Listening For The Ocean

I am at the ocean. 
 
It’s been more than a year.
 
Two-and-a-half years ago, I go to the ocean with my new love. Already something seems to be wrong within my body –but I pass it off to a year of hard knocks. Breast cancer surgeries and radiation treatments, grad school study marathons, and my first sessions with clients as a brand-new therapist in practicum.
 
Eighteen months later, I am done with grad school and almost a thousand hours of client sessions. My youngest child graduates from high school. My oldest child navigates a sexist program at their university and a truly evil roommate situation and survives a complete physical breakdown resulting in pneumonia. I fly to California on a rescue mission, Strong Mama. My youngest child fledges to college in California. I graduate with my Masters in Counseling, finish the major renovation of the new house I will share with my beloved. I take and pass the National Counseling Exam and am at a standstill until I am licensed.
 
We go to the ocean. My love sits with me at the edge of the water and holds me as I realize this thing I have in my body isn’t just stress. 
 
Back in Austin, I begin work seeing clients as a post-graduate. Before my eyes, my body --once supple and strong—changes. Thickens. Sits awash in pain that I can’t seem to describe. I lose my decade-old daily yoga practice, pose by pose.
 
I do the round of doctors, including the rheumatologist who prescribes a drug that I have taken before that resulted in a 30-pound weight gain and the feeling of having had a lobotomy. She assures me it can’t have been the medicine. We enter into lockdown for the pandemic. My life shrinks to working from home –no live music, no walks around Town Lake, no dinner parties. At night, I sit on the porch, drinking first wine and then hard liquor because only that seems to dull the pain. 
 
My body continues to change, now the arthritis moves into my feet and hands. I can no longer walk with my love as he walks our dogs around the block. I gain 30 pounds which causes me more shame than is reasonable. I feel like I have had a lobotomy, but not only because I have brain fog. I honestly can’t feel much of anything, good OR bad. I wean off the medicine. I stop drinking.
 
Now, we are at the ocean. On the first day, I hobble down the beach with the support of my beloved. I am inconsolable as I do the chronology of this disease and contemplate that by next year, I may not be able to walk down the beach at all. I want to feel like I can come back from this; that I can launch a new effort and beat this thing and rise like a phoenix from the ashes. I have done this before, I reason. 
 
But this time I do not have hope. Something is eating me from the inside, slowly. It’s worse than breast cancer which was cut out of me and done with. This feels like the blight on the roses, it creeps forward, inch-by-inch, and leaves waste in its wake. I cannot hear what I should do nor what lesson I am to take from this journey.
 
I come to the ocean for it to whisper what I need to hear. 
 
I am listening.

(Please note: I don't need medical advice, but thank you for loving me.)