Monthly Archives: December 2016

Family, Health, Shadow Mountain, Third Phase

Monitoring

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Samain                                                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

Yes, self-absorbed. It’s one of the moral hazards of serious illness or significant medical procedures. The world is about my temperature, my pain, drugs, sleep, diet, chair. Other’s agree. For a while. But there comes a point where too much attention can become a path to a different, darker place. In that place the original cause for self-absorption passes, but the demands for preference do not. I’m raising the red caution flag for myself. (ok. yes, it’s ironic I do this on a blog devoted to my thoughts and life)

It’s time I began to take on tasks again. That gentle veil of opiates is still there, so is the pain, but my understanding of what this will take is also much greater now. Time and persistence. That’s what it will take. So, I’m on that and on integrating myself back into my life.

Kate’s taking a rest day, maybe two or three. The divorce. The grandkids on weekends. My surgery. Her own arthritis. She’s a dynamo that’s slowly wound down. Needs a recharge.

The main lineaments of the divorce, the rules of disengagement you might call them, are recorded. (I think.) Given the drama and pitched battles of the past few months you could be forgiven for thinking this is the end. Really, though, it’s the beginning. Being divorced is a verb, an ongoing action and it relates to the after marriage. Ask anyone who’s negotiated what to do with a sick kid. Or, had to choose a new school for children in a shared custody arrangement. Ask anyone whose heart thumps on that first date. Ask anyone who’s self-doubt still drags a locked trunk marked: the ex.

Let the after marriage life begin! And, as my buddy Bill Schmidt suggests, let the post-surgery life begin, too.

 

Health

Oh. Ouch.

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Samain                                                Moon of the Winter Solstice

That wonderful straight down from the sky in neat rows snow is falling. Our snow cover is minimal, so it’s not the all snow, all quiet feeling, but it moves in that direction.

The pain has not subsided. It has gotten better when in bed, but up and about the ouch is significant. Looking toward the future.

Still not able to read much, frustrating. Writing hurts so bye for now.

Cooking, Family, Health

Slow

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Samain                                               Moon of the Winter Solstice

Jon came in yesterday evening, billowing chartreuse ski pants, boots with snow fresh from A-basin’s recent 18 inch snowfall. It was, he said, “Worth it.” Skiing, Jon told me long ago, is “when I feel most like who I am.” He turned 48 Saturday. His 48th year will be a significant one, moving him past a painful chapter and toward what we all hope will be a better one.

Ruth built a fire in the place: small to big, one match. She did it. She is now one-match Ruth. She also moved split logs closer to the house using her plastic toboggan. A problem with the lodgepole pine that we burn is its poor heat to weight ratio. Burns fast, not much heat, lots of resin. When the fire mitigation wood runs out, I’ll probably buy a cord or two of hard wood. We can get that, at a price, from down the hill where deciduous trees make their last stand before the Rockies.

Jon’s birthday meal was yet more steak from our Carmichael Cattle Company quarter beef. We discuss the cow from which the meat came, not every meal, but often, following our short ceremony thanking it for its life on the occasion of our first meal with its meat.

Pat, the leprechaun p.t. guy who lives down Shadow Mtn. Drive on the grounds of a 1920’s/1930’s tennis camp will be here in a few minutes for another round of exercises. My follow up with the surgeon’s p.a. is this Friday so I’m prepping for what I imagine will be a less painful phase (less, not none) of the recovery. As soon as I’m off the narcotics, I can drive.

I’ve been in a morphine, dilaudid, vicodin haze since the 1st of December. I lose track of the conversation, can’t follow sentences in books, generally feel gauzy. Less so now as Kate has me on a slow wean, a tricky balance, as I’ve said, between enough pain control to exercise, but not more than enough.

Even with an attractive goal and the knowledge that I volunteered for this, the immediacy of pain and the druggy haze dominates the moment. Hard to feel beyond.

In other organ recital news Kate is off to a rheumatologist today to see if there is more that can be done for her rheumatoid arthritis: wrists, shoulder, back, ankles. When we crossed the border into Colorado, myself with Tom Crane, Kepler, Rigel and Vega, Kate with Gertie a bit later, the entire medical services industry in Colorado joined in a chorus of that old Leonard Cohen song, Hallelujah! A major revenue source coming to stay. Welcome!

This week should see marked improvement. I’m looking forward to it.

 

 

Health, Jefferson County, Shadow Mountain

A Cottony Indistinctness

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Samain                                                      Moon of the Winter Solstice

Let me see. A salmon colored patch of sky off to the north gives romance to the stand of lodgepole pines in our backyard. I’m working on the Stickley side table we bought in early 2015 and looking north. It served as our family dining table over the last couple of years, giving way partly now to the beetlekill table we have upstairs.

Trying to find a metaphor for this stage of recovery. Walking on a path, let’s call it the ancientrail of healing, I’ve passed through a rocky, but beautiful valley. Now the weather has cooled down, the sky gone gray. I’m still moving but the pleasure in it has receded. This, I imagine, is a plateau.

Mobility and extension have both increased, but I seem stuck. The mood that accompanies this portion of the ancientrail is one with the sky and the weather, gray and cool. This will pass, yes, it will.

But. Right now. I’m in it, surrounded by its cottony indistinctness.

Family, Health

Dewebbing

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Samain                                                 Moon of the Winter Solstice

Trying to get the cobwebs woven by dilaudid and sweet lady morphine cleared out. Hard to do since I still need the dilaudid. And I do.

Still the pain in the knee. A week to go until I see the PA and they remove the bandage. Until then, at least, I’ll need the narcotics.

The insult is like somebody took a knife to my knee, cut the bone and hammered metal spikes into my tibia and femur. Then stitched it back up and hid the damage under a water tight, air permeable bandage.

Oh, wait.

Now I’m sleeping, following my nurse/doctor/wife’s recommendations, waking up and doing it again. Though. The general trajectory is up. The pain less, the meds fewer, a bit of appetite returning. By a week from today I’ll be in a much better place.

Health

Hi

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Samain                                                             Moon of the Winter Solstice

The longest I’ve been dark in the last 11 years. Drugs and pain and rehab. Computer problems. Knee much better, still a long way to go.

P.T., in the form of Pat, the Irishman, comes to the house 3 times this week and 3 times next week. I have excellent range of motion, walking ability, overall doing well.

Lots of drugs however which make mentation difficult. Lots of pain which fuzzes everything. Sleeping difficult.

Kate’s a champ. She’s smart about the meds, caring, loving. Good cook, too, but I’ve got almost no appetite. My blood pressure is low, my 02 saturation low, so there are places to improve.

More later, pain returning.

Family, Health, Jefferson County, Mountains, Third Phase

Getting a Knee

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Samain                                               Moon of the Winter Solsticed

Friends. I last posted on Thursday, thinking I’d be  back by Saturday. Didn’t make it. By the time I got home yesterday, about 2:30 pm or so, I was way too knackered to even type the least bit of a post.

So, here I am on Sunday afternoon, after a nap. The sky is clear; the air cool. I’ve had a shower and brushed my teeth twice. And, BTW, I have a new knee. On Thursday Kate and I sat in the Orthocolorado lobby waiting for a nurse to introduce us to the mysteries of surgery in this place. Eventually, Mac came out to get me. Mac was a fifties, early sixties woman with high hair and a casual manner.

She collected my answers to the first of what she assured me were redundant questions. She was right. Yes. 2/12/1947. Yes. Charles Buckman-Ellis. It was also true that it was the left knee. Sure, put your initial right here. Later on Dr. Pagel came in and told me about the anaesthesia. Spinal. Conscious sedation. Fine with me. Better than fine really. Less risk. Dr. Peace dropped by, too. He initialed the knee. Very collegiate.

Then, they hit me with the versid and the next moment I was in room #366, new knee in place, smiles all around. I had just played a totally unconscious role in several peoples’ workday and recalled nothing of it. The sky had begun to bruise. My surgery was at 11 am and it was now 5 to 5:30pm.

My nurses and CNA’s were delightful. We discussed pain using the familiar 1-10 scale. My pain seemed to hang around 3 or  4 for much of the evening and night. It was a liberating experience to have my pain well controlled. In the early morning hours of Saturday, between the shift transition, my pain got up and strolled around a bit. It hit 7 or 8 and my new nurse, Stacy, was late getting to me, so I suffered for the early afternoon.

Later on though, when Amy from the night before came on duty (12 hour shift) we worked together to see the pain reduced. I’m still basically taking that pain regimen. It includes dialudid, long acting morphine and occasional doses of acetaminophen. It’s effective for pain reduction, but not so hot for linear thought.

Gabe and Kate came to pick me yesterday since Jon and Ruth were skiing. Once back home we had to get home oxygen set up because narcotics suppress the lung functions. I went straight to bed and slept on my stomach.

I’ll get back to you later, maybe this evening, maybe tomorrow morning.

 

 

Commentary on Religion, Faith and Spirituality, Great Wheel, Holidays, Reimagine. Reconstruct. Reenchant., Shadow Mountain

Acquainted with the Night

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Samain                                                           Moon of the Winter Solstice

“I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain—and back in rain.
I have outwalked the furthest city light.”    Acquainted with the Night, BY ROBERT FROST

The month of the winter solstice has come. The world itself, at least in the northern latitudes, has begun to go dark since the fall equinox. That cycle, repeated each year, reaches its zenith, or nadir depending on your perspective, on Wednesday, December 21st. That will be six months before the longest day on the Summer Solstice.

winter-solstice3During holiseason many cultures celebrate holidays of light: hanukkah, diwali, christmas, for example. They are rituals that stand against the primal fear occasioned by the winter solstice; that the sun will never return, that the world will continue to grow dark. Even last night at mussar we spoke of the light of the candle, finding the light reflected in unusual places, the light that can get us through this period.

I want to speak a word for darkness. I eagerly await, each year, the darkening. On the long night of the winter solstice, I am at my most peaceful, my most tranquil, wrapped in the silence. Darkness is home to fecundity: the seed sleeping in the soil during winter’s cold, the babe in the womb, the slow decay on the forest floor, the next poem or book or painting waiting in the mind’s dark places.

We can, on that night, become one with the darkness. We do not have to banish it with brave strings of light or loud parties or burning huge bonfires. No. We can sit in it, quiet as it is quiet, fecund as it is fecund, joyous as it is joyous. We can let go of our need to see, to touch and embrace the outer darkness just as it is.

This is not to say that I prefer the night to the day. I don’t. I do prefer the alteration, the relief from the day that comes when night falls and, in turn, the rising of the sun.

It does bear mentioning that life is a journey between two profound darknesses, the womb and death. In this perspective the winter solstice can be a holiday to celebrate the beginning and the end of life. And to rejoice in both of them.