This year, my impromptu birthday celebrations in New York City included yellow roses, carrot cake from Two Little Red Hens in Manhattan, dinner at Ollie’s in the Upper West Side, another dinner at Freebird Chicken in downtown Brooklyn, great conversation with a dear friend, and a gift of my favorite rose body cream and face oil from that same friend.
My acceptance of all the surprises New York City offered fit into my new sense of welcoming all the possibilities, which on that trip also included a bout of painful hemorrhoids (an inherited condition my father and brothers also suffered from), which had been tormenting me for months and had now cost over $500 in prescription and over-the-counter medications I overdosed on to no relief. Still, I’ve learned that there is room for everything in life, especially in New York City, which flip flops between moments of heaven and hell--sometimes both simultaneously; this time, I witnessed a biker mowed down by a speeding car on Broadway and 110th Street, a cardinal at a park in Tudor City where the fancy Manhattan working crowd sat on benches eating their lunch on a clear spring day, a Wall Street broker’s beautiful smile at my enjoying the birdbath of two sparrows at that same park, and my ailing mother’s wishing me a Happy Birthday, which she had not remembered in years.
The week before my trip, I sat at my apartment in Maine bemoaning aging and mortality. I had recently suffered a bout of painful muscle spasms in my back for which I had to beg my doctor for Vicodin, a taboo painkiller that implies of an addiction I do not have when I request it, which is very rarely. When I told my friend about my recent bout with illnesses and ensuing depression about it, she welcomed me to getting older. But was it aging I was concerned about or a shift in my perspective? I had suffered from numerous medical conditions all my life: lactose intolerance, muscle spasms, hemorrhoids, sebaceous cysts, sinuses, endometriosis, hysterectomy, surgical menopause, anemia, insomnia, fatigue, infertility, arthritis, all conditions that sometime required treatment, medical intervention, or surgery.
My illnesses were old friends, but I never got too friendly with them instead running as wild and carefree as a healthy person through a marriage, divorce, single motherhood, and three jobs while dealing with overwhelming fatigue and pain, especially during the years of my bout with endometriosis. I also knew something about wanting my health back so bad I acted healthy already, speeding my recovery and learning to navigate between the worlds of being unwell and well, as if each stage in the process of sickness and recovery required occasional visits to their hell in order to appreciate health, to know when to surrender to illness, and to instinct when to fight back to that same illness.
When I was younger, I thought I was lucky to have numerous medical issues instead of one terminal one. What had changed my mindset? I was admitting I was more of a sick person than a healthy one?
My 86-year-old friend Sabine was my new hero. She did 45 minutes of exercise at the Y every day, including yoga, rowing, and biking, and she went to the gym to exercise regardless of the Maine weather. She was French, and her vitality was her stamp of agelessness which she practiced with joie d'vivre and talk of the Chinese art she painted every morning at 5:00 a.m., the memoir she was writing, and the trips she planned to visit family in Paris during the summer.
I decided before traveling to New York City for my birthday, that I would continue running alongside the streets with my current uncomfortable and hellish medical condition while rushing towards a heaven of health just around the corner because that was all I knew and because there could not be one without the other.
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