I Was Just Fine

My husband, Tim, and I had been looking forward to this vacation for months. We were going on a ten-day cruise with our best friends, Katie and Rick, people we've known and loved for years. All four of us have busy lives filled with careers, family, responsibilities, children, grandchildren, and all the things that make getting four adults in the same place at the same time feel like a small miracle.

If you've never been on a cruise, there's a wonderful rhythm to it: rest and play, play and rest. Eat something delicious. Sit by the water. Explore a new port. Come back exhausted. Eat again. Repeat. It was exactly what we needed—time to focus on friendship, fun, and absolutely nothing productive.

Of course, none of us is particularly good at sitting still for too long. We're curious, energetic people, so we'd carefully planned excursions at nearly every port before we left. We packed our walking shoes and were ready to explore.

There was only one problem. I didn't feel very good.

It started with nausea and a little dizziness. I tend to get motion sickness, so this made perfect sense to me. I put on one of those handy motion-sickness patches and waited for the nausea to disappear. Except it didn't. Every time I ate, I seemed to feel worse.

My next thought was, Oh no. Please don't let this be a stomach bug. Ten days on a ship was not exactly where I wanted to spend quality time with a stomach virus. Then I remembered I'd had an iron infusion the day before we left. I have anemia and periodically need infusions, so maybe that was causing it. Motion sickness, iron infusion, stomach bug, I had plenty of explanations.

What I didn't have was any intention of letting it interfere with our vacation.

I didn't want to be the sick one. I didn't want Katie and Rick worrying about me or Tim feeling like he needed to stay behind because I wasn't feeling well. Most of all, I didn't want to become the person everyone had to change plans for. So I did what I had become very good at doing: I explained it away.

If I lay down for a while, I seemed to feel better. I was going to the bathroom much more than usual, which certainly wasn't fun, but I decided I could manage that too. I would eat less, drink plenty of water, rest when I needed to, and keep going.

And I did. The excursions became harder, but I didn't let anyone know how hard. Tim suspected I wasn't feeling well, but I assured him it was probably motion sickness or the iron infusion. I was fine.

We walked miles. We explored. We played the cruise games. We danced. And because we happened to be cruising over Halloween, the four of us had even brought costumes. We went as characters from Gilligan's Island. If you have no idea what Gilligan's Island is, you'll have to look it up. Some of us were entertained before streaming existed.

I was Ginger, the movie star. Red wig, sequined dress, the whole thing. I looked fabulous. I also felt absolutely awful.

While we were waiting to hear the winners of the costume contest, I became so dizzy I thought I might fall over. A sweet woman noticed something was wrong and brought me some water. Naturally, I found another explanation. It had to be that ridiculous wig. I was burning up. How did people wear those things anyway?

I hurried to the restroom, pulled off the wig, splashed cold water on my face, and sat for a minute. When I came back out, I smiled and made some joke about flushing the wig. Everybody laughed. I sat there watching my husband and our friends laugh, enjoy their cocktails, and have exactly the kind of evening we'd all been looking forward to. And I smiled too.

I was fine.

By the time we flew home, pretending had become much more difficult. Walking through the airport toward baggage claim, I had to stop every few yards and find somewhere to sit. Katie looked at me and said, “Pam, you are so pale. Like a ghost.”

I admitted that I wasn't sure what was wrong, but I already had the solution. I'd get home, rest, and be fine.

Our daughter picked us up from the airport, and by then I was so dizzy I had to sit down on the sidewalk while we waited. She took one look at me and said, “Mom, you're so pale.”

Again, I told her, “I just need to get home and rest.”

So that's what I did. I went home and lay down.

Sometime the next morning, I ran to the bathroom and became terribly sick. When I stood up, I was so dizzy that I couldn't walk. I had to crawl back toward the bed because I was afraid I would fall. I somehow managed to pull myself onto it and yelled for Tim.

That's the last thing I remember.

When I opened my eyes again, I was in an ambulance. And apparently even being barely conscious wasn't enough to stop me from being me, because one of my first thoughts was, Why did Tim call an ambulance? We could have driven to the hospital. Do you know how expensive ambulances are?

Then everything went black again.

The next thing I remember is waking up on a hospital gurney. Doctors were talking to Tim about blood. I heard something about a transfusion. Wait. What? Then blackness again.

When I woke later, I felt a little better. Tim and our son were sitting nearby, and I finally managed to ask what was happening. Tim explained that my hemoglobin was 4 and that I needed four units of blood.

I still didn't understand. “Why am I losing blood?”

At that point, we didn't know.

Eventually, the doctors discovered the answer. I had a bleeding ulcer. Apparently, I had been losing blood throughout our cruise.

Suddenly I pictured the entire trip differently. I had been losing blood while walking miles through ports, while dancing, while playing cruise games, while dressed like Ginger in a red wig and sequined dress, and while smiling at everyone I loved and assuring them that I was fine.

I wasn't fine. I was dangerously ill.

After the procedure and during the long recovery that followed, I kept thinking about that cruise. What stayed with me wasn't simply that I hadn't known I had a bleeding ulcer. How would I have known that? What struck me was how quickly I had found an explanation for every signal my body gave me.

The nausea was motion sickness. Feeling worse after eating might have been a stomach bug. The dizziness could have been the iron infusion. Needing to lie down made sense because we'd been walking so much. Nearly falling over at the Halloween party was obviously that ridiculous Ginger wig. Barely being able to walk through the airport was because we'd had a long travel day. Even when my friend and then my daughter told me how frighteningly pale I looked, I had an answer ready: I just needed some rest.

Every explanation allowed me to do the thing I already wanted to do—keep going.

And underneath all of those explanations was something deeper than stubbornness. I didn't want to inconvenience anyone. I didn't want our friends changing their plans because of me. I didn't want Tim worrying about me. I didn't want to become the problem everyone else had to solve. I wanted the people I loved to have the wonderful vacation we'd planned, so I kept making myself okay for everyone else even when I wasn't.

Eventually, my body made the decision for me.

For a while after that, everyone and everything I had been so worried about taking care of simply had to continue without me. And guess what? They did. Nobody needed me to smile when I felt awful. Nobody needed me to finish the excursion. Nobody needed Ginger. They needed Pam to say, “Something isn't right. I need to pay attention.”

A Note from PJ

I don't tell this story because I think every tired day, dizzy spell, or upset stomach means something terrible is happening. My situation was a medical emergency, and severe, persistent, or worsening physical symptoms deserve medical attention. I tell it because the experience showed me something about myself that went far beyond a bleeding ulcer.

I had become very good at pushing through, putting everyone else first, explaining away what I felt, and saying, “I'm fine.” Those weren't decisions I suddenly made on that cruise. They were patterns I had practiced for years.

That's why this story feels like the right one to share as we begin Week 1: AWAKENING of The Delay the Binge Journey. This week isn't about diagnosing ourselves or immediately trying to fix everything. It's about becoming curious enough to notice what we may have stopped noticing.

What feels different lately? What has become harder than it used to be? What are you repeatedly explaining away? What pattern has become so familiar that you don't even recognize it as a pattern anymore? And perhaps the biggest question of all: What have you been calling “normal” simply because you've lived with it for so long?

My experience was an extreme and very physical example, but it taught me something I haven't forgotten. Sometimes strength isn't pushing through. Sometimes strength is noticing. Sometimes the bravest thing we can say isn't, “I've got this.” It's simply, “Something isn't right. I need to pay attention.”

You can't change what you haven't seen. And sometimes the first thing we need to see is how quickly we've learned to say I'm fine even when we're not.

Your past does not define you; it prepares you.

PJ