The year in review

Like so many bloggers, I stopped blogging this year. This had something to do with getting serious about your writing, something to do with having Facebook to express yourself on/distract yourself with, something to do with having now shared all the wisdom you've got. In the autumn of 2014 I took an online course from the University of Iowa, which has one of the best creative writing programs in the country. It gave me new ways to understand writing fiction, and I got going and wrote half a dozen short stories. I entered one in several contests. Didn't win. Life is unfair.

Why didn't I keep sending out these stories? My vitals page and my calendar tell the answer. Doctors, doctors, one UTI infection after another. The infections are not like the UTIs many women get while young, maybe from enthusiastic sex. They evidence themselves in the depression they trigger in my authentically bipolar brain. So, no writing then.

In late June I was hospitalized with extreme shortness of breath which turned out to be due to no other cause than a UTI. While I was there I told them I'd recently fallen, so they did a scan that showed a subdural hematoma - brain bleed. And I hadn't even hit my head this time. But when you're old - I turned 74 this year - the brain shrinks a little. If you land hard, your brain bangs around in your skull.

The second scan showed the bleed wasn't getting worse, so they released me. The third scan months later showed it was gone, so nothing to worry about. Except . . . my short-term memory is much worse ever since. Much. And my processing is much slower. The new neurologist felt sure it wasn't dementia and would resolve. That was six months ago, and it hasn't. Next time I see my primary care doctor I'm going to ask him to suggest an evaluation for dementia.

I am now very afraid of falling. Because I fell for no reason. I was deadheading the peonies, walking backward in tiny steps on a concrete sidewalk, and just lost my balance. Then time moved very slowly, there was nothing to grab hold of, and I landed hard on my bottom. Because of the concussion, I couldn't figure out how to get up until Tom came out and helped me.

So now I use a cane outside the house. I have two canes, one leopard-skin print, one giraffe print, that's one for each vehicle. We won't have both vehicles forever. My 2000 Civic is low to the ground, and it's gotten hard for me to get out of. Tom's van is much better for me.

This calendar year I had 12 UTIs, yes, one right after another. I had to go to a urologist - I dread those tests - to rule out specific bladder problems. Now I'm on a maintenance antibiotic. It has been working for several weeks now.

I forgot things till I looked at my calender. I had a procedure to fix the artery in my left leg, which went great; the foot doesn't get numb walking now. I was hospitalized again in November with a skin infection called cellulitis from a tiny cut on my lymphedemic right arm. These are a common threat for people who have had lymph glands removed. Old age and being immune-suppressed are risk factors.

Me me me. I meant to look at what I did this year, but it seemed like I had to point out first that I barely had a year. I don't know how I would have taken all this if I hadn't had a good grounding in the dharma. I thought often about karma, about how our lives are not just in our own hands. My health problems started with the kidney transplant six years ago, and the immune-suppressing drugs we have to take. The kidney failure started with taking lithium for 20 years. The bipolar disorder was the result of a combination of childhood trauma and the genes for it. The childhood trauma . . . 

I miss you folks.

Not dead yet

Update on personal body and soul -

Yesterday went to my PCP (primary care provider, as we now call family doctors) because a sharp recurring pain in my stomach was frightening me.  This doctor actually knows me, (despite every effort of the medical and insurance professions to make medicine impersonal), so he ordered a urine sample before he even talked to me.  And there it was again, a hidden bladder/kidney infection.  This one was not signalling itself with incontinence.  So I started on Macrobid again last night, and this morning on omeprazel for the stomach.  The shingles are acting like they should, crusting over, and they itch something terrible now, and if I sweat it makes them sting.  We discussed my pain medication.  I haven't been taking enough. 

As for my soul, I immediately felt relieved - the deep depression of this last week is not necessarily bipolar rising up again.  And in fact, the terrible depression in early September was simultaneous with a UTI.  Regular people who don't have mood disorders get depressed with these hidden infections, but a lot of them think they're just old and ready to die; and younger people can keep bulling their way through what they think they have to do, ignoring or drowning their bleakness or blaming it on their spouse.  But if you need any proof that we are one unit, and there is not one part of us separate from the others (like mind separate from bladder, say), this is it, living proof.

I've been so tired this week that I had to miss things that brighten my life - going to choir, coffee with a friend, having Otto over for the afternoon.  So tired that twice I forgot to take off the elastic sleeve I wear for lymphedema, and slept in it - dangerous for the skin.  In my usual I'll Conquer This attitude, I wrote a checklist and posted it in my bathroom,  so I remember to do the things I have to do at bedtime.  That's how tired I was, and waking up still tired.  But this morning I woke up to find I'd slept 11 hours, and my first real thought/sensation was that I didn't feel as bad, and my second was gratitude.

You know, you are not even in charge of your own will to live.  Today the sun is out here in southern Ohio, and every time I look out the window at the blue sky and take a breath, it feels healing.  I had a cupcake for breakfast and played Words with my grandson, whom I love more than my own life by far.  Now that I'm pulling out of that depression I can feel love again.  Even love is a matter of your health and the mix and flow of chemicals in your brain.

Now, that's all for now.  As for what I do in this blog, I just try to share my life, the reality. As for the image above, is God behind the clouds?  In the clouds?  Is God the sun and clouds, and the photographer?

The things you're spoze to do

[image: one of the very first crocuses this year, growing wild in a little cemetery near our house. This is the photo I couldn't put up yesterday. I am using it for wallpaper, and enjoying it. You are welcome to do the same.]

I have been up almost two hours. In that time, I ate a pretty good breakfast of Kashi cereal with dried strawberries in Rice Dream (no milk for the kidney patient), a hot hardboiled egg, a slice of white (sic) bread and real butter. Decaf, added cream. Maybe that's the problem, the decaf. Caffeine does something else to me, which is why the cardiologist doesn't want you to have it - accelerates everything, the brain, the heart. The mouth.

It's Science Times day in the NYTimes, and all they wanted to write about was the health legislation. I read an article about how complicated non-compliance is. Non-compliance is a term doctors use to mean "the patient didn't do what I told them to."

I had been thinking about this recently, as I recalled that when my father had the cerebral hemmorhage that killed him, he was on a blood thinner, coumadin. It is supposed to be regularly checked with a blood draw, and I've always thought he probably wasn't complying. He had a huge regard for doctors, but a stronger desire to not comply with anything, to show he was in charge. And then there was something else going on.

I remembered it the other day, watching a TV show about a doctor who hated the sight of blood - my father hated to get shots. Didn't my mother say he almost fainted when he got a shot? And toward the end of his life, she was torpid with dementia, there was no one to insist and herd him to the doctor. I wouldn't be at all surprised if it had been months since he had his blood drawn. If the doctor was insisting on regular checkups, as he probably would, my father might have gone off the drug rather than show up and admit the truth. The hell with it, he would say, when he made one of these difficult decisions. Non-compliant.

A healthy life, living in a healthy way, living to maximize your vitality and keep your body/mind working smoothly - you can see this as a string of good habits you will never get down. Go to bed on time, meditate every morning, take a walk outside when the weather is nice, as it is right now. I haven't touched on food and drink, and the intricacies of even knowing what you need (maybe caffeine is good for me) and getting it. Then there are the things peculiar to your body. Oil after a shower. Always wear shoes, supportive shoes with insoles. If I set down all the things I'm spoze to do, including the pills I have to take three times a day and then three other times, with meals, I couldn't stand it. My day would be, it seems, a chain of these healthy habits. It makes you want to do none of them, just go out and have a nice hot fudge sundae. And a menthol cigarette, before they make them illegal.

Surely we know by now that whipping yourself is not the way to get something done, at least I do. So I have a question that applies to all this Doing What's Good For You. Since a lot of my readers practice meditation, I'll frame it around that: What do you do when you don't want to sit? Really don't want to. Do you force yourself? and how? I'd love to hear from you.