Catching up with Megan Mioduski
It's been over four years since my last blog post with MilspoFAN, and it seems like a lifetime ago.
My spouse is an airborne linguist, and just before the lockdowns, he was organizing language refreshers for the linguists in his squadron. But then the WHO reported these strange pneumonia cases from Wuhan. People around us started to get sick, and the Chinese linguists began worrying. Unfortunately, I already had a compromised immune system, and in March 2020, I got sick. Real sick. Couldn't-get-out-of-bed sick. Couldn't-walk-from-my-bed-to-the-bathroom-without-getting-winded sick. Was-stuck-in-bed-for-over-three-months sick. It was the worst I'd ever felt. I still feel the effects today, which we now know as long Covid.
At the time, I thought I was "just weak," and it was somehow my fault that I could not make sourdough bread or clean up my whole house.
It has been hard enough being an artist and a military spouse, but then you add a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic to the mix, and it feels as though it's impossible to find my way back to my art.
The result of getting sick is that I have been "should-ing" all over myself for the last three years. I "should" be creating more. I "should" have more energy. My house "should" be neater.
The should-ing intensified in August 2020. I was in the bathroom, and when I stood up, I felt something massive fall out of me. I screamed because it was the size of a Coke bottle, and I was worried that I had a miscarriage, even though there was no chance I was pregnant (my husband had a vasectomy the year prior). Rushing to the door, my husband asked if I was ok. I automatically yelled, "Don't come in!" He stood outside momentarily and tried to help me calm down through the door. Then I realized that keeping him out was silly because I didn't need to go through this in isolation. So I said, "Ok, I think you need to see this. Just be kind." He came in, saw what was on the floor, and realized the scope of what I was dealing with. My OBGYN performed an ultrasound and found my uterus seven times the standard size, and the thing that fell out of me was a massive blood clot. What happened after that was a blur. I only had a month to deal with the fact that I would need to have a hysterectomy. Since my surgery occurred in September 2020, loved ones weren't allowed to be in the recovery room with you, and I was facing a choice to remove the thing that made me a woman. One more bit of identity that I was losing.
When the surgeon opened me up, she realized I had stage 4 endometriosis, the most severe form of the disease. Stage 4 means that there are multiple points of adhesion. Adhesion is when endometrial cells grow outside the uterus and create scar tissue each month as the uterus tries to shed them. After a while, one affected area can attach to another affected area, and thus adhesion occurs. My surgeon had to call in an oncologist, and they stopped counting after 40 points of adhesion. My surgery went two hours longer than anticipated, the surgeon accidentally nicked my bladder, and they extended my hospital stay due to a much-needed blood transfusion. It was a harrowing experience, but I was fortunate enough to have my service dog Symon to keep me sane. For years doctors told me that the strange pains I was enduring were "all in my head." Come to find out that severe endometriosis was the root cause of most of it and had gone undiagnosed for 30 years.
During the months of recovery, I realized that my uterus was not the source of my femininity, just as I discovered four years ago that being a military spouse was not the source of my identity.
However, finding my way back to art has been a slog these last few years. There were few opportunities to act or direct during the lockdown. Plus, I had this tiny issue of struggling to breathe and going through a major surgery. So practicing my art, or any art for that matter, was nonexistent.
That is why I am now on a journey of rediscovery. I am learning how to mourn the artistic life that I thought I would have. Instead, I am embracing and discovering the life I'm capable of living now.
It's a tricky question to ask yourself at age 40: "What do I want to create?" I don't have the luxury of youth and naivety to catapult me into an area I don't know anything about. But I do want to create. I have to create. My body, mind, and soul crave my artistry. So I have to figure out how I will radically accept my circumstances, how I can radically accept that I can figure it out. And perhaps I can radically accept that I need to summon a bit of that youthful ignorance and "go for it!"
I started a YouTube channel just before I married but left it alone for over ten years. Recently, I've started to post on it again. I hope to document my journey through this current struggle and show that process. I'm constantly seeing creators' lives once they have it all figured out, so I hope to shed some light on that process. Through this channel, I hope to find a group of creative and like-minded people who want to share in their life and creativity. I would have loved to see someone open up during their struggle, so that is what I'm trying to create. Hopefully, I will be able to find my new normal through this process. In the meantime, I'll practice my radical acceptance one day at a time.
If any of you would like to say hello, you can find me on YouTube @RosemarkLife. I hope to see you there, but if not, I hope you are having a beautiful day wherever you are reading this!
