Fresh Spread Shit Grows the Best Flowers

Life is shit sometimes. 

Like really stinky, dairy cow factory-farmed, piled to the sky and fermenting in 90 degree weather, shit.

Believe me, that smell is not a good one, but, you do get used to it after awhile. The house I grew up in was less than 2 miles from a dairy cattle concentrated feed lot (or as I like to think, a bovine concentration camp). The smell of shit and dead and decomposing cows wafted in the air in the summer so thickly, sometimes I could taste it on my tongue. 

But, eventually, you get used to it. Kind of like you can get used to being abused by a loved one. Or you think McDonald's burgers actually taste good. Or how sleeping in a room that's barely above freezing isn't so bad (hey, all that brown fat, I earned it the old school way).

It's easy to become desensitized to the shit of life and you kind of just wallow in it like a pig that's never known a pasture. I've acclimated  to a lot of things during my years on this kind-of-fucked-up-but-also-wildly-beautiful planet.

 I thought joint pain was normal. I thought putting up with verbal abuse was a way to become mentally tough. I thought physically fighting men twice my size would make me stronger. I thought that punishing my body with infinite cardio, would make me immune to physical and mental pain (it didn't). I thought putting everyone else before myself would make people love me (it also didn't).

While the bad shit list could go on and on, there's no need for it. But there is one bad shit experience that tops the rest, and that story I think is what really defined this next phase of my life.

From a misdiagnoses of a respiratory infection, I was prescribed an inhaler and a round of antibiotics. Unbeknownst to me, I was allergic to Azithromycin , and the inhaler I prescribed was recalled a year later for adverse reactions. In the winter of 2022, these medicines in tandem almost sent me to the grave as I experienced anaphylactic shock during the worst snow storm of the season. While I teetered on the edge between life and death, a fire truck and two ambulances and a plow truck became stuck in the snow storm. Two hours after the initial call for help, a team of EMS responders was finally able to reach me on foot with a stretcher. During this experience I "survived" by box breathing while my body maintained a blood pressure of 190/100. Two nitro tabs later, and my blood pressure crashed out, and I blacked out.

After a 4 day hospital visit, I was discharged with no answers and told to rest. A few days later, I blacked out again, and my husband had to resuscitate me. Another visit to the hospital and I was told to rest again.

I have never been one to wait around for answers, so I dove into reading and discovered I most likely had acquired POTS. I began a slow reintegration into life by following the Levine Protocol (which is used to rehab astronauts returning from the International Space Station). Through concentrated effort and persistence, I went from being unable to walk more than 20 feet without getting out of breath, to being able to maintain a steady 130 beats per minute heart rate, on the stair master for nearly an hour. It did take almost 6 months of daily diligence, but I was able to find myself among the living again.

Recently I did  my obligatory Halloween visit to the cemetery by moonlight. During this visit I realized that I no longer fear death, nor am I motivated by it. When I've visited cemeteries in the past, I always left with a sense of urgency, as if the dead were warning me not to waste too much time. Even though the Grim Reaper doesn't like a moving target, I do think I've shaken hands with death enough that its grip isn't so firm on me anymore. While sometimes the more insidious Existential Dread visits, even it's hold on me has diminished.

While facing unfortunate circumstances is not something one should aspire to, I do feel that all the shit we go through can decay into a rich fertilizer to grow a better future. It may not be a perfect cyclicity, but it is one that I am learning to embrace. Because even outside of the metaphor, flowers really do grow better when you apply a little vermicompost. Our lives can be pretty awful at times, but if we take those moments and let them rot, we can use those lessons learned as a potent soul-amendment for our futures.