From Airstream dreams to ER scenes

This definitely wasn't in the travel brochures.

Oct 29, 2024

Howdy! If you’re new around here, welcome to Traipsing About, my newsletter about reclaiming creativity and ditching tired personal paradigms. No ChattyChat bots here—credit is mine for all drawings, photos, bad jokes, and typos.

Please forgive my absence—extenuating circumstances, as I’ll explain below.

This week on Chancing About, Edition #138:

A life curveball.
Staying in touch with friends
Traipsing Tidbits.

In case you missed it: Last time, I wrote about being Smokefugees and hitting the road up the coast for the summer in our Airstream.

Life sure can huck curveballs sometimes.

I’d rather write about Airstream travel or fall hikes in the mountains. Instead, let’s kick things off with me in an emergency room in Washington with heart rate leads glued to my chest.

Honestly, it’s not exactly how I pictured our summer trip concluding.

Last you heard from me, it was late August and Chelsea and I were bopping around the Olympic Peninsula. The plan: Three months in our Airstream during a smoke-dodging summer trip. Hikes, bike rides, beaches, sunsets…

After the Olympic Peninsula and a week in Bellingham, we headed east to the North Cascade mountains at the end of September. It’s one of my favorite places—Alps-esque mountains and fabulous fall colors, yes please, double serving please.

Our third night in the Cascades, I was lying in bed reading when nausea hit me, followed by strong pain in my chest, upper back and legs/arms. We were camped in the woods miiiiles from a hospital. After Googling and making calls to doctor friends, we decided it was time to cancel plans and get to an ER.

Turns out I’d had a reaction to the Novavax COVID booster shot from a few days earlier. My blood work showed that my heart muscle had minor damage, with cardiac enzymes in my bloodstream evidenced by people with full-on heart attacks.

I’d been nailed by a 1-in-a-million chance reaction to the vaccine. Even in those rare occasions, it usually affects young, athletic men in their teens, not old cantankerous 42 YOs like me.

Life curveball much? Silver lining: maybe this means I’m young at heart!

Amazing how fast things can pivot… (Scrambling up a mountain in Hurricane Ridge National Park.)

The cardiologist and studies we found online urged for complete cardiac rest…for 3-6 months. We canceled the final month of our travels and zoomed home to smoky Bend.

What followed was decidedly the most inactive month of my entire life. Since I was still experiencing chest pain and even walking made it worse, I just…hung out.

I know, I know: you’re worried about Chelsea living with Dakota the Under-Exercised Gremlin. Surely I’ve grown horns and spend my days balefully staring out the windows or spontaneously combusting, shards of my anxious self ricocheting around the house.

I won’t lie—I’ve had moments. Chest pain plus being locked inside with smoke seeping through the cracks of one’s house feeds anyone’s interior gremlin, I’d wager.

But mostly, I’m maintaining a surprisingly even keel. SO SO thankful that I cultivated non-athletic hobbies during recent years. If this had happened to me in 2019, Chelsea would be sweeping up Shards of Dakota.

A different mindset

As a friend who spent their career working with people with disabilities said,

“I learned from people I admired that one must focus on what one can do, not on what one cannot."

That’s exactly what I’m doing. I’m finally tackling a Beethoven sonata (or should I say it’s tackling me) and I started Spanish lessons. I’m reading a lot, playing chess, drawing by the river, cooking, and hanging with friends who stop by.

Thanks to all that, I’m not rumbling away in the corner like a boiler about to explode. Perhaps this would be an opportunity to eschew all activities and spend my days meditating, but I am simply not brave enough to try that!

What’s weird is that, other than occasional chest pain, I feel completely normal. There’s no cast on my leg or constant pain to remind me to slow down walking up the driveway. It’s a strange limbo.

Luckily, I have a 99% chance of full recovery. This likely isn’t a permanent life condition, merely a (rather sharp) speed bump in my journey. I just gotta take it easy this winter.

Must…take…it…easy.

In fact, last week I had an appointment with a cardiologist and they cleared me to start walking (110 heart rate or less, woot!). I won’t be skate skiing or mountain biking this winter, but hey, walking! It’s the small things.

So here I am

A friend asked me if I’ve had any WHY ME feelings about this (1 in a million! You’re so healthy!).

In my youth, perhaps I’d have reacted that way. But if there’s one thing I’ve seen in the past decade, it’s that ev.ery.one or someone close to them gets hit by random shocks like this. It’s part of life; if I fought this and screamed WHYYYY at the sky, it would just make it worse.

Instead, I’m trying to frame it as adaptability training. My life is fabulous in so many ways—what’s a few months without sweating on a bike? Getting older is all about reduction in the things we can do, so this is all just prepping for later.

Sitting by a lovely river and drawing ain’t too bad…

As Jung said, life really does begin at 40. Until then, you’re just doing research.

Another question I got was if this surprise made me want to knock out bucket list items—move to Italy, travel to Tasmania, bikepack in Japan?

Nope. The opposite is true.

As I lay awake in the ER listening to my roommate watching football at deafening volume, all I wanted to do was be close to the people I love. Friends, family, Chelsea.

I didn’t lust to bike up another mountain or wander around another pretty European town: I wanted to hug the people I care about or crack jokes in the midst of a conversation about life.

Maybe that’s a silver lining for speed bumps like this: they grab us by our heels, pull our heads out of the clouds and slam us back down on the ground, connecting us to the things that matter.

All I’ve gotta do is hold the Gremlin at bay and keep that in mind for the next few months.

Visits from my dad and Chelsea's bro/lady plus finally getting out for a real walk a few days ago.

How to stay in touch

Speaking of wanting to hug people, I loved this post by Semi-Rad about staying in touch with friends. I often send quotes, pictures, or some random internet thing to friends and I think he sums it up so well:

Sometimes it’s enough to let someone know you were thinking of them, if not in those exact words, but in the language of our times, in which a digital thing you found provides a small artifact proving the uniqueness of your relationship with another person, which is a pretty good thing to do with a few seconds of your day, all things considered.

Traipsing About Tidbits

Note: none of these links are ever affiliate links, just stuff I use, enjoy or admire.

Check out my second piano essay for The Crossed-Eye Pianist about effective practice strategies as an adult.
I continue to be a mix of amazed and terrified by AI and this short hallucinations video could definitely find a place in a weird nightmare.
This sculpture garden in Norway is so fabulously weird; some of the sculptures made me a bit uncomfortable, which means it's good art!
Lots of stressful stuff in the news (election, ahhh!), but this under-the-radar news about how solar is booming feels good: “Solar panels have suddenly gotten so cheap that they’re now appearing in massive numbers across much of the developing world.”

More low stress: A glorious evening on the Olympic Peninsula.

Here’s a quote to ponder

"As long as there is love, there will be grief. The grief of time passing, of life moving on half-finished, of empty spaces that were once bursting with the laughter and energy of people we loved.
As long as there is love there will be grief because grief is love's natural continuation. It shows up in the aisles of stores we once frequented, in the half-finished bottle of wine we pour out, in the whiff of cologne we get two years after they've been gone.
Grief is a giant neon sign, protruding through everything, pointing everywhere, broadcasting loudly, "Love was here." In the finer print, quietly, "Love still is."
Heidi Priebe