Youthful Indiscretions...they catch up

I grew up with a fair amount of physical pain and suffering, and knowledge that my body is fragile and perishable.  So, when “adults” talked about how “kids these days” think they’re invincible or that they’re immortal, I sided with the “adults.”  I knew that I was weak and that I may succumb to ill health or any other physical vulnerabilities.  I had developed TMJ early on, probably starting with the major head injury brought upon myself at age 7, and lived with migraines, locked jaws and other incredible pain.  I knew I shouldn't rest the weight of my head on my chin in my hands...it would exacerbate the problems.  I knew I could break.
I scoffed at the silly indiscretions of my youthful peers, those who engaged in risky behaviors, putting their physical and emotional and mental health on the line.  I knew that acting without forethought would only hurt them in the long run and they’ll regret not making better choices and taking better care of themselves.  I thought I was being responsible and had sufficient perspective, and was lauded for making relatively wise choices as a young person. 

That was then.  Now, nearly two months into my 32^nd year of life, I realize that I too have had some youthful indiscretions, as cautious as I had been, though the level of caution taken fluctuated and lessened with increasing age.  Either way, I’m guilty of not eating regular meals, of partaking in some alcoholic beverages, partaking in “risky” activities (sky diving, ATV/four-wheeling in a desert without a helmet or safety gear, etc), eating food that’s probably past its prime and/or was prepared in an unsanitary environment, and the list goes on…oh, especially not sleeping.  I used to hold on to the thought, “I’ll sleep when I’m dead,” and wished for a sweet moment of death so that I may sleep.  All were unhealthy and silly indiscretions of a mind clouded by youthful optimism. 

I now have screwed with my body enough that I get low-blood sugar headaches if I forget to eat regularly, I have scoliosis, chronic post-tibular tendonitis and bursitis that flares up once in a while.  I am non-athletic and a cloudy mind from the lack of a regular sleep schedule.  I chose a career that robs me of rest and peace of mind, which I find to be emotionally draining and physically exhausting.  I can no longer look at young people and scoff at their indiscretions, because, even though I thought I knew and appreciated my mortality and my physical fragility, I knew far less and appreciated far less than I thought I had.  I now know that I am intricately connected to my family and my social groups, I cannot healthfully function in a vacuum, as I once thought myself capable of doing should the need arise.  I am even more fragile and subject to the physical and mental challenges of this world.  I realize youth is, indeed, fleeting.

Wow I feel old.

[On the disappointments of the job front: It looks like I won't be able to go on the family vacation to Jeju Island that was planned and plane tickets purchased over 4 months ago.  I will spend another traditional family vacation alone and depressed.  And now they're wavering on the home leave the partner had suggested I take in October after the hearing.  There's no winning here, there's no life, there's no consideration of your humanity or need for rest, there's no upholding of their words.  It's all functions of their changing whims.]

April showers...blah blah blah...spring flowers

April showers are supposed to be indicative of the coming of spring and the life that seems to spring up all around, usually.  In Seoul, it means that the toxins in the atmosphere get carried down to the earth and your head, potentially causing hair loss/hair folicle damage/baldness.  I don't know if any of it's true, but the Koreans really are afraid of the rain making them bald, which, I must add, was NOT something I was warned about as a 4 yr old when I lived here before.  You know what?  Their paranoia is getting to me.  I already noticed that I have a bit of hair loss at the top of my head, which may not be noticeable to most since I was like a lion with a full mane of slippery (fine?) hair.  I attribute my hair loss to stress but I am starting to fear the environmental factors too...what if the rumors are true?  Another foreigner of Korean descent warned me, better safe than go bald at 40.

So I feel like in Korea, instead of every cloud having a silver lining, it's the other way around.  Each silver lining has a large, grey cloud of toxic rain looming behind it.  Such a weird thought.

6TH ANNIVERSARY, Residual Swelling
I also noticed that today might be the 6th anniversary of my orthognathic surgery (Lefort 1 and BSSO).  Despite the pain, and the octogenarian diet I kept up with for a year, if I had to go back 8 yrs, I'd make the same decision to go through with the painstaking process.  I had teeth removed and braces put in to arrange my remaining teeth just so for about 2 yrs before I went under the bone saw.  Then I sat in the ICU looking like an angry blowfish and half dead and suctioning globs of blood from my mouth/throat and continuously jabbing my morphine pump.
I still get swelling on the lower left side of my face/jaw daily, but at least I can take a bit of a sandwich and actually cut the food into bite-sized pieces.  Actually, if I get adequate rest, live a balanced life, and kinda deal with the normal amounts of stress, then the swelling doesn't happen as much or goes away completely.
It's just that I made a...um...ill-conceived? romanticized? stupid?...decision to go to law school, take the bar, and be a lawyer.  When I was a prosecutor things weren't that terrible; I mean, I wanted to win the trials and keep the streets a little safer, dole out punishment for crimes, etc.  Then I made a really dumb, overly-ambitious decision to take a job abroad, in a large firm with big egos and lots of annoying, constant stress and inhumane work hours.  And it appears I am permanently swollen on the lower left side of my face.  Most ppl don't notice it much w/out careful examination, just that things aren't 100% symmetrical.  I used to think it had something to do with which side I slept on, but I now think it's fully just the lack of sleep, overdose of stress and a poorly scheduled life.

One of my best friends from law school married an orthognathic surgeon (resident, still), and he told me that I had my operation in the nick of time, essentially.  You see, I had lost feeling in the lower left quadrant of my maxillo-facial system after the operation, and about 6 months later, the feeling started to slowly return, at first like just a numbness, but now I think I have regenerated nerves.  I might have just gotten used to it and learned how to cope and pretend I have full feeling, who knows.  I just touched the left side of my chin and the right side of my chin and they def. feel different, so maybe I've been fantastic at fooling myself.  But then again, some mornings/days, I am numb in that swollen side and the feeling returns or I get used to it as the day progresses.
Anyhow, my friend's new husband (not that she had an old husband and traded him in or anything, it's the only husband she's had, as far as I know) told me that once nerve damage happens during maxillofacial surgery after the age of 25, the nerves generally don't grow back.  But since I had mine before I turned 25, I had nerve regeneration.  So, if you're considering having a doctor chop up your jaw and realign your bite, do it btwn the ages of 18-25.  Just plan your life accordingly, knowing that it might be, say, 4 years after locating a great surgeon, or being referred to one and having your initial consultation before your actual surgery.

MY TIMELINE
I think I met w/ my surgeon for the first time my junior year in college (b/c I refused to get braces in college!), and he removed my wisdom teeth the November after I graduated from undergrad, removed my premolars a few months after that and made me wait until the bone healed fully before sending me off to the orthodontist.  The orthodontist slapped on my metal grills in April the year after I graduated from undergrad...and my teeth did a very slow waltz into their assigned spots for a year and a half, during which time crowding in my lower bite was relieved, and I guess my upper teeth were lined up to eventually match my lower teeth.
I was finally cleared for surgery in the fall of 2007, scheduled for the operation in November of 2007, and insurance played the passive-aggressive biatch game on me.  Then more rescheduling, lots of tears and consultations about possibly doing the operation at the county hospital instead of at the university/teaching hospital where my surgeon was the head of the department, and visits to the head honcho in charge of insurance at my job, some threatening calls to the insurance company to move to a different insurance provider (thanks to the head honcho lady's compassion for my state) ensued.  On top of that, letters from my doctor indicating how this is a necessary procedure to elevate my quality of life to the basic level (ability to eat in public, chew my food instead of swallowing bits and letting my innards deal with under-masticated food, thus increasing stress to my internal organs and reducing nutrient consumption, the pain of the debilitating migraines and tension headaches caused by this misalignment, the progression of damage to my temporomandibular joint, etc,) were sent, and I cried and felt like I wasted the past 3 years of my life preparing for this and it wouldn't happen b/c I couldn't afford it out of pocket, and paid the higher cost of PPO plan for nothing, etc.
Then finally, I was approved for insurance coverage and scheduled into the operating room, did all my blood work, got an in-depth physical to make sure I would survive the surgery, signed all the release forms, then they needed the operating room for something more emergent, like a heart transplant or some other life-saving surgery, so I got rescheduled.  The 30 days passed after my check up and blood work, I got rescheduled and had to get another physical and more blood work to verify that I am still healthy enough to likely survive the operation.
Then it happened.  I was told a few days before the surgery that it'll take btwn 7 and 8 hours, my doctor had practiced a couple times on the plaster casts they took of my teeth/jaws.  The morning of the surgery, I was told they're not doing the genioplasty anymore b/c they didn't think it was absolutely necessary to remedy the migraines/tension headaches caused by stress on the facial muscles, so the surgery would be 6 hours.  I woke up 10 hours later, at around 4 pm or 5 pm in the afternoon, and looked at the clock in the operating room and decided I lost my ability to add/subtract/count, b/c no matter how much counting I did, it had been more than 6 hours since I was conscious that morning (assuming I hadn't been under for over 24 hours).  Then I passed out again.  When I came to, apparently about 40 minutes later, I was wheeled to my ICU bed...and was so proud of myself for remembering the word "nauseous."  I felt like throwing up and it's very, very bad to throw up when your whole head and upper torso is swollen from the trauma of bone-breaking surgery...thankfully, I was so swollen they couldn't wire my jaw shut like they had planned.  So I uttered the only word I could manage, "nauseous," and the orderlies told me they'll get the nurse to get me something for the nausea as soon as I got to my ICU bed.
At the ICU, it was bad.  They hooked me up to a morphine pump which I needed to deal w/ the pain as the anesthesia wore off, I was immobile.  My jaw, my head and upper torso was so swollen I couldn't physically shut my jaw for a month.  It was awful.  I had a morphine pump in my left hand that reset every 10 minutes and delivered 1 mg of morphine per pump...I pumped it endlessly b/c I couldn't figure out if 10 minutes had passed and I was in so much pain.  I had a suction wand in my right hand to suction the blood clumps out of my mouth/throat so I don't choke on my own blood.  My right hip hurt for some reason.  I had a catheter.  I found both my inner forearms bruised a dark blue...had an artery line in the left wrist that hurt.  I had monitors taped to my chest and the heart monitor clipped to my left index finger.  The heart monitor hurt and pinched so I unclipped it...and a nurse came running over to scold me about keeping it on.  I guess they thought I had flat-lined. They didn't let me even have a sip of water.  I wasn't allowed to eat or drink anything in case they needed to reoperate on me.
Turned out that I wasn't insane and stupid when I woke up, my surgery was 10 hours, not 6 hours as planned.  My surgeon explained to me the next day that when they had finished, I was bleeding so profusely from one side that he made the decision in the operating room to reoperate immediately instead of waking me up, and observing me to see if the bleeding would stop.  I was so grateful he did that.  So it took longer than anticipated.  He never told me which side they needed to open back up to take care of the bleeding, but I suspect it's the lower left.  And that's why I lost feeling/had nerve damage there, why I needed to have the plate removed from there a year after the operation and the residual swelling 6 years later.
And if I could go back 10 yrs to decide whether I'd go through it all, I'd make the same decision, knowing the pain, the heartache and the expense of it all.  Totally worth it to be able to eat my food like a human being.

Now...this moving to Korea to work in a large law firm in the Korean corporate culture...if I knew a year ago, I'm sure I'd have made a different decision.

doubting my sanity

..I'm not in a good place.  Today, I had the blood drain from my head, from my arms and down my legs and soak away out of my body, leaving me shaking with shock and feeling betrayed.  Betrayed by this machine called the computer, that I trust to keep all of my documents, my work product, the things that happen to define in an undeniably significant portion who I am a member of society.
I thought I had lost a document I've been working on for the past week, a draft of a submission due next Friday, mere 8 days from now.  I couldn't find it anywhere.  I had distinct memories of when I had worked on it, last night...no, I mean early this morning, before I switched gears to draft a document that needs to be turned in tomorrow.  I felt insane, like I had fallen completely off my rocker and rolled a mile away before I realized that I wasn't right in my head.  I had distinct memories of changing the title of the document from "...OUTLINE..." to "...draft."  I even remembered working on it before I attended a call with an expert on the other side of the planet, at 11:30 pm, and then coming back to it after the call.  If it weren't for the tale-tell signs that the call occurred and I hadn't imagined or dreamed it all, in the form of my hand-written notes during the call, I would have just accepted it as fact that I hadn't actually done any work but somehow imagined about 10 hours worth of drafting work, and perhaps another 10 hours of client meetings and 10 hours of reviewing documents in 3 different languages (1 which I'm fluent in, 1 which I can read with some difficulty and 1 which I have no clue how to decipher).  Thank God for hand-written notes, visible evidence to keep me grounded...even as my head floats away into the clouds of self doubt and utter confusion.

So, why did I react so viscerally, shaking, crying and confused and lost and exasperated and devastated by the loss of a document that wasn't even close to completion and even further from perfection?  B/c I'm not in a good place.  I lost my cool, my hold on reality, the assurance that I am not imagining things, in reaction to something that happens every once in a while to everyone who relies on technology.  Why?  Perhaps b/c I'm weak-minded; b/c I'm actually teetering on the edge of sanity and I am vaguely aware of my instability; b/c I haven't eaten a meal all day for fear of upsetting my sensitive stomach; b/c I've been consuming more caffeinated liquids than water or any other fluids in the past weeks; maybe b/c I haven't had a single day away from work in the past few weeks; b/c I haven't been feeling well but was "too busy" to actually rest, diagnose what's wrong or recover; b/c I haven't been able to sleep from stress, nervousness, physical discomforts; perhaps b/c I haven't exercised or moved or stretched my body for months; or b/c my "bosses" keep increasing in ranks and numbers, pushing down piles and mountains of insurmountable work but no one seems to want to do the grunt work.
Or maybe all those are just excuses for a disorganized, uncontrolled, directionless life.  Do I have work-life balance?  Don't even know what that means anymore.  I feel like any other job would be a paid vacation to me at this point.

But the bottom line is that something is not well.  I'm not being fed and nurtured as a whole human being, and the imbalance is breaking my poor body and threatening my addling mind.  The author of Ecclesiastes, the famed King Solomon of ancient Israel, notes that it's "meaningless!  meaningless!"  that it's all a "chasing after the wind."  That imagery holds a crazy person whose last few screws have twisted out of their grooves and have long ago fallen out as the person endeavored to catch the wind.  Is that person me?  Why am I here?  What am I doing?  What keeps me here and what am I supposed to learn from this phase of my life?  That life, indeed, is meaningless?  That everything I do is a chasing after the winds?  Wisdom is meaningless, fame is meaningless, prestige is meaningless, the acceptance and approval of others is meaningless, a great work product is meaningless?  Perhaps, maybe so...I just don't know.  But I know one thing.  "all is not well...something is rotten in the state of Denmark."  (Hamlet, Act I, Scenes 2 and 4)