Category Archives: Health

Health

That Shoulder Thing

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Spring                                                                       Planting Moon

A Vikings jersey #4 with Favre written on it hung in the corridor.  There were other jerseys too not any one I recognized.  Kate found me a shoulder doc and this was a sports medicine clinic.  And here I was.  #66.

The shoulder quieted down after three weeks of rest and return to resistance work has not caused it to flare again so this appointment didn’t seem as urgent as when I first made it.  Still, I wanted to know what was going on and what I might do if it got problematic again.

The short answer.  Aging body.  Maybe some nerve impingement from arthritis in the neck.  Maybe some tear in my rotator cuff.  At my age 20-30% have some.  Maybe some asymmetry from the polio long years ago.  After several x-rays there was no sign of arthritis in my shoulder area.  “The bones are healthy, especially for someone your age.”

I have “an open invitation” for an MRI and further imaging to run down with some certainty the rotator cuff and nerve involvement, but there’s nothing that can be done about them now.  So I passed on the imaging for the moment.

A bit of physical therapy, maybe two sessions.

Got what I wanted.  Nothing immediately urgent or long term important going on.  It may never flare again.  If not, all to the good.  If it does, I’ll take Dr. Lervick up on his invitation and see him again.

Feelings, Friends, Health, Woolly Mammoths

Being. Together.

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Spring                                                                   Bloodroot Moon

The Woolly Mammoths met tonight at the Red Stag.  Stefan, Lonnie, Bill, Scott, Frank, Warren, Mark, Tom and me.  We talked of grandkids and blood sugar levels, the first days of retirement and the career of Teddy Roosevelt.

Some time ago I learned that these kind of gatherings are therapeutic in and of themselves.  By that I mean there is no particular therapeutic strategy in play save the most ancient one of a gathering of friends, yet that one, the ancientrail of friendship in a group, has curative powers.  My shoulder feels better.  I have a smile lurking just around the corner of my mouth.

Here we are seen by each other.  Our deep existence comes with us, no need for the chit-chat and polite conversation of less intimate gatherings.  The who that I am within my own container and the who that I am in the outer world come the closest to congruence at Woolly meetings, a blessed way of being exceeded only in my relationship with Kate.

Now over 25 years of being together.  Then, in the second phase of work and nuclear family, now mostly in the third phase.  What will we be to each other as this life change gradually envelopes us all?  We suspect it will be more than it has been up to this point and up to this point it’s been very good.

Aging, Health, Writing

My Left Shoulder and How It Communicates

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Spring                                                                       Bloodroot Moon

On Saturday the class with Scott Edelstein on marketing and selling books happened in a typical classroom setting, a meeting room of the Loft at their space at Open Book on Washington Avenue.  The room had a blackboard, a white board, exposed beams and brick walls, the usual rectangular tables and plastic chairs with backs.

In the morning, fresh and eager, I leaned in or sat up, entranced by Scott’s revelation of a new world, publishing in the high electronic age.  At breaks I stretched and at lunch I visited the small deli cum coffee shop downstairs for lunch.  Another plastic chair.

The time after lunch was long.  My nap went missing as the clock hit 1, then 2, then 3.  By 4 my shoulder had begun to ping me.  I don’t like this anymore.  Let’s leave.  Get outta here. Scram.

Since the last part of the class involved romancing the agent, my intentions overrode my bodies urgent signals.  I stayed through the last word.  But I left immediately after it, went downstairs and headed home.

Back home the shoulder felt like a small knife had been inserted just below the clavicle, nestling up next to the shoulder joint and pressed through all the way through to my back. It didn’t hurt in  sharp, glancing away sort of pain, but more in a subdued ache with–small flames like you used to use to decorate the model cars of your youth– flickering around the knife.  It’s agony, a soft agony, spread throughout the body, inviting other muscles to tense up, join in the attempt to isolate the pain, make it stay up there.  Having, of course, the opposite effect.

Not fun.  Kate heated up a neck wrap and after two applications my shoulder settled down, rejoined the rest of the body and allowed as how I might go on with the rest of the evening.

Garden, Health, Latin, Translating Metamorphoses

Sowing A Fallow Field

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Spring                                                                                Bloodroot Moon

And the Latin keeps on coming.  I’m sure I’ll reach a plateau here at some point, but I seem to be learning faster and faster.  Of course, it’s taken me 3 years to get to this point, so it’s not like it’s an overnight phenomena.  Still, it feels good. Session with Greg tomorrow.

Jason plowed a fallow field, seeded it with dragon’s teeth and an army sprung up, only to take after each other with weapons grown with them.  Men.

My shoulder pain retreated a good bit while in DC.  That was after the third week of rest, including two before I left.  Today I started back with the same exercise routine, trying to discover exactly what’s going on so I can have good data for my visit with the orthopedist on April 17th.

Kate and I have on our calendars garden clean-up starting April 1.  April fools!  We’d have to shovel snow off it to get started.  We may straighten up the garden shed, clean and sharpen tools.  That we can do now.  Of course, I still have that book and file moving/removal project that’s about half done.  No dearth of things to do.

 

 

Art and Culture, Faith and Spirituality, Feelings, Health, Third Phase

The Undiscover’d Country

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Spring                                                                          Bloodroot Moon

At times my past bleeds into the present, creating small emotional events, upsetting my inner equilibrium.  Right now is one of those times.  Many of us are heir to understandings of ourselves as malformed in some way, not quite right.  I certainly am.

(Dante Gabriel Rossetti    Hamlet and Ophelia 1858 pen and ink drawing)

These irruptions come in the OMG I’m not doing enough form or OMG I have not done enough or OMG I’ll never do enough forms.  My anxious self underlines and bolds these self-declarations as my mind races back to find the not enoughs in the past–no graduate school, no published books, never made it to Washington, the not enoughs in the present–Missing not revised, Loki’s Children not started, no time for serious in-depth reading, not helping out enough at home or making enough time for friends and then uses both of these information streams to predict a dire future:  no books published ever, no friends, no concrete results of any kind, then, wink out.

If this line of thought continues, I’m going to have to visit my analyst, John Desteian.  In touch with him (and, now, Kate) I’ve been able to dispel these strong phantoms, learn to live with facts not illusion and get on with what is a good life.  This is, I think, as much due to faulty wiring as anything else, my family coming with a strong genetic pattern for bipolar disorder, though I don’t believe my issues rise to that level of dysfunction.  I know, not enough even there, eh?

Not long ago I re-read Hamlet’s speech in Scene I, a scene I had memorized long ago for a dramatic presentation contest.  It’s baldly existential view surprised me, even shocked me. A line from it came to me as I woke up this morning and it captures my feeling tone right now:   “…the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.”  This exactly describes me when I get into these episodes.

In the lines just before this one Shakespeare refers to death as the undiscover’d country from which no traveler returns and identifies the dread of that journey as producing the pale cast of thought, thus rendering a person unable to act.  To be or not to be neatly summarizes all this.

 

Aging, Health, Travel

Ancor Impari

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Spring                                                                       Bloodroot Moon

Ah.  Just back from Mt. Vernon.  Learned some things about traveling now.  Now, that is, in the third phase when I’m no longer as resilient as I used to be.

1.  Use a cab or public transportation to a location, then walk back.  Or, the reverse.  Don’t walk both ways, especially on concrete.  (An example this trip would have been the Lincoln Monument.  I could have walked back and seen the Whitehouse and the Willard on the way home.)

2.  If tired, stop.  Rest.  If hungry, eat.  (I have a tendency to want to keep going when I’m moving, wait until meal time if I’ve worked up a hunger.)

3.  When wool gathering about enough this or enough that get out and do something.  Don’t forget 1 & 2.

4. Take at least one vacation a year where the whole point is to relax.  I know this may seem obvious to many of you, perhaps most of you, but I typically have a goal, an intent.  This time, for instance, it was immersion in the pre-Raphaelites and learning about how to work with art post-MIA.  Did it.  But.  I kept needing to turn the hamster wheel one more time.  Stop that!

5.  Vacations are more fun with Kate along. (I knew this one already, but it never hurts to write things down.)

 

 

 

 

 

Aging, Health, Third Phase

Pain

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Imbolc                                                                         Bloodroot Moon

Put your shoulder into it.  Increasingly difficult for me, at least on my left shoulder.  This is a post about pain, aging, the third phase.  Not because pain during aging is new or a surprise, not, rather the opposite, because its common.  Known.  Experienced.  But rarely discussed.

As the body changes, at any time, sure, but especially as we age and the terminus grows closer, we bring our personal history into our consideration, our weighing, our evaluation.

The shoulder pain, for example, pushes me back to a certain Madison County 4-H fair in August of 1949.  I’m young, very young, 2 1/2 years old, but I swear I remember the bare light bulbs strung on thin braided electrical cord, pink cotton candy, my blue blanket and my mother’s shoulder as she carried me.  I also remember a shiver, a full body shudder as I registered what I later came to believe was the onset of polio.

Whether this was the moment and whether the memory is even possible is uncertain.  That I would go on to contract bulbar polio and be paralyzed completely on my left side for over six months is not.

So, 63 some years later, when my left shoulder makes me wince as I lift my arm or move it  backwards or pains me especially if I try to lift an object, like a book, with my arm extended, as I’ve done many times in the last couple of weeks as I reordered my studies and eliminated books, my thoughts go to polio.  More specifically post-polio syndrome.

Probably not post-polio, a slippery diagnosis, not completely believed in by docs.  Probably not.  But that doesn’t make me stop considering it.

This pain has persisted, now maybe two months.  Not long, compared to someone like, say Kate, who has had persistent back, hip and neck pain for over 20 years.  But long enough to make me ready to see a doctor.  I want a diagnosis.

So Kate’s hunting for the best shoulder doc in the orthopedic community.  I’ll see whomever she finds and go from there.  In the meantime I waver between accepting the pain, avoiding the movements that exacerbate it, and medicating it.  I don’t like either of those choices.  If I can help it through exercise, or if I won’t make it worse by using it in spite of the pain, I’ll exercise and use it.  Just put up with it.  Maybe add some meds to help even things out.

If I can’t help it through exercise or if moving it creates more problems, then I’ll really need a doc because I’m in a bad place at that point.  I depend on exercise as part of my personal health regimen and having to back away from any part of it is not something I’m willing to do.  At least right now.

This will be a continuing series.  Part of the third phase.

 

 

Health, Writing

Low Grade Disharmony, Dis-Ease

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Imbolc                                                                         Valentine Moon

Looking back some low grade disharmony began to sneak up on me last Wednesday.  Feeling punk.  Over the weekend I laid low.  I find it a DIY MFA for writing a couple of days ago.   It had some interesting suggestions for reading as a writer and with a specific purpose, so I followed them while sleeping and resting.

That is, in this instance I read the competition.  Percy Jackson and the Olympians.  A middle-school Harry Potter-like story of a twelve year old who discovers he’s the son of Poseidon.  It’s fun, a bit, well, juvenile, yet captivating and the plot has a propulsive force.

The gods and demi-gods, monsters and other creatures of the sacred world abound.  I love this stuff, even in its middle-school form.  Once I’ve finished the third of the Percy Jackson books, I’m going to start on Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time series.  Also on the list is re-reading Tolkein.  Of course, I read him and a long, long time ago.

There are three other lists on the reading with purpose idea: one is classics, another informative and the third is contemporary.

The same process asked for my 5 all-time favorite books.  This kind of list changes, but here is the one I wrote down on that day:  Steppenwolf, 100 Years of Solitude, Mists of Avalon, Metamorphoses, the Bible.

Now I’m feeling better, though not all the way there, and its time to get cracking on that revision.  Time’s, well, we all know what time is.  And we don’t get more.

Dogs, Health, Our Land and Home, Travel

Out of the Salt Mines and On to the Treadmill

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Imbolc                                                                 Valentine Moon

Well, I’m close, but not finished.  As the books got shelved, the remaining space seems to be inadequate for what I have left.  Probably a way around it, I’ll find it tomorrow.  Right now.  Tired again.

(a salt mine cathedral in Colombia outside Bogota.  I visited in 1987.)

Just brought in more bags of feed for the animals.  40 pounds at a time.  Then salt for the water softener, 50 pounds a bag.  But.  They have nice plastic handles.  Working in the salt mines doesn’t mean what it used to.

Discovered that my glucometer needed calibration.  Once calibrated it told me a story I was glad to hear.  At least by today’s reading my low carb diet has lowered my blood glucose level.  And, I’ve lost a bit of weight, too.  All in all a good thing.  Though Kate, a carb lover of some note, has expressed some dissatisfaction.  No pasta, no breads, no cakes or pies.  We’re figuring out now how to add carbs back into her diet without creating a cook two meals at a time situation.  We’ll figure it out.

Right now I’m getting on the treadmill.  Which, for that matter, doesn’t mean what it used to either.

This is a Landice treadmill, the brand and model I’m about get on.

 

Cinema and Television, GeekWorld, Great Work, Health, Latin, Our Land and Home, Translating Metamorphoses

95%

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Imbolc                                                                                Cold Moon

So the parade of salesmen has begun.  First up was Reliant heat and cooling.  They sent out a really good guy.  Told us what would fit, how much it would cost.  Very reasonable price.  Good furnace.  If I hadn’t had the others scheduled, I would have bought this one.  Still, we’ll hear the others out, too.  You never know.

This furnace runs at 95% efficiency.  As opposed to our current 80%.  Think about a difference of 15% less gas used.  Then multiply it by hundreds and thousands of homes.  Hard to believe.  Of all the strategies to combat global warming, the easiest and most immediate ones involve conservation.  More fuel efficient cars, furnaces.  Better insulation in homes.  Switching from coal-burning electricity generation.  Having cleaning crews in large buildings clean during the day.  Strategies that have broad application yet involve relatively straightforward choices and proven technologies.

Finally wrenched myself away from the image moving to work on the Edda’s some more.  Brunhild today.  A sad story.  Sigurd jumped into that burning ring of fire, but boy it really didn’t work out for him or Brunhild.

Also back to my one sentence of Latin.  Again, it seemed to flow today.  Based on past experience I’ll hit an impossible head-slapper tomorrow, but today.  All right.

I’m in my second week of rest for my patella-femoral syndrome.  I’ll start back on the workouts on Monday.  I’ll see how, or whether, this helped.

Been watching House of Cards on Netflix.  As the brave new face of television, I like it.  13 episodes up all at once.  We can watch it as we like it.  Cool.