Tag: Susie Rinehart

The Art & Science of the Nap

A nap is a thing of beauty. World peace is within reach. All we have to do is nap. It’s the most underused, powerful tool for self-care and work productivity. There’s science behind this. My doctors told me that short naps, between ten and twenty minutes, do more for lessening anxiety and improving focus than caffeine or even adding an hour of sleep at night. Increasingly, companies are creating special napping areas to give their employees a chance to recharge. Apparently, Google, Huffington Post, Zappos, Procter & Gamble all have nap rooms and encourage napping. They don’t just want their teams to work hard, they want them to work smart. I have been thinking about the nap as a way to begin again in the new year. After all, it’s my favorite way to reset, renew, and reinvigorate any day.

Here are a few tricks I’ve discovered as I channeled my perfectionist tendencies into napping:

Keep it short: 10-20 minutes allows you to slip into light sleep, enough to recharge without feeling more groggy. On weekends, I go for the luscious 60-minute nap!

Darkness helps: Cover your eyes with a mask or a hat. I use earplugs too–I can still hear my alarm with them in, but I don’t get sucked into nearby conversations.

Rest counts: Don’t worry if you don’t actually sleep. Just lie there and breathe deeply.

Imagine paradise: Picture yourself in a blissful, relaxing place to drown out the to-do list.

Build it in: Schedule it into your day. I plan when I am going to eat lunch, and when I am going to nap. Sometimes they are back-to-back. For me, the best time to nap is between 1-4pm.

Set an alarm: I use a timer, set at 12 or 20 minutes. I don’t trust myself to wake up without it.

Practice: Commit for 21 days. Make it a habit before deciding if you can or can’t nap.

Ok nappers out there: what are your best tricks? I’d love to know!

It used to frustrate me that I couldn’t make it through a day without lying down since the surgeries this past summer. In September, I was asleep more than awake and I understood it to be apart of the healing process. But by October, naps made me feel fragile. In November, I called myself weak. In December, I thought my low energy was a sign that I would never be strong again. Over the holidays, the naps felt like painful reminders of how much had changed since last year when a day wasn’t complete without a morning run, an afternoon ski, and an evening ice skate. This year, a good day included two naps and a bath.

The feeling that I shouldn’t lie down comes from the same place of shame that I feel if I am not producing something or fixing something. To do nothing feels wrong. But the brave thing for me to do is to nap. There is deep beauty to just being. After a nap, I am more present with the people I love. I am also more positive. I’ve even solved problems while napping. I wake up, knowing what to do or how to compose that tricky email. And when that doesn’t happen, I am at least better able to deal with drama.

I have been on the quest for the perfect nap ever since I can remember. As a child, I fell asleep in the sandbox, on a chairlift, while paddling a canoe. In college, I fell asleep in every class that began after one o’clock. I felt terrible about it. My professors got together and recommended that I go to a sleep clinic to determine if I had a disorder. They decided that I must have narcolepsy; it couldn’t possibly be their teaching that was putting me to sleep. I went home and told my parents. Next, I overheard my mother say to a large crowd of friends at a holiday party, “My daughter has a small necrophilia problem.”

This is what I learned: I don’t have narcolepsy (or necrophilia, thank goodness). I spent twelve hours hooked up to electrodes and video cameras in a tiny room to figure this out. They monitored my brain activity, lungs, heart rate, plus any movement in my legs, arms, or eyes. They filmed me sleeping and they set alarms to wake me up at random times. They filmed that too. The videos showed that my right foot kicks slightly, all the time. The doctors said, “You’re still running, even in your sleep. It’s enough to make you tired the next day.” The prescription they gave me? 1-2 short naps a day.

The doctors explained that a complete sleep cycle takes between 60 and 90 minutes. Most people drop into slow wave sleep (deep, dream-filled dozing) after 20 minutes. So the trick is to train your body to nap between 10-20 minutes at a time. That way, you stay in light sleep, and gain energy when you wake up. If you nap longer than 20 minutes, you risk waking up in slow wave sleep and feeling super groggy. What if you can’t fall asleep because your mind is spinning fast with the list of things to do? You breathe deeply and rest. There is a belief in eastern medicine that resting is just as good as sleeping for your health, immune system, and brain activity.

In college, I learned to build naps into my day. Instead of fighting the head nods while reading, I practiced putting my head down the minute I arrived at the library. It worked. The first fifteen minutes of a homework session began with my head on the table, out cold. After that, I could read for hours without stopping.

Later, when I was helping to run a school and pregnant, I used to ask a colleague to watch my door for six minutes while I lay down. I could sleep, even snore, and wake up refreshed after just six minutes. I don’t think I would have made it through those years without those holy six minutes each day. But I had to master the 10-20 minute nap first before I could pull off that short of a nap. The trick is to find that magic number of minutes that allows you to decompress and wake up feeling refreshed.

Now I nap at least once a day. I just napped in the middle of writing this reflection. Over the holidays, I was a moveable nap. I napped on the couch, in front of a friend’s fireplace, on the floor, drooling on the rug. I love that feeling right before I fall asleep, when I tug a blanket over my shoulders, and sink into silence, knowing that soon I will be sound asleep. This year, I resolve to focus on that good feeling and ignore the one that says I am not doing enough.

Love,

Susie

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*****

Voice Lesson

I had my first voice lesson on Friday. My teacher was trained as an opera singer, then lost her voice, and her career. “I learned a lot from my training, but I learned more from having to find my voice again,” she told me. We sat in her small office downtown. There wasn’t much in the room except for a piano and a giant jungle gym for cats. Her cat couldn’t have cared less about either. Instead, it sat at our feet, rubbing herself silly on my boots. (Did I tell you that I used to be terribly allergic to cats and now I’m not? One of the bizarre outcomes of my surgeries is that I don’t seem to be allergic to anything anymore: cats, feathers, dust, perfume. Nothing bothers me. I don’t recommend two craniotomies and a neck fusion as a solution to hay fever, but it is a nice bonus.) I digress. This is a story about our voices. And the moral is: ease over effort.

“I am hoping you can help me speak without pain,” I told the voice coach.

“What’s the problem?”

“I have to force air out to make a sound that people can hear. By the end of a five-minute conversation, I’m exhausted.”

“Oh honey, I’m going to have you singing in no time,” she responded.

“No, no, I don’t sing. I’m here to learn to talk,” I corrected her.

“Can you do this?” she ignored me and lip trilled like she was a baby blowing a raspberry.

I laughed and did my best lip trill which sounded like a very weak, unripe raspberry.

“Now, lip trill We Three Kings with me,” she said and moved to the piano.

I had no idea what this had to do with speaking clearly. But I was a little bit scared of her and did what she said.

I lip-trilled “We” perfectly, but “Three Kings” came out sounding like a sputtering motor with no fuel.

“There is damage to your tongue and vocal chords, but it doesn’t sound permanent. Your enemy is tension. Your voice is obstructed because you are straining to be heard and using muscle tension to force the sounds,” she said.

“If I relax, can I go home?” I asked.

“Again,” she said and moved an octave higher on the keyboard.

I tried. But I squeaked and sputtered and could not make it through the first phrase. Even the cat seemed to give up on me. He stopped nuzzling my leg.

“Hear that? You are straining to get the right sound. I want you to find your voice, not someone else’s. Forget about what you think is a good voice,” she stopped playing the piano and said to me directly.

There was that message again. Ease over effort. Brave over perfect. My voice, not someone else’s. Remember this?: “The opposite of joy is not sadness, but perfectionism. When you are straining to do all parts of your life so well with the hope that you will rise above confusion and criticism, that’s what I call perfectionism. The world doesn’t need you to be perfect, it just needs you to find the courage to contribute to the common good.” I wrote that. And yet I need to learn it again and again, apparently. It’s especially easy for me to forget around the holidays when everyone else seems to decorate and cook and bake cookies with ease, and I am trying to be someone I am not.

“I don’t have enough air,” I protested.

“You have the same amount of air as a Met opera singer,” she said.

I took a full breath, and tried again. This time, I made it through the first verse on a single exhale.

“Girl, you have a BIG voice,” she smiled.

It was that flattery that landed me, a day later, at a public sing-a-long. And not just any sing-a-long, but a two and a half hour version of Handel’s Messiah. I was not raised in a religious or musical family. I knew nothing about the Messiah.

When I told my friend Christine, she said, “Most of us sing Jingle bells and Silent Night and call it a day. You have one voice lesson and sign up for the Messiah?”

We started at two in the afternoon. The church was packed with believers and non-believers, lovers of the Messiah, and others, like me, who thought Why not? The minute I sat down in the balcony of the church with its vaulted ceilings and listened to the eighty-person choir and thirty-person orchestra perform the overture, I knew I had made a big mistake. The soloists were holding notes for six, seven, eight bars and I couldn’t even hold the two-hundred-page vocal score; it was too heavy. I passed it to my friend Teresa who was raised Catholic and knew exactly how to hold that thing. She also knew when to stand, when to sit down, when to be silent, and when to sing.

The program let us know that there would be 53 songs, divided by a 20-minute intermission. The sun was shining high in the sky when we arrived. By the time we left, it was so dark out, I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face.

Teresa held the score and danced and sang her way through the first three songs. I tried to sing with the altos, but then the sopranos and tenors came in and I couldn’t hear the altos anymore. So then I just tried to sing whatever part I could hear. I squeaked high, I bottomed out low. I ran out of air singing the single word, “Rejoice!” My neighbors in the pew, a family with three young girls, gave me smiles full of pity. They knew every word and sang along beautifully. Except their little sister, who rolled around in the pew and threw her shoes on the ground. I gave up and sat down next to her. I mumbled something about being tired. She responded by patting my hand. Then she steamrolled over her mother’s lap to her father. I read the program.

The story behind this sing-a-along is worth telling; Handel wrote the Messiah in 1741 as a gift to the orphans of Dublin. Since then, it has been shared as a gift to the world. In our Colorado town, this event started thirty-four years ago by an air-and-space engineer. He was not a musician or a singer. In fact, he had no musical training, but he loved the Messiah. He pulled together a choir and an orchestra and then invited the public to sing along with them. He said in the program that it wasn’t enough to give a concert; he wanted to co-create the piece with an audience of willing voices.

My friend who plays second violin gave me my ticket. At intermission, he admitted that the first years of performances were rough.

“How do I bring you in?” the engineer-turned-conductor asked the string section.

“You count to three and we’ll come in on four,” they suggested. For years the engineer tried something, face-planted, got back up, asked for help, and kept going. Tonight was his 101th Messiah sing-a-long. If he could be so brave as to learn to be a conductor before thousands of people, I could lend my voice for a few hours.

So I tried to sing. I didn’t care what part; I even joined in with the baritones when I felt like it. I actually made some pretty decent sounds that weren’t like a duck dying. When I was lost, I hummed and looked at the beautiful light coming through the stained glass windows. I thought of the orphans Handel wrote this for over two hundred years ago, and how many voices have sung these notes. Then I noticed that if I only listened to one part, the tenors, say, it sounded quite average. What made it sound so good was the layering of all the parts and voices, as if what mattered was our diversity, not our ability to sing. The music wasn’t perfect, but it was something I could wrap both my arms around and love.

When it was finally time to sing “Hallelujah!” I could feel the audience gearing up to sing loudly. I wasn’t sure I would have enough volume. I thought I might feel small, or left out. But I remembered the voice coach telling me in her office, “Take a full breath and think easy does it. If it feels full of effort, you’re doing it wrong. Think joy. Think yes!” I stood up tall and inhaled deeply. Then I heard loud sounds coming out of me. I was shocked by how much volume and fullness came from my vocal chords. I felt like celebrating. Which is exactly what we were doing–all of our separate voices joining together into one triumphant, joyful sound.

Love,

Susie

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*****

by Susie Rinehart

How to Cure Nightmares

At three a.m, our ten-year-old daughter Hazel came into our room. I couldn’t see her in the dark, but I could hear her short, shallow breathing and her shaking voice.

“Mama, I can’t sleep. I had a really bad dream,” she said. Hazel was born with a huge imagination. It is a blessing and a curse. She can visualize forests where butterflies bind together to protect the woods. She can also picture bad men with bazookas blasting through our door. I opened my eyes. Hazel stood next to the bed in her monkey footsie pajamas that she has worn so much that her feet stick out the bottom. She looked smaller than her ten years. And although she is beyond the stage of being afraid of the dark, she still has nightmares. It’s also fair to say that a lot has been going on in her life lately.

“Can I sleep with you and Papa?” She begged.

Saying yes means that we have to make room for her, but also for her blanket, her giant stuffed- animal squid, and her brown bear. I normally try to corral them all back to her bed, and coax her to sing herself back to sleep. But that takes energy I just didn’t have.

“Hazel, you’re safe,” I said, not moving from our bed.

“But I can’t make the bad thoughts go away,” she sniffled. I knew what she meant. I often wake up, sweating, worrying about the future, unable to make bad thoughts go away.

“Nightmares make us feel powerless, paralyzed. But that doesn’t mean you are,” I said.

“But I don’t know what to do,” she said. She had me there. When I am spinning in worst-case-scenarios, I am too dizzy in darkness to imagine a good outcome. I forget that I am strong; I forget that difficult times challenge me to be better, to tap into my resiliency and the strength of my friends.

“Climb in. Tell me about your nightmare,” I gave in.

“There was a murderer. You were up ahead on the sidewalk.”

“Oh hon. It’s not real,” I said, hugging her tight.

“I couldn’t get to you to tell you that the bad guy was the one you would least expect. Then he took out a knife and tried to cut off my hand,” She said breathlessly.

“Hazel, when you’re asleep, you can’t do anything. But when you are awake, you are immensely capable. Remember? You walk to and from school on your own. You make up songs to stop bullying. You wouldn’t ever let someone cut off your hand.”

“But I can’t stop thinking about it,” she said.

I wanted to help our daughter. But I desperately wanted to sleep. Then again, I had a pink squid with bulging eyeballs in my face and a girl with bad breath breathing on me. I couldn’t sleep. I remembered something I had read by sociologist Martha Beck. She said, “We’re most creative when we are relaxed and happy. Conversely, we can direct our minds into this state of calm by undertaking a creative task.”

“Hazel, let’s make something,” I said and got out of bed.

“Now?”

We dragged the whole gang of comfort blankets and stuffies into the living room and pulled out the butterfly mobile Hazel had been making for days from a craft kit.

I thought about this crazy world we live in. Then I thought about butterflies and imagination and if making something could genuinely redirect our troubled minds to quiet, calm waters. I don’t know. It’s not the only solution, but it felt like a cure to disempowerment and paralysis.

Hazel and I folded and glued pink and purple butterflies outlined in gold glitter. I couldn’t hold my head up; I kept leaning against the couch, half-asleep. But it felt good to make something together. Hazel’s breathing slowed and deepened. Her shoulders relaxed. She added golden jewels to the butterfly bodies and wings.

Eventually, we crawled back in bed. She immediately fell asleep. I lay awake, but felt calm. In my mind, I re-wrote the ending to Hazel’s nightmare to include butterflies binding together to protect her, until I fell asleep.

*****

by Susie Rinehart

Tumor Can’t Take My Voice

Last week I learned I have a tumor at the base of my skull that is slowly taking over my brain stem. “First, your tongue will go numb. Then you’ll lose your voice,” said my doctor in the same matter-of-fact tone that he might have said, “First your appetizer will arrive. Then you’ll get your salad.”

At 45 years old, I was, up until this moment, medically “boring.” No health or genetic history of any kind. Previous conditions: none. Previous surgeries: wisdom teeth removal. I ran ultramarathons and often podiumed in my age group. The news was a shock. I stared at the screen with the black and white images of my skull and tried to make sense of this white growth, shaped like storm clouds, pushing into the dark spaces around my tongue and vocal chords.

“How does your voice feel now?” My doctor asked, “Are you able to use it whenever you want?” I said yes, but the question hung there for a moment.

Usually, when the topic of “Finding Your Voice” is mentioned, it’s about permission, but I feel lucky to have been born into a time and place where I feel free to speak up and speak out. But that doesn’t mean I have known how to find my voice and use it to author my life. The idea that I might permanently lose the ability to speak made me acutely aware of how little I genuinely used my voice on a daily basis.

Take the other morning as an example. I woke up feeling raw and scared by this new diagnosis. My husband was making himself breakfast. Instead of saying how I felt, I used my voice to say, “Should you really be having two fried eggs for breakfast again?” Then a neighbor asked how I was feeling, and because I didn’t want to upset her, I said, “I’m fine.” Later at work, colleagues asked me how a project was going. What I really wanted was their support, but because I didn’t want them to feel burdened, I opened my mouth to ask for help and closed it again. Then when I went home in the evening and felt helpless to manage my children’s screen time, I used my voice to scream at them and make them cry.

I was raised to be nice, to avoid conflict, to keep the peace. For people outside the house, I am calm and kind, generous and positive. I use my voice to say what I think others want to hear. Then later, at home, the volcano inside me erupts as resentment or rage and then my children and I suffer the consequences of my reluctance to use my true voice all day long. There is nothing peace-making about avoiding saying things that might be uncomfortable. There are only the consequences: strained relationships and a lost, unused voice, maybe forever.

The voice I want to find in me and in you is the one that sings, the one that moans, the one that trembles and cries and howls and roars—a voice that is primal and real– one that will make me soar and others stop in their tracks and listen. It is not the voice that hedges or hesitates, judges or gets jealous. The voice I want to find is the one that has the passion of that angry voice when pushed to the edge, but without the helplessness. Can you imagine if that voice was tamed, or if we exercised its muscles more often in small ways? It would come out as song.

We are born with a voice that is powerful. Then one day we are teased or ignored or shamed for saying how we feel, and suddenly our voice makes us feel unsafe. Maybe finding our voice requires retracing our steps and locating where we last remember using it. Then we can begin again to express ourselves, however awkwardly.

I have a memory like a snapshot of when I was twelve and the girls in my cabin at summer camp made a list of our names and the expression we could most often be heard saying. Mine was, “Stop it! It’s NOT funny!” When I saw what they had written, I was horrified. Now I knew that they saw me as a whiny, defensive, irascible wimp. Never mind that saying, “It’s not funny” might have been a perfectly legitimate way of standing up for myself. It didn’t matter because I wanted to be seen as fun and easy to be around. I wanted to be loved and included, and so I began artfully saying anything, or nothing at all, to earn that kind of belonging.

Another memory: at fifteen, I liked to write poetry. Then a boy I liked scribbled in the margins of one of my poems, “If there is an original thought in here somewhere, I can’t find it.” I ripped up the poems and threw them away.

Moments like these, layered like weights on a scale, tipped me off balance. I stopped using my voice to express myself and instead used it to say what I thought others wanted to hear. In the process, I lost my voice. Now, finding my voice feels like listening to the sound of a hawk’s wings high above me. Or rather concentrating on something small like the wings of a bee or a butterfly.

While sitting in the doctor’s office, I had a disturbing thought. Finding my voice was no longer just a phrase from empowered women’s literature, but a matter of life or death. What if this tumor moved into the place on my vocal chords because the area seemed available or abandoned? The thought frightened me, then gave me an idea. Now, using my voice might be as effective as flipping on a light switch and letting the tumor know, “Sorry. No Vacancy: This space is occupied and home to a powerful, wild voice that cannot be silenced.

As you can imagine, I am willing to try anything to heal. I left the doctor’s office determined to try an experiment; I would use my voice to say what I felt and knock this hobo tumor right out of my brain-stem railcar.

The next thing that happened was that some friends invited me out to a movie. I didn’t want to go, but I didn’t want to stay home alone that night either. I also thought it would hurt their feelings if I said no. So I went. (Old habits die hard.) Well, the movie that was labeled a comedy was grim; the whole thing was filmed in dark green and brown. It played the same violin lines of music over and over. People died senseless, graphic deaths. No one smiled. I sat there in pain, but to get up and walk out of the theater felt strangely not obvious. It felt like I had to stay, because that is just what one does. But with the courage of my new experiment, I leaned over to my friend and said, “I’m going to leave now.” Then when people on screen started kicking dogs to death and blinding themselves with steak knives, I crawled over my friends and left the theater.

I went for a walk and watched the sunset over the mountains. I had a strange sense of exhilaration, so different than the dread I felt in the dark theater. I had walked out. I would never have done that before—it would have felt weak or just rude. But the idea that I could, and that I did, felt like freedom. And you know what? Another woman sitting behind me walked out right after I did. I wonder how many of us were sitting in that theater, waiting for it to get better, and not doing anything.

It shouldn’t have to take a diagnosis of a massive tumor to recognize that there is nothing benign about not expressing ourselves. The question I am living with now isn’t, “When will I lose my voice?” But rather, “When did I let it go?” When did I ignore it so much that it walked away, opening the door for something ominous to move in?

Maybe someday soon I will use my voice to end violence and inequality or save lives in a big way. But beginning small feels like a form of deep listening and discovery. Now I check in with myself moment to moment. How do I feel right now? What do I really want to say or create with this, my only voice?

Then I close my eyes and imagine that every time I open my mouth to express myself fully, the force of my truth rips the tumor storm clouds off my vocal chords, and blows them out of my mouth. I keep my eyes closed and start to sing, feeling these tiny tumor clouds rolling like tumbleweed down a dusty, dirt road, far, far away.

*****

by Susie Rinehart

What a Bad Day Looks Like

Tuesday at Mass General hospital in Boston was supposed to be a long day, but an easy one. All I had to do was have pictures taken of how things looked inside my skull and neck with a CT scan and an MRI, nothing I hadn’t done at least several times before. In fact, the night before when I struggled to get a good night’s sleep I thought, “It’s Ok, I can nap inside the machines.”

Instead, I ended up half-naked on my hands and knees in the streets of Boston, violently throwing up every last grain of my steel-cut oats breakfast while my body blocked the entrance to the hospital parking garage. How did I get there?

That day, Dr. Liebsch, our radiation specialist at Mass General, wanted the most detailed images possible of my head and neck in order to create a radiation plan for me. Proton-Beam radiation is a powerful and effective means of zapping a tumor without damaging surrounding tissue. To get an accurate photo-map of where the tumor is and where the healthy tissue lives, they needed to inject color contrast into my spinal fluid and let it move to the top of my neck before sending me into the CT scan and MRI machines. Dr Liebsch explained that I would need to lie on a table tilted slightly toward my head and that I might experience a headache for up to three days afterwards.

Dr. Liebsch has silver hair but looks younger than his 60 some years. He is not very tall and has a soft, round face. He explains complex issues in a thick German accent with a voice just above a whisper as he calmly waves away concerns with long fingers and manicured nails. But looks are deceptive; Dr. Liebsch is tough, strict, and fiercely dedicated to getting the details right. He once took 45 minutes to explain how he wanted my short medical history organized on paper. Another day, he spent 2 hours crafting a fiberglass mask of my face and neck to hold my head in exactly the same position every time I had images taken or received radiation. We liked his fastidiousness; it was a good quality trait in someone who is in charge of radiating your skull.

On Tuesday, we arrived in time for me to change into a hospital gown and go straight to the room where they were going to inject the contrast fluid. Maybe it was Dr. Liebsch’s accent, but in all of his instructions, I missed the part about the new guy (a resident doctor) doing the spinal tap on me. I also missed the part about how they needed to strap my ankles into leather buckles so I wouldn’t slip off the table when they turned me upside down to let the contrast do its magic. The “magic” gave me a raging headache, made worse because I was lying on my stomach and had to really concentrate to breathe fully. Finally they straightened me out, rolled me onto a stretcher, and pushed me into an elevator and down several hallways to another room where I promptly threw up several times from the headache pain. Throwing up is never fun, but throwing up with a recent neck fusion is a whole new kind of painful. This was no one’s fault; I was having a rare, unexpected, bad reaction to the contrast that was not dangerous, just annoying.

“You ok?” Dr. Liebsch asked.

I gave the thumbs up.

“Good,” he said, “Now you must lie on the floor and roll around to mix the contrast up.” I waited to see if he was joking and he only gave me his hand to help me off the table. I handed the nurse my motion sickness bag and slowly lay down on the tile floor. Then I rolled back and forth with all the grace of someone in a neck brace who has just thrown up several times and now discovers that she is on fire. When they said I could stop, I crawled back onto the table and lay flat on my back. Then they pressed the fiberglass mask tightly over my face and neck before sliding me into the machine. Somehow, I did not throw up.

When the scan was over, I met Kurt in the waiting room where he pointed out that my hospital gown only had one working tie at the neck and the rest was wide open to the world. Meanwhile, the fire alarm was going off in the building, but no one seemed to pay any attention. We left anyway as we had some time to kill before the next series of pictures. Outside, the fresh air felt cool on my face and I instantly felt better. Until suddenly, I didn’t. The next thing Kurt and I knew, I was buckled over in my useless gown, throwing up knives, or so it felt. There wasn’t anything wrong, it was just a bad reaction, but the freshness of my scars from the surgery and the immovability of my neck from the fusion made everything hurt more. I kept thinking, this is as tough as labor. Then the puke started coming out my nose and I couldn’t breathe. No, I thought, this is way worse than labor. It helped to cry. Kurt rubbed my back and tried to steer traffic around us while I puked and cried, puked and cried.

It got better after that. A nurse grabbed a wheelchair and put me in it and wheeled me back to Dr. Liebsch’s office. He immediately gave me an IV with an anti-nausea medication and had me lie down to make the headache stop. He was determined to complete the series of pictures and somehow he knew I could do it. But the MRI machine we were scheduled to use was off-site, so he whisked me into a cab, rolled down the window, and I stuck my head out like a dog as we zoomed along the Charles river and I tried to relax and watch the sailboats and rowing hulls, runners, and trees.

I threw up again into a biohazard bin when we arrived, but somehow felt good enough after that to let them strap that mask back over my nose and mouth and slide me into the MRI machine, this time for 45 minutes. Before going in, the tech handed me a button to push in case of an emergency. But my doctor who was focused on getting all of the images we both knew we needed said to me, “But don’t push it.”

Inside the MRI machine, I watched movies in my head, memories of family vacations on a northern lake or a Mexican beach and when those ran out, I went through a slide show of every relative and friend, pausing on each one’s smile for a three seconds. It worked to distract me from the deafening digital knocking and bell sounds that the machine makes; it also took my mind off the urge to use the button that I was not supposed to use. I knew that if I panicked and pushed it, we would need to start over. However bad I felt now I knew I would feel worse doing this again for another 45 minutes.

Finally, it was all over. We made it back to our hotel without another incident. When I walked into the lobby, an older African American bell hop gave me a big smile. I was still in my ridiculous hospital gown and wearing my neck brace so I wasn’t really in the mood to be seen, but he seemed genuinely happy to see me.

“My name is Thomas. In Jamaica, where I come from, we like to make people happy. May I sing you a song?”

“Sure,” I said.

And right there, in the old Holiday Inn lobby, Thomas started singing to me.

“Rise up this mornin’

Smiled with the risin’ sun,

Three little birds

Pitched by my doorstep,

“Singin’ sweet songs

Of melodies pure and true

Saying’, (this is my message to you),

Singing’ don’t worry ’bout a thing

‘Cause every little thing gonna be alright”

Then we all sang together,

“’Cause every little thing gonna be alright”

I smiled for the first time that afternoon because I believed it. Thomas noticed the smile.

“See, I make you happy!” he laughed.

“Thank you,” I said. And I meant it.

*****

Afterword:

We flew back to Colorado the next day and made it all the way home before the headache slammed me again and I was back in bed and hugging the toilet for the next three days, until the contrast dye was completely out of my system. It was a freak reaction that is over now and I feel weak but getting stronger. What amazes me is how I had a reprieve during the flight; what a gift. It could have been much worse.

by Susie Rinehart

Your Faces

Do you know what I thought about when I woke up in the Intensive Care Unit after 34+ hours of brain surgery?

Nothing really, but it’s what I saw that astounded me. For two days and two nights in the ICU, I saw nothing but the faces of people I loved on every wall, on every surface, in each fold of fabric. I saw my mother’s face in the stream of light coming through the door, the smile of a former student in the white sheet tucked over my arms, the flowing hair of a friend in the curtains, kisses blown to me from nieces and nephews from the ceiling tiles.

Of course I’ve heard of the way your life flashes before your eyes at the end, but this was not what I had imagined–there were no places, no events, no memories, no flashes of anything. The faces were like floating candles on a raft, carrying me safely to shore over a deep lake. And of course, there is the explanation that I was heavily medicated; I could label these images hallucinations and call it a day. But these faces were so clear and so specific to everyone I had ever met that I can’t dismiss them as such, so easily.

The day after my surgery, some of the finest neurosurgeons at Harvard and Mass General, Brigham Women’s Hospital and Dana Farber Cancer Center gathered together to review my case. They saw the images of the tumor in my skull before and after. They wanted to know how it was possible to remove so much foreign mass when it was tangled around the brainstem and almost every major nerve and artery. The surgeons asked about the neurological consequences of the operation. Their assumption was that there must have been some damage.

Can the patient breathe on her own? Yes.

Can she see? Hear? Think? Yes.

Can she walk? Yes.

This morning, my friend sits at the foot of my bed as I recover, reading to me from Facebook and my website the many comments I had not seen from the days around my surgery. “I was your student in 2006. I want you to know that I am holding you in light,” “I knew you at summer camp in 1985. I am praying for you,” “Your friends out west are imagining the tumor leaving you easily.” Tears filled my eyes as I understood exactly why I had seen an uninterrupted stream of faces when I awoke from surgery.

When the music of my inhales and exhales threatened to fade away to nothing and I felt the last page of the book of my life between my thumb and forefinger, I saw your faces. I saw the constellation of all of you who had carried me toward safety with your thoughts and prayers, lit candles, and ceremonies. You had a hand in this outcome. Do you feel the immensity of that?

I don’t pretend to understand the world. In fact, I am partial to its mysteries. I prefer to look about in wonder, to bow down in humility, and to kneel down in gratitude.

by Susie Rinehart

In A Dark Time the Eye Begins to See

So begins a poem by Theodore Roethke (pr. Ret-ke) that I used to teach. In a simple classroom on a farm in Vermont, we sat around a large maple table, reading the lines out loud together. We did this on the anniversary of 9-11. We pulled out the poem again when one of my students was paralyzed in a bike accident, and again when a faculty member’s brother died. It was a tradition born in the belief that poetry heals; it universalizes the human condition and gives specific language to feelings of sorrow that we share.

I’m thinking about this poem again because it is a dark time in America and across the ocean right now. Horrible shootings. Senseless, un-repairable bombings and violence. Politicians screaming offensive remarks, clouding the air with hatred. A people divided and afraid.

I know the purity of pure despair
My shadow pinned against a sweating wall—

I went for a run early this morning and a police car rolled up next to me in the dawn-dim light and I felt afraid. What was he going to do to me? I slowed down and let the car pass. A few minutes later, a young man was walking towards me. I felt afraid. Did he have a gun? I crossed the street and picked up my pace. Then I heard a deafening boom from somewhere off to my right. It was likely just a truck backfiring at a construction site, but I jumped. Both feet came off the sidewalk. I’m clearly on edge.

Plus, in my situation now, knowing that I have an extensive tumor threatening my brain stem and my ability to breathe, I can go to a dark place really fast. And I do. What if I don’t make it through the night? How will my daughter, who sleeps with me when she has nightmares, handle waking up next to her un-breathing mother? See, I told you I can go to a dark place, fast.

That place among the rocks, is it a cave,
Or winding path? The edge is what I have.

The thing is, I need to go to those dark places as part of the process. It doesn’t help to push those thoughts away – they just keep on coming back, knocking louder. So I am practicing sitting here in the dark, paying attention. It’s like walking in a forest at night without a flashlight and slowly letting my eyes adjust to the dark.

I also need to remember lessons learned from natural history. A deer, when it senses the presence of a mountain lion, jumps and runs away. Adrenaline pumping through her veins, she can move fast and far in just fifteen minutes. But then she stops running and stands still. She listens, and slowly relaxes. She lets her nervous system process the adrenaline and let it go. She stands there, licking the dew off the grass blades far from her fight/flight center where she was living just moments before. She recovers fully so that if the lion approaches again, she will be able to escape.

But in these dark times, we are living in our fear centers all the time. Our bodies can’t tell that there is no lion and that this is not, in fact, a case of life and death. We feel threatened, unsafe, out of control. And so our oldest protective fight/flight nervous system kicks in. The result is that we are trying to make decisions, parent, and live from the core of a nervous system that is only designed to help us for fifteen minutes, to immediately escape danger.

So what do we do? Step back and gain perspective. It’s been dark before. It will be dark again. We can still move forward in the dark. Ask the mothers of the middle ages. Ask the widows of the civil war. Ask the children of internment camps. Ask the young people of the late 1960s when we were caught in an endless stream of assassinations and war in Vietnam. Is this, now, really, the darkest time?

We have a tendency to imagine that the Golden Age is behind us, those days when people climbed hilltops to sit under trees and write poetry. Times were simpler, which must mean better than now. But is that really true?

Dark, dark my light.
A fallen man, I climb out of my fear.

This morning, I sit up in bed and close my eyes, letting waves of fear and emotion about my upcoming surgeries pass through me. I breathe and relax. What do I notice in the dark? I see that I have lived in fear for too long. I also see that I have counted on others to lead: politicians, lawmakers, and people I have deemed less-busy than me.

If it was clear before, it is vivid now. We need to step up. When my surgeries are behind me, I need to rearrange my days and devote at least 10% of my time to directly advocating for non-violence, for wild places, for gender equality, for gun-control laws. We’re sitting in the dark in our living rooms with the doors locked, when we should be sitting on our representatives’ doorsteps, saying we’re here to help you push peace forward.

And one is One, free in the tearing wind.

With my students, we used to linger on this confusing last line of Roethke’s poem, trying to make sense of it. This morning, I see the lowercase, singular “one” as me sitting in the dark, facing my personal fears. And I see the capitalized “One” as all of us. The way forward for me to heal is through the universal. We are all in pain and instead of just spinning in my own fears, I may as well show up and help others out. Maybe in the process of being in the dark together, we heal, and set each other free.
***

by Susie Rinehart

Terrorists or Neurosurgeons?

“You know what I think when I see a muslim man in the airport?” my husband Kurt asked me as we waited in the security line at the Phoenix airport. “What?” I looked around nervously, wondering where this might be going.

“Neurosurgeon,” Kurt said, and smiled.

Kurt and I have spent the last two weeks in airports and in doctors offices across the country. When I first received my diagnosis of a skull-base tumor, I called the only neurosurgeon I knew, Dr. Moustapha Abou-Samra, in California. He is an immigrant, the father of two of my former students, and a man I hadn’t spoken with in over 20 years. He was on vacation and yet he returned my call immediately. He took the time to walk us through the difficult journey ahead.

Three days ago we were in Boston because the leading world expert on skull-base tumors, Dr. Ossama Al-Mefty, an immigrant from Syria, had seen my MRI scans. He personally spent two hours with us during his dinner time, just to help us understand my diagnosis. Today we were in Phoenix, sitting for five hours in a packed waiting room at the Barrow Neurological Institute. The surgeon, Dr. Spetzler, an immigrant from Germany, had made an extra effort to see me; I would be one of 108 patients his team of surgeons would meet that day.

In the waiting room in Phoenix, there were large screen TVs on every wall, broadcasting the Republican National Convention and its theme, “Make America Safe Again.” The waiting room was quiet and tense. There was an older couple next to me. The man wore a US VET ball cap. He told me he was there for a check-up after a near-fatal aneurism. Dr. Spetzler had saved his life. It was hard to hear him when he spoke because the convention goers on the TVs were so ravenously enthusiastic about their candidate that the room seemed to erupt into Bieber-Fever shrieking every few minutes.

“We need a total and complete shutdown of muslims entering the United States,” Donald Trump has declared, and as I watched the convention, the speakers who seemed to get the loudest shrieks of approval were the ones who talked about the need to strengthen our borders. Our country’s problems are clearly the fault of those nasty, no-good immigrants.

Are these the same immigrants that are known for their expertise in solving complex neurosurgical problems? The ones who spend every waking minute dedicated to saving the lives of Americans?

We chose our surgeon, Dr. Ossama Al-Mefty, because of his unparalleled skill and experience, not to mention his complete devotion to caring for his patients, regardless of their background or religion. But hey, shut those borders down! We don’t need any more smart, dedicated people in this country.

*****

by Susie Rinehart

Brave Over Perfect

I come from a long line of strong women. My mother’s mother taught me how to hold a shovel, my father’s mother taught me how to hold a cigarette. People called me tough, independent, and smart. It was a great childhood, and for that I am truly grateful, but I was ultimately clueless when it came to making big decisions about relationships, love, work, and spirit. No one taught me how to be curious about my emotions (Why bother?) or how to take care of myself (Don’t be so selfish!). There were certain kinds of brave that I was good at: I could run up mountains and dive head first into giant waves. But there were other kinds of brave I needed to develop: how to stay true to myself in a crowd, how to face conflict, and how to keep trying when it doesn’t turn out perfectly.
The opposite of joy is not sadness, but perfectionism. When I am straining to do all parts of my life well with the hope that I will rise above confusion and criticism, that’s what I call perfectionism. The world doesn’t need us to be perfect, it just needs us to find the courage to contribute to the common good.
These strong women raised me to believe that I could be anything I wanted to be. But the way I internalized that message was that I must be great. And there were many times that I didn’t feel capable of being great and so I gave up. All I ever saw were the outer, perfect performances of women in my life: my mother, in a graduation gown, receiving her second advanced degree, and her friends’ immaculate homes and flawless appearances. I never heard about their inner conflict, so that when I encountered doubt or my own imperfections as the leader of a school, as the director of a company, and as a mother, I thought that the confusion I experienced was uniquely mine. I assumed everyone else knew exactly what she or he was doing.
You may feel that way sometimes, like you are not good enough, or brave enough, or that there is something wrong with you because you can’t keep up with the world’s expectations. There is nothing wrong with you. Just ask people of all ages for their stories. Then listen to the constellations of suffering and beauty that make up who we are.
In teaching adolescents for over twenty years, I have had the privilege of listening to their biggest questions and concerns. Here’s how one girl I shall call Annie sums up her experience moving through the maze of defining herself. “We are like glass lanterns. There is a bottom: we are lesser than—and there is this top: we better be perfect—and then there is this hollow middle with an elusive wick, waiting for us to strike the match.” Maybe you too were conditioned to be good at striving for the top, reaching for external goals and illusory perfection, but does it leave you feeling anxious and hollow?
As a teacher, I heard this question a lot: “Is this right?” “Is this answer on the test right?” “Am I doing this essay right?” I understood my students’ desire; I had spent plenty of late nights in school erasing what I had written and starting over in order to get it right. But now the challenge is: How do we cultivate enough courage to truly banish the idea that we have to get it right before we begin?
The urgency to take on this challenge hit me one day, far away from home. I was traveling with students in Nepal on a cultural exchange. At 12,000 feet above sea level, we made our way along a narrow path that wound through cultivated gardens and modest homes. We came around a corner and there was a young mother with three of her children walking towards us, carrying large bundles of firewood on their backs. When we met in the path, Jackie, the student in front of our small group, put her palms together and bowed low to the woman to greet her. “Is this right?” She called out to me, at the back of the line, while the young mother bowed back at her. Jackie never saw the woman’s wide, affirming smile, because she was looking back at me, seeking approval. She also never saw the children rushing to embrace her.
It’s not Jackie’s fault. She was used to a system that rewarded her for playing by the rules. It made sense that she was trying to make a good impression, but the moment made me wonder, “What are we missing in our effort to get it right all the time?” Real connection. Abundant joy. Balance. Creativity. Plus the chance to play more, to tinker and try things, to roll up our sleeves and be apart of the teams that are innovating to solve big problems with no single, right answer.
The world cannot wait while we sit alone at our desks, erasing and starting over, trying to get it perfect. The world needs us to iterate and to expand the limits of what is possible if we want to make change. The only thing getting in the way is that we get stuck trying to find the single, right way. We don’t know who we are and what we want sometimes, and how to move forward. The more clear and grounded we can get about ourselves, the more impact we can make. But we have to be willing to do the work of discovering who we are.
Here’s where I want to take your hand in mine and say, “Let’s go find a different way together.” Let’s practice being brave over perfect on a daily basis until we strike the match and follow the light, full of joy.
***