Mad. Very, Very Angry

I am caught in a snare between a disability insurance company that bullies me (aren’t they supposed to help me?) and the Medical Records Department with my health insurance (I think they’re supposed to help me, too.)

Their combined incompetence has cost me three half-days to travel to the hospital to fill out paperwork for them to lose, four different explanations about what might have happened, one honest “I have no idea what happened” and one “I don’t know if I can help but I’ll do my best”, nineteen phone calls, two nasty letter from the disability insurance case manager, and countless hours of lost sleep.

It may cost me the only hope I have of any income for the next five years, as I prepare for a new career since I can’t do my previous career anymore.

I keep singing the classic from Little Jerry and the Monotones on Sesame Street, “Very, Very Angry”:

(background singers): We're mad. Very angry, very, very angry.
Real mad. Very angry, very, very angry.

When someone socks me in the eye
And they don't even tell me why, that makes me mad.

(Very angry, very, very angry)

When I'm walkin' down the street
And someone stomps upon my feet, that makes me mad.

(Ya, we're angry, very, very angry)

When I’m tired or angry, my body lets me know it. Balance is more difficult. The intermittent Parkinsonian tremor in my left hand makes my hand feel that it’s floppng like a fish out of water. My heart beat races. My upper right lip jumps around like it’s been electrified.

Last night after another ridiculous phone call and contacting a lawyer and a disability advocate, I could not relax enough to fall asleep. The Parkinsonian tremor worsened as I imagined what I might say to these people when I can give them a piece of my mind. (Just an expression. My brain’s been fiddled with enough.)

I start thinking of all of the other things that made me angry yesterday…or ever.

When I thought my hand might never relax, I thought about the precept of Santosha, the focus on my yoga class on Monday morning (yea! My first yoga class since surgery five years ago!) Santosha, usually translated as “Contentment” is not a synonym for “happiness” but in my mind it’s more accurately a quality of stillness, even in a difficult time.

Molly, the teacher, pointed out that  Santosha is not a state of being, like happiness. “Santosha,” she said is a practice.”

As I lay in bed with my spasming hand, I wondered what practicing Santosha might require. I gave myself an assignment much like I used to give assignments to my students.

List everything that I am grateful for. 

The list is long, and I imagine an image for each item: my partner Ann, my family of birth, my church, my life, sunshine, the hummingbird that strifed us as we ate our dinner on the deck, our dinner on the deck, my trike, avalanche lilies on Mt. Rainier, John Keats’ Odes, my brain tumor support group, and so on.

As I imagined so much that I am grateful for, my hand stilled.

When my angry words crept in, and they did, my hand flopped again, but the moment I returned to gratitude, my hand relaxed.

Cool.

I slipped into sleep remembering the words of my colleague Jenn’s Lithuanian grandfather: “It’ll all be okay in the end. And if it’s not okay, it’s not the end.”

“It’s not the end,” I slurred in my sleepiest voice to myself.

And then I slept.