Category Archives: Health

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Health, Kabbalah, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Third Phase

Hail a New Creation

February 25, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

My life flows on in endless song;
above earth’s lamentation,
I catch the sweet, though far-off hymn
that hails a new creation. “How can I keep from singing?” Robert Lowry

When I opened this page, Robert Lowry’s hymn came to the surface. I could sing this verse with no pauses for personal editing. The rest of them? Not so much. But, no matter. This one has a powerful, here and now message and it came to me from my unconscious.

third phase The woes of the body, our lamentations here on Shadow Mountain, are of the tactile world, the one bound up in life and death; but, they are not of the soul, the spirit, the ohr, the imago dei. No. In my soul (a word I’ve come to use more freely of late, meaning that part of me that bows to the god in you, namaste.) I can hear the sweet, though often very far-off hymn. It hails a new creation coming into existence even now, one shaped by the lamentations, but not determined by them.

That new creation is a new sort of intimacy for Kate and me, one forged not in the upbeat, I did it, achievements of the family and career second phase, but in the existential reality of the third phase. In the third phase the body begins to let go of life, gradually, a bit here, a bit there. At the same time the fruits of a lifetime of meditation, awareness, thought, friendship ripens. The soul begins to unfold, ready.

Rudolf Steiner, the founder of Anthroposophy, said that September 29th, the Saint’s Day of the Archangel Michael, is the springtime of the soul. (odd coincidence. Kate’s bleed was on September 28th) What I’ve always liked about this idea is that it marks soul growth as occurring best in the fallow time. The fallow time, especially after Samain, Summer’s End, on October 31st, is that point when the growing season ends. An analogy to the third phase seems apt to me. The fallow time is a time for going within, going deep, finding nourishment in the eternal parts of ourselves, our soul.

That is what is happening for us. Our souls are flowering in the decay of the body. That flowering of the soul (I see a lotus.) is the new creation, perhaps not as far off as it seems.

Blessed be.

Family, Health, Mountains, Shadow Mountain

Then the heparin lock

February 24, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

tpn Two saline flushes, then the heparin lock. Clamp the picc line. Half of the thiamine bottle, one each of the white cap and blue cap bottles, all injected into the tpn bag of milky, 950 calorie nutrition. The thiamine is yellow and floods into the bag creating a branched, river like stream. Shake the bag so that the vitamins and other additives mix up. Spike the bag with the plastic spike that connects to the tubing. Clamp the tubing. Connect the cassette that holds the tubing to the pump. It slides in and locks. New battery for the pump. Turn pump on. Wait, go through the pump’s programming. Unclamp the tubing. (lots of alcohol wipes in here. sterile technique required since the picc line ends just above the heart.) The tpn nutrients gradually, a milliliter at a time, snake up to the connector. Saline flush. Wipe. Connect tubing to picc lock. And, voila, breakfast, lunch and dinner.

I do this by myself this morning, with Kate’s assistance of course. The tpn pump, in Kate’s case, runs almost 24 hours, delivering approximately 41 milliliters of nutrition an hour, every hour. The objective here is not so much weight gain as getting her tuned up nutritionally for surgery. The feeding tube placement procedure is not major surgery, but it is surgery and she is frail. Most of the time people learn how to do this for a much longer duration. In our case 10 days. Learning new things everyday.

Still slowly emerging out of the cocoon in which illness places us all. Perhaps I’ll have imaginal cells (a real thing, see butterflies) which will alter my being, transform me into someone new after the last three weeks. I’m ready for some new, even if it’s taking up again the things I was doing before with changed purpose.

It’s 10 degrees here on Shadow Mountain, but, in Colorado fashion, a warmup is on the way. 47 on Tuesday.

And, btw, yes, it has occurred to us that 8,800 feet is not the best position for us with our ailments. Not likely to change soon however with the dogs and my almost pathological aversion to the idea of moving. The move that got us here felt like a last time for that sort of thing. Difficult.

Family, Health

Still Here

February 23, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

A new chapter. Mt. Evans’ Hospice and Home Health Care (personally wish they’d reverse the order of those nouns) has begun to come out. First, nurses to help us understand and adapt to Kate’s picc line and the changing of the tpn pouches every 24 hours. Both Julie and Michele live on Warhawk, very close by. Reassuring. The feeding helps, 950 calories or so over 24 hours, and balanced for her needs as I mentioned before.

Second, Kate had her first p.t. session yesterday and will have o.t. next week. This is important since Kate’s activity level has been minimal for months.

It’s a lot of change in a situation that has already caused lots of change. This is forward progress though. Kate sees Edwin Smith on Tuesday and hopefully the feeding tube placement will get scheduled and done soon after.

We get a grocery delivery today. That will be welcome. Once I feel better we can forego delivery and go to pickup. Still order online. They bring the groceries out to your car and you take them home. Ted plowed our drive this morning. 5 inches or so overnight. Happy about that.

I’m much better, but still mending. Chest x-ray on Thursday. Follow-up. No word on that yet.

Faith and Spirituality, Family, Health

More Health Stuff.

February 21, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

Gradually getting more stamina. Felt good enough to go in and pick up Kate from Swedish yesterday afternoon.

She’s home now, again. Trying to imagine what this whole ordeal must be like from within her frame of reference. Difficult. So many procedures, hospital and doctor visits. So many different interventions. And the needle sticks. She has rotten veins and it often takes four, five times to put an iv in or draw blood. Sounds medieval.

Home health from Mt. Evans’ Home Health Care comes by today to hook up the tpn. They offered to come last night around 7, but Kate was too weary. A delivery guy from an outfit called Medspeed dropped off two thermo insulated white boxes and an ordinary cardboard one, supplies. We’re entering new territory here with home health care and medical apparatus on site on Shadow Mountain.

Kate has had an important insight. Now that she’s well hydrated through the tpn nutrition her dry mouth is much, much better. We need to figure out how to keep up that level of hydration for her. This is a big deal because the dry mouth makes eating difficult.

We see Edwin Smith on the 28th about placement of the feeding tube. He wanted her on the tpn to get her stronger. Since medicare has severe restrictions on the use of tpn, we were lucky to get the ten days granted to us. Somebody was a good advocate.

I’m feeling incrementally better each day. Able to stay up longer, do more. Still watching it because I want, need, to stay healthy. Follow up chest x-ray today, probably. I have my annual physical on Monday. There will be lots to talk about.

I’m over my foot on our neck whine. Back to head down, move forward, take it as it comes.

Of course this whole process, starting with Kate’s bleed on September 28th until now, has been stressful. As near as I can tell, I’ve not added to the stress by becoming anxious about outcomes. Not sure the toll the stress has taken on me, though I imagine it did lower my immune response to whatever viral truck slammed me down to the pavement.

Grateful for all the care and time and thought given to Kate, and to me. Grateful for the snow and the cold, more like Minnesota this last week or so, and welcome. Grateful for those dogs who wag their tales and put up with our chaotic schedule. Grateful for the Valentine Moon, for 72 years. Grateful for my recovery that’s underway. Grateful we live Rocky Mountains. Yes, adversity unveils gratitude. Strange. True.

Family, Health

February 20, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

Fort Three weeks ago I drove through Denver around 8 pm exhausted and wondering why I was so damned tired. Getting home was hell. Today, thankfully, I’m able to be up and get things done. Still operating at about half to three-quarters power, stamina not great, but improving. Stronger today is my day phrase.

Kate sounds great. Needing to recover I’m still at home. One thing I learned over the last three weeks is that if I’m not healthy, it makes our life here very difficult. I’m going to get back to normal so I can help her as much as she needs. A difficult balance, especially with her in the hospital.

They may insert the feeding tube while she’s at Swedish, too. This will give her two sources of nutrition, one intravenously and the other by drip directly into the gastrointestinal tract. She will able to eat meals as well. Several advantages here.

First. She’s been stuck at 78-82 pounds for months. Nothing nudges her out of that range. She needed a different approach.

Two. Electrolytes and other necessary nutrients will be carefully balanced in both the tpn and the feeding tube. Her diet up to now has been what she could tolerate with an emphasis on calories and protein, not overall nutrition.

Three. This will reduce, hopefully eliminate, her always nagging feeling that she wasn’t eating enough. This should help her get back to eating normally, without the attendant anxiety of trying to gain weight.

Four. Since she’s wanted this for several months now, these supplemental feeding tools give her a psychic boost, which she needs.

Five. Our big hope with this intervention is that it will lift her into a normal weight range where her diet and her stamina can both improve while the secondary effects of malnutrition drop away.

We’ve seen plenty of false dawns in Kate’s journey to this point. I’m hoping this is the one we’ve been waiting for.

Family, Health, Mountains

Black Mountain White

February 19, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

I’m just gonna say this. May be a little whiny, but it’s on my mind. Hey, universe! Would you get your foot off our necks? Or, at least let up long enough for us to catch our breath. Geez. OK. There.

Kate’s collapsed lung resolved with concentrated oxygen therapy. Thankfully. The picc line went in yesterday and she’s getting her first infusion of nutrition through it as I write this. She’s very happy that, as she said, “Something’s happening.” She’s dealt with the weight loss, the fatigue, Sjogren’s, food aversion for so long. As one just coming out of a still debilitating illness, I can only imagine what it would be to feel the way I feel now everyday. With no change maker on the horizon. This picc line may be the beginning of a turn around. I sure hope so.

Meanwhile I’m weak, still. Feel like the diseases of the past two weeks plus have left the field of battle, but the wreckage is still under repair. I’m 10 pounds behind now, limited stamina, and less energy. I’ll improve over the next few days, I’m sure. I look forward to getting back to things.

Lot of learnings, most not consolidated yet. They will be over the coming weeks.

Here’s something uplifting, at least I think so. Black Mountain white.

20190218_073058

Family, Health

Health Cares

February 18, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

Feeling much better. All except my bowels which took a beating. I’ve eaten very little over the last two plus weeks, down 10 pounds. Not as hydrated as I normally am. Result: intractable constipation. Since Saturday afternoon, my recovery has been interrupted by this. Beginning to resolve this morning, I think. Sure hope so, misery after misery.

I’ve lost about two weeks. By that I mean, I don’t recall events during the time when illness dominated my body. It’s an odd feeling, but I’m grateful for it. I remember blurs of discomfort, but little else.

Kate went back to Swedish E.R. yesterday. Jon had to take her due to my severe cramping and general dis-ease. They admitted her, though I don’t know exactly what for. She has an appointment with a home health company today to insert the line for her tpn feeding, don’t know what’s going to happen to that.

This was not the most festive birthday week I can recall. Maybe the least? Either way the earth keeps spinning and racing along its orbit.

Faith and Spirituality, Health, Humanities, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Science

The Death of Opportunity

February 16, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

So here’s my summary of the last 17 days. I got ill. My doc thought it was influenza A. That lasted 10 days, then I got really sick. The pneumonia is clearing. I have more energy each day, though I’m still weak. Eating and sleeping. Still the main activities.

All these mortality signals keep whizzing by. The third phase is an existentialist phase no matter your theological orientation. Somewhere in the no longer so distant future is a personal and permanent extinction event. Made me read the news of Opportunity with a pang I might not have otherwise felt.

The struggle we have over these deep questions in our own day to day has gotten interlaced with our creations. It seems like taffy or a Chinese finger puzzle. The more we try to answer them the tighter the puzzle grips our finger. And when a plucky, brave, dogged machine just keeps on ticking, year after year, moving and sensing and communicating, all on a planet not our own, we see its slow, but confident progress, its unwillingness to stop until the last trickle of current ran from its batteries, as life itself. Until we say it out loud. Do we put quotations marks around death? What do we do with the emotions we feel for something made of silicon and metal?

death and friend “Our beloved Opportunity remained silent,” Thomas Zurbuchen, associate administrator for NASA’s Science Mission Directorate, said Wednesday… Her power dropped to a trickle, and she was last heard from on June 10…Keri Bean was among those who helped send that last radio signal. Losing Opportunity, she says, is like a death in the family…But at least it was Mars that killed her — it wasn’t the rover failing or something else. It was Mars. And I feel like that’s really the only appropriate death for her at this point.” NPR

It’s possible that we’ve been making a category mistake all along about death. We assume that we are individuals, clothed in an impenetrable skin with a mind mysterious and often hidden even from its self. What if that is too narrow? Way too narrow. What if we are also those things in which we invest our life? That is, I am not only the meat sack that turned 72 yesterday, but I am also Kate, our house, the dogs, even our Rav4. I’m not making a weird boundary issues statement here. I’m trying to point to what Buber calls the I-thou*. Buber saw the I-thou as a relationship with another that is permeable. I love this idea, but want to say that we can extend it, in some instances, even into the realm of what Buber calls I-it relationships.

Those instances are not as few as we might think. Yes, family. Yes, friends. Yes, members of a community important to us. Yes. But also the dog who sleeps in your bed. The tree you care for each spring and fall. The flowers that you plant. And, yes, the machines that extend your self into the wider world. These machines, like Opportunity, do function independently from us, are definitely an it in the usual understanding of the term, but perhaps we misunderstand the distance, the separateness. “Our beloved Opportunity remained silent.” “Like a death in the family.”

Opportunity was not only the physical entity on Mars. It was also a literal physical extension of those who made it, those who guided it, interacted with it, and gathered its data. It was like a hand or an eye, an arm or a leg, not separate, though able to operate independently. As such Opportunity’s death was just that, a death, the loss of an I-thou relationship.

How do these relationships happen? I believe this quote says it very well:

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” chewy.com

*Buber’s main proposition is that we may address existence in two ways:

The attitude of the “I” towards an “It”, towards an object that is separate in itself, which we either use or experience.
The attitude of the “I” towards “Thou”, in a relationship in which the other is not separated by discrete bounds.

One of the major themes of the book is that human life finds its meaningfulness in relationships. In Buber’s view, all of our relationships bring us ultimately into relationship with God, who is the Eternal Thou. wiki

Health

February 15, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine Moon

I had an influenza strength virus for ten days, then I really got sick. That’s my summary.

Family, Health

Year 72.1

February 15, 2019 Charles Leave a comment

Imbolc Valentine’s Moon

Starting my 73rd year feeling better. Better, of course, is relative. In this case relative to a lost two weeks. I mean that almost literally. The last two weeks were a fog. I know things happened. I know I did things. But what were those things? Mushed together in a perceptual porridge put through a blender. Indistinct.

Saw the doc yesterday. Left lobe cleared of pneumonia according to stethoscope. None in the right lobe. But wait! There’s more! Yes, another “incidental” finding. Atelectasis in my lower right lobe. Sounds ominous, right? Could be old, probably is. It means that some of the aveoli have collapsed.

When Tabitha listened to my lungs, she thought she heard pneumonia in my lower right lung. It was the atelectasis. So it’s significant. It can be the precursor to other bad things like lung cancer. Hope not. Still, when you consider my history. Smoker in my 20’s and early 30’s. Working in two different factories where asbestos and fiberglass were used. Cutting rags to make fine rag bond paper. I did this last job for a year or so and worked in a room filled with the dust from, of all things, Munsingware scraps from making underwear.

SEX-DRUGS-ROCK-N-ROLL-1” I’ve known for years that something like this could come up. If I could go back and change the choices I made while my chooser was broken (grief, alcoholism, lack of wisdom, plus general youthful stupidity), I would. But, I can’t. In my own vernacular, those problems are bought and paid for. That is, I did things that may cause serious problems for me physically, now, later in life. Can’t deny it, ignore it, or wish it away. It’s not clear right now of course whether this will be a serious issue or not, may not be clear for some time, though I imagine there will be a follow-up CT to more closely i.d. the causes of the atelectasis.

We all have to die of something. If this is mine, well, so be it. Not gonna dwell on it, but I do acknowledge it. I don’t blame anyone, not even myself. My 20s, as they are for so many of us, were a time of transformation, mutation, evolution. I learned so much, felt so much, did so much. There was another path for me through that thicket, many paths, I’m sure, but the one that transpired is the one I followed. And, it may be beginning to have consequences.

In other news Kate’s stent is open. CT proved that. Hopefully today she’ll get a pic line put in and get started on some nutritional supplements by iv. TPN, total parenteral nutrition. This should help her overall and make any surgical procedure, like the feeding tube placement, more likely to succeed. A home health service will send nurses here to set it up. Eventually, I’ll manage it. A step in a good direction for her.

Sun. Blue skies. Black Mountain standing tall. All things that will be here no matter how any of this turns out. And, again, I find this a source of deep consolation.