Happy Easter

[photos 2010]

Statin adverse effect

Documenting this statin AE.  This is so common and well-known I can't imagine why that doctor gave it to me, or any transplant patient.

It also pushed up the level of cyclosporine in my blood, way up, so the clinic doctor called a little bit ago to say the blood culture shows a bad UTI that only IV antibiotics will fight.  I.e.  hospital.  No.  We will fight this with d-Mannose, which has worked before.  The women know about this.  The doctors don't.

So I thought, why not do this publicly?  Isn't this the best thing about social media that you can use it to tell on Big Brother?   Initial research tells me that many credentialed people think this is a very bad drug, useless in many cases, and the most profitable in the history of Big Pharm.  I found a study that gave people co-enzyme Q-10, so Tom is doing some research to find a good brand and will go out to get that.  

11:00 am

My feet and legs feel ice cold about 1/3 way up the calf, about halfway up the tight calf.

Very swollen.

I've had two or is it three helpless crying fits this morning. I feel confused.

I awoke early, maybe 6:30' so got about 5 hrs sleep.  

Of course my stomach is very upset.  Had cream of wheat for breakfast.

I also have large patches of cold  (neuropathy) on my back, right side, and right arm

Talked to nurse this morning who thought yes, this is a reaction to statin, and thinks the worst of it should be over in a week.  Sounds like heroin withdrawal.

11:25 acid reflux

Made it to bedroom.  Very short of breath, and right foot very painful to step on already.  It had felt not so bad when I got up.   Dr. Dapore had said keep it elevated, ice 20 on, 20 off. I'm using my phone as a timer.

I feel miserable.
~~~~~
Later
Stomach still upset.  A pain pill has not made the legs feel better, but did lift my spirits some.

I'm doing this from my iPad in bed, which is much better than not having an iPad, but is cranky, and I can't get the picture function to work so I will just have to post pix of my swollen feet on Facebook. I can send them directly there from my phone.

Health Update

Where to begin?  Just chat, I guess.  I am propped in bed, Tashi on knees, a scene I sometimes feel is heaven.  I am icing my right ankle 20 minutes on, 20 off, and taking care to do the least possible walking because every step hurts.  Tom is in bed in the other room though it's only 8:00 pm here, and we're both hoping he's just tired, not getting sick.  Long active day, and he had to do all the driving.

What happened was that the transplant doc way last December saw my total cholesterol bump over  200 and prescribed a statin.  He made a good case for it, and I thought he knew what he was doing.  I took it for 3 days and ended up in the hospital being looked at for heart attack.  They ruled that out and released me, and nobody ever talked about the statin.  Then household calamities arose and somehow it was displaced from the box that holds my medicines, and had not yet gotten on my med list.

Two weeks ago I was somehow reminded that I was supposed to be taking the damn thing, so I started it again.  No one had ever connected the events of last December with the statin.  No one ever asked, "What's the last medication you started?" which I now know is always an important question.  This time, when I made a fairly urgent (next day) appointment at the clinic I use, nobody asked again, though the nurse went through the tedious business of updating my med list.

Wednesday I was worse off yesterday than I'd been in December: terrific edema in my legs and feet, and my right foot so painful I could hardly bear to walk.  Short of breath, by which I mean out of breath from tying my shoes.  Temp low, blood pressure low.  They took chest x-rays, listened very carefully to my lungs and heart, then sent me over to the hospital for a venous ultrasound and an echo.  These things showed no blood clots, no heart problem.  Home, relieved that I wasn't admitted.  I am really tired of going through so much to stay half-alive.

Thursday I had a message from the clinic that the urine sample showed some bacteria, so they are culturing it.  Meanwhile they wanted to throw Cipro at it.  I told the pharmacist I wouldn't be picking that up. Both my shoulders have torn rotator cuffs, apparently as a result of taking Cipro for a week when it turned out to be the wrong thing altogether, but it was Christmas and nobody checked the lab results...

Today I saw my really good doctor about the painful foot.  He is a DO who specializes in musculoskeletal-skeletal problems.  He x-rayed the foot six ways and said, "The good news is, nothing's broken. Your bones are fine." Once again, I was giddy with relief.  It has worn off.

He did say two other things.  One was something about how they now think statins do something else to lower cholesterol, and that's not good.  The other was that this is not classical rhambodyolosis, but I'm such a delicate balance he thinks the statin went in and upset everything.  He's going to be out of town next week, but made sure I knew to call the office it I have any questions or it isn't going well.  And asked me to check in the following week and let him know how I'm doing.

Tom thinks he and I can be excused for not questioning the transplant doc's prescription of this low dose of statin because of how learned and certain the guy seemed.  This is what he does, deal with kidney transplant patients. I think nobody has ever looked after me in my life and I am never again going to take anything without researching it thoroughly.

I had not read this article or heard about the book.  A whole goddam book against the most-prescribed drug in the world.  Then, leafing through Wired magazine, I read,that 30,000 people die every year in America from over-treatment.  At the same moment the evening news was,informing me that seven people die every day texting while driving.  I'm an English major - you do the math.

God knows how long it will take to get back in some kind of physical balance and be able to maybe walk without pain, and drive.  I talked today to someone I thought would care and she told me with veiled impatience that it's not the doctor's fault, it's the system.  And don't bother to try changing the system.  Or even think about a lawsuit.  And I am just thinking deeply about this idea, self-compassion.  Caring for myself as much as I have for other people.  It's a woman's problem.  In a good mood, I have a grip on it, how you're no good to anyone if you don't take care of yourself.  How martyring yourself is nothing to brag about. 
~~~~~~
I wrote this last night, propped in bed, the foot elevated, feeling my mood go down.  It is still doing that up/down, but is less predictable now.  I felt that what I wrote didn't begin to express how frightening this was, how low I felt. 

Just fielded a phone call from the clinic nurse, about how they want me to start Cipro.  I feel like the medical system has continued the abuse my father started, the utter failure to look at me as an individual or listen to me.  It's the patriarchy.  That's what he did, trained me to accept abuse.....I can't think of a title for this.  Just going to post it for the information of friends, I guess.

There's Self-love and then there's sssSelf-love

by Georgia O'Keefe

With my morning coffee the other day, I listened to an NPR bit on Alzheimer's disease.  I found myself thinking about how "personality" or what we call in Zen "the self" and I call sssself when I'm mad at mine, seems to reside mostly in the brain.  There is also temperament, of course, creating ethereal air people, focused fire people, comforting earth people.  That's kind of general.

But the ssself is particular.  It's all yours.  The one thing you own.  But a lot of it goes when memory goes.  Even before dementia, personality can be changed with a stroke or tumor.  My mother lost something like her work ethic with her first stroke at age 63, and became someone who mostly just wanted to sleep, smoke, and watch TV.   (Don't take retiring to do the things you love for granted.)  I know of other elders who got rude, mean, or downright violent with age-related dementia.

I was thinking about this when I noticed a blue sticky note I'd put on the newspaper the other day, so I looked at that page and, behold, here was the sssself again, this time in an article titled Good News Beats Bad on Social Networks.  I knew that - I've been unfriended for my realism, which translates to some people now and then as pessimism or cynicism.  But enough about me.  This is the paragraph I'd circled:

...Social consciousness comes into play when people are sharing information about their favorite subject of all: themselves.  This [sharing] is intrinsically pleasurable and activates the brain regions associated with rewards like food, as demonstrated in a study...[that] showed it's so pleasurable that people will pass up monetary rewards for the chance to talk about themselves.

Monetary rewards - that's money.  People will give up money to talk about themselves.  But you knew that.  We pay therapists of many descriptions to listen to us.

another Georgia O'Keefe, because I like it.

In the Zen tradition, Teachers are supported by gifts, though that is having to change - it's expensive to live in America.  You also sort of pay by sitting hour after hour meditating and following specific rituals in order to have the privilege of a moment with the Teacher that will be all about you and you alone.  It can happen that in this interview you say a few words and they may say a few words or say nothing, and ring the bell, meaning the interview is over.  That seems to mean whatever you said wasn't right, or worth responding to.  Something.  You have many hours until the next such interview to wonder about it.

Abrupt dismissal can hurt if you've been thinking deeply about your ssself and your desperate desire to have someone tell you you're enlightened; or asking for a kind of help no one can give you; or studying a koan and positive you're right this time.  These things can really disturb ssself, and maybe that's not bad; the project in Zen is to get less attached to that constructed batch of delusions, preferences and, oh yes, standing resentments - in brief, to your stories.

I'm not a scholar, but that's how I see Zen practice.  You sit quietly on a little raft and hope to drift far enough from the elaborate castle of self to see it. and therefore not be constantly traveling its hot and windy maze and playing with its treasures when you should be paying attention to the cat.  It sounds good, but does seem to take a lot of work.  No matter how bad Wun's self-esteem, we can be very attached to our delusions. 

And here I am, talking about myself again.  That's blogging for you.

The Only Good Doctor is a Compassionate Doctor

It seems my last post made it clear how I've been suffering with my bipolar disorder, compounded by the death of a friend and a funeral that did me - and another friend - more harm than good.  I heard from several compassionate readers.  (I want to include here a painting I did Sunday night that vividly illustrates the high and low, but technology is defeating me.  Maybe tomorrow.)

The background:  the last time I saw my trusted psychiatrist he told me he couldn't do squat for me.  (You can read the post I wrote then here.)  Nothing.  He suggested meditation, which showed me that he hasn't heard a thing I said, or if he did, didn't write it down, or if he did, didn't take time to look at my file.  I told him I've been meditating since I had cancer in 1997.  That's not the kind of thing they think matters.  I was wrong to like him as much as I did.  I'm sure you should never trust a doctor who always runs on time.  We don't need clockwork doctors.

The whole problem with a teaching/research hospital is that the doctors who survive there are the kind who want to do research and pontificate in classrooms.  These jobs use areas in the brain (and ego) that have little to do, I am sorry to say, with humanity or compassion.  OSU is infamous around here for its unfriendliness, but we experienced similar contempt when we visited the Cleveland Clinic a couple of years ago.  I suspect teaching hospitals are like this unless a considerable effort has been made to be friendly.

The whole idea of doctors doing research and teaching hospitals nests in the whole idea of Western Medicine, which I am beginning to call a Parliament of Clowns (or choose your obscenity).  Here is a neat illustration that I pulled off the internet comparing Western Mechanical-Man medicine to traditional Chinese medicine, which views the body as a garden:

(It's fun to blow this up, print it, and color it.)  It is very Western to think with the left-brain, to respect advances in technology, to believe that enough money and knowledge will cure you - and that's how all the big hospitals advertise, too.  They are cutting-edge, they save kids with weird cancers.

The brand of Western Medicine I have been unfortunate enough to live through, which misdiagnosed me for three years (I almost died of suicide), then ruined my kidneys with lithium, then charged me $200,000 for a transplant, and then didn't  give a damn what happened to me after that - is actually American medicine.  I hear things are better in European countries.  American medicine is profoundly influenced by the American Dream, the get-rich get-status gunplay frontier attitude on which this country was founded by a bunch of  fortune-hunters and misfits (and a few good men).

At present we have a medical profession run by rich old white guys and the occasional Queen Bee, too many of whom went into it for money and status.  Too few went into it out of compassion, out of a desire to relieve suffering and heal the world.  (And I do know those doctors exist.)  People who want to help others often go toward the helping professions, ministry, nursing, teaching, massage, alternative healing modes.  Who can afford med school, anyway, but the sons (and, recently, daughters of the rich?  And who can endure the brutal frat-boy hazing system of internship and residency, which is not nearly as much fun as Grey's Anatomy makes it look.

What do you do when a system is broken at its very foundation?  Anyone can tell you it's going to be a long long uphill climb of the Sisyphus kind.  Nevertheless, we should try.  Here are my suggestions:

1.  Medical schools should begin screening with psychological tests all applicants who look smart and diligent enough to be admitted.  Test for this:  compassion.  Test for what we call people skills.  That shouldn't be too hard.  Further, interview selected candidates.
2.  We patients should begin interviewing and evaluating our doctors.  What is their spiritual practice?  Why did they go into medicine, why this field?  What do they do when they don't know what to do for a patient?  (Throw her out in the snow?)
3.  We should all begin asking ourselves what each of us can do to bring attention to this awful mess, how we could suggest corrective measures.  (Don't overlook the ability now to rate doctors on internet sites.)
4.  You should print out this post and send it to your doctor.  Or former doctor.

I myself intend to write that doctor a letter, striving for compassionate communication, explaining to him how this has affected me.  Try to show him that it was appalling to dump me - a known suicide risk - out here without any help in coping with this dangerous mental illness.  I want to suggest he consider going into administration full-time.  He's already rising in that department and told me he likes it.  He likes being busy. 

I may also write to Les Wexner, a local rich man who has given OSU so much money that his name is now part of the name of the OSU Medical Center.  I don't need to mention the bad doctor's name; the point is not to punish an individual who thinks he means well.  The point is to examine the very premise of the place.  If anyone is in a position to set a few balls rolling and shake things up, it's Les.  As I think about it, such a letter sounds to me like skillful means, one of those Buddhist concepts.

I won't have time to do this today.  I highly doubt I will be able to do it tomorrow.  It's been day UP/day down since I went off Seroquel, and that would make tomorrow a down day.  Those days it's a real struggle to get dressed, to drink my water take my pills on time and eat halfway right.  To somehow distract and amuse myself during the endless blank painful hours of a day like that.  To fall asleep.  But maybe the day after that.  After all, I have taken the Bodhissatva vow, to save all beings.  You have to keep working at it from wherever you are.

Today's Fish Selection, Carpe Diem

Sitting here tonight - it is 11:19 pm (the way we've learned to tell time digitally, instead of ghe more casual "almost 11:30) or "past bedtime" or "getting toward midnight," and you probably know I've been faithful to a bedtime routine that includes getting off screens at 9 pm, okay, sometimes pushing it a bit.  I've done a lot of things those who style themselves experts in sleep call "sleep hygiene."  (The very term makes you not want to do it.)

Because over and over I keep learning it doesn't pay to be good.  I mean, to be obedient, to let someone else tell you what is good for you.  I've had two nights running now where I did all that shit the way I was supposed to and still couldn't get to sleep until 2 pm.  And then only because it occurred to me to take another 6 mg of melatonin.  Jesus.

But I've had a good day here in spite of that, or maybe because I was just too stressed from it to behave.  Started right off with a nervous breakthrough, that's where I get really upset at someone and have to practice right speech like crazy and take some ativan.  These things usually happen when I've been too f---- patient, too nice, put up with crap until it nudged me over the line.  It's always a good thing in terms of clearing my mind.

I got closer to some women friends today as a result.  Made it to church, but not to the worship center.  Just sat in Fellowship Hall and talked to people, starting with, thank God, Barb.  I told her how I can predict tomorrow to be a bad day, and just knew I wouldn't get in the car at 3:00 (my low point of the day, except I get worse until about 6:00 on a bad day) and go to Art Journaling which is now a semi-private group of very nice women who are interested in each other's art-making and old enough to be cool.  Women you can talk to. I love the intimacy of making art with friends.

So Barb said she is going to be babysitting Christopher tomorrow, and how about they come and pick me up and take me to art?  Now - that is a bodhissatva at work.  Barb happens to be a UU Christian, I'd say, and I am rather that too, but primarily Buddhist.  Who cares?  Kindness is the basis of all true religion.  No doctrinal arguments there.

It's been a hellish week for me, still alternating days good/bad like f------ clockwork, and my depressed days really black, maybe because of learning about Scott's death Sunday, on a bad day, and then the funeral last Thursday, another bad day, and I never should have gone.  I quit.  I am not going to anymore of these goddam "Memorial Services" unless I feel good.  I personally hate the way my church does funerals, where everybody talks about celebrating someone's life - yeah, celebrating.  Scott was 49 years old and died of a massive heart attack.  What is there to celebrate about that?

Nobody ever breaks down sobbing helplessly at these things, it's like that's everyone's goal, not to cry.  Actually, that's been true of every f--- funeral I've ever been to except Sarah's last fall.  Sarah's, we cried, her sister sobbed, a minister spoke briefly of death and loss.  But the ones at our church . . .

It has never worked for me.  I can't drink now, with my meds, but what I'd really like is to go to a good Irish funeral as I imagine them, I don't care what the religion is, as long as people wear black and weep.  And then everyone should sit down to a lot of good substantial food and get drunk and kiss people in the hall and hug each other and tell people sloppily you love them.  That's what you should figure out from being around death:  get into life.  Get with it.  Live it.  This is no time to be civilized.

Alright.  I'm going to break one of my own sensible rules and post this tonight.  I hope you like the cat pictures.  And by the way, I love you guys who read this.  Sometimes I feel so tired and lonely in the middle of the night, and it's consoling when I see someone on the other side of the world is reading this blog that very moment.  I love that.  This is my little bit of string.

Life and Death is the Great Matter

It's been almost a week since I posted.  I had a post almost ready to go out last Sunday, but when I got to  church Ray came over and told me Scott Robinson died Saturday night of a massive heart attack.  He was 47 and not known to have heart disease. 

Scott was a special friend to us for many years, used to meditate with us, was often in our house for gatherings.  He was bipolar, and it was basically disabling.  One of my first thoughts was that I was glad it wasn't suicide, that I couldn't have stood that. I think you always feel at a death, even a natural death, that you could have, should have, done more for that person. I don't think Scott knew how much he meant to me.  I should have told him he was like a kid to me, that I cared deeply for him.

Scott and Ray

There's another kind of thing that swept in on me with tsunami force Sunday, which was a down day for me anyway, so I was vulnerable:  an intimate understanding of my own fragility.  It comes back to me as I write.  When I close my eyes I can see my stomach, pancreas, all my soft internal organs, my fragile ribs, my aging colon, my swiss-cheese spine.  One fall, one cough from someone with a deadly antibiotic-resistant bug, one kid opens up with a gun in the theater and you're dead.  Gone.  Forever.  You didn't get to plan or say goodbye.  And you will very soon be forgotten by all but a very few.  If you want to know, Buddhism is not consoling me about this.  Obviously I am not enlightened.

Scott's cover photo on Facebook

Because of this intimate sense of fragility, I wore a protective mask yesterday in the crowded waiting room at the James for my long-scheduled appointment with a dermatologist.  She specializes in us transplant people, who are much more likely than you to get aggressive skin cancer.  We are supposed to be inspected top to toes (literally) every year, but she wants me to come every six months because my brother died of melanoma.  I did not have the disassociation I was afraid I might have during all this, sometimes do have with medical exams.  This wasn't sexually invasive like a cystoscopy or colonoscopy.  I was engaged during the long, tedious affair of the nurse and her telling me what I already knew about prevention; but I wasn't emotionally engaged; I was thinking.

Scott and BartholomeOw

What I kept thinking was the spectacular amounts of time, money and trouble spent on keeping me alive these last few years.  A friend underwent major surgery to give me one of her kidneys.  Well over $200,000 was spent on that surgery, most of it by insurance, including Medicare, and it costs thousands of dollars every month for the horrible immune-suppressive drugs that inflame my stomach but keep me from rejecting the kidney and lay me open to all these kinds of cancer.  You can get cancer in the whites of your eyes, in your mouth and throat or genitals. I'm supposed to schedule a Pap smear, too.  That's a different doctor.  This doctor cut off a pink thing on my arm that I thought was recent scar tissue and is having it biopsied. It stings.

I want to convey the weirdness of understanding that all this money is spent on me while people die or go blind or are crippled for want of inexpensive medical care.  It is not fair or right.  It's an accident of karma that I was born into a thrifty family in white middle-class in America in a time when you earned pensions as you worked, and ended up with terrific health insurance.

But weirder that I don't deserve it, and still worse that I bitch about all the stuff I have to do just to stay alive.  Taking care of myself takes all my time!  At this very moment I should have already done my chi gong and meditated and should be eating Cream of Wheat and taking the rest of my morning pills, and I resent that schedule calling me.  I work on not resenting how my bipolar disorder took on new life after the surgery, how I am depressed every other day now, sometimes immobilized by it and given to drifting suicidal fantasies, and nobody can come up with a medication that's any help.  It's bad.  I feel guilty that I'm not suffused with joy.  I think I should be happy all the time for every extra day I've been given. 

And I feel guilty because I haven't accomplished anything much, either.  I ask, What can I possibly do to make it worth while that Laurie Brown gave me one of her kidneys?  That I am here and Scott is dead.   My central gift is seeing, feeling, expressing my experience.  Maybe that's all I have to give, and I have this blog, which is the easy way to give it.  So here it is.  And here is something Scott posted once.

How to Get $200 With Just a Few Keystrokes

I could write a letter to my grandson about this, but his life is hard enough, with his Mom, Stepdad Chris, and me all friending him on Facebook - and keeping an eye on it, too.  And really, it's one of those rediscoveries that seems so excellent I want to share it worldwide. 

Scenic train

This really is about how to get easy money, though not $5 million dollars and acreage in Nigeria.  This is real.  I, an old grandmother on pension, do have $200 in a savings account at my credit union, and all I had to do was set up one monthly e-transfer from my checking account.

If I'm e-banking, I can only think everyone else who has any dollars at all is, too.  In the course of setting up my new checking account (having realized that credit unions treat people better than big national banks that spend a lot on advertising) I protected myself against late fees by setting up a transfer of $20 on the first of each month to my personal credit card.  So I learned how to do that.

When I joined the credit union, they'd required that I set up a savings account, too, with $5 in it.  That's all I had to do. But I thought, Hmm.  I could just have them transfer $10 a month into that savings account.  I could do that and not miss it.  So I did.  And that mounted up without me noticing it.  When it hit $100, I thought, I wouldn't miss another $10 a month, either, so I changed it to $20 a month.  And today it went over $200.

Two hundred dollars.  That was beginning to impress me.  I could buy - oh, heck - lots of different luxuries with that.  A weekend retreat, if you want to be spiritual about it.  If you don't, a distinctive Hermes silk twill pocket square (and have a few dollars left over - very few). You never see those at the thrift store.

I had the wild thought that I should start a similar account for said grandson, just having $10 a month transferred into it for the next ten years.  When he graduates from college he could come into it.  Figuring at 2% compound interest (savings account interest is low these days, even at the credit union), it would come to $1,326.16.  If I wanted to grow it faster, when it hits $500 I could invest that in the stock market, and add to it with the next $500.  Invest in something with high-growth-potential like Contrafund. Even if I didn't do that, just let it sit there safe in the credit union, the money would buy him a nice Eurail pass, with the 35% discount for young people who don't mind travelling second class.  He could stay at hostels, have some fun.  I wish I'd done it when I still could, except I never really was that young.  (Insert rueful smile.)

I started my first savings account when I was about 12.  I don't remember much about that, except that interest was reliably 4% then.  This was the fifties, before credit cards became popular, so that's what people did - they saved until they could afford a new stove, or whatever.  I know, what a weird idea.  Getting along without something until you could pay for it.

I get the impression that these days a lot of Americans don't have any savings at all, that that's what's meant by living paycheck-to-paycheck.  Always a really bad idea.  It would make me very nervous.  I am convinced that anyone can save something.  The trick is, get it started.  Make it regular and automatic, and don't withdraw it the first impulse you get.  Save it for an important dream or a third notice from the gas company.

I'm not saving for anything right now.  I just enjoy watching it mount.  You never know.  There - "you never know" - that's a word of Zen.

How To Find Your Path

Faithful Readers may recall me talking a while back about softening around pleasant emotions in line with the project of working with difficult emotions. Here I am doing it again.  How nice that is, since it has been bad weather in my brain lately.  I say "brain" rather than "mind" because I think it's my chemistry that has me in a state best described as ADD; my 83 problems are behaving just now.  I've never been diagnosed as ADD, so I hope it's a passing thing.

In an effort to gain some sense of control over what seems to be a whirlwind of clutter around here, I asked a friend, Chris, to come over in her professional capacity and help me organize my study.  Ahh.  We must have taken a hundred books out of here and put them on the dining room table, her doing most of the carrying, where they now await Tom's culling.  History suggests he will take some of them down to that room now called a man-cave.  It has everything in it he doesn't want to see thrown away, including an antler he once found walking through a woods, though I've never seen any old chewed up bones down there.  In a few days Chris will come back and take the remaining books out of here to a closet in the church where they will await the church's next book exchange day.

Rambling lead-in.  You can do that on a blog.  Nothing to sell, no editor to please but me.

Apple, blossom end (unedited)

 Chris was scheduled to be here two hours, but we got a lot done the first hour, and I wanted to sit down and did.  I am really out of shape just now.  Here's what I'm most grateful for: she asked me if maybe we'd done enough for now.  I know, I'm a grownup, I can say when I'm tired.  But I was on her schedule for two hours of work, so was hesitating to cut it short.  Her sensitivity felt caring and tender.

The feeling I had about all this - the help with decision-making, the pointers toward what I need to do next, the sensitivity toward my tiredness - I can't really name it.  It is in the area of my heart, an expansive softness.  You know, it's one of the principles of Zen that you can never capture anything in words.  But I could call it gratitude and be close.  Sometimes things like this spill over in tears for me, but I thought I'd just stay with it, let it be there.  Accepting is part of the process of working with emotions.

For most of my life I was an independent person who could do anything, or figure out how to get it done.  (The kind of woman who is the lifeblood of a church. Fortunately, there is a younger generation doing that work now.)

Aging and illness have forced me to give up many kinds of work, including volunteer work.  It's been hard.  But not as hard as refusing to accept reality.  It's taught me to ask for help.  As I enjoyed this soft feeling, I realized that this is my path right now, where spiritual and psychological growth meet.  Connecting to my own reality; asking for help. 

It points out to me once more the truth that no one else can define my path for me.  I am the only person who knows enough about me and my whole history to know what I need, and take my next step.  This is a sort of principle of Zen, going back to Taoism.  That's why it's said, "If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him," meaning, stay away from anybody who promises they know your path, and are willing to sell it to you. You find your path yourself, one step at a time.

You can see the above inspiring Apple Mandala at Fionaviola's Etsy shop, Chain Stitch. 

Caring in a Caveman Society

This is a personal blog, about making my way through life, and I don't often veer into opinion because (a) it attracts trolls, and (b) I've never won an argument yet.  But the whole world affects me, of course. 

I was stirred by reading an article in Tuesday's NY Times, "Low Pay at Weight Watchers Stirs Protest as Stars Rake It In."  This is not so different than the issue of astronomical bonuses for bankers and pathetic wages for the working class, except that it is largely about exploiting women; there are not many male Weight Watcher leaders. (And BTW, not many women CEOs in the largest companies.)  Here's the bit that has me shaking my head:

"It's a female-dominated job, it's in the service industry, and it's caring work," Professor Mastracci said of Weight Watchers.  "Caring work is undervalued..."

Sharon Mastracci is the author of "Breaking Out of the Pink-Collar Ghetto" and teaches at the University of Illinois. Let me repeat that: Caring work is undervalued. Let me change it just a bit:  Compassion is undervalued.

Is it possible to say something sadder about a society?  And it's not just the United States.  It's everywhere  we are not yet freed from the values of patriarchy, which I think of as caveman society, since many of those values grew then, when the strongest men ruled.  These "masculine" values are many, and some are admirable, such as teamwork and courage.  Others run through society like big ugly threads.  They underwrite pornography.  They fire competition for winning, power, wealth, and fame, often with beautiful young women as the prize, and that competition too often leads to ruthlessness.  Over and over someone caught up in it ends up doing ugly things.  Occasionally they get what they deserve.

Lance Armstrong

This is all very personal for me.  I am a woman.  So is my daughter, so are most of my friends, so was my mother and hers before her.  Those in my generation and earlier were taught that we had three career options, if we weren't lucky enough to marry a good provider and have children and be a Happy Homemaker:  teacher, secretary, nurse.  Who knows what many thousands of us might have done if we'd had a chance to see what we could do?  What we wanted to do?

Most of the women I know are in middle-class members of my generation and my daughter's, and most of them  have been involved in caring work, such as child-rearing, homemaking, nursing, support staff, or K-12 teaching.  When caring work is undervalued, it's women that are being undervalued, and women's work: raising children and making homes and caring for the sick - the work that keeps society together while the men make bombs and play political games and decide women can't be priests.

Caring work is the most important work in the world.  Until the men figure that out, we need to be sure we know it for ourselves.  And not be afraid to rock the boat a little in our own lives from time to time, for the good of the world.