, which bounced it off the ground and into a concrete lamppost just behind the driver’s door. It cracked and bent the transaxle, shaping the truck into an angle not usually associated with functioning vehicles, before gravity brought the truck crashing back to the ground.
Within the cab of my truck was a crate of books I’d been carting around to donate, which had flown about the cab, slamming into my face and head. Behind the seat was an aerosol can of Fix-A-Flat, which had punctured during the impact, filling the air with pungent stickiness as it released the contents.
I didn’t feel the damage to my body immediately. Adrenaline coursed through me and I was able to somehow slide out of the truck from the gap in the driver’s side door which was punched open, covered in glass, little spots of blood dotting my arms and head. I called 911 from my giant 1998 cellular phone in a complete daze, unable to describe anything about what had just happened, or even where I was. I heard sirens and hung up after thanking the 911 operator for finding me (she hadn’t, two police officers on patrol a few blocks away heard the impact and came searching, preemptively calling an ambulance). As soon as my heart stopped pounding and I relaxed, the pain throughout my body became excruciating. I went to the emergency room, met by my in laws, as my husband was in another state, working a promotional tour for a film.
I had massive soft tissue damage in my back and neck and arms, which would take an extraordinarily long, non-linear time to heal. Not only did I miss the big interview, I was off work for four months as I went through intensive physical therapy to get back to a full range of motion once again. The truck was classified a total loss by the insurance company — not a surprise. The surprise was reserved for the news that nothing in my body was broken, considering what it had gone through.
Unfortunately, that accident and the resulting back injury placed me on a frustrating path, impossible to deviate from, where every other medical issue I experienced after that day was explained away by doctors as a result of the crash.
I’m not exaggerating.
Any time I saw a medical professional for anything, one of the first questions asked was, “Have you ever been injured in an auto accident?” And no matter what the problem was, the only answer they could think of was the wreck, the only solution offered was always a prescription for very addictive pain medicine.
Horrible, debilitating cramps during my period? Likely from that car accident, let me write you a prescription for hydrocodone.
Increase of migraines causing me to miss several days of work on a regular basis? Sometimes they increase after car accidents, here’s some drugs, I’ll give you a couple refills.
Massive, sudden, nauseating pain filling the whole trunk of my body from my shoulder blades to my tailbone that takes my breath away and sends me to the emergency room about once a month? Oh yeah, that’s definitely from the accident, here’s something that will take the pain away but side effects may include addiction if you take more than a couple doses.
Pain is subjective and I can’t, and won’t, say who should get the strongest of meds for debilitating pain. But I also know I could make a career of writing solely about the opioid crisis in America and how close I was to becoming one of it’s victims. What saved me was simple. I had first-hand knowledge of my extended family’s history of addiction, and had personally experienced very real withdrawal symptoms after running out of the month’s worth of the highly habit forming narcotic pain meds following that initial car accident.
Later, when it was prescribed to me for other things, I experimented with the line between helpful and harmful. I found I could take four doses and then stop without trouble, but stopping after a fifth would bring a massive headache which could be stopped by a sixth dose. Stopping after seven or more brought on general achiness, nausea, and the sweating and shivering that comes with a fever, without actually having a fever.
Ten years ago I said no more, I would no longer take even one, and flushed all my partially used bottles of pills down the toilet. Side note: I’ve since learned that is not a recommended way of disposing of prescription medicine, but I had kids in the house, and the faster it was gone, the better I could sleep at night.
This path of doctors blaming everything on the accident highlighted for me how the medical profession in general, and every physician I saw in particular, lacked time to do any actual investigation into what might be causing a problem, lacked curiosity to look beyond the most obvious possibility, and lacked the ability to look into my eyes and listen to my voice when I said I didn’t think my reason for coming in that day had anything to do with a car accident. A car accident which was moving further and further into the past each day.
Aside from the general topic of pain and how to treat it, there are countless instances where I sought medical care I did not receive.
After the birth of my second child, a scheduled C-section, I bled heavily for over six months. I passed giant clots which caused me to pass out twice. I became anemic. I was dizzy and fatigued all the time, afraid to go too far from home while caring for a newborn and a very active two year old. I could check every single box on the colorful “when to call your doctor” checklist my OBGYN had given me as I was discharged. And yet at every scheduled check up, plus all the extra appointments I made because I had no peace over how my body was reacting post-surgery, the doctor said not to worry, that sometimes this was normal.
I’d already had one child via C-section and did not experience a single one of the issues I found myself struggling with from the second. Was I not allowed to say what was abnormal for me and be taken seriously? To have someone actually investigate when I kept returning every few weeks with no improvement?
And that pain I previously mentioned, the one which filled the entire trunk of my body from my shoulder blades to my tailbone, which would come on suddenly and fill me with nausea, sending me to the emergency room about once a month for ten years? The pain I was told was simply a residual effect from having been tossed around inside a vehicle as it was slammed from the front of a speeding car to a concrete pole and back to the ground again?
It took an entire week, seven miserable days and seven horrible nights, of pain so bad that I could not control the nausea and vomiting, a full twelve years after the car accident, to push my latest doctor into finally doing some bloodwork, an ultrasound, and then a scan, to learn that my gallbladder was inflamed, diseased, packed with dice-sized gallstones, passing at a rate of about one a month.
Can you guess what the typical pain pattern of passing a gallstone might be? If you guessed sudden, severe, nauseating pain filling your trunk from your shoulder blades to your tailbone, give yourself ten points. Heck, give yourself a hundred points for the ten years I suffered needlessly because evidently medical training says any patient who has ever been in an accident can only ever possibly have pain from that accident.
Having my gallbladder (and a shocking number of large, angular, alien-looking gallstones) removed, changed my life for the better in countless ways. But the fact I had to go over a decade being offered addictive painkillers for a back injury that was actually a diseased and struggling organ is almost criminal.
It wasn’t just the back pain and gallbladder that weren’t taken seriously, causing me to doubt what I was allowed to complain or advocate for when it came to my own body.
I’d been told at ages seventeen and eighteen that due to an issue with my uterus, becoming pregnant naturally was likely impossible. Within this piece I’ve already mentioned I’ve given birth twice, so not only were the doctors wrong, they needlessly worried a teenager, her parents, and the boyfriend I pulled out of line at the cinema on our first date when he told me he was one of five kids, awkwardly telling him that if he wanted a big family too, I was not the girl for him and we should part ways right then before things got serious. (Spoiler alert: the boyfriend didn’t care. He would later became the fiancé and then the husband and then the father of the two kids that awkward teenager would naturally go on to have after four years of marriage.)
I’m not angry that those two doctors were wrong, I’m so grateful for the two children my faulty uterus was somehow able to grow and nurture within, but I’m angry with the treatment my uterus got for years after it had done the job it was biologically intended to do.
It caused crazy amounts of pain, which as I mentioned, was more than once attributed to that car accident back before I had kids. It caused such heavy periods and terrible cramping that I missed a day or two of school and then later work every month for two decades. I saw doctors in Northern California, Southern California, Hong Kong and Macau, amassing an actual notebook of test results, scans, and images of hormone-fed growths which ravaged my insides and adhered to nearby non-reproductive organs.
Every doctor said what I was experiencing was within the range of normal, and that one day I would magically enter blessed menopause and all my troubles would simply float away. In the meantime, I found myself gulping down fistfuls of non-narcotic (but not exactly healthy for you) ibuprofen, just to get out of bed in the morning. I cried every day from pain and cramping, not just on the days of my cycle.
I was miserable but got really good at faking it.
I was nowhere close to menopause and needed to pace myself with the complaining if I was going to make it across the finish line of this normal experience without pushing away every person I shared a home and life with.
We ended up moving to Shanghai, China, and after acquainting myself with the local hospital thanks to a horrible sinus infection, I decided I would give the doctor there the very last chance I was willing to take in asking for assistance. I slouched in with my notebook of test results, scans, and images and quietly pleaded for help. The randomly assigned doctor looked at every page, and then looked me in the eyes. She said she believed it was a miracle I was sitting across from her, that she was there that day, that we were both in Shanghai at the same time. Her specialty was in treating the very condition which every single test result, scan, and invasive exploration indicated I was suffering from. We can take your uterus out this week, she said. How’s Thursday?
Thursday was fine, so out came the uterus (which did actually plunge me into immediate medical menopause, a walk in the park compared to my miserable experiences with menses) along with the fist-sized mass growing through the uterine wall, adhering to adjoining organs. Sure, that mass would have shrunk all on it’s own when menopause finally came and my hormones stopped feeding it, but at what cost? How many days, weeks, months, years of productive living would have been lost due to not being able to function due to the within the range of normal pain I was experiencing?
The pandemic put a lot of routine, non-urgent, annual appointments on hold. I’m a year late for a lot of things, but a recent change to a mole on my chest made me fearful that putting off the annual full body skin check with the dermatologist might be a costly error. My mother passed away at the end of 2019 with, but not of, melanoma skin cancer, so it runs in the family. I myself have had various suspicious moles and growths removed through the years, so I take it seriously. And as always, I just wanted someone else to do the same.
The first dermatologist my family doctor in Hong Kong referred me to remained six feet away from my fully clothed body and masked face. He listened to me tell him my family history and my own history, about the mole on my chest which I was concerned about, the mole on my back that every other dermatologist I’ve seen likes to carefully examine. He could see my red hair and the pale, freckled skin on my exposed arms. And then without coming any closer, he said he didn’t need to see me for another year or maybe two, that I should just have my husband look at my skin to see if anything changes, and out the door he went.
Tell me, what would you do in this situation?
Would you just shove down the feeling inside telling you something feels off, pay attention, this is important? Would you run after the dermatologist and demand that he at least look at your nose beneath the mask, the number one most common place humans get skin cancer? Would you just leave, accepting his brief time in the same room with you as fulfilling the role of an annual check up?
I didn’t. I couldn’t.
I asked around and checked with two skin cancer survivors in Hong Kong and got two strong recommendations. The first one I ended up paying out of pocket for a highly rated dermatologist to try and do the job the first one should have. But… it was an awful experience. I was shaking at the doctor’s complete indifference to my questions plus his shouting when I couldn’t remember how old my mother was when she passed. I stuttered and said, “Let me just use my calculator.” He raised his voice and said, “That is NOT HELPFUL to me at all! Just estimate! Can’t you estimate?”
I couldn’t speak at all. I wish I’d said, “I’m still grieving her loss, I’m extraordinarily nervous to be in this doctor’s office in the midst of a pandemic, stripped down to just my undergarments and a mask while talking to you, I don’t like getting shouted at for asking an honest question, and I have a stupid math-related learning disability that makes numbers difficult to begin with. No, I cannot quickly estimate the age of my mother at the time of her death under these circumstances, and I am paying full price for this time with you, so if you want to know how old my mother was when she died, you can wait 25 seconds for me to pull out my phone and calculate it.” But I didn’t.
In response to my question of how to tell the difference between a changing age spot and a changing suspicious mole, he told me it wasn’t my job to know the difference, and any time I have a concern I should see a doctor. Well gee Doc, that’s what I thought I was doing. I had a concern so I went in to see you. He didn’t take a single note and gave my skin only the quickest of glances.
I left the office in tears. Of frustration and anger and even shame. I do not want to have skin cancer. I grew up in Southern California during the days when people would lounge in a swimsuit at high noon slathered in baby oil, not SPF 30 sunscreen and a big hat. I had a blistering sunburn almost every weekend of my childhood, running track and swimming and playing on the beach. My mother had two types of skin cancer in her life. I am in a higher than average risk group for one day having skin cancer.
Avoiding the sun is the number one way to prevent it, but early detection is the key to surviving it. I know this, it’s been drilled into me since my mother had her first skin cancer screening and biopsy when I was just twelve years old, and at every single annual skin screening I myself have had since age 19, by doctors in five different countries. So what I was supposed to do? Assume that this dermatologist’s unmagnified eyeballs are superior at detecting anomalies while every other dermatologist I’ve seen around the globe needed at minimum a flashlight and a magnifying glass? If I have trust issues, I come by them honestly!
The second recommendation from the two skin cancer survivors I spoke with had been someone within the large public hospital system. I’d successfully made the earliest appointment, which had been several months away. I never cancelled it after getting in earlier with the private dermatologist, because while it can take forever to get into the public hospital, it’s practically free. Which is great if you’re dealing with catastrophic illness. So two months after the disastrous experience of getting yelled at, I went for my third skin screening in a year.
For this appointment, I wrote notes to hold in my hand so I didn’t need to remember dates or numbers. The doctor and his nurse listened to everything I said, asked me to show him where the previous pre-cancerous moles had been removed, to show him the areas that I had concerns with, and then he went over every inch of my skin with a flashlight and electronic magnifying device, taking enhanced photos of the suspicious spots, and a small sample of the one really suspicious looking one… right between the bridge and tip of my nose. The area covered by a mask. The spot the first doctor wouldn’t look at, and the second doctor barely glanced at, telling me to just pull it down real quick while I held my breath. This, the third doctor said, is worrisome and we’ll test to make sure we don’t need to take quick action. I’m glad you came in when you did.*
Can you feel my frustration?
Can you feel my helplessness at being forced to advocate so strongly for my health, while not knowing what is serious enough to fight for, or how long I need to keep fighting? Can you see how hard it is to trust my own instinct of whether something is serious or not? Can you understand the very real doubt and apprehension which arise from so many doctors all saying the same thing for years, but then finding out all of them were wrong, that I had spent years in unnecessary pain?
A month after the bloody pedicure incident, we settled in on the sofa to catch up on the latest episode of Mare of Easttown. The day before had been Mother’s Day, so my husband and I shared a glass of prosecco from the open bottle in the fridge. I had a few pieces of my gift, imported candy from America which I’ve not had in years, chock full of dyes and additives we don’t usually consume, as most of our imports come from Europe. Places which restrict food additives to a greater degree than the United States.
Within five minutes of starting our show, my face flushed a painful red and I thought my head would burst. The flushing painfully spread to my ears and down my neck and the skin all over the rest of my body became itchy. It was strange and bizarre and I immediately stopped eating the candy and sipping the bubbly, took two types of antihistamines, and put a cold, wet towel on my face. I paid attention to my breathing, worried I was about to head into a severe allergic reaction. It left as quick as it came, and we finished the show.
Later that night in bed I asked my husband what the threshold should be for calling an ambulance or heading to A&E (the local emergency room). I wanted to determine at what pre-decided point it’s okay for me to stop second-guessing and just tap him on the shoulder and say, Let’s go.
He was bewildered by the question. If you have to ask if you should go, it’s probably time to go. But it’s not that simple, is it? I’ve shared what might seem like a lot situations where it wasn’t simple at all, but those are just the biggest. The number of times in my life I’ve been dismissed or belittled for something I thought was serious, the times something serious was labeled as normal, the times I left a consultation for something making me absolutely miserable, negatively affecting my quality of life and ability to be a good mother and wife and productive member of society with the advice to just rest and take this addictive pill are too numerous to count.
Going to the hospital if my face is flushing but I can breathe just fine, feels like I’m putting myself in a position for yet another doctor to dismiss my concerns without compassion and cause me to trust myself even less. So it really did seem like a good idea to discuss ahead of time how bad things need to get or what symptoms need to be disturbing me enough to confidently say, Let’s go.
So let’s go back to the beginning of this story.
Back to me, sitting with my entire leg draped across the dining room table, surrounded by bloody paper towels, a giant bin of bandages and ointments before me as the locksmith follows my direction to just come on in, the door’s unlocked.
“It looks like you’re doing some first aid here,” he calmly said to me.
He put down his tools and asked to have a look at my heel. Not even thinking about how odd it is to show your bloody foot to a guy who changes locks for a living, I pulled back the wad of gauze I had pressed into the wound. I told him what happened. “That looks very painful. Probably not what you were expecting when you went for a pedicure,” he remarked.
He explained the anatomy of skin, told me the razor blade had gone fairly deep, taking off several layers, which is why it was bleeding so much. The elevation and pressure will help. He said our feet have more nerve endings than other parts of our body, which is why it hurt a lot. He confidently stated it was likely to hurt really bad for a week, it would take a month for the skin to rebuild itself, and the healing nerves would remind me of the injury so I would stay off it.
Are you a doctor, I asked my locksmith, hazy with pain and hunger, or possibly an angel?
He held up his hands to me, palms facing outward. “No, look — I just have a lot of experience.” He pointed out scars on his hands. Who knew being a locksmith was such a risky profession? The machine used to cut metal blanks into keys once sliced him almost to the bone on one hand, and took off a large piece of skin on the other. His rough palms held dozens of other stories of injuries and accidents. He changed the locks while telling me about security and safety and the lengths some of his clients go to so that no one can break in, effectively distracting me from the pain, and then he went on his way.
The wise, experienced angel of a locksmith was absolutely correct. The bleeding stopped completely by the next morning. The really fierce pain lasted eight days. The nerves in my foot felt like a thousand hot needles poking me at once, reminding me not to put pressure on it, which kept me off my feet — much to my injured back’s delight. One month after the pedicure, the skin had grown back, no resulting pain at all.
The lesson here is one I’m destined to learn over and over again, always in different ways.
That little voice inside me that says something isn’t right? I can, and should, listen to it. No one else lives inside my body and feels what I feel, and I’m allowed to see as many doctors as it takes until I feel seen and heard. I’ve just laid out my literal lifetime of training for this, and yet it doesn’t seem to get any easier.
I followed up with one of the skin cancer survivors I spoke to here in Hong Kong, a young mom of two children. She said she also went to three different doctors because she knew something was wrong, but was brushed off by the first two. She ended up just waiting. By the time she finally got up the guts to go see a third doctor, they discovered stage three melanoma. She has endured four disfiguring surgeries to remove parts of her body, and then two more for reconstruction, plus chemotherapy and immunotherapy. She does not regret pushing harder to have someone take her seriously. She does regret waiting so long after that second doctor, ignoring her internal alarm.
I’ve been thinking about the day I left that second dermatologist, walking down the street in tears, feeling ashamed and alone because he was pushy and rude, and made me feel stupid and silly. I look at my two miracle sons who grew within me and my beloved husband of twenty-five years and never want them to cry a single tear because they lost me too soon for something that could have been caught early.
May we always find the courage to look stupid and silly if that’s what it takes to keep us here, alive. In less pain. Leaking less blood all over the mall. Preferably no leaking of blood whatsoever, but if there is an abundance of blood outside my body instead of in, may my courage extend toward getting to the A&E ASAP (and may I remember to keep a snack in my bag at all times, just in case).
It was that last chance I took on one more OBGYN, in China of all places, slouching in feeling hopeless and looking ridiculous with a whole notebook of test results, which finally changed my life. May we always find the strength to return just one more time when it comes to anything that affects the quality of the one and only life we get to live.
We’ve been in the new flat just shy of two months.
My husband reminded me it took three years of living in our old flat to finally get all the art up where I wanted it, to acquire the perfect furniture, and arrange every little thing in the right place before I felt like I was done. So why was I pushing myself to accomplish what previously took three years in just three weeks? Or even three months?
So what if Christmas arrives and we find ourselves putting up the tree next to a few boxes, all our art still unhung, no video tours of my new home forthcoming? There’s no crime in stopping to put my feet up, not because they hurt, but because I’m allowed to take a break any old time I want. Join me?
*In the middle of editing, I got the report back from the dermatologist on my nose. All clear! Appointment for next year is already on the calendar. Oh hey, just wondering… any appointments you need to make right now while you’ve got your phone in your hand?
It took me 2 years, 4 hospitals, and 8 different neurologists to finally find one that believed me and told me that yes, something is indeed wrong. Being told over and over that "nothing is wrong with you" when all tests come back normal while having all the symptoms I have been experiencing is needless to say frustrating. If doctors had said "I don't know what is wrong but I am going to find out" that would have been totally acceptable but telling someone NOTHING is wrong when they are sitting in front of you with out-of-the-blue speech & gait problems is not acceptable.