Acceptance & adapting…

I gave a quick update on Monday’s blog post that I don’t have pulmonary fibrosis. I was relieved and happy when Dr. Stewart told me the good news. 

My pulmonologist at Dartmouth Hitchcock was young, intelligent, and easy to talk to and understand. 

He sketched out drawings to explain what I do have, interstitial lung disease. It’s not a quickly progressing disease, and there are two medications when it does progress. 

I received the best answer I could have gotten that day. It sucks that I have lung disease, but it’s something that won’t kill me in 3-5 years.

On Wednesday, I had some breathing problems which I knew would affect me at dance class. 

I had to come up with a plan and how I could adapt how I could dance. Breathing doesn’t affect how I teach, which I love.

I spoke with Kathleen about how we can adapt to my new condition. We came up with a variety of things we can do. 

Next, we discussed how we can adapt our classes for our students. Kathleen made my dancing adaptation easy.

Kathleen danced to the fast songs during my tribal workout. Emily is away and usually does the fast songs for me.

Our level one class constantly evolves with who we have in class and the students’ levels. Wednesday night’s class was clumsy, and I wasn’t happy with how it went.

I wasn’t teaching my students’ technique; I only was watching them dance, making a few suggestions. (This had nothing to do with my breathing issues.)

I let everyone know how I felt about what we tried. I thought out loud, and with the students’ help, we devised a new plan that should work.

During the next class with our core group of dancers, I told them about my condition and what it meant. 

These women and I have all bared our souls to one another. I tried to be positive when I spoke to them and shared what Kathleen and I came up with. (Kathleen had to leave early that night.)

I also shared on a deeper level why it’s been hard for me to teach so many different levels of students at once. Again, we came up with more ideas to give all the students what they need since everyone progresses at different times.

I was good with everything during class but began crying while driving home. I was sobbing in my truck before I got home. 

I thought I accepted having lung disease because I came up with ways to adapt. It turns out it isn’t that easy. 

I came into the house still weepy. When Marty asked me how class went, I started crying again—ugly crying. I told him I was having trouble processing everything and how hard it was. This was life-changing shit going on. 

We talked about it briefly, then decided to eat our dinner at 9 pm. I had a glass of wine while I ate and calmed down. 

This week has felt long and tiring. I’ve been busy doing things with little time to sit down and feel sorry for myself. I am not sure what I’ve been doing since today I realized our house was a fucking disaster; well, for me, anyway, I am a neat freak.

Many people have much worse things going on health-wise, but I feel like this was another sucker punch on top of dealing with other severe health and mental shit.

It’s Friday afternoon, and I am still in processing mode. Marty can brush things off and move on with life; I can not. He was “in one ear and out the other” poster child when dealing with things growing up and still now.

Why did dancing make me realize I have not accepted my current situation? Dancing was the thing that saved me from taking my own life and my boys’ lives 20 years ago, so now losing a big chunk of it makes me sad. I am grieving.

I can’t just fucking move on and adapt as quickly as people think I should. I still have to accept this significant change in my life which will never get better than it is today.

It took me a long to accept getting older, but this isn’t about age; it’s about the inability to do things you love.

I don’t really have a happy ending for this blog post, except at least it wasn’t fibrosis which would have been life-ending. I haven’t felt like writing this week, but today I needed to.

It’s not a “Happy Friday” kind of Friday for me this week, but I’ll “get over it” and snap out of it with time. Thanks for listening and sharing with me your comments which mean a lot, and are super supportive. 💜