MY LEAKY BLOG

1. Grade 11 chemistry. Which I only took because of my mother’s and my guidance counselor’s insistence that I don’t burn any bridges. To prove them wrong, I burnt that bridge far more decisively than if I’d never taken it all. My test average was 28%. With labs I had a 40%. (Until I found out that I couldn’t have a spare in Grade 12 if I didn’t pass so I studied for the stupid exam and passed the course but that’s a whole other story). Point is, I’m comfortable with failure.

2.  My Grandmother used to set her clock varying degrees ahead of the actual time to convince herself that she was late so she’d speed up and actually be on time. My Dad and my sister still do this. Who knows how many generations this behaviour precedes me.

3. I don’t want to waste any writing energy on segues because all words should really be directed into the the mammoth un-edited chaos that is currently my book.

4. So you get numbers.

5. My real deadline isn’t for two months. But I set my fake deadline for yesterday with the hope that I’d get it done way in advance. In such a scenario I wouldn’t be the grumpy, self-pitying bundle of nerves I am right now.

6. I’m hibernating. I’ve decided to work only in bed until this is finished.

7. I change my mind a lot.

8. I’m comfortable with the public failure of not achieving the goal of yesterday’s fake-deadline; making the motivating factor of having a public deadline null and void.

9. It was a fake deadline anyway.

10. I’m procrastinating by making this list right now.

11. By the way, even though I’m not remotely defensive because I don’t care and writing a book is hard and what not, I spent two out of four of the last weeks sick. First with usual leakiness, then a week of health where I went away for some employment for 4 days and then epic facial leakiness. Like serious biblical plague or torrential phlegm. Not that I’m making excuses or giving justifications or defending myself or anything like that because obviously I don’t care at all.

12. There was something else. Probably something about how I don’t think I’m really that far off finishing but who freaking knows.

13. Did I mention that I’m grumpy? I love the number 13.

Yucky start to the week, body-wise. Took a piece advice I give other ppl but rarely actually do, when I started feeling better, I still took it easy. This is good advice. I’m a million times better now. And having a word-crisis. Like there’s way too many of them.

I’ve divided the My Leaky Body book into 4 sections: The Stretcher, The Table, The Theatre and The Recovery Room. The first two sections are about 50% over word-count. And I haven’t started fully-merging the last two yet, so they could be too. There’s also still things I want to write that feel important. Yup. So I know this isn’t really a tragic circumstance I should expect much sympathy on, but seriously, trying to merge a 6 year-old manuscript with everything I’ve thought about and done in the 6 years since is torturous. Okay, that’s a little dramatic. But hard, anyway. I keep looking at the snappy little chapter synopses I wrote back in the heady optimistic days of the proposal, and wondering how I ever thought they would turn into snappy little chapters rather than bloated opuses.

In the words of the immortal Kenny Rogers: I gotta know when to hold em, know when to fold em, know when to walk away and know when to lie in fetal position on the couch watching TV while B makes me cake. Any advice? Tales of throwing away pieces of your soul to meet a wordcount? Or, um, like, editing? Insights appreciated.

Big weekend working plans. And then, Saturday morning I wake up in pain. Boring, old, usual pain. Take what needs to be taken. Drink millions of gallons of water. Whine a lot, take it all really badly. Get talked down by B. Watch millions of gallons of TV. Feel nauseated by the stuff I took that needed to be taken. Again, the usual. 

Today, visit friends in the country. Take a brisk constitutional in the fresh air (please, leave me with my Jane Austen pretensions, it’s all I have right now). Feel a bit better. Epsom salt bath awaits.

Conclusion: much success at being a leaky body, less success at writing about it.

Laters.

So my new theory, to justify the mid-week weekend break I just took, is that my oppositional nature means writing during “normal” working times sucks. Well sometimes.

And last weekend was really fun, write write writing. I’ve gotten a few hours in here and there over the last couple days, but definitely more of a weekend pace than a full-out working one, so I’m going hardcore now. Plus, I hate going out after 10 pm on weekends. It always ends up w/ someone off their head trying to convince me of something really annoying and me responding before realizing that the glossy unfocused eyes are a good reason to avoid and run.

Speaking of being off of one’s head, I partially attribute this mid-week break to a kundalini yoga class I did Wednesday night which was awesome. Like, as in, when I woke up Thursday morning, I felt like I’d taken sleeping pills the night before. Like the good shit I got in hospital from the 12-year-old psych intern.  I posted that story last year. It was always a really luxuriously slow molasses feeling in the morning that some people complain about but I always loved, even though it’s really not conducive to getting anything at all done.

Now I’m back on track. Will post again Sunday. Thanks to everyone for all your electronic support.

I’m feeling more optimistic as I scour the 6 year old manuscript.

Today’s Favourite Thing I Forgot I Wrote:

“As it turned out, he was my Sibyl. Prophets and soothsayers always come in the most unlikely of shells. It’s strangely appropriate that mine is a soldier in a size-small hoodie.”

That’s all you get. I forgot about it, actually forgot entirely about the incident, and then reading it again made me smile. But the story’s too long for right here, so that’s just the teaser. And now, a break-down of my writing days:

Monday Morning sucked. There was something strangely exhilarating about being so productive on Friday through Sunday. Everyone else was on vacation, but there I was, happily plugging away. But by Monday morning, everyone else was being productive, which made me feel like, conformist or something. Which really doesn’t sit will with me. I got used to knowing that neighbourhood kids were playing in the snow while I typed. Sitting in class down the street? Not so fun. So I watched Ellen. Christian Slater was on. It was funny.

I decided to empty out the “currently working on” file on my desktop while being facebook-y and tweet-y, and actually took care of lots of outstanding un-book-related business. Except then my eye started twitching. Like a persistent pulsing above my eye-lid. Due to the fact that I blame Twitter, I refer to it as my eye-Twitcher. I wrote some stuff in the evening, and then shut it all down.

This morning I wake up with a really sore wrist and and a wildly Twitchery eye. So I take my printed section with a notebook to a cafe and drink the first latte (or any type of coffee) I’ve had since November. Yeehaw. On fire. Scribbling away, optimistically reading old material, tweeting via text on my cellphone. And this caffeine-fuelled optimism has inspired my belief that It Will Be Done. There’s so much more usable material than I ever remember. The struggle will really be what to leave out.

In the afternoon I stop  by the hospital to visit a friend of a friend who just had surgery for Crohn’s. We’ve never met before, so thankfully we get along well.  I am so unspeakably grateful to be on this end of the patient-visitor equation. “LaaaaaaaaaaaaH!” <— that’s the angels singing in the film-soundscape of my life. What an incredibly rough time this strong and brave young guy is going through. There’s no way to say it that doesn’t sound cheesy, but hanging out with him and chatting is a crucial and powerful reminder of why I’m doing what I’m doing, and also how incredibly lucky I am to be doing it.

I promised contests. Nothing has occurred to me yet about how to involve other people, besides asking those of you who are actually in the text to pick your own pseudonyms, (which would be made pointless if we involved other people), I can’t think of any! Anyway, it’ll happen. It’s only day 5 after all.

In the meantime, I feel I can confidently declare that, It Will Be Done. Yipperdeeyee!

2001-2002 I lived in Vancouver. I got really sick. It sucked. There were bright spots and beautiful things, but there were also dark, grey depressing clouds and the complete, ulcerated disintegration of myself, as my bowel tissue started eating my body from the inside out.

The first time I wrote this chapter it was called something very different. It was six years ago and I was seriously pissed about a number of things. Mostly how the university treated me at the time. Now, despite the fact that I’m in less emotional pain about the whole ordeal (yayy therapy!) I’m still resisting the urge to curl up in fetal position under my writing table and hide from the chapter all together. And I really feel like once this small piece of my story is written in some sort of satisfactory way, I can easily flow into finishing the rest of the manuscript.

So I discarded a lot of what I wrote before and started fresh:

“In 2010, I’m still mad at Vancouver. Like irrationally angry at the city itself. When I hear the weather forecast and it’s better than Toronto I react bitterly, like a jealous ex-lover. I recently found myself gloating when it rained there on Christmas. It’s nothing against the people who live there, it’s not them who I want to weather the stormy greyness. It’s Vancouver I hate. The beautiful city who seduced and then betrayed me.”

Despite the clenching in my chest when I revisit these scenes, I’m still enjoying writing. I also wrote some of the lovely things, that were previously unwritten in my self-piteous tales of woe. I renamed my arch-nemesis to something really ridiculous so I can at least laugh now when I write about her.

And, to top it all off, B. just found my missing zip drive with the original manuscript on it, the only digital copy I have. So things are looking up.

Day 4: Paris and Rectal Exams

Happy Leaky New Year! It’s the first day of the decade and I’ve achieved unbelievable things:

-After three failed attempts at making my very own Yerba Mate Latte since my sister bought me a stove-top espresso maker for Christmas, this morning I put the tealeaves in the coffee grinder first, and success!

-Beautiful snowy-treed dog park this morning. Gracie-dog chases a squirrel and obsessively looks up tree trunk. I call her back. She comes. This. has. never. happened. before. I figure this will be the pinnacle achievement of the day.

-After returning home, hepped up on Mate and snowy morning air, I download a driver for my new netbook that allows me to revive my very favourite old laser printer that hasn’t worked on anything since my bubbly blue imac five years ago. Yay for pack-rattedness!

-I print the first section of my book — The Stretcher. Some of the chapters are completely written. Others are written in patches with notes in between. I hole punch the entire section and put it in a pretty binder.

-I spend my day editing it with coloured felt-tip pens, writing things into the computer version, and giving myself till Thursday to make the section sparkly, shiny, complete.

- I tweeted 8 times. Yes I did.

And here, as I go back through the manuscript to finish and find things that I forgot about, I start a special, new Leaky Blog Feature. It’s called, “Favourite Thing I Forgot I Wrote”.

And here’s today’s:

“The poem is the first thing I wrote about illness. It was about a month before my first surgery and I was writing in imagined response to becoming invisible in my hospital bed. I had some uber-pretentious image in my head of myself dressed in black, reading emphatically and dramatically to a crowd of people who look artsy. I subsequently become very embarrassed of this piece of writing, although now I can’t tell if it’s the secret fantasy I had of performing it or the actual text which was more cringe-inducing. As much as being ill lets me get away with certain things with other people, it also lets me give myself more space, and lay off a bit in my perpetual practice of self-mockery. I was sick, stuck, terrified — and having fantasies of ranting at doctors from the safe distance of public stages with sympathetic audiences was life-saving.  Irrespective of how the poem sounded, how many berets were in my fantasy crowd or how much the interpretive dancers behind me were gyrating, it’s a piece of writing that’s still precious to me. It was the first appearance of a writing voice, a hand to hold, a future me, standing softly in the shadows, lighting a path and guiding me through.”

It always sounds like a door slamming in my sleep. Gracie sleeps in a separate room because she sleep-barks, whines and kicks. And every once in a while, from her room (furnished with her own futon and quilt) she decides very early in the morning that we should all get up. It’s not her regular bark, or her dreaming noises. It’s a sharp, loud “Bwoof!”, that in my sleep, brings forth images of doors slamming. So that’s why, on Boxing Day, I was up at 7 am. And of course, as I sit here typing, she’s fast asleep again.

So I tidied the vestiges of Christmas from the front room. Made it pretty. Then decided to do some internet housekeeping. And in my zealous removal of 267 spam comments of my poor, neglected blog, I erased every comment anyone has ever left, myself included. How is it even possible to mark myself as spam? Riddle me that Wordpress. It’s clearly a deep ontological question. But I did. Luckily, hardly anyone ever leaves messages here. So I found all 3 of you through gmail searches and retrieved your comments from spammer prison. And then realized that if that’s really the only thing I accomplished with a blog that hasn’t been updated since September, then Gracie’s efforts were wasted.

So I wrote this very ambitious title. How to finish a book in 31 days. It sounds instructive, like I know.  So I just typed the “tell me!” in parentheses. Because I’d like you to, please. Every time I’m about to get on stage to perform My Leaky Body, a thought occurs to me. It always goes something like this, “WTF am I doing here? This is ridiculous, I’m not a performer. I’m a writer. I should be in a dark corner with an oil lamp and a quill pouring my soul onto paper all by myself with no one looking at me.” And at the time, I really believe it. But the truth of the matter, is that every time I sit all by myself with some highly-motivated writing plan I think “WTF am I doing here? I need people, stimulation, conversation. I should be working somewhere busy and bright and active…” So here’s my compromise. I will sit, writing, by myself, but not as the fictional oil-lamp writer version of myself that I romantically cultivate when scared of performing, but as a more realistic version who blogs and tweets and facebooks at the same time.

January 1st I will start to finish my book. And January 31st I will have a printed, finished manuscript sitting in front of me.  I’ll keep all 4 of you updated on what I’m working on. And the fact that I’ve put my promised finish line in print, will magically make it happen. That, and the fact that there will be contests. Want to choose pseudonyms for mean doctors? Want to send me happy writing things with the knowledge that you could win something cool that I haven’t thought of yet? This is the place to do it. Or by email or snail mail or facebook or twitter. No gym-teachery stuff though. I don’t do well with hardcore motivation mean types. So help! (Please). Frequent updates will ensue.

It’s Thursday August 20th, and the storms are heading towards southern Ontario. And I  am in pain. Like wild over-the-top stupid pain. I’ve planned to attend an event with my friend S. up at York. It involves a meal and tennis, and, as I often do in such situations, I’ve convinced myself that once I get there I’ll feel better. 

The sky is a gorgeous shade of purple, and as we reach the grounds, S. and I hear security telling people to evacuate because of a tornado. I roll my eyes and say to S., ”That’s so drama. As if.”, in the kind of way that “if” has two syllables, and I’m just totally above such panic.

We get to the indoor area where food is being served and it’s packed out because the storm outside has started, and it’s raging. I can barely stand at this point, because as usual, my optimistic theory about miraculous instantaneous recovery that fits into my timetable is slightly flawed.

So I steal someone’s seat who just got up near the window, and S. takes the seat next to me. The organizers have gotten me food that meets my dietary requirements but I can’t even feel air going into my now-spasming abdomen, much less imagine food happily making it’s way through. (In retrospect I wish I’d brought tupperware and taken it home to freeze because it was really good food and I would eat it right now, but that’s not the point). The point is, that I’m still smiling and talking to people and politely declining food as if the pain gripping me is “just a little thing going on with my tummy”, which are the exact words I use.

A few miles away, tornados are touching down, ripping roofs off of houses and schools, terrorizing people and animals. We don’t know this, we just wonder when the thunderstorm will pass so the tennis can begin. And it does pass. People work frenetically to dry the courts, and we all go out to take our seats. 

Because of the delay, fans are drunker than they normally would be at the beginning of the match. With every irritating jeer or too-loud aside my gut wrenches with increasing fury. My mind starts racing with every thing in my life that’s currently annoying me, and blows it into outrageous proportions. I can’t think straight, and now feel like I’m going to throw up. (I still remember, the minutiae of every detail about the the last thing I ate, exact tastes, textures and sensations). And while the thought of blowing chunks on the loud drunk guy immediately in front of me is briefly amusing, I tell S.,

“I really need to leave.”

The ride home is blurry, and B. is already in bed when I get there. I run the bath, take some Gravol, and finally vocalize the pain, which really does help relieve it.  B. gets up and comes in to talk to me. Soon I’m lying in bed, gripped by the pessimism and misanthropy that always arise when I succumb to pain. Everything sucks, I hate everyone.  And most importantly, 

“This is never going to go away. I’m always going to be sick. I’m probably bleeding from some giant Crohn’s lesion in my stomach that’s going to make a fistula into other organs and require surgery and…”

B. patiently listens, calmly soothing until I fall asleep. It’s been a long, long time since I’ve felt like this. 

The next morning things are brighter, better, I even manage a meeting about a project I’m working on. But the ache is still there, along with the nagging thought that something is really, really wrong. Days pass and I’m ok as long as I don’t eat much, and there’s still occasional moments of extreme pain, until, suddenly, I’m totally and completely fine. Energetic and healthy even, and slightly puzzled. What happened?

Eight days after the initial attack I get my routine blood-work done and meet with the specialist who takes care of my iron levels. She’s showing me the results on the computer screen and everything is good. Better than good, amazing.

“Are my platelet counts normal??”

She looks surprised at my excitement,

“Yes, they are, you must really be absorbing iron…”

“No, but the Crohn’s, it means there’s no ongoing inflammation, it means, everything’s fine.”

She smiles,

“Yes it does.”

To put this into perspective, I actually can’t remember a time when both my white blood cell (WBC) count and my platelets were within normal range. There were hospitalizations when I literally had to stay there until my white blood cell count dropped into a range that was not dangerous. The WBC has been normal for sometime now, but the platelets were still always high.

So a week in pain, two seasons of Brothers and Sisters on DVD and obscene levels of panic later, I discover that I must have just had the stomach flu. Nothing life-threatening, nothing dramatic, just one of those typical consequences of inhabiting a generally-healthy, sometimes-leaky body. A common illness, possibly made worse by years of abdominal trauma from disease and surgery, and definitely made worse by terror. 

I’ve spent this summer going back through old illness writings and re-working them. Sometimes I cringe at the rawness I wrote with in those moments, because now, in this usually-healthy and comfortable body it’s easy to wax poetic about illness as a journey, without truly remembering what it was like. It’s also an amazing relief to remember that even healthy bodies leak, and that happy endings aren’t about perfection and invincibility. Tornados pass through and dramatic storms are real, but they pass, and for now, the calm after the storm is sweet.   

4 years ago this morning I had a screaming panting 11 month old cat bearing down in my lap, giving birth. Right now I have a gorgeous four-year-old cat, yawning and purring in my lap. She is none other than Saffron-Kitty, Superstar. Anyone who’s ever met me has heard this story, likely more than once, and I appreciate the polite nodding during re-tellings #5-7. But it just occurred to me this morning, on the 4 year anniversary, that I’ve never written it.

So lets start with the facts of the situation. I had just turned 26. One year earlier I had the last of my colon removed, leaving me with an internal pouch stretched out of tissue from my small intestine. That hurts exactly as much as it sounds like it does. Then I had massive bowel blockages, hospitalizations with NG tubes shoved down my nose and into my gut, and a new Masters’ program to start. So yeah, super dramatic.

Part of the whole journey of this illness through my twenties, (I love being 30 and being able to refer sagely back to “my twenties”, it’s freaking awesome), is realizing that the first part of that sentence, ie. blockages, hospitals, suggests that the last part of the sentence, ie. Masters’ program, was perhaps poorly-timed. And that maybe the sentence should have ended with things like Spa, or, foot massage. So the summer after my first year in the program, I am very ill. 

And now the emotional content: I’m massively disappointed, depressed, frustrated, stir-crazy, bored, irritable and, I’m sure, irritating. Enter Lorelai. The young cat the next-door neighbours named Floppy, and never bothered to fix, or take to a vet. After she chooses to move into our house, pregnant, I rename her. then write a story about it in the Globe. After the story is written and accepted for publication, but before it is printed, Lorelai goes into labour.

Now as any good graduate student with a pregnant cat would, I have been to the library and taken out every book on cat births. I have read everything I can find online, and I am prepared.  I have towels, facecloths, scissors, dental floss, and the knowledge that a cat bred on her first heat may have no idea what to do when the labour starts. Nowhere in any of this literature, was there any discussion of what to do if a cat wants to give birth in your lap. Yes, I did spend an awful lot of time giving her pregnancy massages and cooing comforting words about how I would support her through the whole thing, but that was just so she’d let me near her without clawing my eyes out, not so she’d jump up and pop them out right *on* me.

“Lorelai, you’re doing great, I’m going to stay right here, I just need to put you down so I can see what’s going on.”

I somehow maneuver the birthing towels under me on the chair and put her down on them as I sit on the floor, still massaging her. She lets out a final moan as something looking like a glass ball lands on the towel. She looks at me in shock and horror. Prepared for this moment, I have a facecloth soaked in warm water which I use to simulate licking motions on the amniotic sac within which the perfect little kitten is encased, Lorelai catches on, and joins me in the process. The cat is fully visible within, little white paws and chest, on a black body. As I wipe the amniotic fluid off of her face, she sucks in her first breath, and I place her on Lorelai’s belly for her first feeding. And that friends, is the bloody emergency of Saffron-Kitty, Superstar.

Two weeks later the story is published. I feel reintegrated into the world as people phone and email me about it. In the pre-website days, this also led to some cold calls from strangers who found me in the phonebook and wanted to discuss health issues. When the kittens are six weeks old, little Lorelai who never intended to be a Mum, snaps. She’s had enough, so she goes off to B.’s parents for the life of luxury she’s still enjoying. Willow-cat takes over with the kittens who are now looking for homes. But everytime someone is interested in Beezlebub (Saffron’s kitten name because she indiscriminately knocked all the other kittens off of all the other teats at every opportunity), I give them a vague answer like,

“Oh, I’m not sure, I think someone else wanted her.”

Until I finally admit to myself that she’s staying. In the coming months, she starts her own photo-blog where she discusses all manner of things. Life as a cat, the thieves who stole Yoga from her ancestors, pop-culture, politics. I often tell her her birth story and she always gives me the same blinky, purring happy look. Happy Birthday Saffron-Kitty!