Battling the Big Guy

Lace

 

I had a rest-less (good word) night due to extraordinary pain that had me on Vicodin all day - sometimes I can go without even Tylenol except at night.  Pain in left shoulder and that damn left hip, which I hurt last Saturday at the health club by doing one small new back exercise with care. Let your pain be your guide, the sport-spine doctor's mantra, ran through my thick head, and I was careful, and thought yes, the little leg lift was a little painful, not bad.  But it turned out it was bad.  Now I think the SI joint on that side is inflamed.  I woke up with these two areas hurting, a bad sign, as being prone for some hours is usually very helpful.

But my mantra is, It won't kill you.  Also, Being in pain doesn't mean you have to be unhappy.  Also, Having limitations doesn't mean you need to be unhappy. I used to have ideas in my head that these things did necessitate unhappiness. No, unless you cling to your desires to do things you used to be able to do.  Things have changed, that's what happens to carbon-based life forms.  If you don't want to change, you should have been born a hunk of granite.  Then you wouldn't change very fast. (Wondering now whether granite is based on carbon.)

Often I read about someone's determination to find a cure for cancer. There's a big uproar now about women wanting the FDA to keep Avastin listed as appropriate for metastasized breast cancer, though there is no reputable scientific study that shows any benefit.  One warrior said she wanted every possible weapon in her arsenal against this dread fiend.  I thought, yes, but this is a gun that never hits the target and can backfire and kill you.  The problem seems to be that if the FDA does remove its temporary sanction, insurance companies can refuse to pay the $88,000 a year it costs to take the drug. The women want anecdotal evidence to reign; in other words, if one person taking it felt better, they want it.  You know I have many reservations about Western science and medicine, but it does have its uses.

Here's where I want to go on this:  The good old Five Remembrances (see sidebar on this blog).  I guess I should have them tattooed on my forehead.  Barring accident, we are all going to have pain, we are going to get sick and die of something.  If not cancer, something else. Doing your best to be alive - really alive - I heartily recommend, but accept reality, you'll be glad you did. As for pain, I am trying to befriend it, if you know what I mean. "Oh, there's my rheumatiz again" type of thing.

When things change, there might be a benefit in there somewhere.  The bad shoulder (Bad shoulder, Bad!) and back mean I no longer have to do the weeding.  So my dear friend and Grand Master of the Gardens, Karen, is coming this afternoon to pull many more oak seedlings and generally set things right in the front gardens. She earns money doing what she does so well and loves.  I feel relieved.  The neighbors are relieved.  I get to sit here and play with my photographs.

Limitation is okay once you accept it and stop yearning to never grow old, certainly to never die, to always be able to do what you feel like doing.  I posted a John Tarrant quote on that a while back, so I won't add it here. Grandmas do tend to repeat ourselves, maybe because nobody heard us the first time.  (Insert smile here.)

Things are always going to hell

"In human life, if you feel that you have made a mistake, you don’t try to undo the past or the present, but you just accept where you are and work from there. Tremendous openness as to where you are is necessary. This also applies to the practice of meditation, for instance. A person should learn to meditate on the spot, in the given moment, rather than thinking, “...When I reach pension age, I’m going to retire and receive a pension, and I’m going to build my house in Hawaii or the middle of India, or maybe the Gobi Desert, and THEN I’m going to enjoy myself. I’ll live a life of solitude and then I’ll really meditate.” Things never happen that way."

The above quote by Chogyam Trungpa made its way to my inbox this morning, a salvation from an aggravating payment mixup on Ebay (don't you wish something would go right once in a while?).  It was titled Accept Where You Are and Work From There. It's the first two sentences I'm interested in because I just got a lot to accept. I wish they didn't keep me so busy accepting.

The title of this post is an unofficial but right-on definition of entropy I once read. It is true of all made items, or forms, and super-true of the human body.  It is running down all the time, and often you just don't know it yet.

I had the lumbar MRI a couple of weeks ago. Last Friday I talked with Chad, my physical therapist, about it, but not in detail.  I did have that underground feeling while we talked that he felt compassion for me. Yesterday, though, I met with the doctor and we talked about it, and I got a copy of the report.  Reading it over I got the message - severe degeneration of all the vertebrae down there. A mess.

For this, the doctor didn't even talk about surgery.  We did talk about why I'm not electing surgery on the rotator cuff, a decision he agrees with.  He did warn me clearly that the pain may take a long time to fall away.  (But that is also true if you get the surgery.) He is quite okay with my use of Vicodin at night, more or less said, "You can do that forever, it's fine."  I already found out I can't not do it, or I am wakened often by the pain. Yesterday evening I took one early.  The back can hurt in several places at once.  Maybe I had done too much driving (though using the left arm very little, and being cautious about how I wore the seat-belt), or maybe I was somewhat depressed by this news, and that mysteriously makes pain worse.

What is there to say?  Suzuki Roshi has summarized Zen like this:  "Things change."  When you first hear that it seems meaningless.  Yes, trees lose their leaves, nations rise and fall.  But as you go on experiencing your own life and becoming more aware, you see that it's the profound truth.  You change all the time, accidents happen, people suddenly die or leave you, most things are beyond your anxious control. If you can stay right there with what is you can work on adjusting to it - accommodating to the actual body you have.  Being aware that your good luck (being alive) can change any moment.

Hitting a wall like this one is a good example, I think, of why it is important to practice being with reality.  I've done a varied lot of spiritual practices in my time, and all have benefited me, but meditation has done the most.  And it is time to go do it now.  But I want to mention that at the bottom of this blog you will find an ancient chant called The Five Remembrances. I don't recite it in cemeteries at night, as some Buddhist monks do. But I have said it enough to learn it by heart, and it pops up at times to remind me that I knew this, I'm just experiencing it more deeply now.

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.

Why not leave well enough alone?

It's another old Grandma type saying that expressed a meaningful truth.  We are in an age where marketing is all about New! Improved! More+ Don't you wish people would stop improving things?

Not everything, of course. The computer is a great improvement over the Selectric, which improved the typewriter by making erasure easy, though much more expensive.  My ergonomic keyboard is a great improvement too, and probably prolonged the health of my shoulders for years.  Yes, and digital photography is much cheaper and more flexible than film; Photoshop on the other hand, desecrates far more often than it improves. And in the old days you didn't have to look at so many people's pretty bad pictures.

Just the other day Google improved itself on me in some invisible way, and the icon that takes me back to Home page moved to the other side of the screen, who can know why?  Maybe just so they could say it was new.  I found it, but the search annoyed me and broke my train of thought.  It's still not a habit, though, more mental work for an overtaxed brain.  My Thunderbird e-mail improved itself too, and now it plagues me with boxes that wants me to learn more about it.  What?  It sends email to and fro.  I can direct mail to various boxes.  I can send people my own bad pictures.  What more do I need?

We monkeys like new toys, or are we magpies? attracted by glittering items, regardless of their usefulness.  But get a Droid and, if you were born last century it will take you many, many hours of study to learn how to use the damn thing.  Don't drop it!  In olden days, you couldn't hurt a phone.  Ads for the telephone company played on that by showing a handsome dog with a handset in his mouth, cord broken.  The dog was grinning.  And you were never in danger of putting the phone through the washer and drier back when the only phone in the house was black, wired to the wall, and sat in the hall on a little phone table.

Of course, of course, I like many features of life now:  the self-defrosting freezer, tires that last, the motorized wheelchair, Vicodin.  This is just to say that change is not necessarily an improvement.  And more is not necessarily better.  That goes for our lives, too.  Most things have not improved my level of contentment.  
As for improved new new, I read recently in Chogyam Trungpa's Work, Sex, Money that there is an old Tibetan saying that it is better not to start something - but if you do, finish it.  So I am finished here for now.  Maybe I'll call a friend and talk, and not drive or mess with Angry Birds or dust my windowsills or anything else, just sit there comfortably talking, like we did in - you know what I'm going to say - in the old days.