Double Vision: not just a cheesy Foreigner song

Last Sunday, as we were driving back from a fabulous weekend up north hanging out with some of our favorite people and snowboarding, my vision was a little off. At first I just felt funny, but as the day progressed, things went from blurry to split in two—totally in two. I was trying to keep up a brave front, catching up with phone calls, making plans for the week. But when we stopped for a bite to eat, I realized I could hardly walk and felt absolutely drunk (the kind of drunk where you have to close one eye to see). I nevertheless got myself to the bathroom to change Clementine’s leaky diaper (yuck) but realized we needed to get to the hospital to be sure I didn’t have brain damage.

I wasn’t really sure what had happened, but I got to tell the story so many times over the last week or so I can recite it by heart. On Friday I took a pretty serious tumble while snowboarding, smacked my head but bounced back immediately (I wear a helmet, after all). There were no signs of concussion beyond a little dizziness that night. We spent the next day hanging out, seeing sights, shopping. I was fine. We went out for some night skiing and had a great time for a while—Nate and I were on our own and really enjoying it. We wanted to hit every hill before we took a break to visit Clementine and Laura in the lodge, so we headed over to an easy hill on the far side of the slope. I remember strapping in and following Nate down and around a bend, but then the next thing I remember is waking up on my back much further down the hill. I don’t think I fell because it was very flat there, very gentle and easy and I had no snow on me, no aches and pains that might lead me to think something had happened. I got up slowly and headed down the hill dizzy and disoriented. Nate was waiting for me at the bottom and told me he had been there for five minutes and was beginning to get worried. Needless to say I cut the night short and went back to our hotel. I felt kind of dizzy but still very functional. My vision didn’t start to split until we were on our way home—I thought it was something mild or, at worst, a dramatic overreaction to the end of a fabulous vacation.

Once we reached Detroit, Nate and Clementine dropped me off at the ER at my insistence—the last thing I wanted was my girl hanging around the hospital again, and I was pretty sure I’d be fine or that Nate could find someone to watch her while the doctors patted me on the head and told me to take some Motrin and promise never to snowboard again. I wasn’t at the ER long, however, before a negative CAT scan got the doctor thinking I had a ruptured brain aneurysm—he prepared to do a spinal tap and I freaked out, called Nate who had taken refuge at the home of the people with whom we were traveling (as if they hadn’t had enough of me) and started cursing myself for not having a will. The spinal tap was as awful as it sounds—worse, actually, as there is not so much a tap as an invasive injection that involves the needle scraping along one’s vertebrae (I made quite a few jokes about the lengths I had gone to in order to avoid an epidural only to end up with something pretty similar, but the doctor had zero sense of humor). Without my asking, both Karen and Laura showed up to keep me company as we waited for results, more tests and some kind of news. I’d be embarrassed remembering all of the compromising situations in which they saw me (at one point I remember Karen holding my IV bag while I peed), but the good thing about head trauma is that the memory is the first to go.

Eventually they had no answers and it was almost midnight. They decided to admit me and schedule me for an angiogram in the morning, but I had to wait two hours to get a bed in the ICU step-down unit. Nate went to get some sleep at our friends’ house with Clementine, and I spent the hours until dawn drifting off to sleep and then waking myself up immediately anytime I saw any sort of light in my dreams. It sounds ridiculous, but I was trying not to go into the light. I called my dad at 5:30 AM because I just felt so lonely and scared, but by about 7 AM things started looking up. My vision was slowly improving, my head didn’t hurt too much and a wonderful nurse practitioner told me that other than the spinal tap I had no signs of aneurysm. The neurosurgeons agreed, so then the great witch hunt of what the hell had happened to me began in full. Tests, results, theories, disagreements and an endless parade of doctors ensued.

There are days and days of details that follow and they are all pretty much the same. I was frustrated because I couldn’t leave or see my daughter, doctors stopped by and ordered more tests, everyone had different answers. In the end it turns out that I am OK—probably just suffering from a severe concussion, the effects of which I may feel for 6 to 12 months. I’m still banned from driving, however, until I have this crazy test done later this week to look for seizures. They think that may have been what grounded me on my last snowboard run.

I am back at work today and feeling good, despite the headache. I’m trying hard not to dwell on all this. I will be back on the slopes again next year, I will be fine and I can’t wait to start my yoga again because man, my muscles are sore.

Thanks for all the emails and notes and comments and good wishes. Now let’s talk about something happy.

Helmets may not be punk rock...

...but mine sure did save my life. I was released from the hospital yesterday after three long days of tests, poking, prodding and wondering what the hell happened, and it appears everything is on the mend and there is no lasting damage. I'm NOT giving up snowboarding, and let me be clear: this is not an indication of how much I suck. I was rather awesome and ripped it up pretty well--I just caught a bad break (no pun there since nothing is really broken).

Looking at the computer for more than a few minutes gives me a pretty huge headache, especially since I had my eyes dilated AGAIN today for a never ending series of tests. But more on my experiences soon.

On my mind: snowboarding and babysitting

Honestly, skip this post if you are unprepared for rambling irrelevance. I apparently needed to exercise some demons today. Oh, and find a friggin' babysitter.

It would be a total lie to say that I took to snowboarding as easily as I thought I would. I knew it would be hard and that I would fall, but I imagined by the end of the day I’d be pretty proficient, able to at least handle the small hills without many wipeouts. And I might have been had it not been for the thousands of pint-sized skiers and shredders who hit the hill Sunday afternoon and totally freaked me out by either going really fast around me, really slow in front of me or by wiping out as many times as I did and lying in the snow dramatically after each fall, a little hazardous slalom course, the likes of which I certainly wasn’t ready to handle.

But all in all it was as fun as I thought and I did eventually feel like I got the hang of it. Had I not been so worried about taking the children out and having to face off against their eager parents watching from the bottom of the tow rope (and by worried I mean if I hadn’t thrown myself eagerly into the powder every time I saw anyone in front of me in order to avoid collision), I’m pretty sure I would have spent a little more time upright. I can’t even talk about Nate, who looks like he was born on a snowboard after only two times out. He was up on the chair lifts and down parts of the hill I didn’t even get near enough to look at, but he was also patient and supportive of me wiping out on the seedling hill through the best of the morning. This is huge for me: I usually HATE when he’s better at something than I am and can’t stand to have him instruct me, but this time it really worked for us and I didn’t call him condescending once.

The full injury count is hard to assess at this time because I stupidly went to an insanely tough conditioning class at the gym on Monday, so I’m not sure if the sore muscles are due entirely to one of the other. But I did knock over Cameron, my faithful and wonderful 18-year-old teacher who wondered several times if I was deaf or just unable to follow instruction. I hit my head a lot (next time a helmet for sure), overworked my legs, bruised my knees, knocked my shoulder hard and overworked my quads, and Nate either pulled a muscle or worsened a very small hernia he has had most his life. Who the heck cares? I can’t wait to back on Thursday night. I watched the X Games for inspiration and find myself standing in my snowboard stance while doing dishes or just hanging out, and I’ve been dreaming about weaving down the hills—toe - heel, toe - heel—the last few nights.

Nate and I were lucky on Sunday to be able to go boarding together because Laura (pronounced Yo-ra by darling C) was kind enough to offer to spend the whole morning with Clementine, a morning which must have been a hell of a lot of fun because C now asks for Yora morning, noon and night. Having Laura and her clan so close and so involved in our lives is a saving grace—they are the closest thing to family we have in Detroit, and that is something I’m really missing as my life with a kid gets more and more back to normal. It’s not just that I miss hanging out with my family…although I really do…it’s that I’m finding it hard to find a sitter for those still-rare nights (or days) that Nate and I actually want to leave the house together. Alone. Just the two of us. No Clementine.

I do work in a high school, so it’s not like there is a shortage of kids around. And it’s not like I’m still the neurotic new mother who won’t leave her kid with anyone. Sure, I would like to leave C with someone she knows or can come to know (we’ve had a few one-hit wonders), but the real problem is the extra expense of a sitter. It’s hard to justify a $20 movie night that ultimately costs $40 and is replete with constant cell phone checking, the possibility of interruption and the nagging sense that we’re on a schedule, that we MUST be back when we say we will. I have Laura, but anyone who has someone like that in her life will tell you it’s a careful balance—you never want to take advantage, to overuse that go-to person to the point of fatigue. I feel like I need to protect Laura for the important stuff, the big stuff, not just the dinners out and little errands. I know she’d balk and say whenever, whatever, but I just can’t abuse that.

The real issue, I think, is that when I’m looking for a sitter I feel the same pit-of-the-stomach dread I felt when I was in a doctor’s office recently and read some common-sense article about how all parents should have a will in case of disaster and an emergency bank account with 6 months of expenses in it. Holy shit, I thought, we are totally unprepared for anything out of the ordinary—job loss, death, anything.. And although not being able to find a sitter so we can go out Friday night is hardly on par with this, it does make me feel totally vulnerable, at the whims of another person, a little bit out of control. It’s hard for me to ask for help—I’m always worried I’m inconveniencing someone or asking too much—and even when I do ask, it’s hard for me to trust that it will all work out in the end. Hiring someone is easier than asking a friend to help out, but even that isn’t foolproof. How many times as a teenager did I flake out on a job? Karma is a bitch, baby.

Let me remove my wrist from my forehead a minute: I do realize the sitter conundrum isn’t dire. I realize that if we did run into some emergency, something unexpected, the people we know are awesome. I have no doubt that we’d be covered in the face of a catastrophe. But what about when we had theater tickets (with Laura) and our babysitter backed out that morning? Who do you call then without feeling like you’ve abandoned your kid with the first warm body you can find? More importantly, how do you justify leaving your kid with a series of strangers all the time? And how do you ask your friends with kids of their own or busy lives to rearrange everything so you can go out and be footloose? All of our friends around here who have kids also have grandparents and families that sit for them, so it’s not like we can trade a night for a night. Our friends who don’t have kids are either too busy or just not interested in kids and would be totally traumatized by a night alone with my picky, lovely little girl. If we lived in a neighborhood that wasn’t the white trash hole ours is, I imagine I could have some sort of bohemian co-parenting arrangement with the great family down the street or next door, an open door kind of thing that made life a constant sleepover, an easy give and take. These utopias surely exist somewhere, right?

This would be so much easier if we lived near our families (even though they are scattered all over). I’d feel so much more relaxed, so pleased knowing she was hanging out with her grandparents, her cousins, her aunts and uncles. Even if we didn’t do it a lot, it would be so nice to know that the option was there in case we ever did get a whim. Nate and I are doing a tremendous job dividing labor and splitting the work up—I get out as often as I like while he stays home with C (and vice-versa, though he is such a hermit I have to force him out). The problem with all this splitting and dividing is that we’re doing very little together these days beside pass out on the couch after a long day and let insipid TV shows decay our brain and once lively conversation. Of course there are no easy solutions—my sister lives close to my mom and has more than once admired my life as a pioneer in family-free lands. I guess I should just quit my bitching and get back to the constant phone calls in search of SOMEONE to sit.

Again, sorry for rambling.