Arnold

So I was in a bad mood – because I’m on too many drugs, because I’m paranoid about being able to choose the right hospital to give birth in, because a film synopsis is not coming along, take your pick – and then I was reminded of how much I love Arnold Schwarzenegger:

There’s been too little Schwarzenegger in my life as of late. Maybe it’s because I married a dude who’s obsessed with Jim Jarmusch and Lars von Trier (oh, and speaking of that – um, yeah, Cannes…). Or because getting older means, to a certain extent, letting go of past joys. Or maybe it’s the pregnancy hormones. I suppose everyone has an excuse for having too little Schwarzenegger in their lives, and mine are all good ones, but still. In times of crisis, a lack of Arnold only makes your problems worse. Don’t let it happen to you.

Lady troubles. And a pretty Moscow spring.

The Globe and I were in the hospital for a few days – due to him possibly deciding to come out early. I’m back home now, writing, with a bunch of drug prescriptions, some of them quite fun. Inside of me, The Globe is busy imitating a starfish.

May has finally become kinder in Moscow, dominated by birds. I actually heard an honest-to-God nightingale in the park by my house the other evening. With my husband back in town for a little while, we played Björk to The Globe. Odd, how I didn’t like her much before, until my life changed.

When I once asked my husband why he chose me, considering the fact that it was an unlikely choice, he replied something along the lines of that we never know, at what turn life will hand us a gift. And the more I think about it, the more I realize that there are many gifts I have failed to notice before, stuff life has held for me in an outstretched palm, like a kid eager to show off a Junebug – stuff you miss particularly when confined to a hospital bed, stuff like a book, a park bench, a decently written article, a giant mug of green tea, a zombie movie.

Physically speaking, I am less free now, because I have to put my health and the kid’s health first, but there are doors and more doors opening inside of my mind. The changing circumstances have made me adapt and hone new talents. I write more than ever, when the shoulder doesn’t hurt. I can make steamed fish and rice now. I am no longer terrified of IVs.

I hate hospitals, but I have been reminded, once again, that certain medical care systems that are in place in Russia are vastly superior to what we have in the States. Even as a foreigner with an entirely basic insurance package, I received treatment – and received it for free. And they were prepared to keep me there for a long time, if necessary – and treated me well. I am having a baby, and babies are important to Russia’s demographics crisis, but at least the government is doing something about improving prenatal care. The cases that get highlighted in the press are the horrible ones, no one wants to read about how “we had a scare and then it turned out to be OK, because of the exceptional doctors and nurses”, but really, even rural doctors will tell you that improvements are being made.

In the beginning of this month, I visited Vyazniki, Vladimirskaya oblast, about a 5-hour journey from Moscow. It’s a small town where the views are great and the roads are crap (and parades still go down these roads). Our family friend, Seryozha, works as an anesthesiologist at the local hospital there – and is regularly called in to help with epidurals for women in labour. It’s not a modern ward they have over there, but women are allowed to request epidurals freely – a huge change from ridiculous Soviet times. Seryozha, who’s one of those doctors who cares, is really pleased with how the maternity ward operates. And if demographics are indeed to improve, this should be the case all over Russia.

Meanwhile, husband’s off to film on location again – for his diploma project – and The Globe and I will be mostly alone, watched over from a safe distance (the word “distance” being key) by my mother, who’s in town. If things should go well, and I will be in no more need of hospitalization (please, God, please) until the bairn is actually due, I’d like to take my mother to some plays, and hopefully finish my own. I’d like to work on more articles, including my remaining theater columns, and I’d like to sit on park benches and watch the sun going down, and be OK. The Globe can feel the adrenalin in my blood. I want him, also, to feel some love, and remember that the world he’s joining isn’t always enveloped in shitstorms.

The woman I shared a hospital room with is called Lyudmila. She’s got one kid, aged 18 and already off to do his army service, and is awaiting fraternal twins – Sofiya and Spiridon. Last year, Lyudmila lost a baby at 38 weeks, her heart stopped beating while she was still in the womb. “We don’t have much on the gravestone,” she told me. “An angel, and the day of her death.” I hope Sofiya and Spiridon come out just fine. We listened to their hearts before I left and they were going pretty damn strong.

On chronic pain: love your body, or it will smack you down

Thank you for your donations that are helping see me through what’s been a really difficult time and are helping me buy more time as the result. Although I’ve managed to carve out a fairly decent life for myself in Moscow, medical bills have been an absolute nightmare – even though I have managed them in such a way that I would have never managed them back home in the States. The good thing about life in Moscow is that you are still able to afford decent doctors if you are middle-class and don’t have comprehensive insurance coverage – but even so, the expenses can add up when you’re in my situation, and then add up some more, and more.

In addition to taking care of my eyes and other parts of my body is the amount of physical therapy I have needed, just to manage pain. I’ve been living with chronic back pain and stomach for a while – the direct result of not taking care of myself, not loving myself, really, not allowing myself a break. The pain was bad before, but pregnancy can make it unbearable – entire sections of the physical matter which I occupy can light up in agony so great that it feels as though my nerve endings are being fried. And then I wish that they were being fried. I wish that someone could take a blowtorch to them. The hatred I feel for my own physical weakness in that moment makes the pain that much worse.

When I get treatment – which I can afford right now because of your donations – I’m often told that I shouldn’t be in so much pain. That there is more going on here than a physical problem with my spine or a problem with the lining of my stomach. The tests, the pre-pregnancy x-rays, the medical history – all tell one story, but there’s another story running parallel to that, one that my physical therapist was able to pin down after many other medical professionals just shrugged, because he’s seen it all before.

And the story is of how much I have hated myself and hated  my body, down to the point where me now asking it “hey, could you please carry this child” results in a resounding “I suppose I can – but YOU CAN GO TO HELL.”

Psychosomatic pain is not a phenomenon that’s well-understood, but when you have doctors telling you, for years, “Look, you’ve got some physical problems, but you shouldn’t be screaming in agony right now, Jay-sus,” it becomes something worth looking into. “Do you just have an adverse relationship with your body?” My physical therapist finally asked me. “Do you even know how to relax it? Do you realize that you could be making yourself worse?”

Besides working with the physical manifestations of the problem, we talk about the psychological aspect. “You need to let go of this,” he says as we work on trying to get my collarbone to stop acting like a huge needle that’s been inserted by some sadistic god into my skeleton for the sheer fun o fit. I’ve been learning to exhale it – this feeling of agony and desperation. Spinal problems are problems of flesh and bone, but the if the flesh and bone are constantly being told to go screw themselves, you may never get better.

When we first met, my husband began asking me questions about my relationship with my body. “You do realize, that we have the chance to talk right now and interact, because we’re occupying physical bodies?” He would ask me. “Look what I can do,” he’d say, and run his fingers up and down my arm. “I can do that because you have a body and I have a body.” It was the mere fact of the existence of our bodies that allowed for the creation of The Globe, who always sits very patiently when mummy is getting help for her ailments, and only begins to cautiously tap out his Morse code when mummy gets to the point of shrieking from how much it hurts. No bodies = no Globe. It’s as simple as that, but something buried deep inside me has yet to accept that.

But I’m trying. I really am. And if there’s anything useful I can take from this experience so far and share it with the readers of this post it’s the following – Don’t despise yourself. It’s totally not worth it.

And Tara agrees, love-hate relationships are not healthy:

Why feminist blogging sucks

It sucks because of the fucking idiots.

Really.

Let me tell you a story: when I was 17, I really wanted to go to college. And I got accepted – all the way to Duke University, Eruditio et Religio et Huge-ass Fees. At the time I was accepted, my family were genuinely in a place where they could help out with said fees. By the time I was starting my sophomore year, my family was nowhere near being able to help out with the fees. ‘Cause that’s what happens sometimes. Circumstances change, and it’s not as if there are safety nets in place to help people when they’re already in free-fall – especially if those people happen to be immigrants.

So I got stuck with some huge student loans. And although I am committed to paying them off, I am also in a place right now where I could be picking between “make loan payments” and “make hospital payments for me and my baby.” I didn’t plan on this to happen either, I thought the future would be fairly solid for at least a year or so – and BOY was I wrong. I’m in a situation right now where I can barely afford prenatal vitamins day in and day out, let alone food. And it’s not because I don’t work, I work my ass off – while heavily pregnant – but unexpected expenses keep coming up (like needing laser eye surgery to prevent retinal detachment, woo! And dealing with an insurance company that wants me to wait for months to get treatment in a state clinic when I will lose my fucking retina if I wait for months, double woo!), and freelance gigs keep falling through for both my husband and myself, and chronic pain can take me out for an entire day when I could be being productive.

I have a donate button on this blog – for the fiction that I have published here in the past. I haven’t been able to publish any new fiction – because sitting at a computer for hours literally hurts. I try to do my best, but I am running out of options, and it sucks.

So then I read posts like the one I linked above, that pretends to care about “poor people” and people who no longer have their health, and I’m just like – please. Just stop it. Please.

It sucks that I even have to flay myself open, as Jill put in her original post on the issues in the feminist blogosphere, to get my point across – but whatever. I don’t even care about that anymore. I am tired. Lord, I am tired.

Oh look, Osama’s dead

… And “buried at sea”, apparently. Hm. Interesting.

What scares me now is retaliation, the re-imagining of Osama as a “glorious martyr” and so on. Let’s hope all efforts that go in that direction will be amateurish at best.

The Globe and I listened to the President’s address together. “That’s our President – I voted for him,” I told The Globe (speaking of that, I hope the Embassy paperwork won’t be too horrifying for when The Globe is born). The Globe twitched and kicked. “On September 11, 2001, I was in high school,” I told The Globe. “You don’t even know what high school is yet. Anyway, Mr. Che said that the person responsible will be caught. It’s nearly a decade later, and here I am, already pregnant with you, and two wars later, it finally happened.”

The Globe kicked some more. He’s really far away from all of that now, completely oblivious to even the barest notion of international terrorism, of the prolonged conflict in Afghanistan, of civilians killed. He’s far away from all that, and for now, I’m glad.