The Four Unpleasant Truths, and a Kicker

Home, and we don't know what is causing this shortness of breath.  But we know I have a well-functioning heart, and no blood clots and don't have a strange lung disease brought on by my Rapamune.  I have yet to get a pulmonary function test, which they prefer to do outpatient.  We have a maybe:  maybe my breathing is impaired by having smoked a pack and a half a day for thirty years. And I grew up smoking passively in a household with two smokers.

But wait, this isn't fair - I quit in 1988.  It was hard, too.  I thought my lungs cleared up when I quit.

Karma isn't fair, but it's just.  All the time you smoked, it was damaging your alveoli.  Bad karma, bad.

But today is another day.  I was sitting doing the multiple eyedrops for post- and pre-cataract surgery and enjoying Tricycle Magazine, when I read this, in an article called The Present Moment.

No one denies the potential benefit from learning to calm or focus the mind, but many Buddhist teachers worry that an approach may be easy and give immediate benefits and yet risk discarding essential elements in the Buddha's teaching.

Wait.  I actually had a little dose of MBSR years ago, as part of a course in overall healthy living taught by my health club.  It did not just risk discarding the teachings - it carefully explained that it had nothing to do with religion.  It was about you feeling better and living longer.

A secular meditation practice is almost never sustained, and I'm here to tell you why.  Because sitting still doing nothing opens you up to reality, and that's the last thing most of us want.  Why is that?

This is a truth abundantly restated on the internet, which has enabled us to complain a lot verbally and visually. And in fact, it's religion - a restatement of the Buddha's First Noble Truth, the truth of dukkha, the suffering inherent in life.  So let me continue in this vein with my Four Unpleasant Realities.

1.  Life sucks.
2.  It's your fault that it sucks.  (a) You think it shouldn't, and (b) you keep trying to evade all the suckiness with distractions, positive thinking, and scotch and soda.
3.  There is a way to bring the volume of suckiness down a bit.
And here's the assignment -
4.  The way is a complex, sustained effort to meet the suckiness face to face, and change the way you act.

Huh?  What?

This was really funny when Tom and I came up with it at the breakfast table an hour ago, but it is not amusing me so much as I write about it.
~~~~~~~~
And there I stopped writing a week or two ago, and got distracted by the second cataract surgery.  Such is old age that I forgot about this draft until now. And I am again stuck with the subject.  Because nobody wants to hear about The Eightfold Path and behave themself.  So I'll cut to the executive summary, which is sometimes expressed like this ~

Sorry about all the black.

But it's true.  And the founder of the Zen I study, Dogen, said that when you get that, you've got it:  life is impermanent. YOU are impermanent.  Not only will you die, but you have no idea when you'll die, today, tomorrow, after you print out your to-do list.  And that goes for everything and everyone you love.  Get that, and you'll be motivated to be with the moment you've got.

So, it's Monday.  Did you need this on Monday?  Yes, probably.  I know I do.

Still Here, But You Never Know

Having nothing better to do in this hospital room, thought I'd update the known universe on my condition.

Life is the great Teacher. Only Saturday my sitting group enjoyed this Dylan Thomas poem, because I had quoted the first line earlier to Nancy V. (We have two Nancy's most day, some days three. Really.). As I read it aloud I realized how it is about life and death.  Now I'm here soon to get scanned  for blood clots etc.

But, to my story.  One microbe in this colony of seven billion.  I woke up yesterday much more short of breath and tired before I even got out of bed.  It happened that my annual visit with the cardiologist was scheduled that day.  He follows my atrial fib.  Struggled to shower and get there, Tom driving.  Well, they take difficulty breathing with any exertion seriously at the cardiologist's.  And yes, tightness in chest....so this was exciting. Got taken by squad - five guys! - to the ER and so on. Nitroglycerin patch, aspirins, all that.  Nobody took a video.

And today much more testing, no blood clots found to explain my symptoms, leading to the startling affirmation that I need to get a heart cath tomorrow.  It looks like we will do that, knowing the contrast dye might damage my one kidney and we could have to do dialysis for a while if that happened. But the kidney would probably recover. And that might not happen.  If on the other hand a massive heart attack blows out your heart . . . there are no living donors of hearts.

Life.

I realized something this morning as my night nurse, Rachel, told the day nurse, Julie, all about me.  Looking at Rachel, I saw how tired she was, and she is young, under 30 I'd say. They work on their feet, you know, endlessly interrupted by crises small and large.  It's hard work. Nurses over 50 usually look tired all the time.  For the first time I realized - They work all night. I mean I saw it, I knew what it meant for the first time, how they keep the cities alive.  My consciousness expanded to all the people who keep Riverside humming, the electricians, the miners who dug the coal for the first electric plant, the train that brought it here, the engineer . . . probably the young people who build computer chips from China that schedule the trains.  How all this cushions my life.

Sunday I had been remembering Torei Zengi's Bodhisattva Vow, so that also led me real-eyes this truth a little more clearly.  Here's a bit of it:

Among us, in our own daily lives, who is not reverently grateful for the protections of life: food, drink, and clothing! Though they are inanimate things, they are nonetheless the warm flesh and blood, the merciful incarnations of Buddha.

Sick, and Tired of it, With Comments on the Spiritual Path

I was reminded this morning of what took me from trying out all kinds of Buddhist practice to focusing on Zen - I met a Teacher.  Then I met another one.

Both these men, Daniel Terragno and Ama Samy, come to Grailville in Ohio once a year from far places to hold retreats, and snagged me on my very first retreats.  I've also met another Zen Teacher, James Ford, a unique Unitarian minister, and corresponded with a few others.  Now I am gratefully undertaking to practice "distantly" with Dosho Port of Wild Fox Zen, who is extending himself to work with us solitary and destitute types via internet methods. 

Every single one of these people has treated me with the attention you would give to the most important person on earth.  Their attitude is not just about the calmness and general slowing-down that we gradually learn through zazen.  It's about the practice of open-heartedness.  You can think of it as treating everything and every little yellow buttercup as sacred.  Or you can think of it as kindness.

I thought about this watching one of Dosho Roshi's videos this morning, in which he explains the above.  It is not at all abstract to me.  I have been so ill for so long here (see previous posts), and it is frustrating to wait for phone calls from the nurse, the doctor, home health.  It is easy to get resentful of friends who are too busy to offer some homemade soup (see cartoon above).  It is easy to feel entitled to inflict on others the occasional crankiness natural to this situation.

That crankiness comes from animal nature, perhaps, but the Eight-fold Path asks me to refrain from expressing it in harmful ways.  And it reminds me that I am actually not the center of other people's universe.  Jeez.  That I am no more sacred than everyone else.  That we are all seeking happiness.  Even poor Tardar Sauce (above), the cat who looked grumpy from birth.  And maybe was and is, I don't know.  I love him (her?) anyway.

Where I'm Calling From

You're probably wondering, Where is Jeanne?  Did she die?  I could, you know. Mic the redness in this painfully swollen right foot is cellulitis, it could make me septic and kill me.  I told Tom, that should be worth oh, $10 million just for pain and suffering.  If they have to amputate it, tha's worth My real dwelling has no pillars and no roof either, so rain cannot soak it and wind cannot blow it down. -Ikkyu Sojun

It drives me crazy to write on my iPad.  Look what it just did, pasting when I was trying to get a cursor.  

Okay.  This is not funny on a bad day, and every other day is lousy for this bipolar self beyond the help of chemistry.  But today it's funny.  That's the interesting thing, and led me to suddenly understand a koan assigned to me years ago, Seigo the Chinese girl, has two souls... There's a folk tale with it, you can find it easily enough thes days.

I can't sit at my computer and write because I haven't figured out how to do that and have my legs,out straight in front of me, let alone feet higher than heart.  That's the recipe for this dependent edema wished upon me by a f----- statin drug as I wrote last week.  Next week I'll be scheduling lymph edema massage for it.  I have to be transported by van and wheelchair.  I can only be on my feet as necessary, that is, to go to the bathroom, to shower.  That's it.

Today my lovely friend Darlene who cleans for us periodically helpd

me with massive wardrobe reorganization.  I've been so tired with all this medical stuff I stopped even intending to hang up clothes.  Anyway, you have to do that standing up.  I sat on the bed and straw bossed her. That meant my legs hung down.  I wasn't even standing on them.  But I wasn't elevating and icing.  I ended up in excruciating pain.

I am documenting this shit, even posted a photo of my feet on Facebook.  This was just plain bad medicine giving me that.  It was unnecessary and not the most reliable statin, either, I am told.  Fortunately, I have other doctors, good doctors, who are helping me through this and I never have to see that arrogant bastard again.  Who, may I say, was on vacation last week AND the guy covering for him didn't answer the nurse's page.  Well, everyone busy celebrating Easter.  But me and Tom.  We did not get to church.  I hope to go this Sunday, if I have a wheelchair.

You want to see something, you should see doctors painstakingly not say anything negative about another doctor while trying to patch up his mess.  But they will have to tell the truth if called on in court.  I am just not into being a nice girl anymore.
~~~~~~~
I can't get my wonderful toy, the iPad,  to do labels on posts, either, or get at my major photo trove, or move a photo where I want it.  And making corrections is too hard.  Typos.  And I was an English major.  More suffering.

:). As we say on Facebook.  Where, BTW you could follow my page, if you were on Facebook.  (Don't knock it.  We chronic invalids love it.)

The Problem of Aging

Escaping the frame

I was struck by this thought yesterday, and rushed to put it in a box on this blog:

 Being old is not necessarily a problem.  

It wasn't actually that striking, more like interesting in a quiet way.  So I've been thinking about problems in general and aging in particular.

Aging, being old, is a fact, a condition created by a series of experiences, of changes.  Problems themselves do not exist in reality.  The word problem is abstract, a concept in my head tied up with a judgement that it is difficult and I don't like it.  These thoughts made me remember Joan Halifax's story about when Issan was dying, and she was crying at his bedside.  He said to her, "That isn't necessary, you know."  He was a Zen master (so is she), so I thought seriously about that.  Not necessary to be sorry your friend is dying?  How about yourself - does your death have to be a problem?  Is sickness necessarily a problem?  Is pain?

Using the word problem is a way of framing a large issue.  You could say the real problem is not aging, but that we resist its reality instead of  flowing with it.  It's like "difficult emotions" in that way.

Framing a couple of issues

It's funny how we welcome risk and surprise when we pay for it.  People go to theme parks, travel uncomfortably on planes and go more uncomfortably through airports, which have become fun houses, delays popping up like monsters in the corner.  We deliberately meet fear on roller coasters, we pay to be thrown around on those teacup rides. But when life throws us around, we hate it.

These thoughts must be growing out of my current interest in softening to difficult feelings (discussed a little in the previous post).  My own "difficult" feelings arise when I don't like what's happening.  Depression. Pain.  People who don't do what they said they would (had to throw in something trivial). 

I couldn't explain why, but this is making me visualize making a not-too complicated mandala.  Reds for desire.  Some black strokes for judgement.  Here and there beautiful greens, restful lavender......What would be at its center?  Maybe a nice peaceful white, or a blue sky with puffy high clouds passing over.  Maybe some glitter.  

Softening Around the Pleasure

Today is rest and recovery for me after yesterday's eye exam, which involved three different kinds of drops and bright lights.  This doesn't give me migraines, but I felt the chemical disruption the rest of the day, a certain confusion, a bad stomach.  I could see the yellow stain from the drops still coming out of my eyes onto tissues in the evening.  All this reminded me that I am seventy.

So does my slow arising most mornings, certainly this one.  I slept until my phone alarm nagged me to take my 9:30 a.m. immunosuppressants.  It was past 11:00 when I finished morning things like nasal rinse and practice and made myself the perfect breakfast.  Perfect for this moment.

Supremely digestible Malt-o-Meal with a little butter from our friend, the cow, some Ghiradelli chocolate chips, a few walnuts and maple syrup.  Ah.  Really, it was lovely.  And the sun was out.

I've kept working with the ideas of Phillip Moffitt on handling difficult emotions (a video I posted a while back).  In his book, Emotional Chaos to Clarity, he talks about "softening around the feeling."  I responded to this body-centered metaphor.  Years ago my yoga teacher, Kit Spahr, talked to us about softening around around any specific physical pain that arises when holding a yin yoga pose, and that's worked for me often. It is a way of not slamming the door on the pain, or on fear or sadness, whatever you want to flee. 

This can be hard to do.  So Moffitt makes the interesting suggestion that you can practice softening by softening around pleasant emotions.  I did this as I ate this morning, staying with the pleasure of and gratitude for this just-right breakfast so it quietly expanded and filled me.

I am glad to report that the minor infarction in my left eye had healed.  It didn't have to go that way.  So I am especially appreciating my eyes, being alive and well today, too.

[image: redbud seedpods in May on the ravine.  These colors please me.]

When You Are Engulfed in Flames

Now you can find the phrase "engulfed in flames" in headlines about truck accidents, but it's a strange locution.  Engulfed is a water word, with synonyms like flood, overflow, deluge.  Wikipedia explains where David Sedaris got the title of the book above, which features an early van Gogh study for a cover.  Van Gogh's life was not all sunflowers.

Sedaris was a guest on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" on Comedy Central June 3, 2008. During the interview he recommended moving to Japan for three months to stop smoking. This smoking cessation method, which cost the author $23,000, is the subject of the last essay of his book. He also described the genesis for the name of his book. It was the name of a chapter in a book he found in a hotel room in Hiroshima, Japan. 

There is something gruesome about that, and he knew it. Maybe, like me, he was once assigned to read descriptions of the holocaust at Hiroshima.  You don't forget that. Or, I don't. And we shouldn't.  It's too easy to engulf this planet in flames.
~~~~~~~~~~
So it's, what do you do when you personally feel engulfed in flames?  Overwhelmed?  Life can be like a tsunami, big problems tumbling in on the shore even as the waters rise.  That's how I felt last night when I started this post and ended up diverting myself by rereading David Sedaris.  Not a bad strategy, but not enough to get me to sleep.

My biggest anxiety now, the one that put my stress over the top, is this infarction in my eye caused by a  landslide of household stress a couple of weeks ago.  It hurts, and it may or may not heal itself.  I got to a good doctor and have a followup with him in three weeks.  I'm talking with my psychiatrist about this sense of overwhelm.  Meanwhile, how to deal with the feeling?  I turned to a talk by one of my favorite Zen teachers, psychiatrist Barry Magid, on Practicing With Sickness.   Here's a bit of that talk, formatted to clarify the points for myself.

If we're going to practice intelligently with illness or with pain, what we most need to do is cultivate a psychological awareness and honesty about how we handle ourselves in the face of it. Do we -
1.  try to always tough it out, and never admit anything is too much for us?
Or do we
2.  easily feel overwhelmed and always think things are too much for us to handle? Real practice should equally expose and challenge both of these positions.  Our practice should always be about watching our selves as honestly as possible - and keeping that honesty intact and functioning is the real goal.

There.  Isn't he wonderful?

So to end with, another van Gogh.  He found nature healing, and I find his paintings healing.

Wheat Field with Cypress, Vincent van Gogh

You Don't Have to Like It

A good laugh helps, though

I do a lot of talking to myself about my bad attitude, a privilege I reserve for myself - I'm plenty self-critical, I don't need to hear it from anyone else.  But actually, I think I have a good attitude about life in general.  Yes, it's full of pain and loss, but I work to minimize my own suffering, and I have faith in the Buddha way, which has helped me thus far.

But I've been accused of being negative because I complain sometimes about the new losses of ability that just keep coming at me as I age.  Can't wear pretty shoes. Can't travel without great fuss and discomfort. Always hurt somewhere.  Can't drink even a little wine - it interacts with my meds and makes me dizzy and sleepy.  Said meds have increased my appetite and I gained ten pounds this summer before I knew what was happening.  And do not forget the bipolar disorder, which is now predictably one day up, one day down.  The down days are hard just to get through, just to endure.  If a down day coincides with a stress like a friend's funeral, it sets me spiraling further down and I get in trouble.  And so on, and on.

Who would like this crap?

That's my point. Yes, you can see these as learning experiences.  Bad luck and trouble can help you extend compassion to others with similar experiences.  It keeps putting mortality in your face; that doesn't feel good but it is good, I guess.  Maybe I won't be so shocked when it turns out that I die, too.  So yes, there are ways to gain from unpleasant experiences.  Fine.  That doesn't mean you have to like them.  Sometimes, complaining is in order.  I know complaining sometimes helps me bond with my equally aging and just occasionally cranky friends.

As far as I'm concerned, a good attitude is the Zen attitude:  being open all the way to experience, accepting its reality.  That is actually part of what we do when we sit in meditation.  It is often uncomfortable enough to make people drift away from the practice.  But if you accept reality, you can deal with it in reasonable ways.  If you're in denial about unpleasant truths, or determined to win impossible battles, that's when you really get in trouble and create trouble all around you.

That's all I know.   

You are not who you think

This morning things are conspiring to make me realize more deeply the amazing luxury we live in here in the middle class in midwestern America just this moment.  Those conspiring things are the forthcoming book by Pema Chodron, which I have the really great good fortune to receive in galleys because I blog about these things; and the front page of the New York Times.  Specifically, an article about the problematic fact that now people in India and China want air conditioning, too. They want it more than they want TV.  I told Tom, "And not just in the bedroom - in the whole house, like us."

But don't kid yourself - in most of the world there are not that many "middle class" people.  There are mostly the handful of very very rich and the very poor who slave away in the mines and fields to bring us luxuries. I realize that those who can sit and read this blog are probably among the fortunate, like me.  You don't even want to know how many computers we own here.  We are middle-class Americans who grew up in a time when there was a larger, stronger middle-class.

Before you turn away from this post, thinking it is about, yawn, politics or economics, it is about to get intimate.  Actually, all those big-thinking things are intimate, in a sense.  Your air conditioning affects the whole world.  That's the problem discussed in the Times today.

But it is my personal life that's been nudging me to wake me up to reality these days.  Faithful Readers know about the majormajor problems of Tom's parents aging and not admitting to that fact.  Reading Pema last night, I felt like she had Tom's mother perfectly described.  To say, at 90, "I'm not old - I can drive - I'm perfectly capable of living in my house" is to insist on your delusion of invulnerability.  I'd guess this is connected to having spent your whole life refusing to acknowledge that you will not only age, you will die.

I have been rummaging around in Buddhist teachings for quite a few years now, and am familiar with the concept of ego.  This is not quite what we mean when we say someone is egotistic or has a big ego.  That refers to someone who thinks very highly of himself.  I say "himself" because most women seem to suffer from the opposite problem, low self-esteem.  How could we not when even Oprah, who ought to know better, has her nice plump zaftig body airbrushed into a size 12 on the cover of O?  (Here, I will restrain myself from posting a candid shot of her.)  In a competitive patriarchal society, most people feel inadequate, I'd guess. There isn't much room at the top.

So you see in the grocery store a big woman with huge (painful, beautiful) tattoos on her arms.  It is as if she is saying defiantly, "Hey, I might be stuck in a crap job, but I'm someone."

Well, you are someone.  But not who you think you are.  Who you think you are, that I-dentity you've worked up, that's a fixed idea, an ego.  Because we are really this cloud of constantly changing active systems.  A human being grows, matures, and then starts to age.  You could think of it as the decay of the carbon atoms we are composed of.  I like that word, composed.  Made.  Then de-composed.  I wish I could say that to my mother-in-law.  You're old, and getting older as we speak, I'd say with a smile, like I say it to myself after I try to take a flattering self-portrait.  Get used to it, I'd think - it's never going to go the other direction. But I won't tell her that - everyone's been telling her that - it doesn't work.

Good shoes

[imagine you see a beautiful picture here]

This morning, wasting the first hour up, not fighting my resistance to my Artist's Way assignment (write morning pages first thing), and to meditating. I love to connect with friends on the internet over coffee. Always wanted to be able to do that. And roam around, having found again last night Yeats' Sailing to Byzantium, and the whole poem.  I read it to Tom in bed, the Norton footnotes too, how Yeats developed this belief in what we could call a Pure Land, which he thought was made of art and fine craftsmanship.  In this, it seems to me, he did not have the acceptance of this fine organic mess we try to cultivate, trying harder the messier it gets.  It was this poem, BTW, that begins with the line "This is no country for old men." And has several other immortal phrases, too.
~~~~
Went to six-month appointment with kidney doc this afternoon. It looks very much like we can't go on with these UTIs developing ever-more resistant bacteria, so we are proceeding to talk to a surgeon again about getting the useless old bad old stupid calcified shrunken cystic kidneys taken out, on the assumption that they are harboring infection.  There is a type of cystoscopy that could give more information, maybe, so we are trying to get that going.  I feel optimistic about this, since it might mean I could feel more well and healthy down the road. I don't know how many surgeries I've had now, and I'm pretty blase about them.

For the appointment I decided to dress up by wearing "real shoes" instead of my Avias.  This is it, folks, as dressy as it gets when you've had several stress fractures in your feet and must wear good (as opposed to pretty) shoes to protect them.  The adorable Mary Janes below are leather, not mesh and rubber and a lot of engineering. The autumn leaf socks were a special touch due to by poor sock laundry management.  I really need some Easter socks.

p.s. My ankles are not that fat - it's the perspective.

Miracules of healing

It is with great relief and gratitude that I can report today that Sheba is clearly much better.  My gratitude is general, to the universe, that brings forth marvelous forms capable of healing, and particular, for the friends at home and online who understood and made helpful suggestions.

Today Sheba is eating again a select variety of expensive canned catfood, even her dry kidney diet if it is soaked in chicken broth to soften it.  Her digestive system is operating as it should. She has resumed her usual schedule, lying up against my hip while I read in bed. (I knew she was really sick when she stopped doing her rituals.)  It does seem reasonable now to hope that what caused her weight loss was not kidney failure, but pain in her mouth that made it hard to eat. The antibiotic has helped.  Next week she will go to the Vet to be sedated and have her mouth examined. 

She did not entirely heal herself, but was helped along by those two daily doses of liquid amoxicillin.  We have become more skillful in administering that to a cat who does not like to be held in any way, let alone having her pretty little head immobilized for a few seconds.  Maybe she has realized something, for she seems to swallow quicker.  Thanks to my daughter, Cassie, who recommended I look in Sheba's eyes and talk to her, explain why we are doing this.  Cassie said animals may not change their behavior, but they understand. I had a sense that this was true when I did it.

It is thundering.  I just went to the screened porch expecting Sheba would want to come in.  Our last cat, Sherlock, did not like thunder, and went to a special place under the guest bed, way back against the wall.  But Sheba was watching the dimming light and blowing leaves through the screens with interest.  We are all  unique.

Her gains in health caused me to look at her as a remarkable collection of organs and patterns, including immune response.  She is so small, 7.3 pounds, so delicate, so complicated, and able to heal, as all life is.  If I stop for a moment I can see my own body the same way, how my pancreas has been healing by merely following a different diet for a while (and discontinuing the drug responsible for the illness).  No major medical treatments involved, just let the pancreas rest.  It fosters a sort of awe.

I feel that awe often now that I am back on my feet - when I walk across a room barefoot in the morning, or take the short sidewalk to my acupuncturist's office.  It feels miraculous to be up on my feet (with custom insoles in my Asics), after last year's long difficulties.  I am even able now to grocery shop without using an electric cart.  I love a little verse by Thich Nhat Han that goes like this:

Walking on the earth is a miracle!
Each mindful step reveals the wondrous Dharmakaya.

[image:  a portrait of Sheba in morning sun]

Embracing the new day

[calligraphy by Sengai]
I haven't been blogging much. I was thrown by the nephrologist's recommendation, in the face of labs that show decreased kidney function, that I get an access surgically installed, so I am ready for dialysis. There are logical reasons to dread total loss of kidney function; hemodialysis is simply not adequate to keep you healthy; and is fraught with problems. Add to that a psychological dread of being strapped down, helpless to move because you are tied in to a machine that is taking blood out of you, filtering it, and putting it back in. Your safety depends on a dialysis tech doing their job.

But this upsetting news has been pushed aside by the sudden development of a painful and limiting disorder related to kidney failure. It is described in this quote from the Neuropathy Assocation web site:

Peripheral neuropathy is caused by damage to your body’s peripheral nerves. This damage disrupts the body’s ability to communicate with its muscles, skin, joints, or internal organs. It is like the body’s wiring system breaking down.

Some of the symptoms I am experiencing are--
* constant burning and freezing pain
* sharp, jabbing pains
* extreme sensitivity to touch (feet can't stand bedclothes)
* muscle weakness
* difficulty walking; the pain exhausts me
* tingling, numbness

You get the idea.

Pain is pain, a sensation. You experience a lot of it, sitting on retreats, and you learn how to accept it and watch it change, along with everything else. I can ignore my burning feet when I'm here at my computer. It's getting up slowly and limping to the kitchen that's hard. Then it's hard when, walking back, I spill coffee on the floor - that's the muscle weakness. "Losing your grip" isn't funny.

Meanwhile, I am debilitated by anemia, another side effect of kidney failure. The good thing is that my nephrologist is willing to order doses of an EPO drug for me to inject myself at home, saving the hours wasted driving to a doctor's office, sitting around waiting, just to get a simple injection. The bad thing is that the wheels grind slowly, and it will be at least the end of the week until the stuff arrives in the mail. Meanwhile, I am anemic. That alone makes you tired and lackluster, easily out of breath. Believe me, you are your red blood cells. I hope if/when we get my red blood cells up over 11, I will remember how to spell. What an odd thing to lose (and I was spelling champion of my third grade).

There are so many dissatisfied perfectly health people in the world, doing things they don't want to do. If I had my health back - if I get a transplant - I swear I would never waste an hour. I would never forget my gratitude at just being able to walk, able to stand and cook something good. Able to think clearly again.

As for troubles, I'm not done yet. Last night while I was doing nothing, I pinched a nerve high in my back. It makes it painful to be upright, and to pour a cup of coffee. I think that's about my osteoporosis, another byproduct of kidney failure (and kidney patients can't take the bone-building drugs). I'm hoping the acupuncturist can fix it.

Meanwhile, it is today. And a beautiful spring morning. One special daffodil has already bloomed and is on our altar, and I'm expecting more today.

What does Buddhism say to help me? The Five Remembrances (on the bottom of this page) remind me that human beings get sick and age. All the face creams and plastic surgeries in the world won't change that. Remembering that truth, I think of friends who are in worse trouble than me. They parade before my inner eye, valiant people who are facing death.

And there is the central truth of Buddhism - reality. The only thing real is this moment - not all your fears and sorrows, not your preferences and disappointments, those mental emissions. This moment I have the sensations and the form that I have, and all I have to deal with is now. It is simply a new day. When we sit in meditation, we just sit like a frog in the present moment, training in being here. The bell rings, and we get up, and continue to be here with whatever we confront.

Only connect

Today was a big day - my first visit to the kidney doctor since my labs - and my general health - went downhill. It was a satisfying visit; he cares about my comfort, and wants to keep me off dialysis as long as possible, so we are on the same page. On the other hand, he feels it is time to visit a vascular surgeon and get an access installed, so I am ready to go on dialysis whenever necessary - a moment that no one can predict. Sometimes you get more reality than you want.

Afterward Tom drove me to the lab to get a blood draw. Among other things, the kidney doc needs to verify my ferritin level so he can get some EPO shipped to me, to address the anemia that follows from kidney failure. EPO will give me more red blood cells, without which life is not worth living, or even possible.

It was a very good blood draw, an experienced tech with a sense of humor. I told her she should be doing musical comedy. We agreed, we'd all like to be paid for clowning around.

Coming out, I found the reception area empty except for one man, the sort of morbidly obese person you might see on TV but seldom out and about. He was leaning back in his chair catching his breath. I noticed that his gray hair was in a little pony tail, and he had a pleasant face. I smiled at him. In the back of my manicy brain was the thought that people usually look away from anybody with a disfigurement or handicap.

He smiled back, and surprised me by asking, "How are you doing?"

I was hobbling along, the neuropathy worse with every step. I try to concentrate on standing up straight and walking normally, but the pain in my feet and legs has a mind of its own.

"About as good as you," I replied, laughing. After all, there we were, getting blood draws in the hospital lab because we are both ill.

He laughed too. He had a nice laugh.

Slowly walking on out, I felt how warming it was, that moment of connection between strangers. Illness tends to isolate us. It's something to remember when someone is sick or dying. Sometimes we stall, we can't think of how to "help" someone. Speaking from my experience with cancer, deaths in the family, handicaps, I'd say, Don't try to "help." You can't heal us or find some magical way to make us happy. All you can do is give a little comfort or pleasure, and a sign that you have empathy. A heartfelt card is nice; a visit is great. The best gift is when someone is willing to be with you and acknowledge your truth without drama. Acknowledge that you are still a person; fat, crippled, dying, I am still me.

Here is the quote I took my title from today.

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon.
Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted,
And human love will be seen at its height.
Live in fragments no longer.
Only connect...

--E.M. Forster, Howards End

How the Chinese doctor sees it

"It" being the sort of chaos I'm experiencing - especially the frustrated anger that had me wide awake at 3 a.m.

It is absolutely not hard to find things to be frustrated about in my life. Kidney function significantly worse, despite a lot of efforts and expense - and suddenly, the imminent threat of dialysis. Still limping with pain in the left foot, yet still suffering moodswings caused by the corticosteroid shots that were supposed to fix that flareup. (Still getting used to having significant arthritis.) Still anemic, and without what I need to monitor my own hemaglobin and give myself EPO shots. Can't see kidney doctor for over two more weeks. Forgot to do my PT exercises last night until I was in bed.

And all this chronic illness, and Tom's, is mostly invisible, not dramatic; when I go to church, someone usually tells me "You're looking good." I don't argue with them. So the recycle piles up in the garage while I rest the foot, and my car hasn't been cleaned in a year. I used to be able to do these trivial things myself, but with a low red blood count and a uremic burden, running the Roomba is too much effort. I know people who are dying, and courageously, so I usually try not to whine.

It was the stubborn pain in the foot, coupled with my decision to refuse more corticosteroids, that got me to make an emergency appointment with my acupuncturist yesterday. Dr. Wang fit me in at 8:30 this morning, and I had it all aced, dressed, checkbook in purse, out to car at 8:00 a.m. - and my car wouldn't even turn over. The battery is only a month old, but the lights had been left on. My little Civic chimes to remind me to turn them off but, I told myself, it isn't idiot-proof. By then, I was focused on my goal, and didn't even bother to get mad, just got in the van and backed it out, chewing up the lawn the way I do. The driveway is narrow, the van is large, I do my best.

I had started my morning writing in my journal about how I don't like to be told to look on the bright side. I can stand it if people want to falsify their own feelings, but I hate it when they try to get me to do it. So I didn't try to generate any positive thoughts about running my car battery down, just focused on the task and drove to the doctor's office, not getting in a wreck.

He listened to my recital, asked a few questions, gently palpated the foot. Then he said, "Which problem is bothering you most?"

I surprised myself by saying, "The anger." It had trumped the foot as I lay awake in the night contemplating the meanness of the dialysis nurse in charge of my care last time. I should have called her up before the licensing board, but I didn't have the energy.

He nodded. "Then we will concentrate on that."

As he applied the alcohol and then the needles, I said, "But it's all one, isn't it?" The idea of a holistic self is foundational in Chinese medicine, which makes it so different from the Western medicine with its specialists in pieces and parts and chemicals that haven't been adequately studied.

"Yes," he said, speaking clearly, because I had, of course, forgotten my hearing aids. He went on. "Spring is the time of wood, and wood opens the Liver, where anger is stored. So it is very easy to get angry right now."

This clicked in place for me as an interested student of medical systems. I knew that Wood is the creative energy. And I had already written two poems that morning, literally woke up with one going in my head.

"Too much wood," I said. "Is the antidote metal?" Yes.

Traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) is based on an elaborate theory of energies, and includes a theory of constitutions: we are made of combinations of five elements. Years ago I determined that I was a person who benefitted from the element metal when I felt scattered - which translates in daily life as structure, schedule, calm activities.

So here I am, much improved by the treatment and determined to make lists, meditate, and read unexciting things. It is working. I do not feel in nearly so much danger of sending out furious e-mails and initiating lawsuits. Though I like to think I might when I get organized.