Died and Gone to Heaven, Metaphorically speaking

Your brain on Buddha

I feel like I just won the lottery - got a long-awaited call from my nephrologist that I can very slowly ramp down on one of the immunosuppressents I take to keep my donated kidney from being rejected by an alert immune system.  Why would you want to go down on these lifesaving drugs?  Because they suppress your immune system.

Take last night - I was suddenly stricken with Herpes on my lips - cold sores to you - so suddenly that it scared me.  I felt unwell, and the whole left side of my face felt irritated and involved, including that eye.  My eyes are one of my favorite organs.

A whole lot of people have had cold sores and harbor the herpes virus forever in their bodies, but it is dangerous to the elderly and to the immunesuppressed.  I happened to have a doctor appointment today, so I mentioned it and he looked at it and talked to me about it.  It looks okay, and he didn't prescribe an anti-viral, but I should call immediately if this infection gets worse. . . .

This is why it is said a transplant is a treatment for kidney failure, not a cure.  So, you know, you do what you have to to stay alive, but you don't always enjoy it.  Even if you meditate.  Zen is not about eternal bliss, but about being fully alive.

I always like to post pictures, but you sure don't want to see pictures of cold sores, or if you do, GIY.  Above, one of these pictures intended to make you want to meditate.  Perhaps I should note that my kidney was given to me by a woman I hardly knew, who had sat with our Zen group one night when I was doing orientation.  That's quite an outcome of being in a meditation group.  Unusually good karma, indeed.

And that makes me want to post a favorite puppy-dog picture, which I may well have posted before.  So here:

 

May you have some good luck today, too.

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.

Letter from an American Hospital

It is 3:08 am and I am sitting in bed in a luxury hospital thinking about writing an open letter to the doctor who woke me three hours ago to express contempt for my conviction that I cannot take steroids or contrast dye, though he had accepted that to the extent of cancelling the scheduled scan.

Dr. Doctor:
Okay, you're short.  I wouldn't have noticed except that you were so aggressive, so angry at the possibility that I thought I know something about my body that you don't.  So had to be on top. Contemptuous.  What?  You're short, animals recognize power in size, it is not fair.  And you know what?  Nobody cares if you are king of your little mountain of being right. Get over it.  We're grown us now, we don't care who's tallest.

So you were so pissed off when the nurse told you at 10 p.m. that I refused steroids and cannot have a test with contrast dye, that you came bustling into the room two hours later to wake up a deaf 70 year old lady who has apparently had a heart attack for only one reason: to do your power thing.  You and the fiery nurse who had already talked to me like I was an idiot, "Do you have any idea what you're risking?"

Yes, I do.  If I let you do the test you so imperiously wanted, it could damage my kidney - the only working kidney I have or ever will get.  That would be a sentence to death. You didn't know that, and it really pisses you off that a woman, an old woman yet, would think she knew something you don't.   Okay, you won.  You woke me up.  I can't get back to sleep. Good for my health.

You're playing doctor here as if it were a war game.  Interested only in towering over me, not in discussing the other ways we could examine the issue, or in calling my transplant doc. Did not want his name.

That nurse earlier informed me she would be giving me a heparin shot.  I know all about that, Christ I was in and out of hospitals for ten years.  It's a blood thinner.  I said, "I just had four aspirins two hours ago.". Oh. (And why didn't urgent care give me an aspirin at noon when they saw symptoms of heart?  Why didn't the ER they sent me to?  Don't you people watch TV?  Everyone knows you take an aspirin.  I knew it, but didn't know vertigo was a symptom, but you knew that.). No heparin shot.

No use trying to go to sleep now. Someone will wake me to do another blood draw because that's protocol no matter that I only have one arm you can stick.  Then someone will wake me to do vitals.  Then someone will come in shouting at me to rate my pain. This is Western medicine.  It has a great kill rate.

The Best Thing You Can Do For Your Health

Common snapdragon

And I just did it - I acted as my own doctor.

I don't mean the kinds of odd things we come up with that stand outside Western medicine, which is, generally speaking, based on science, on studies and lab results and radiology and chemistry.  I do plenty of things for my health outside that province, like oil of rosemary to perk up and eucalyptus to sleep, yogurt, apple cider vinegar and garlic and d-Mannose, and lately, wearing cotton on the advice of yoga teachers.  Four liters of water a day and various spiritual practices, including a church. And more that Western science is just catching on to, like singing, laughing, getting enough sleep, and making art.  And I have several doctors and take many prescribed pills on schedule and get blood draws.......you know.  Almost 70 here, basically you work on staying alive.

But what I'm rejoicing today about is a triumph of Western medicine.  Basically, getting established with a doctor I  can get in to see, and who will listen to me and, sometimes, go along with what I want.  Yes!

What I wanted from my kidney doctor was that he reassess the immunosuppressants I take to keep my body from rejecting the kidney Laura Brown gave me 20 months ago.  Why?  Because I can't spend five minutes outside without my allergies getting even worse than they are when I stay home in filtered air.  I figured that having my whole immune system suppressed might be behind this, though it's true that here in midwestern America we have had so much in bloom all the time this year that everyone's allergies are worse.  (What, you don't believe in climate change?)

I actually have two kidney docs, one at the research hospital that did the transplant and a private doctor.  They usually alternate, each one seeing me once a year.  But I thought the right one to talk to was my private-practice doctor, Dr. D.  He is that unusual thing, an extrovert who enjoys talking to patients and telling us what he knows.  He's just about the only guy left who does the hospital - there is a vogue now for something called a hospitalier who works there and never saw you before in his life.  So I waited a month to get in with Dr. D, and saw him this morning.

I do my best to look respectable when I visit a doctor, and to seem reasonable, though I do have orange shoelaces. And Tom goes with me.  Whether you like reality or not, they respect men a little bit more.  Tom testifies to my truth and helps me remember things.  I gave my pitch, and Dr. D quizzed me about other symptoms.  I hadn't complained about the GERD which has been constant since the transplant.  He knew about the multiple UTIs.  And I reminded him I am almost 70.  Said that before, didn't I?  "I'm an old lady," I said, without even blushing.  Because I know that, generally, it is good to lower doses as you age. 

He looked over his printouts on my labs, and talked a while about how there are some newer drugs than Rapamune, which a lot of people don't tolerate; and how stable I've been since the transplant.  He thought maybe my dose could be lowered.  He takes pains to work closely with the research docs, worked there once himself.  So he called that doctor and then called me.  Yes, the doctor called me himself, they can dial the phone it turns out, rather than having the message filter through a nurse or two.

I actually couldn't have implemented the changes they are prescribing without a new prescription.  And I wouldn't have done it on my own - kidney rejection could kill me.  They want a new blood draw after a week, and I would have wanted that if I'd thought to ask. The fact is, I need professional help to be my own doctor sometimes.  But this wouldn't have happened at all if I didn't pay attention to my body and act on its behalf; that's what being your own doctor means.
 
It turned out that Research Dr. agreed.  Lower the Rapamune and lower the Neoral a little, too.  He told Dr. D, "I didn't realize how old she was."  Of course I am way too cool to be grinning as I write that. 

Life is not fair, but you knew that

Well, I thought I would comment on how my Spring form-new-habits project is going. 

Getting back into meditating every morning has been easier than I expected. It reminded me of the power a habit has, which is why I never smoke "just one" cigarette.  (Quit in 1988, and it wasn't easy.)

Hanging up my clothes at night - pretty good. I've tended to forget, maybe even get into bed and then see them draped over the hamper, waiting to be hung up, and say Uh-oh.  Last night I had a lapse, a sort of binge of not hanging up clothes.  I'd had one of those really bad days, from start to finish, and was feeling a little wild at bedtime, but I'm glad to say, got to sleep.

So, about that day.  I had signed up several weeks ago for a two-hour workshop on decorating eggs Ukranian style, taught by a church friend.  Right away I was in trouble, because I had to get up with an alarm clock at 8:00 to leave the house by 9:15.  I don't really know what I did in that time, coffee, dress, eat an energy bar, take a million pills, but I didn't meditate.

Pysanky is an intricate, beautiful traditional art - you can see examples here.  That's what the instructor's eggs were like. We were warned that our first eggs weren't going to look like that.  Actually, the people around me at the table were absorbed in doing some nice-looking things, and nobody else wanted to ever leave, I guess.  But I learned something:  I have a tremor.

It's just a small tremor.  I'd noticed that my handwriting isn't pretty, a bit jerky, but thought it was arthritis, because my hands do hurt when I write a few sentences.  No, it is enough of a tremor to make drawing with hot wax on a curved surface impossible.  So my two attempts came out like this -

 That stick is what you use to do this - the blackened head is copper, you hold it in your candle flame, stab stab your beeswax, draw.  Then you do a resist process, like batik.  You note that the egg on the left is signed and dated by me, as suggested, so future generations would know who did it. Yes, that says 2012.  See what I mean?  The egg on the right is broken because as I was working on it after the first dye, I dropped it.  This happens.

The photographers among you may notice that I have messed with these photos, since I have the use of special effects with Picasa just for two more weeks (an editor that came with my phone).  In other words, I made them look as good as I could.

The farther you get from these eggs, the better they look, so here.

The teacher is very experienced, and complimented the beautiful russet I got on the left-hand egg by following a pale yellow dye with brown.  That egg  was actually covered with horrible scrawls - here you see the bottom, its best view.  And the mottled effect of the pink, which happened because I didn't prepare the eggs with vinegar the night before, as suggested, though not required.

I think I sound light-hearted about this, but I did not feel that way when I left the workshop - first one to leave, too. I just felt down. I was thinking some good thoughts, how I've been satisfying myself artistically with photography and collage, how good this is, because I don't know now whether I can paint or draw. I am usually steady enough with the camera, and collage is forgiving.  But I had a new fact about my body, and it's likely it's a side effect of the Rapamune I take - these immunosuppressants have big side effects.  Nobody takes them unless they have to.

Just two days before this, I got a diagnosis of chronic gout in my left big toe, which hurts right now. It always hurts, and the more I walk, the worse it feels.  I feel like I should get a break, one new ailment a week.  But it doesn't work that way, does it?

And that's why I didn't hang up my clothes last night. 

Of course I feel better today, loved church, cried during the anthem, wrote a poem about all this.  And did meditate before I went.

How I learned to stop worrying

Mandala

 

I think the artistic creation above is more attractive than a photo of my ankles, so you will have to imagine my peripheral edema.  Peripheral means on the outskirts of your body, usually your lower legs, as they sort of hang down all day, which encourages fluid to accumulate in them.  Edema is the visible swelling caused by that fluid.  I only make a point of this because I know many of you have a grandma in your life who has to go to the store in bedroom slippers, and you don't understand it.

Here's the thing:  it's not good when both ankles swell, but when just one is swollen, everyone worries.  So several weeks ago we saw my primary care doctor about it - this was on a Thursday - and he scheduled the soonest possible ultrasound, the next Monday, to rule out blood clots.  You really don't want a blood clot to form and travel to your heart or lungs.

But Friday night we noticed how bad the ankle looked, and Tom called our doctor's clinic about it, hoping for reassurance.  But the doctor on call said, of course we should go right to the ER and get it scanned, and not end up suing them for negligence. 

So we did, and this is getting to be a long story.  So I will skip the part about how they shut the ultrasound down at night and those people go home, so it was spend the night in the ER, having many other stupid tests done.  And finally the scan in the morning, and finally they said it was just fine.  I did not have a blood clot.

I'm trying to wind my way to now, several weeks later. We went back to primary care doc yesterday, because the damn swelling hadn't gone down, and I also suspected another UTI.  And this led to a thorough review of all the stupid tests done in the ER, which are right there on his laptop (!).  Blood draws, liver, kidney, and so on.  And everything looks fine.  This was a huge relief to us.  Nobody had told us to see him for a follow-through. This is modern American medicine at its best, unless you are very rich.

He explained that with age the arteries and veins can grow slack, and edema happens.  We could see a vascular specialist, but it was clear enough that the only thing that would accomplish would be to assure us further that nothing was wrong.  I should wear my compression stockings.

But most interesting, he had gone to some computer program with the extensive list of my medications, and returned with three pages detailing which meds are most likely to cause - guess what - peripheral edema.  When a doctor does things like this, you don't mind if he's wearing bespoke pants and Italian leather shoes.

And guess what?  One of the immunosuppressants (Rapamune) is a HUGE culprit in this, causing it in over 50% of the poor transplant patients who have to take it.  And furthermore, it commonly, their word, causes half a dozen other things, some of which I don't have yet, like headaches (but I'm thinking about it).  Nobody tells you these things.

You may have come to this post hoping I had a clue about how not to worry.  In a way, it's implicit in the story.  Identify the problem, take steps, get information, don't push it away.  It is easier to face your worries when you meditate; in fact, it is impossible not to, eventually.  Sometimes it's when the anxieties start to break through the bliss that people drop the practice.  But that's when it's started working.

[The image is me having fun with a recent photograph.  Now we're down to it - you can do so much with photography, the only reason to paint or draw is that you enjoy the feel and smell of the materials.  Which is a good reason, after all.]

Control or Undo?

Decisions, decisions

This evening, after a lovely day with Tom's family, I find myself a hot smoking gun in writing comments and e-mails.  So I will reproduce two items below that I don't feel like developing any further.  As far as criticizing Oprah, it takes a brave or hopeless writer.  I believe I am both.
 ~~~~~~~~~~
Why I feel Oprah is a seriously bad influence on women:
1. She is airbrushed on the cover. To say nothing of professional hair, makeup, and all that Spanx.  Nobody actually looks like that, ever.
2. She tells us we can do Anything if we only fabricate outlandish goals and continually pump up our craving to achieve them. This is bullshit. It makes women cheer when they are in the studio audience, but the next day it can only make you very very depressed. Because you can't.  Do Anything.  Everyone is limited in many ways by many factors.  I mean, come on, I can hardly do anything, let alone Anything.  And I've tried.
~~~~~~~~~~~
Hi ----- to all who are contemplating kidney transplant -
In the 14 months since my transplant (live donor) I have had 15 bladder infections, and no. 16 showed up today the way they do, with major urge incontinence.  So charming.  They bring depression and apathy with them, and the antibiotics upset my digestive system, so I have to force-feed yogurt and acidopholus pills and carry various stomach medications.  I am having serious pain problems with degeneration in my spine, perhaps avascular necrosis caused by the huge doses of steroids at the time of the surgery.  I am limping, that's a hip, and recovering very slowly from a broken arm. The steroids caused me to start having exaggerated moodswings that require medication, and it took six months or more of trial and error to solve the insomnia they brought on.  Everyone tells me I look great (for 69).  Wow, reborn.  I have not had any rejection problems.  There are people in my family who are glad I'm still around, I guess.  :)  Otherwise, I have not earned the transplant or paid the universe back.  The main thing I have gained is that I am no longer afraid of dying.

I don't know whether I would do it again if I had foreseen all this, but I think that's not a very good question.  We don't get to undo our decisions.  Or control the outcome. Don't even think it.

Unintended consequences

I have only tried this exercise from a mystical yoga teacher once, and it did not awaken that deep well of joy some Buddhist teachers purport to experience, nor a sense of bliss, but it did relax me, seems promising, and I feel I should be offering something now and then on this blog.  I am disappointed in a couple of other bloggers I follow by email, who have stopped posting regularly, leaving me with an inbox that is stultifyingly boring - [what?  now spellcheck is telling me stultifyingly isn't a word - nor is spellcheck.  Nor is bloggers.  I HATE this.  (The computer capitalized hate by itself, don't blame me.)]

Here is the whole world at my command, yet I am bored.  Or say, unimpressed.  Ah, there is the sun, a lot of golden leaves outside my window, a pale blue wash of a sky, water with just a drop of indigo  . . . Speaking of painting, I may be ready to pick up a paint brush in a week or so.  Suddenly yesterday I found myself basically not using the sling.  Well, the day before I hadn't used it much, either.  Found myself loosening it whenever I was sitting, just resting the arm in my lap.  Ah-ha. Healing.

The arm is tending to hurt now in the rotator cuff area.  Another ah-ha recently: maybe these problems with torn muscles (torn rotator cuff in left shoulder, remember?) have been caused by the *&%(# steroids at surgery (one whole gram).  That, or the misprescribed Cipro.  Or the years of levaquin.  Well, an ordinary life. Even if all this crap hadn't happened to me, I would still be getting old.  Or, already old.

And I think that's what I've come to as I digest the fact that it is now one year since my kidney transplant, and the kidney is very unlikely to reject.  I am possibly not going to die of kidney failure, but of something else.  It first came to me almost like a revelation, the mundane words you keep reading as you wait and pray:  A transplant is not a cure, but a treatment.  Like I said, mundane.

But under that lay something else - I had been led to believe it would mean a whole new life.  Being restored to health and vigor.  Maybe that is the curative fantasy one of my favorite Zen teachers, Barry Magid (who is a psychiatrist) talks about. 
~~~~~~~~~~
creativus interruptus - a phone call from my favorite best nurse, Joanie at the transplant center.  Yes, the urine culture taken last week does show an infection.  They are going to prescribe an antibiotic taken four (4!) times a day for ten (10!) days.  Well, thank God, I said, in italics, because I thought I should feel better than this.  These damn infections sap your strength and depress you.  And why am I having them?  Seems related to the transplant, since this is the fifteenth one in about a year (15!)  Ah, yes, I am immune-suppressed.  Sigh.  And always will be (as far as we know now).  That leads us to the title of this post.  Wikipedia on the subject is excellent:

More recently, the law of unintended consequences has comes to be used as an adage or idiomatic warning that an intervention in a complex system tends to create unanticipated and often undesirable outcomes. Akin to Murphy's Law, it is commonly used as a wry or humorous warning against the hubristic belief that humans can fully control the world around them.

Sounds Buddhist, but then Buddhism is so loose and accomodating, a lot of things do.  I bet anything that if you look at your own life, you will see that you - a complex system - have experienced such consequences too.  Like the way sex leads to babies, and babies become teenagers.  If they were born teenage, nobody would ever get pregnant, at least not twice.

The First Noble Truth, Again

My life

Day by day the depression has retreated, like a dark smog going out to sea.  I am not so bad this morning, but left with the realities of illness in both mind and body.  This mind has resumed an active ability to be depressed that I haven't had in many years, just the way my body has revealed weaknesses now that I have the energy to use it more.  (Back story: kidney transplant 11 months ago; age 68).  When Sleeping Beauty wakes up, it is to a mess.

This morning an image came to my mind, of life as a hooded Torturer who says to me, "This is the way it's going to be from now on - always some new disability or loss, some new pain.  Maybe several things at a time.  You will never know what it's going to be or when, sometimes it will be very hard.  And the only way out of here is death."

I say, "But I didn't do anything to deserve this."

He shrugs.  "You were born."

"I didn't ask to be born."  The adolescent cry, meaning, I wouldn't have bought a ticket if I thought the ride was going to be like this.  (Manic-depression has something in common with adolescence, heightened emotions connected with internal, maybe hormonal, changes. Also, an adolescent is being born out of childhood into a different less-fun world, new ways of seeing.)

So the question becomes, How do you live in prison for life under these lousy circumstances, knowing the torturer can visit anytime?

First, get with the reality; cultivate awareness of the reality, the kind of food you can expect here.  This was the Buddha's First Noble Truth - Life sucks. If you don't like this reality, you'll have no trouble finding people who want to feed you sugary pap.  That's their approach. 

One example of my bad attitude

A very bad stupid day yesterday, which maybe meant I hit bottom and turned the corner from the depression.  This morning coming in here w my coffee I noticed some faint negative thoughts, I mean the pissy thoughts about people whose crap makes my life even harder, but I noticed the thoughts, so there was a witness looking at my poor overloaded mind.  I wrote a poem this morning.  I meditated for the first time since we got back, briefly, knowing I had to do these things before the pain got bad and I took the first oxycontin, because on opiates you just don't care.

(I guess that's partly how they ruin lives. That, and the fact that they're illegal unless prescribed; and I suppose it is illegal to prescribe them just because someone likes the way they make you float and appreciate beauty.  It is a stupid law that has resulted in our prisons being crammed with mostly black young men who did nothing violent, just sold drugs.)

This has all involved how hard I worked these last years to stay alive, how vigilant I was, had to be.  Then what, you're walking toward the bathroom to fill your water pitcher because you have to drink 3 liters of water a day, you trip over nothing and down you go, flat, and a broken arm that is going to make every minute of your life a hassle for six weeks.  One second of inattention.

It was a second during which I was thinking how unresponsive and useless dokusan had been that morning, how I wasn't going to do another one, how I just had one *&%$# day to get through, then we could go home, thinking I probably would never come back on this retreat.  Yes, I had things on my mind.  But I don't care what you do, you can not guarantee you won't fall.  Could have struck my temple on the doorframe and been a functional vegetable the rest of my life.

It hurt, and it shocked me the way a fall can, and let loose all the misery and anxiety of these last years trying not to die.  And now what?  Almost a year after transplant and it's been a lousy, difficult year, not worth living.  I will never have another transplant, or go on dialysis again.  Done with extraordinary measures.

In all this depression there was something I decided about letting go my anxious vigilance.  I don't mind dying, people - in fact, at this point I'd welcome it.  God, gets me out of here.  I will do what I know I have to do to (maybe) keep living, take the damn drugs 7 times a day, get labs done, drink the *&%$# water.  But I'm done dragging myself through things that supposedly will protect me.  I enjoy food.  I will eat what I like.  I find exercise boring, so today while Tom did his I walked around McConnell with my camera.  Watching every *&%$# step, believe it.  Enjoyed it.  Well, there you are.  An update. Where I'm calling from.
~~~~~~~~~~
p.s. It's been 12 weeks now, and the arm is still a problem, not even ready for PT to get range of motion back (Wun hopes).
 

DNR Me

Far fields

We got here yesterday to set up the sound, but retreat is just starting now, and silence, thank god. I got overstressed by the week, the packing, the change of everything, and went into a really bad mood last night. I assure you undiagnosed people - what Tom calls Temporarily Able-Bodied - you do not know what depression is.  I write about this because I know there are bipolars and borderlines who read this, and who do know.  It has been a day to just get through.  I took to hiding in my room so I would not run into some chirpy smiley Hey how are you girl and snarl at her.  It's not their fault but fact is, their suffering inflicts me.

The outlook in depression is also real, though not balanced.  Mine has led me to see something I think is going to feel like a big relief after I get a night's sleep. Because you think about death, and how you're just so tired of all this.  Most of all I am tired of knowing tomorrow this kidney could fail.  This is less likely the further I get from transplant - 11 months now - but shit, I have a torn rotator cuff and will probably never play guitar again, an inflamed SI joint, crumbling vertebrae, a worsening hip, a bad knee, an incurable  toenail fungus, what might be gout on the other big toe, a tendency to blood sugar problems, can't drink ... people, getting old sucks as much as being young (except you can get good drugs legally). Add to that having my very dear friend almost snatched away by a heart attack, and no telling how she'll be after lots of rehab.  You learn a major Buddhist truth - you can read  The Five Remembrances on the side of this blog - anything can be taken from you in a flash.

And I thought, if this kidney fails, I'm done.  I'm not going to die slowly on dialysis.  I've had it.

Would I take another transplant if some miraculous kidney was offered again?  Don't know.  What an ordeal this year has been with 11 infections, steroid flashbacks, and  all the usual crap of normal life.  I am not likely to get to make that decision, so forget it.  I am about to turn 69, and that's part of my depression.  I lost the last five years to severely low kidney function.  The five years before that were a hell of mother dying, brother dying, Tom becoming too disabled to work.  Jesus, when did I have a good year?  Maybe next year?

So that's where I'm at after 14 years of pretty dedicated, not to say intense, spiritual practice.  Right there in reality.  Which sucks sometimes.  If anybody tells me to look on the bright side, I will hunt her down and kill her.  But quickly - I do have some compassion and, I guess, still a sense of humor.

Sitting like a frog

Being, like a frog.  Being like a frog today, in fact.  Except a frog doesn't have to worry about the kitchen floor and go get a blood draw and order calcium online.

Recently read where some Teacher reminded us how special it is to be the only creature that can build a relatively safe, comfortable shelter from the weather.  Though even at this moment one thinks of the tornadoes that have barely missed us lately, of how Hurricane Ike sent high winds all the way to Ohio, and big trees fell in our neighborhood, where we are fortunate to have big trees, and we were out of power for seven days, and everything in the freezer and refrigerator finally went bad, though I did manage to give some chicken nuggets to Barb.

Yes, that's this beautiful mind today, open.  Big day yesterday, drove to Amish country to visit with Tom's folks and Uncle Ted, had an excellent lunch, a wonderful time.  Today, I am tired, a frog without the energy to stick my tongue out and catch a fly.

Trungpa's advice to just sit was exactly the advice of Suzuki Roshi, I remember - and it was Suzuki who told his students to just sit like a frog.  I didn't "get it" as well as I do now that I am reading it in Trungpa Rinpoche's book The Path is the Goal: A Basic Handook of Buddhist Meditation.  Whew, long title.  The idea is that the path is not a journey.  The goal is not to become a perfect human being.  Not to move along the path and get somewhere so you can be a student of a higher order.  The only goal is to get on the * path.  Just get both feet on it, take one step.  No, maybe it's just sit down on it.  That's all.  No going forward. It is a wonderful thing to hit this guy at this stage in my practice. He illuminates everything from another direction at a time when I have learned too many ways to occupy my mind while in meditation.

Ah yes, I am loosened up and happy today by a wonderful day with family yesterday, all that riding through gorgeous green landscapes unmarred by big farm machines. At the produce stand, there was a team of horses waiting.  An Amish man was showing a non-Amish neighbor the hoe he just bought - handmade.  Hand riveted.

But back to sitting, I mean, meditation.  Trungpa very emphatically wants us to begin practice at the very beginning, to sit down and do nothing.  Don't focus on a candle flame or your breath or your mantra or a visualization.  You begin at the very beginning by sitting down like a tired old frog on a lily pad on a hot day, not even waiting for a fly.  We humans call it "wasting time." Letting time go by, empty.


Furthermore, he maintains that there is no verb form for meditation in his tradition.  No such word as "meditating" in Sanskrit.  It is a noun.  You be in meditation.  You don't do it.  So think of it as a nice sort of closet of cool light you step into, sit down, and don't even wait.

Anyway, I felt quite odd today after doing my meditation, oh no, not doing it, just sitting there.  It was quite different for me.  I came out of it still feeling froggy or foggy, not having any idea what to do next.  Okay, got dressed.  Have to go do labs.  I don't do them, I submit to them.  I sit like a frog and people put big needles in me and take my blood away.  Like six vials every two weeks to make sure I'm as healthy as I look. And don't even give me a * cookie.  That's life post-transplant.

We can still be crazy

How could I resist the above title of a selection by Pema Chodron?  Here is the sentence in context:

We may think meditation will improve us, but it’s really about accepting ourselves as we are right now.

When we start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, we often think that somehow we’re going to improve, which is a subtle aggression against who we really are. It’s a bit like saying, “If I jog, I’ll be a much better person.” “If I had a nicer house, I’d be a better person.” “If I could meditate and calm down, I’d be a better person.” . . . 

But lovingkindness—maitri—toward ourselves doesn’t mean getting rid of anything. Maitri means that we can still be crazy, we can still be angry. We can still be timid or jealous or full of feelings of unworthiness. Meditation practice isn’t about trying to throw ourselves away and become something better. It’s about befriending who we are already. The ground of practice is you or me or whoever we are right now, just as we are.

Maybe the fundamental delusions are
1. that we're not okay, and
2. that we can be someone else.

Trouble is, the culture tells us we're not "normal," and the psychiatric establishment pedals the idea of getting rid of that crazy mind.  Psychotropic medications do indeed change you at a fundamental level, the very activity of the brain. They are meant to change you, your energy, your emotional responsiveness, your impulses, and they do.  They affect the same creativity that can express itself in hallucinations or voices.  What to do?


Meditate, I think. Just sitting I learned to see my emotions rise and fade, see how sometimes they were fueled by my elaborate thought-trails, and sometimes just arose for no reason at all.  Learned (slowly, slowly) that I could sit still and not say a thing and not act on strong emotions.  That I could say to a bad memory, I don't want to go there now.   That I could choose when to act crazy.

As for my personal life, I am thinking about that very small dose of Seroquel that has been helping me sleep.  I am in a phase of profound physical healing right now, nine months since the transplant, three months since any infection, though my ordinary herpes is manifesting in cold sores, result of all the heat and light of July.  Not the moment to make a significant change.

If you read this far, you deserve a treat.  Here it is.

Assignment: see color

Green

Green autofixed

Green J's fix

After several weeks of thinking about it, I bought myself Contemplative Photography. Why was I reluctant? I don't know. I have been leafing around in it (sorry, pun) and caught the first assignment - Color. It's like any kind of awareness until you are a Buddha, perhaps, and have no lapses - now wait, I think that's wrong - I am told we lapsed beings are Buddhas, though we are cautioned to try a little harder, nevertheless.

My life: I have only 10 more minutes here, and was just interrupted by a much desired phone call from my transplant nurse-coordinator, Joanie. The dr. wants to raise my Norvasc - I had sent her another fax with a week's blood pressure readings that showed it is still too high for someone whose parents both died from stroke. This concern got moved recently from cardiologist to tx kidney doc, for the kidney plays a part in controlling your BP.  The new one doesn't seem to have caught on.

Back to the more spiritual. Creating art.  Catching photos with the 5-pixel camera on my phone, which turn out pretty nice, especially in outdoor light  The top photo above was my spontaneous catch this morning - I was amazed to see the backs of the leaves were really that light, and stuck with that amazement long enough to take one picture.

Below that, the auto-fix available on Pikasa's editing program.  As soon as I saw it I knew why most photos on the internet look somehow alike.  The program has been tapped to make them conform to a formula.

Below that, the result after I played with it awhile. The more I did, the less I liked it, and I don't like it now.  I tried cropping it different ways - nothing pleased me.  I still prefer the original, the point-and-shoot.  I told Tom I am going to invent The Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Visuals.  See it, stay with that- don't mess it up with conceptualizing-, and click.  One take.  The book calls it three stages: the flash of perception, visual discernment, forming the equivalent (or taking the picture). It's just like washing lettuce or talking to a friend - be aware, stay aware, stay aware again.  It's what we practice doing when we meditate. That's why we call it practice.

A Householder's Practice

This morning I am on Poop Patrol, again.  Tashi has finished her doses of deworming and her antibiotic, and I need to take in another sample for fecal float, to make sure she is well.  That means I have a timer beside me to remind me to check her box every 30 minutes.  If a visual check shows disturbance of the neatly raked surface (my little Zen garden), then I have to put on mask and gloves, as I am immune-suppressed since my kidney transplant.

Zen teachers say a lot about shit (the word they use), at least compared to ministers I have known.  It is a vehicle for getting germs out of the body, so we should be cautious around it; but it is essential to life.  Believe me, I know, for as my kidney function declined over the years, constipation became a constant problem.  If your body can't get rid of waste, you are done for.  So.

It's not that I am repulsed by what the Vet calls feces, but I find it distasteful, despite all these years of tending cats.  Practice, as I get it, means we recognize that distaste, not grasp it and make a big deal, but not try to suppress it, either. This certainly is not practice as in sitting sesshin on a retreat all day.  But even in a monastery, someone has to clean the toilets. Personally, I think it should be the Abbot.  In a business, the CEO.

Okay.  Thirteen minutes to do my body practice before the next litterbox check.  I am thinking "real practice" is exactly this.
~~~~~~~~~
Later.
I ended up with only half an hour to do my bodywork and meditation, because the Poop Patrol was successful.  So it was stop everything for both me and Tom, pack that up, get dressed, put the poor cat in her carrier - her paws needed trimmed, too - and off to the Vet.  (It turned out the fecal float and stain were negative.  So we will start adjusting her diet - bland food - to see if that helps.)

Something about writing on this subject this morning made my whole day nothing but practice.  Not the easy kind, either.  If I were to write about it and explain all the occasions when I had to step back, breathe, divert the energy or anger, or step quite away from a problem, or discipline myself strongly to get my weekly pills  done, honestly, it would make a book, and I am not Virginia Woolf.  Just what Buddhists call a householder, as opposed to a monk.  I am grateful to John Tarrant for writing about practice in the lay life.  And here it is.   And here is a paragraph of it:

I think of the old story of the warrior who did zazen with such energy that all the mice in the house grew still until he had finished. His wife remarked on this and he said, "Well, this won't do, I'll have to try harder." His zazen deepened and soon, as he sat, the mice came out and played all over him, completely unafraid.

[Zen Cat image from Northern Sun]

It's the little foxes that spoil the vine

Last night I had a stress break.  Hit Friday with two big things, no, three - the appt. with the transplant surgeon to assess whether and when my native kidneys have to come out, that appt. pushed back three weeks.  I don't see how I can have that surgery and get to the retreat in late September.  The one time a year when my Teacher, Ama Samy, comes to the US. But how can I not have that surgery ASAP, and risk a fatal infection?  Long story, many infections since the transplant, I've blogged before about all that.

This schedule change, more delay, I learned about late in the afternoon after talking to Joanie, my transplant nurse, who was leaving on vacation for a week.  She is my lifeline, she is the only person on top of my medical problems, which include frightening blood pressure right now.

My shoulder hurts.

But worse, Tom and I had a long talk with sister Diane, who lives far away and visited the folks recently.  Lots and lots of scary things there - they are very old and no longer able to take care of themselves, but will not leave their crumbling cluttered mansion.  House. This is a very bad situation, and it worries me, saddens me that my mother-in-law, whom I care deeply about, is trudging through hell with her very sick and mentally incompetent husband, and the kids don't do anything to help.  The whole situation is profoundly karmic. I know you can't undo someone else's twisted karma. I work on turning my over-responsibility into simple kindness, not trying to fix things.  But it blossoms up now and then.

Other little things - T and I had a playdate Sat. a.m. at one of those nice huge stores called Market District where you can buy cool things. But very soon his wheelchair ran low on energy and he had to go back to the van while I continued the shopping alone. Shouldn't have. This is a new chronic problem, him letting the wheelchair run down. I don't want to be responsible for that.  My shoulder hurts.  Tashi has diarrhea from the worming, though, thank God, she always uses her litterbox.

Yesterday morning after church got to talking to an old acquaintance, listening, rather. She detests her mother, always has.  Mother is in a home in the next state, has dementia.  My friend calls her every night and hates that her mother doesn't seem to know who she is, has nothing to say (I said, has dementia). Friend has a real rigid sense of the obligations a Perfect Daughter will meet.  I used to call the two of us Eldest Daughters. It is a song, the term repeated over and over in a simple bass line.  A mantra. Being an oldest daughter is a syndrome you don't want.  It involves a sense of responsibility that can make you end up totalling your car. i.e. being unable to do anything. That's where I am this morning. Totaled.

My shoulder hurts.

So I had bought a pork roast, been wanting to do that since I read that the USDA has lowered the standard for doneness of pork to 145 degrees, so you don't have to cook it to death anymore.  So felt that last night I had to go thru with the plan to cook it, tho I didn't feel real well - confused depression.  It turned out to be laborious to figure out how to do it, it's been so many years that I was too sick to really cook. Hot in the kitchen, though we have central air. I could have just stuck the damn thing in the freezer, but had this Plan.  It didn't turn out very good, and was cold by the time I had a stress break yelled at the poor cat for getting on the table, got mad at T who was supposed to watch her so that didn't happen, because I could die from an infection borne by cats, long story, I've probably written a lot about the various dangers of being immunosuppressed. Being aware of these very real dangers and careful and accepting that I could die any moment, well my enlightenment doesn't quite cover that yet. And my shoulder hurts. I'd really like to buy some colorful annuals to complete the front garden, but I can't plant them (bad back, dirt is dangerous) would have to call Karen, just don't feel up to it.  My shoulder hurts.

All the mother stuff tugged at my now ancient memories of the nightmare of dealing with my alcoholic mother and alcoholic siblings as she slid into dementia.  Her basic conversation was about Your Brother, whom she always adored to the exclusion of my sister and me, and how she loved this young bartender who she kissed on the mouth when we all went out to dinner at his restaurant.  The tragedy and ugliness of all this is mostly laid to rest right now, but sometimes when the moon is full the ghost rises from the grave.  Don't anyone dare tell me to get therapy on it - I did years of it.  Years of practice, too. It's memory, I remind myself - it's in my brain and cells, but not real anymore.  A torn rotator cuff is real.  My shoulder hurts.  I must have slept too hard on it.

So, a stress break.  I used to call this kind of thing A Nervous Breakthrough, but this morning it doesn't seem funny. Somehow the cat getting on the table (she walks in the litterbox with those paws), table I had cleaned with Clorox, Tom not watching her, all the hard work of trying to make a decent meal which didn't turn out very good - frustration overload.  I have to ease up, stop cooking, stop shouldering (note shoulder metaphor) responsibilities. There is so much to do taking care of myself, I don't have much space for anything else.

Last night 108 Zen Books posted about Joko Beck being in hospice.  Here is a sane, sober person, which is how you hope to be with enough practice and hard work, here is someone who accepts sickness and dying as natural, who is having a good death and not stressing out her kids with craziness.  It is like another planet from what I have had to deal with in my own parents and Tom's. It made me sad.

So what's a little stress, what's a big stress, WTF is stress?  

Anyway. By the time you read this I'll feel different. Things change.

About the little foxes:  the meaning of the verse from the Christian Bible is this: mature foxes eat the grapes.  That's an annoyance, a problem.  But the little foxes can't reach the grapes.  They nibble on the vines instead.  That can kill the vines.

Pain Hurts

I am confounded right now by a cascade of problems with pain.  Not just a torn rotator cuff that looks like it would not be amenable to surgery, and besides, I have a more important surgery to do.  Back pain. Sudden physical limitations.  Limited use of left arm.  Limited ability to pick things up off the floor.

I was almost unable to get off the floor today when I lay down to meditate in the most painfree position, flat on my back. Driving hurts the shoulder.  Typing hurts the shoulder.  No wonder I'm depressed.  Here's from Wikipedia on the subject -

Experimental subjects challenged by acute pain and patients in chronic pain experience impairments in attention control, mental flexibility, problem solving, and information processing speed. Acute and chronic pain are also associated with increased depression, anxiety, fear, and anger.

So at least I'm normal.

And about pain medications . . . There is a whole raft of things I can't take as a kidney transplant patient.  No Nsaids, no fancy things like Celebrex.  No steroids since these problems seem to be weakened tendons.  I have opiates, limited Tylenol, limited Neurontin.  I am willing - grateful - to use things that help.  But I was still awakened early this morning by pain.  The more you hit pain with opiates, the wierder your mind feels.  I like a crisp, clean mind, able to perceive, to think.  This is a strong preference.

In my fashion I have done things I could think of to do about this.  Ordered a big moist heat pad for my back.  A hot or cold pad for my shoulder.  Figured out a way to wear a bra for a limited time without further hurting the shoulder.  That's progress.  Made an appt. with my wonderful acupuncturist, the doctor who brought me flowers in the hospital, he and his nurse.  All excellent things.  Oh, and joined a health board where a forum on pain looks promising.  Yes, and wrote my transplant e-list and figured out that my new hot flashes are probably caused by the Vicodin. None of these actions have lifted today's depression.  Which may in fact be caused by the Vicodin.

I certainly know more than I did about chronic pain and deep pain and disabling pain.  This is serious.  This is aging.  It happens to everyone who lives long enough.  I don't know any guidelines to offer other people.  I am walking in the dark, one step at a time.  And I guess all I have to offer today is my experience.  I could say some Buddhist things about it being an inevitable part of life.  I still don't like it.

What the little cat knows

Contemplation

The Little Cat loves routine. Three times a day my cellphone alarm goes off, I come to the kitchen and take my immunosuppressants, I feed her.  While I take the pills she rubs daintily around my ankles.  After she tastes the food she jumps up on my kitchen chair and holds her front legs up to me, an invitation to let her climb on my shoulder and settle down on my chest, purring.  The world is running the same old way, and she feels safe. Food, safe shelter, predictability, these make her actively happy.

It makes sense for an animal to be anxious about change; predictability spells out food and shelter to them.  So I suppose that we, in our animal body, are the same - comforted by routine.  But we are capable of understanding that things always change.  I mean always, every minute.  That's what organic life does.  Here in Ohio, you can count on the blue sky being gone in an hour, the temperature dropped 20 degrees.  People complain about it all the time, wanting the more equable skies of California, perhaps, without the mudslides and early freezes, of course.

Suzuki Roshi once said that the central teaching of Buddhism is "Things change."  When I first read that years ago, it didn't seem real inspiring.  Now that I am 68 many experiences have taught me that it's true.  Some 70 tornadoes went through the American midwest yesterday.  A high wind is the ultimate in chaos.  No telling where that tornado will touch down, whose house will be leveled.  Me personally, last summer I had the shock of being offered a kidney by a friend.  This promised to give me many more years of life, to take me from what had become very old age and physical degeneration back to being an active 68-year-old.

Since then I've had either 8 or 9 UTI's and two or three hospitalizations, lost count.  Inbetween all that, I've had glimpses of feeling alive all over again.

So far the UTI's are unpredictable and we've been unable to prevent them.  The good luck is that - so far - the bacteria involved have been responsive to antibiotics.  So far.  The spread of resistant bacteria is scaring everyone in the medical field.

Like all other living things, from strawberries to Bengal Tigers, our safety is never guaranteed.  We ourselves and all forms of life constantly change, and age.  Felt great Wednesday, Thursday woke up with urge incontinence, a fever, and urine full of white cells.  So we had to postpone the bladder scope that we hope will tell us why I have all these infections, and thus how to stop them. Had to cancel three appointments on Friday.  I reminded myself of The Five Remembrances (you can find them at the bottom of this page), which many Buddhists recite every day .  I focused on  "I am of the nature to grow ill; I cannot escape illness."  That is, don't count on anything.  And don't get too caught up in your desires; that way you won't be too disappointed.

Years ago I knew a woman who was convinced that if she did the right things and had a strong will and stayed hopeful ("a positive attitude") she would survive metastasized cancer and live to be 94, the number she felt entitled to after taking a test in a women's magazine.  She died at 72, pissed off, still sure that if you only did all the right things, all of them, you could live, well, forever.  Still not accepting reality, I'm sorry to say, which is, Do what you can, and let your craving for a certain outcome diminish.  Life is as unpredictable as a high wind.  Take refuge.

Seeking distraction, and no wonder

I wonder why this has been such a bad week for me - one in which I often sought distraction in the form of games on my PC or my new Droid, damn that thing.  It is a seductive toy.  Angry Birds, Bubble Shooter, Tetris, as far as I can see, all these games reach a level you simply can't solve.  Some people can, especially kids, their quick reflexes, their plastic little minds, plastic in the sense of fluid, growing, changing.  I can't.  They just get too fast for me, so I plug away at it in frustration, one damn level over and over.  I am a little ashamed to confess it in writing.

This bad week - on Wednesday I was positively ADD, or do they call it ADHD now?  I wasn't really hyperactive physically, my mind was.  Attention deficit hardly describes it, falls laughably short.  Couldn't walk across a room without forgetting why I was doing that.  Had to focus hard on my goal.  And never felt I was doing the right thing, what I should be doing.  Always getting distracted.

ADD was never a problem for me.  Moodswings, yes.  I know what hypermania is, and this wasn't it.  This was like a certain beloved woman I once knew - always distracted by some other thing, flitting about.  I sometimes thought it was a response to her basic dissatisfaction.  Maybe anxiety.  Was that it with me?

Well, I am anxious about a pending cystoscopy which in theory hurts so little they don't even bother with a local anaesthetic, let alone put you out.  If I want my mind numbed before they put a scope in my urethea, I'll have to do it myself.  In theory, in Zen you experience everything, and pain is just a sensation, and it passes. In practice, I have been deeply troubled by any invasive test, from pelvic exam to colonoscopy.  A camera in your bladder?  A tube at least the width of a pencil?  I did have something like that (a Foley catheter) in for four days after the transplant.  It wasn't exactly painful, more profoundly annoying all the time, bearing in mind that I was being helped by anesthetic hangover and periodic morphine for the post-surgical pain.  At that time I constantly sought distraction by reading mystery novels.

Another anxiety about this:  if the freight train of recent urinary tract infections (seven now) is not caused by something in the bladder, then we're talking nephrectomy, removal of the "native" kidneys.  More fun. More being down and losing physical conditioning, which is a huge problem right now, leading to inflammation in the sacroiliac and the rotator cuff.  Constant pain and limitation from these things.  Just started PT for these problems, and how I'd like to be able to continue and build some fitness.  When you're fit you don't know how lucky you are.

Well, all this fooling around thinking about it suggests to me that waiting for this [obscenity deleted] procedure is a problem for me.  Believe me, I have worked hard on the anxiety related to abuse over the years since my father died and I began to remember what he did to me.  But you know, you are what you are, you are the sum of your experiences.  You cannot fix yourself, that's not what therapy achieves, and that's not what being a buddha means, it doesn't mean you transcend your self, your form, and rest on a fluffy pink cloud.  As I get it, a buddha is one who is aware, not only of the present moment, but of all it contains, at times aware of the megapixels of karma, the long trail leading up to where and who you are right now.  Aware of how you feel.  Distractions, games, stories, novels, movies, busy busy talking and so on, these things take you away momentarily, dis-tract.  There it is in the online dictionary:  distraction:  an obstacle to attention.

There is some help in Buddhism.  In fact, it is right upfront in the Noble Truths.  Number one:

Life is suffering.

Zen, like every other religion I know, has The Answer.  As far as I know.  And it is:  Sit with it. When I'm like this, I don't want to sit.  Don't want, like my grandson used to cry out when he was a baby, just about his first words.  Am not going to sit right now, it's time to get dressed for church, where I will sit and sing and listen to the choir and the sermon, and sometimes cry.  An older woman I know once said to me, "I always cry in church."  Maybe that's what it's for.

A kidney-failure friend just lost "my altruistic donor," who already gave a kidney to someone else.  He intends to keep searching hard for a donor.  He writes, "There's always a way if you work at it."  I wouldn't say this to him, but I thought, Yes, there is a way things are going to happen, but sometimes that way is not the way you want.  That's when your spiritual practice really comes into play.