I am sitting in the Urgent Care Waiting Room. The last time I was there was Christmas Day, 3AM, with a staph-infected thumb from jabbing it with a sewing needle three days earlier. I don’t ‘do’ urgent care. But my ears are plugged and I get stabbing pains in them. The pain is radiating down my jaws and across the top of my head. It feels as if there’s a hole drilled right on top of my head. Yesterday my head hurt so badly I ended up holding it in my hands, rocking back and forth on the couch in the front room. Today I went to see Dr. Deb and get my sore neck and shoulders fixed. I can’t remember when they have hurt this badly.
It was an intense summer for everybody. My summer was fabulous but still stressful nonetheless, and these next two weeks are going to be very...busy, but then, but then it will be calm again. For a while. Until something else happens.
The doctor walks into the room and I’m glad it’s her. I saw her as I walked into the room. She had curly brown hair, cute Born shoes and looked remarkably un-doctorlike, in a good way. I decided to be honest with her, and after I recited my ‘symptoms’ (achey, hot and cold, nauseuous, sniffly) I told her I knew I wasn’t ‘sick’ but sometimes I just need to make sure. She checked my ears, had me open my mouth, and said, “Oh - that’s some bad TMJ you’ve got there. Are you stressed out?” Damn, I started crying. Again. The last time I did that was in Susan Mathison’s office when she did and said the exact thing to me a few months ago when I last thought I had an ear infection (I didn’t).
Is it one of my lessons this lifetime to learn how not to get stressed out, not to take responsibility for everybody and everything, to not take on too much, or do too much, or expect too much? Probably. But as I get older, I notice that my lessons are easier to see, anyway. Or should I say easier to FEEL? As I massage my jaw I remember my dear dear mother, who suffered from TMJ. I am like my mother in some ways, and I don’t know if she ever learned how not to let stress hurt her, or how not to take on too much junk, but today I am interested in looking at my tendency toward ‘too much’ and make a gentle gameplan to lighten up a little.
If I am feeling this, maybe you are feeling this. If you aren’t, congratulations. If you are, know that you are not alone. I make mistakes, I fall down, but I always get back up eventually. Maybe not always gracefully, but I do get back up. And maybe someday I’ll learn. Until then, I’m a work-in-progress for sure.