Tag Archive for: gut

Trusting your gut

/in /by

by: Joelle Charbonneau

I have a sick tot. Friday he was fine. Friday night he coughed himself awake until morning. By Saturday at noon he had a 102.0 temperature. Now, I’m not a worrier by nature. I know fevers can run high for kids. (Heck, I still spike a high temp when I get the sniffles.) I gave him some Ibuprofen and settled down with the kid on the rocking chair and watched The Wiggles as we waited for the medication to kick in. The meds didn’t put a dent in the fever. And I started to worry while feeling stupid for worrying. I mean, all my friends with kids were talking about some bug going around with high fevers. We just needed to wait it out.

Swapped out the Ibuprofen for Tylenol and prepared to watch the thermometer drop.

Nope.

For the next 48 hours we tried every trick in the book. Alternating the meds every couple hours. Cool baths. Wash cloths on the forehead. Nothing broke the fever. Yep, I was worried even when people told me it would probably be fine by morning. Most of the time I would have said the same thing. But this time something felt “off”. My gut told me something more was going on even when I finally got the fever to break last night before midnight.

This morning my mother went with me and the tot to the doctor. The kid’s fever was almost non-existent. He was perky and greeting everyone who walked into the doctor’s office with a cheerful smile and a happy dance. The kid looked fine. Minus the cough he sounded fine. The chest x-ray told us that he wasn’t fine. Diagnosis – pneumonia.

It’s a mild case. We have drugs and hopefully by the end of this week this experience will be behind us. However, I did realize that no matter how much I told myself I didn’t want to be the parent who freaks out at every snuffle, I have to trust my gut. In fact, trusting my gut is a lesson I need to remember both in parenting and as a writer.

This summer, I took a crack at writing a young adult novel. (For those keeping score, this is THE TESTING that will be published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt in Spring of 2013) I zipped along telling the story enjoying every minute of typing then came a moment where my gut told me I had done something wrong. I was at 85,000 words. Just a chapter away from THE END. And yet – I knew something was “off”. The character was in exactly the right place I needed her to be in to write that final chapter. I told myself to just forge ahead and wait to critique my work after had hit the final page.

But I couldn’t. I was stuck. My gut told me there was something wrong and that while my character was physically in the exact place I needed her to be, how she got there was more important than where she was. (Does that even make sense to anyone but me?) So I started scrolling back through the pages to where my gut told me I’d gone off the rails. I highlighted almost 8000 words and hit cut. I pasted those words in a separate file and started anew agonizing over the new pages for days. I had been so close to the end and then hit the square on Chutes and Ladders that sends you sliding back to where the finish line looks like it will take dozens of spins to get there.

The thing is – I was right to go back and start where I felt I’d gone astray. The new pages were very different. The heroine finished in the same place, but she was not the same person when she got there. I trusted my gut and the story was better for it.

Thankfully, I trusted my gut today in that same way and got the tot in to see the doctor. Hopefully, by the time you are reading this he’ll already be better for that decision.

Trust the Gut

/in /by

 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about instinct.  The kind of gut feeling that helps us with self-preservation.  The older I get, the more I’ve learned to trust my gut, even if someone else is telling me I’m wrong.  Because that little voice inside my head has proved right too many times to doubt it. 
When I was diagnosed with breast cancer back in late 2006, a mammogram had shown that a cyst my doctor felt was nothing.  I got a letter stating that I was fine.  “See you next year,” it said. If I hadn’t listened to my gut—and my body—in the weeks after and insisted on an ultrasound three months later, I hate to think where I’d be now. 
More recently, I went to my dermatologist for a pink spot on my upper chest.  I didn’t think much about it until it got dry-looking and bled a bit when I nicked it with my fingernail.  That spot ended up being early stage skin cancer.  There was a second pink spot, even tinier, but I had a bad feeling about it.  I asked my dermo to check that one out, too, before I went to the surgeon to have a procedure called Mohs to clear out all the cancerous cells.  She smiled and remarked that the second spot looked benign then she sent it off for biopsy.  I found out the morning of my outpatient surgery for Spot #1 that Spot #2 was also early stage skin cancer. 
“I’m glad I’m so paranoid,” I told people.  But, truly, I’m glad I’m so unafraid of looking stupid that I dare to speak up when my gut tells me something.
Not only did these experiences teach me to be pro-active when it comes to my health (as with so many things in life), but they reminded me to pay attention to my instincts.  Trusting those gut feelings can sometimes mean the difference between life or death.  I know it sounds dramatic, but it’s true. And I think so many of us have been trained to depend on others to tell us what’s what—doctors, lawyers, financial advisers, whomever—that we stop listening to ourselves. Or maybe we never start.
That’s bad news if you’re a writer, particularly one who writes from her gut, as I do. It’s pretty impossible to know for sure when I’m writing a first draft if what I’m putting down on paper is good or bad, if my agents and editors will love it or loathe it. “Does this sound right?” I wonder.  “Does it move too slowly?  Is this character interesting?  Likable?”
Unless we constantly have someone else looking over our shoulder, telling us what to do (which would be paralyzing, I think!), we need to trust our instincts to know if what we’re writing is worthy or not.  When I read a book that’s well-done, I feel it inside.  Something “clicks” within me, and soon I’m absorbed in the story, along for the ride.  When I find a book lacking, I end up dissecting it rather than enjoying it (or I just stop reading it altogether). 
I find it’s like that when I’m working on a first draft.  If I don’t feel a “click” when I write a scene or chapter—or if I feel stuck—I know my gut is saying, “You might want to rethink this, Bubba.”
All writers work so differently.  Some outline. Some fly by the seat of their pants.  Some do a bit of both.  But in order to become better and stronger at what we do, we have to trust ourselves—trust our gut—and listen to that little voice that guides us. 
I’m trying very hard to stop second-guessing myself.  I’m not always right, that’s for sure.  But when that little voice inside my head speaks up, you can bet that I listen.