Using Mindfulness Coping Skills for Terminal Illness

When you live with a chronic life-threatening, life-limiting illness, you have to pick up some mindfulness coping skills. You have to figure out how to mentally deal with the fact that your days on earth are numbered and you will face debilitating pain on an hourly basis. If you don’t have mindfulness coping skills for that you will spend the rest of your life miserable.

Body Scanning: One of my Mindfulness Coping Skills

Earlier in the day, Jeff had pointed out to me that I didn’t look good. I did a quick body scan. Body scanning is one of my mindfulness coping skills. It’s something I learned to do from some of the YouTube meditation videos I watched on mindfulness. When you do a body scan, you close your eyes, start checking in with the top of your head and see if anything hurts, itches, stings, is making you dizzy, or anything like that.

Then you move down the rest of your body, going first to your neck, then each shoulder, then the top of your back…

I realized my hands and face were tingling, a symptom I now immediately recognize as low potassium. As soon as I called up Dr. Rose and told him my suspicions he ordered stat labs. He knew by now that I was usually right about these kinds of things.

Mindfulness Coping Skills Can’t Help Critically Low Blood Pressure

Several minutes earlier Jen had measured my blood pressure. It was 66/51. Even Jeff knew that was bad, even he was getting antsy.

“We are going to do everything we can to get her back to baseline,” Jen said to Jeff

She slipped a pulse ox on my finger and pulled out a stethoscope to listen to my heart and lungs.

I looked down at the reading on the pulse ox.  My oxygen was only 89%.  Jen looked at the number too and wrote it down.

“What do those numbers mean?  Is she going to be all right?  Jeff asked.

“Well, her oxygen level should be between 95 and 100%, so I’m turning up her oxygen from 3 Liters to 4 Liters until the ambulance can get here. Her breath sounds are diminished but there is no crackling. There is something very wrong with her, but we will draw her blood while we wait for the ambulance to get here, it will be processed stat and then we’ll know exactly what to do to help her feel better,” Jen assured Jeff.

Another Hospital Stay

“It’s my potassium, it’s critically low,” I told Jeff and Jen.  “It happens all the time and this is exactly what it feels like. All I need is a whole bunch of potassium and probably some magnesium infused into me.” Another one of my coping skills was to look at the situation and break it down to its most simple form. That way it didn’t seem as scary

“I’m going to call for the ambulance now and then quickly draw a metabolic panel including potassium and magnesium. Dr. Rose has it ordered stat so that once you get to the hospital they should have the results,” Jen said to me.

Sure enough, my potassium was critically low, and my magnesium needed to be replaced too. I stayed in the hospital for three days while the doctors straightened out my electrolytes. Dr. Rose played around with my maintenance IV fluids while I was there.

Use Mindfulness Coping Skills or Be Miserable

“I don’t know how you handle this so well,” he told me again.

“I don’t have any other option,” I explained.  “Stuff happens, I am in the end stages of a severe chronic illness. I just keep using my mindfulness coping skills. I can choose to look at all the negatives about my whole situation., or I can look at everything I do have in my life. that I appreciate. That’s what I can focus on. Then I can make a conscious choice to be happy.  I have the best man in the world as my life partner.  He is the most loving supportive person I have ever met.  As long as we’re together I can deal with anything,” I told Dr. Rose

Being Grateful For What I Do Have

The more I used my mindfulness coping skills and thought about being grateful, the more things I was thankful for popped up in my head. I never get tired of Jeff’s company. We never run out of things to talk about, but we are also okay sitting together in silence. Sometimes we just sat together drinking each other in without feeling awkward.  He loves me unconditionally, and I love him unconditionally.  My mom now understands my illnesses and comes up every single week to visit me and bring me things like homemade vegetable broth, Gatorade, and Iced teas that I could drink and then immediately drain out my G tube. There’s my caregiver Melody who knows my care backward and forwards. She always makes sure everything is done right.  She is more than someone who works for me.  She’s like an aunt I never had. 

When Lauren Played Hooky

Lauren was another story. No matter how much I used my mindfulness coping skills, I couldn’t get around the way she kept calling out. First, it was to go stay with her boyfriend in New York City.  Or she would come in, but she would be super late. Then she would make up ten different excuses about why she was so late.  Sometimes she would say that she could come, but she would have to bring her son too.  Jeff immediately said no to this and that he was never letting that monster kid come back over.  Some of the time Melody could cover her shifts, but not all the time. That meant Jeff had to cover for her and would grumble about it the whole time.

I tried to teach Jeff some of my mindfulness coping skills, and teach him how to look at each person as if they are trying their hardest, and accept them for how they were, but he was just too angry.

Some Days…

Sometimes I have days where I can be up in my wheelchair for hours and do a lot of normal, everyday activities even though I have a chronic illness that will never go away.  There are days that I produce a lot of good quality writing.  I am still making money off royalties from the book I published in 2008.

I Am Chronically Alive

Yes, I do have a degenerative illness. It’s true that I can’t eat anything by mouth. Tolerating tube feeds is not going well. Everyone can tell that I have lost a lot of weight recently that I didn’t have to lose. No one can ignore the fact that I am in terrible pain and have debilitating nausea every day.  My balance and mobility are getting worse and worse. I am almost at the point where I can’t bear any weight during transfers.

But I don’t focus on all that stuff. I am chronically ill, but I am also chronically alive.

My mindfulness coping skills help me remember that, I close my eyes and think about all the beautiful things in my life. While I am doing something I really enjoy doing I pay attention to every little detail of it so that it’s even more enjoyable and lasts longer and I get the most pleasure out of it.

One of my really helpful mindfulness coping skills is that every day I make a list of three things I am going to do that day that give me enjoyment and then when I do those activities I pay extra close attention to every aspect of them that I particularly enjoy so I get more happiness from each part and each wonderful moment last longer, then I just minimize the bad moments by tossing them aside in my brain and changing my focus anytime my brain tries to go toward them.

“I really wish all of my patients were like you,” Dr. Rose kept telling me.  “You’re a force to be reckoned with.