Author: Isy

I think I'm getting better.

Prelude to winter canning recipes

Isy / / basics, food allergies, nutrition, science, self-care

Don’t you love the change of season? Especially here in Middle Cali, where there’s a hint o’ green to mark the second of our two seasons — Drought and Mold.

But seriously… I just had my first blueberry-clove shake in awhile, and boy am I glad I remembered about them. I’m actually stringing a thought or two together. Not eloquently, but let’s not be fussy, ok?

It’s worth noting that I’m staying off social media until I’ve finished a couple of very important projects. I’m using my brain time in a highly focused manner.

Why? Because the seasons are changing, the barometer is bouncing around like a honeymooner’s pillow, the solar radiation (between eclipse, sunspot the size of Jupiter, and X-class flares) is doing the hesitation waltz ALL over my nervous system, and my otherwise lovely partner is genuinely addicted to TV so I have that constant, impersonal nag grating against my brain.
Sketch of brain, with bits falling off and popping out, and a bandaid over the worst
If I weren’t so well-equipped with irony and sarcasm, I’d be howling like a princess with a split nail right before her prom date.

So I remembered about my blueberry clove shakes. This reminded me that I need to prepare for the REALLY hard times that winter brings. And that made me think that there are a few principles to keep in mind for my dietary framework:

  • Vegetables. Lots of healthy vegetables.

    I have that covered for emergencies already: vegetable juice with one of those thought-out “super green” organic powders (my choice is Garden of Life’s Perfect Food.)
  • Anthocyanins in ridiculously strong doses. This is key for my brain function. Huge.
  • Something for bad pain.
  • Something for bad pain with a different protein profile, to lower the risk of developing an allergy.
  • Immune support. Winter, right? Virus heaven.

Brains which are under siege need appropriate saturated fats. I know, I know, we’re told they’re bad. Back up a bit and take a look at that, because it doesn’t hold up to closer inquiry. What we don’t need are INappropriate saturated fats, which, admittedly, are most of the ones in the grocery store.

Chocolate, coconut oil, organic palm oil, and pastured butter are appropriate fats. These are well within the kinds of foods we have been eating for thousands of years, if not longer.

One reason why a bite of something fatty is like an instant lift. The saturated fat goes right to the brain’s pleasure centers. The brain knows what it needs, and we’re wired to like it.
glee
It’s up to us to use appropriate forms of fat, which our bodies can reliably use.

When I’m fighting off a virus, I crave raw coconut, coconut oil, coconut butter, or coconut milk with a gnawing passion. I’m old enough to do what my body tells me to. Interestingly, studies are coming to light showing that just the coconut oil has real benefit for fighting off viruses, among other things. Imagine what we’ll find in the rest of the nut, one day.

For pain, I find that half a tablespoon of 100% grass-fed/pastured butter is better than a pain pill. (It cuts the pain dramatically but doesn’t make me goofy at all.) It doesn’t always last for more than a few hours, but there are no side-effects that aren’t healthy: it makes my heart stronger, helps stabilize my immune system, and reduces my tendency to pack on weight. I’ve found this to be consistently true over the years, and, since it doesn’t match our expectations of dairy fat, I checked the science.

For a fairly extensive and science-supported discussion, look here. I’ll provide some highlights.

100% pastured bovine fat, of any kind, is such an effective anti-inflammatory that it can reverse heart and vascular damage. I’m not sure why it helps moderate my weight, but I suspect it has to do with cleaning the metabolic pathways.

Conventionally-raised or grain-finished cattle are sensitive to grain, as a species, so they have ongoing low-level immune responses to their feed (even without the steroids and antibiotics normally used in beef and milk production.)
feedlot-NRCSAZ02094_-_Arizona_(471)(NRCS_Photo_Gallery)
Naturally, the histamine outfall, metabolic garbage, and fats get stored in their flesh, milk, and fat.

That’s how animal bodies work — a lot of stuff gets concentrated in our flesh and stored in our fat, and if what went into us isn’t right, what gets stored in us isn’t right, either. That’s why people pay so much for the grass-fed stuff.

Now you know 🙂

Getting pastured butter is not hard. In Ireland, grass is cheaper than grain, and (unlike New England or Wisconsin) it’s available nearly year-round.

Gorgeous black and white Frisian cows grazing deep green grass with colorful, healthy fields patchworked down to the edge of a body of water.
Breathtaking shot of Irish cows from Richard Webb

Next time you’re at a major supermarket, grab yourself a block of Kerrygold butter and try a slice on some non-inflammatory food, like a dish of steamed veggies.

Go on, try it…

Now you know what’s behind the recipes I’m going to post next.

Autogenic training — calming the CNS in the nicest possible way

Isy / / ANS and fight-or-flight, brain care, CRPS Art and Spirit, poetry, self-care

I have to fling this file up onto my site and write the supporting material later. I’m trying to do a lot on very little steam, so forgive my slapdash approach. There will be a readme to go with this next time. Believe it or not, there’s a reason for every single line 🙂

Anyway, this is the (probably) final draft of the first autogenic training script I’m writing for my charity, CRPS: Art & Spirit. It will be read in and turned into an mp3 in the fullness of time, which will also be available under the same Creative Commons license, so please do share.

Meantime, if I say it myself, just reading this is soothing to that frazzled ol’ autonomic system 🙂

Now, let’s see if I can load the whole pdf here… direct link to brain-soothing script

Indirect link to script:
autogenictraining-no1-ver1.2 — Click the link, then click the link again.

NOTE
I’m sorry to say there were some ghastly cut and paste errors in the version originally posted. I posted the corrected version on December 2nd, 2014. This one will flow a lot more smoothly.

Living without hope – tasks and aftereffects

Isy / / adaptation, basics, critical thinking, imp-possible, mortality, perspective, radical presence/radical acceptance, self-care, what works

I lived without hope for years. Years. It was weird to look around one day and realize I had no hope, and that I hadn’t had any for awhile. I didn’t think I was going to see another Christmas… for at least 5 Christmases.
ChristmasTree_NOT
When the few friends who were willing to be honest asked me what I hoped for or what I had ambitions for, I had to tell them that I had no hope and I had no dreams of the future.

They really had trouble with that.

Some just did that weird, head-shaking, “I didn’t just hear that” thing and changed the subject. A few asked if I was suicidal. I had been, and I drifted in and out of degrees of thinking about how to make it painless and permanent if I did kill myself, but I was… surviving.

Actually, I was working really hard on surviving. Hope had been sucking me dry, making me see things that weren’t there, putting my energy into some future I could only imagine, but couldn’t see a way to reach.

If I hadn’t been willing to drop everything, including hope, in order to just focus on the business of living with this horrific reality, I think I wouldn’t have survived. I had no extra energy, and hope was too demanding.

Line drawing of woman flat on floor, with woozles coming out of her head
Image mine. Creative Commons share-alike attribution license 🙂

When I came out of that time, very very slowly, it dawned on me that I had been fighting for so long for my own life that, for the first time in my entire conscious existence, I felt no need to apologize for the space I took up, the effort and attention I required from the world, or, in fact, for anything.

As I told my Mom at the time, “I’ve fought for others’ lives pretty often, and when you’re coding someone, they’re your whole world for the time that you’re coding them.
CPR
“If you fight for someone’s life over any length of time, you come to care about them as well as for them, even if you have nothing else in common. Well, I’ve spent years fighting for my own life, and it’s impossible to fight that long for someone without really coming to care about them. I really love myself, in a solid way, with no caveats, and nobody and nothing can shake that.”

So, I don’t associate hopelessness with futurelessness or lifelessness, as most people seem to do. I have every faith in our ability to face life without hope, because sometimes it’s just dead weight. Sometimes, it distracts us from what’s real.

I have faith in us, hope or no hope. I have absolute faith in our ability to move through the stages of this unbelievable circus we call life, and make them work for OURSELVES in the end.

Faith isn’t the same as hope, because it relies on something that’s present now, not on something that might be possible in the future. I have faith in our doughtiness, an old-fashioned word combining the meanings of nerve, grit, and determination. Boy, do CRPSers have all of that!

In the end, hope is a luxury we can’t always afford. Hoping and dreaming — putting our energy into things that don’t exist — can be a real sink. That is, maintaining hope and dreams can, themselves, take more energy than we can afford.

It sounds counterintuitive to someone who’s never been there, because most people think of hopes and dreams as what pulls us forward.

If hopes or dreams pull you forward, that’s good; if they don’t, reconsider, and maybe refocus.

Refocusing on the sheer present business of finding a way to survive with things as they are right now is not wasted time, it’s not suicidality, and it’s not even an act of despair. It’s profoundly rational, profoundly functional, and even when it’s profoundly difficult, it’s still profoundly worthwhile.

From my own experience, I have to say it’s a strange state of mind to live in, but it’s surprisingly worry-free. False worries fall away as fast as false comforts do. Once I accepted the state of life with no hope, there was no room for b.s., either in my world or in my relationships.

Life simplified itself; all I had to do was keep up — or rather, pare down. That was weird too, because I used to find stuff comforting.

In that utterly simple state, though, it wasn’t comforting. It was just stuff.

Having emotional energy invested in something so … stufflike … was absurd. Talk about false comfort!

So, before long, all I had was what I needed; nothing more, and not much less.
teapot-eaglehaslanded
In time, everything changes, even the amount of energy we can spare. I can tell you exactly when I rediscovered the luxury of hope, because I blogged about it here. It was nothing more than the first whisper, because that was all I could support, but it was unmistakeable.

Since then, I’ve also rediscovered flippancy, ambition, and even toilet humor. (My sense of irony never left, which makes me think it’s essential. H’mm…)

But a few things still remain, deep currents in the otherwise twinkly surface of my character:

  • stuff is good only if it’s useful and there’s room for it;
  • nobody, but nobody, decides when I die but me; and
  • I love myself. I may be grubby, nerdy, daffy, clever, ill-yet-unconquered — but I love myself absolutely, without vanity, and without caveats.

If it took living without hope, then I’m better for having done it.

Aphorism for the day: Don’t be afraid of what life brings you. You never know what’s on the other side. It’s just a matter of getting there.

me-fingers-peace

Home

Isy / / CRPS knock-on effects, loved ones, moving/traveling, perspective

Too big a subject for one blog post, but I’ll try. If this gets poetical, there’s a reason.

The home of my youth, Egypt in the mid-to-late ’70s, (alternate link: http://jldtifft.com/, click Galleries, click Search, enter “Egypt”) no longer exists. The generous and opening society, the cobwebby clutter of the Cairo Museum, the beautiful horses that were cheap to ride, the empty vastness of the Red Sea shores with the impossibly deep nighttime sky,

astrono_galaxies_hubble
Image from NASA/Hubble

even the occasional cockroach in the sodas… Shot down, cleaned up, built over. So it goes. One day, I might adjust to its absence.

I consider New England my home — one very special part, roughly between Mount Greylock and the Quabbin. When I had to move away, the first time, I remember feeling lightheaded as I drove across the border into New York, and spending the next hour counting and re-counting my limbs. I was sure one of them was missing. The feeling of dislocation, in its most essential sense, was that powerful.

When I moved back, coming the southern route, I remember my cat (originally a native of Egypt) waking from her long slumber as we drove through the last few miles of Connecticut and into southern Massachusetts. She had a lot to say about it, which amused the other drivers. When we got onto the Mohawk Trail and headed uphill into the Berkshires, her white fur glowed (I never found out how she did that) and she climbed up to the dash, where she could smell the air coming in through the vents. She inhaled it with complete attention, entranced, ecstatic.

I completely agreed.

To me, the endless green, the snuggling hills, the way the trees mingle with everything around them, the way the water bends and bounces over the sparkling stones, in that particular region, is the most beautiful on earth.

The airy, daffy grace of the black tailed deer, the sweetly sardonic canniness of the foxes, the fluffy explosiveness of the rabbits – not quite like anywhere else.

The white granite begot my bones. The ubiquitous brooks are the flow in my veins.

water_swimminghole-1
Image mine. Share-alike attribution license from Creative Commons.

The turning of the seasons could ignite poetry in the driest of souls: from the full-throated glorious summer, with birds shrieking their fool heads off and the hayfields looking like fat emerald velvet scattered with amethyst heads of clover; to the outrageous glorying riot of autumn; to those rare days in winter when the first light sets every tree, covered in a skin of ice, to blazing like fountains of diamonds; to that astonishing time when the air touches your mouth differently, you notice the first puddles of dirt showing through the snow, the very hint of a crocus nose pokes through, and winter isn’t over yet but the rise of spring pulls you up by the heartstrings.

A friend of mine sent me maple syrup she’d collected and boiled from her own trees.

maple_syrup_tap

Every now and then, I take one taste, and that’s all I need: I can smell it, hear it, feel it — if I close my eyes, I can see it too.

I love the un-fussiness of the people. Outsiders consider New Englanders reserved, but it’s more that they’re judicious. If it were obvious how utterly decent they are, nobody would ever leave them alone.

A visitor made this plain to me. A crusty old fart, whose family name was on half the landmarks in the area, had just plowed my driveway with heavy equipment. Knowing from my winter of splitting and hauling cordwood what it takes to do winter work, I invited him in for fresh-ground coffee. He hesitated until I said it was fresh-ground (I never drank much coffee, and it either had to be good coffee or a bitter day for me to enjoy it, so I made sure mine was good.) He came in, stamped the snow off his boots outside and inside, and shut the door as he unzipped his enormous down jacket, which was itself stiff with cold.

Underneath the crusty outer layer of jacket, the down was puffy and warm, opening out in billows behind the zipper. As the coat opened, so did his face. His voice warmed up and he reached gratefully for the coffee, alight with delight and fellow-feeling.

That’s New Englanders all over. Super crusty and maybe chilly on the outside; underneath, all soft, gentle, slightly fluffy, and ever so warm. Once a New Englander accepts you into the inner circle, you’re there for life.

It’s not bad. Not bad at all.

Years ago, the aggressively shortening days of winter made half the year pure hell for me. No amount of expensive lighting could compensate. With CRPS on top of that, the cold is unbearable and the extra work of winter is beyond me – and I used to love splitting wood, and even shoveling snow. It was the second-best way to get warm.

Snow_shovel
Image from Wikimedia Commons

I’m more or less trapped on the other side of the continent. I’ve given up on long trips until I’m strong enough to recover quickly; the current recovery time is 10 days, which doesn’t leave much time for visiting.

Nevertheless, and despite the fact that October’s shortening days are impossible there for me, there are times when I miss being home.

I’m thinking ahead to finding a place to settle. Where I am now is temporary, and for a very specific purpose (more on that later.) I’ve had a decade of transience, with much travel and frequent moves. I have other things to do, and I want a home to do them from.

I’ve had two excellent, intriguing, beautiful and fulfilling homes in my life. That makes me very lucky. Nevertheless, before too long, I’ll be looking for one more.

Johann_Georg_Grimm_1886,_Fazenda_em_Paraíba_do_Sul

Preparing for winter in “Settler summer”

Isy / / activity, basics, CRPS knock-on effects, loved ones, meds/drugs, recipes, self-care

I’m too conscientious a historian to call it Indian summer, when the normally pleasant California shoulder season turns murderously hot.

I’m cleaning up, getting rid of clothes that were old a year ago and replacing them, and canning, dehydrating and even preserving food. I feel driven to, although it’s a lot of work and not necessarily CRPS-friendly tasks.

J cannot fathom why I’d be cooking in this heat, let alone making heavy, hearty food like bacon mash.

He’s cutting firewood instead.

Yeah, I know. We’re both kinda special.
matchgrins-horsenwoman_decamps-pauline_4blog
I have 4 blog posts almost ready to go up, but I keep making the mistake of starting my online time at social media. Within minutes, my attention is shot. I can’t finish a blog. I can barely finish a sentence.
me_wrysmile
This is the first vaguely functional day I’ve had after a spectacularly ghastly mast-cell-mediated flare.

Silly me, I ran out of my zyrtec (which I didn’t take very seriously; it’s not important like an SNRI, right? HAH!) and spent one day incoherent and two days merely swollen, crabby and able to cope only by losing myself in mindless tasks or Terry Pratchett books.

Took a day to figure out what was wrong. Partly, that was because I didn’t realize how much the zyrtec was doing for me, and then, of course, there was the headache that made me want to hack off the offending part, which made it quite hard to reason things through.
Sketch of brain, with bits falling off and popping out, and a bandaid over the worst
J is still avoiding me, hiding in the trailer with the tv when he’s not actively butchering logs. It’s possible this chicane isn’t over yet; his behavior is usually a reasonable guide to how unbearable I am.

I only took one zyrtec today, as my stomach would not even think about more. In a couple of days I may be back up to my usual 2. It will be nice to have normal fingers; reasonably functional digestion; less inflammatory pain playing xylophone on my spine, with rimshots off the other joints; and maybe a calm and considerate personality again.

Anything is possible.
Trapeze_artists_1890

Isy’s anti-inflammatory mashed potatoes
Obviously not for those with belladonna sensitivity.

  • 5 pounds organic red potatoes, cleaned and coarsely chopped
  • Turkey broth
  • 1 organic white onion, diced and lightly browned
  • 4 oz grassfed butter, like Kerrygold or Organic Valley Grassfed, in chunks
  • 10-12 oz grassfed aged cheddar, like Oscar Wilde 2 yr, Cabot Extra-Sharp, or Kerrygold aged cheddar, sliced or chunked
  • Optional: nitrate-free naturally-raised bacon, like Niman Ranch, cooked until very crisp, then drained and crumbled fine

Steam the potatoes in the turkey broth.

You might need to assemble the rest by halves, depending on the volume of your mixing bowl or blender.

Dump the rest of the ingredients into a mixing bowl or, if you have a really good blender, use that instead. Put the potatoes and broth on top, so the butter and cheese start melting under them and make it blend better.

Beat or blend until it’s the consistency you like.

Enjoy it nice and warm on an achy day.

Treating CRPS enough to have a life

Isy / / adaptation, brain care, care team, CRPS knock-on effects, insur-dance, meds/drugs, neurotransmitters, nutrition, self-care, what works

Someone asked a question on social media that led to my doing a brain-dump on the basic format of current treatment for CRPS. This will take on a more formal form, but right now, for quick reference, here it is.

Like many others, this person has narcotics as a primary form of pain control. Increasing the dose increases function, but past a certain point, is that a good idea?

And, more importantly, the biggest question was, what does it really take to be able to have a life again?

 

Common-sense note on narcotics

Firstly, it is GREAT to have something that works. I know plenty about narcotics from a physiological and neurological and even a gastrointestinal standpoint, so I know the arguments for and against — but, when all is said and done, it’s great to have the option and it’s great to have something that works for you.

Keep what works! Unless and until you really can replace it with something better. (Clinicians, in their overbearing way, can be pretty cold about this.)

In the end, if you need to increase the dose, then increase the dose, but given how our bodies adapt and the disease shifts over time, it might be good to keep higher narcotic doses in your back pocket for breakthrough pain and flares, and see about the other meds that treat nerve pain specifically, support (in some cases) your neurology so you can function better and be more stable, and leave some slack in your body’s narcotics “budget” for other times.

Doctors should be able to support the idea that you should be able to have a life, and happy to help you figure it out. Good pain specialists have this as a specific goal which they try to help us reach as much as possible for as long as possible.

Read tamingthebeast.ca or elsewhere on this blog for loads of tips on nutrition, homeopathics, herbs, and other at-home strategies. This is just about the stuff your doc can do for you.

I mentally break these into 6 categories, 3 of oral meds and 3 of other, more interventional stuff:

MEDS

  • Neurochemical support: Mostly antidepressant-category meds, from tricyclics to SSRIs to SNRIs. SNRIs have the significant bonus of potentially stabilizing a faulty ANS.
  • Transmission shifters: Mostly anti-seizure meds, Lyrica and Neurontin. Ketamine certainly shifts nerve signal transmission, and the protocols for giving it are getting better and more specific. Technically it’s an NMDA receptor antagonist, but it affects opiate and MAO receptors too.
  • Calcium “wranglers”: Calcium channel blockers, bisphosphonates.

Basic principles of medication

  • Remember, all meds have side effects. There is no free ride; sorry!
  • Most of our meds can affect judgment, memory, and perception. Ask a relative, housemate or friend to check your brainpower and personality, to see if there are effects you’re not aware of.
  • Avoid polypharmacy, or too many meds, because it’s a great way to create a neurochemical mess. I stop at 3 different ongoing meds, since I can’t tell what’s causing problems if I take more. I also have 3 as-needed meds, which I rarely use, unless the side-effects of the pain/nausea/wheezing are worse than the side-effects of the meds.
  • Last but not least, med is spelled M.E.D. which means Minimum Effective Dose. Both adjectives are equally important. It must be effective, or why are you taking it? It must be the smallest dose that really works well, because otherwise you’re dealing with the same issues mentioned in the previous points, and they get a lot worse with overmedication.

Keep in communication with your doctors about your meds. If they’re savvy, they’ll work with you to optimize your medication profile for best functioning with fewest problems.

INTERVENTIONS

  • Injections and implants: spinal root blocks, prolotherapy, spinal cord stimulators, botox injections, spinal baclofen infusions, implanted drug dispensers.
  • Zaps and rads: TENS (electric counter-stim blocks the nerve pain), TCM (electro-magnetically stimulates and remaps certain parts of our brain that support the disease), Calmare (a more complex electrical technology that retrains the pain signal so it eventually doesn’t restart.)
  • Retraining, rebraining: Multi-Disciplinary Functional Restoration/Rehab is the gold standard for treatment. Most of these programs, but not all, require participants to be narcotic-free. The puritanism I can do without, frankly, but the whole-person approach, and the enormous mental toolkit you come away with, is absolutely life-changing.PT, OT, counseling, and learning about relevant subjects from pain mechanisms to nutritional effects on pain and function to communicating effectively with those around you so everyone can do more with less effort, is simply tremendous. It used to be a shoo-in for US citizens because it got people back to work so effectively, but in the industry overall it’s more profitable to keep us sick, so now it’s harder (but still possible) to get that paid for.You have to have determination and some mental flexibility to get admitted into a program, because it’s hard work, but if you find a program that agrees with you, then it could be the single biggest change in your life.

Every time something goes under your skin, your body has a shocky/inflammatory response. It may not be noticeable, but if it is, be ready to manage it.

If you get an invasive procedure, like implants or injections, then use one of the vitamin C protocols to help ward off flares and exacerbations: 500 mg 2 to 3 times daily, for 1 to 2 weeks before the procedure and 2 to 3 months afterwards.

Now what?

Talk over these different options with your doctor, if you haven’t already — increasing your current meds, using supplemental med support, trying technologies and interventions, risks and benefits.

Also, sadly, it’s important to discuss the realities of funding and insurance coverage, so that you can develop contingency plans to follow in case your hoped-for option doesn’t get approved right away.

Always leave yourself a way forward — that’s a good strategy 🙂

There is a lot that can be done, and most of us cobble together a few different things that work a bit so that, together, they add up to enough to let us … have a life 🙂

Un Crossed

Isy / / critical thinking, CRPS knock-on effects, Dept. of Blith. Obv., legislation, loved ones, mortality, poetry, worker's comp

Note – For legal reasons, this article is explicitly labeled an opinion piece. Quotes are used with prior permission of the author.

I’ve written of bereavement, suicide, the fact that CRPS is not imaginary (the whole point of this blog), and the true mortality rate of CRPS.

Now it has all come together.

Cross Y. was a friend of mine. He wore his heart on his sleeve — there was no deception about him, no malingering, no lying, no selfishness. Selfishness was something he needed more of, and tried to aspire to, because he forgot his own needs in the face of others’. His kind and loving heart poured forth upon his CRPS kindred and those he loved, often in scintillatingly original and muscular words.

He was injured at work. You’ve seen the news about corruption in New Jersey. Add to that the corruption of the Worker’s Comp system, and try to imagine for one minute what that might be like.

July 8, 2013
The truth will set me free,
Kill your dreams,
have nightmares for the rest of your days,
Welcome to New Jersey,
we stand our ground,
unite and become one sound,

The truth will set me free,
technology,
paper trial was the beginning,
soon the end,
your dark tunnel will remain,
Yes this once holy man,
once believed,
now a fucked up memory,
many joined,
happily crucified,
only one will remain,
your future is in vain,
your lies you cannot hide,
you may run,
change your name,
DNA will remain.

The truth will set me free,
Kill your dreams,
have nightmares for the rest of your days,
Welcome to New Jersey,
we stand our ground,
unite and become one sound.

Cross Y 7/6/13 1.21pm

He was a good-looking young Middle Eastern man, so of course, the New Jersey cops figured he was dirty from the get-go.
Cross solo
Then his brother, who didn’t believe he had this disease, became a cop, and things got worse still.

I watched his family dynamics transform as his marriage with a green-card seeker fell apart, then his beloved family started to fail him, and then he spent the best part of a year fighting to survive in an increasingly hostile and impossible hail of abuse, predation, invasion, and brutality.

The system failed him. His lawyer failed him. His family failed him. The original newspaper articles, based on interviews with his family, trivialize and brutalize still further the brightest mystic-poet I’ve ever known.

I’m grieved. More than that, I’m furious.

I had to watch as his extraordinary resilience was pushed and pushed and pushed until every strand of rubber broke.

I had to watch as his stumbling command of English prose was used to throw away the meaning behind his words. Judges and doctors alike could hardly be bothered to listen, and certainly couldn’t be bothered to believe him. Those of us who knew him had to watch as his posts wove between intelligent determination and raging despair, as time after time after time he was thrown back from what properly belonged to him.

His wife stole $30,000 of disability checks. His wife dumped him as soon as her immigration status was assured. His wife pushed him down off his weak leg.

Guess who went to jail? It wasn’t his wife. Try to imagine cold, sharp steel cuffs snapping tightly on CRPS wrists. You can’t. The world isn’t supposed to be large enough to hold that much pain.

August 6, 2013
The color of my eyes have become

the mountain I cannot climb,
the west brings the rainy days,
the east brings the heat,
So I wait,
I’ll give you my night,
I’ll give you my site,
I’ll give you my last breath,

The color of my eyes have become

the mountain I cannot climb,
Realities exist,
Unwinding occurs,
Petals unfolding,
Protecting what’s remaining,
Adapting each day,
Earth is distributing,
New sign,
New rhythm for humanity,
Being Bold,
Voice your feelings,

Full moon of greatness,
Hidden lights reflecting,
Fire resurrecting,
Slumbering beliefs,
Illusions of the underground,
Transformation of natural field,

The color of my eyes have become

the mountain I cannot climb.

9.42am 8/6/13 Lost soul

His brother’s police pals broke into his room (or were let in by his parents), stole his thumb drive, plowed through his poetry and his belongings, took his personal belongings, hacked his hard drive and his accounts. When he said he was going to install a spycam for evidence, his parents got him involuntarily committed to a public psychiatric hospital in New Jersey. They did not treat his CRPS, which was, after all, all in his head. They treated delusions that didn’t exist and a paranoia that was a perfectly rational response to his ghastly situation.

He got in line for emergency housing, but the wait list was at least 6 months long — for emergency housing. A combination of Governor Christie and Hurricane Sandy saw to that. The emergency housing and homeless shelters in New Jersey have been utterly gutted.

Three weeks ago, his father attacked and strangled him at a barbecue, in front of others. He posted a picture of himself afterward, with a bleeding bruise under one eye and big red welts around his neck, with the distinctive engorged look around the eye-bones (remember this is a former Emergency nurse writing this.)

His mother stood by and watched.

Someone called the police.

The partygoers disappeared.

His mother told the police that her husband had not attacked Cross, but that Cross had attacked her — with a knife.

Guess who got the handcuffs…

In private, she later apologized, and said she’d write a statement retracting the police report and her statements behind the psychiatric report.

She reneged.

He was living with people who were actively trying to destroy him. His work was being invaded and stolen. His life was in danger. Not even his dog’s life was safe.
Cross and his dog Leo
He had a sign posted in the rear window of his car: “We burn until there is a cure for RSD/CRPS.”

With perfect logic, he burned his car, before jumping to his death in the most beautiful part of the state. Of such indelibly poetic actions are myths made.

For him, there was no cure.

July 7, 2013
They Murdered me, I never

committed Suicide….

This disease is not imaginary. He was not crazy. He was perilously sane. He was a warm and loving soul with a shining gift of a mind, trapped in a fatally tightening spiral.

All he is now is a tragically truncated memory. What’s left is what we can scrape together of his work from our online conversations.

They keep saying he died of suicide. That’s not true. He died of torture: CRPS, institutional murder, and child abuse.

I. Am. Furious.

Cross, however, is finally at peace.

Reaching the Universe

Silence the past,
Silence the worries,
Silence the outside,
Silence the future,
Silence the self,
Silence the noise,
Silence the people,
Silence the voices,
Everything has left,
Faith in the now moment,
Faith that I am present to myself,
You are stripped,
You are Free,
You are Pure.
You are reaching the universe.

– Cross Y

Rest in peace, my darling, shining brother.

Learning to stand: t’ai chi, qi gong, and unscrambling the CNS

Isy / / activity, basics, imp-possible, marathon, massage/bodywork, perspective, radical presence/radical acceptance, self-care

About 15 years ago, I studied shaolin kung fu with Ted Mancuso at the Academy of Martial Arts in Santa Cruz. I was outrageously lucky to wind up there. I had too much spiritual feeling to tolerate the gym-type martial arts classes normally found in the US, but not nearly enough discipline to make the most of my time at the Academy.

However, I did learn a few things, including how to block a punch in such a way that my opponent’s spinal reflexes were disabled for my return punch. That was cool.
circulation-allbody-Anna_Fischer-Dückelmann_1856–1917
Being short, blonde, female, well-traveled, and — above all — a sometime Emergency nurse, all my illusions about bad things only happening to bad people were long since destroyed. It’s a great big world out there, and anything can happen to anybody.

So there I was, in my self-satisfied early 30’s, at a top-flight martial arts training school. The fact that the teacher (or “sifu”) had started in qi gong somehow totally eluded me. I was infatuated with the grandmother of martial arts, shaolin kung fu, and really had eyes for nothing else.

Smiling sparrers from Shaolinsuomi at Wikimedia.
Smiling sparrers from Shaolinsuomi at Wikimedia.

I briefly flirted with t’ai chi, but decided it would be too hard on my knees… Knees are important, but shoddily made. I had cruddy cartilage (what was left of it) under my kneecaps. I thought that was painful (how cute!) and was afraid of making it worse before my time (another joke, in retrospect.) I got physical therapy for that problem, and learned that my legs had been aligning poorly at least since I was 11.

Retraining my legs to activate different muscles, ones I could hardly feel (and no wonder), was daunting at first.

I remarked to Sifu Ted, in tones of reflective melancholy overlaying a certain smugness, “I’m re-learning how to walk.”

That was supposed to be the opening line of a short discourse on rebuilding something so fundamental, literally repatterning one of the most reflexive early lessons in life, going right back to the beginning and restructuring an utterly basic activity … yeah. Cute.
children-Versailles_petit_appartement_de_la_reine_web
But, before I could get started, he said, in a tone of unrehearsed frankness overlaying a certain frustration, “I’m always relearning how to walk.”

My verbal hot-air balloon deflated on a laugh, before it ever left the ground.

He said, “It’s true.”

I nodded, and went away to think that over for a decade or so.

I thought of Ted when I realized that combining energy discipline and body work was the best rubric for managing my CRPS. I’m back at his school now, studying — you guessed it — qi gong and t’ai chi.

Um… No, it’s not too hard on my knees.

T’ai chi is second to nothing I’ve tried for correcting posture, the way Ted’s Academy teaches it. While each body is unique, there are certain things that have to happen in order for the movement to work. To do good t’ai chi is to line your body up properly. My low back is slowly opening and lengthening again, and my feet are remembering how to find the ground.

Qi gong is another dimension beyond that. I’m sweating over re-learning how to stand. When I find the words, which may take awhile, I’ll write about it more. To start with, I’ll just say that I had no idea how much I get in my own way — and I’m not that bad, for a Westerner. I started qi gong 20 years ago, but now I’m starting all over again.

I thought it was trippy to go back to when I was 11, and un-learn from there. Now I’m realizing I have to go back to when I was 1.
Faience_beer_stein_with_ball_scene_on_brown_background_web
But I’m looking forward to knowing how to walk.

Humbling invitation

Isy / / ANS and fight-or-flight, CRPS knock-on effects, mortality, nutrition, self-care

I’ve been invited to ride in the funeral cortége of the man I helped code last week. It’s a semi-public occasion, as he was a semi-public figure (which is why I’ve been cagey about details), so “yes” is not as simple as it sounds.

I seek public exposure the way other people seek whooping cough — every now and then, it hits, but fortunately, it’s rare, and generally causes no lasting damage.

I was silly enough to mention that I have a sub-par central nervous system to the extremely kindly person arranging the event — who was also my CPR partner at about this time last week. He nearly withdrew the offer on the spot, possibly raw over the possibility of another medical event.

It’s a bit strange to have someone else worrying more about my body’s reactions than I do. Kind of refreshing… but definitely strange. This disability has been so invisible for so long — a fact assisted by the sturdy stoicism so many of us live by — that I simply have no idea how to handle someone else’s concern.

To mitigate any need for worry on anyone’s part, I’m preparing for CNS stress on Monday. Here’s how…

I have found, absolutely consistently, that the key to preparing for extra events is all about berries and vegetables. All the vitamins in the world — which I think I’ve tried — can’t do quite as much good as half a bucketful of organic greens and half a basket of good berries per day. I just had a big farmer’s-market-fresh salad; I’ll have kale for dinner, and there’s steamed summer squash awaiting the next moment when I can handle a few bites. Wild blackberries are set for breakfast.

I’ll boost my multivitamins and antioxidants only slightly, since I already take about as much as my body can absorb. I’ll keep lemon balm (for pain flares and dysautonomia) and yerba santa (for nausea and nerviness) in my pockets.

I’ll do extra brain-training, which I’ll talk more about one day, but it’s basically about learning how to calm the central nervous system by sheer will. And t’ai chi. Lots of t’ai chi. Mental practice, if not much physical. I see a couple of Epsom baths in my future, stocking my system up on magnesium and sulphur to buffer this body a bit.

Funerals are for the living, though we think so hard about what the deceased would appreciate. I’m not sure why that works, but it does.

The peacocks left us a glorious side-feather.

peacock_sidefeather

It might come with me. It might not come back. I’ll see what it feels like the deceased would appreciate.

Move slowly, stay happy… except when pushing one and a half to two inches straight down on the lower half of the sternum

Isy / / activity, basics, imp-possible, what works

We went to a great farmer’s market, where J got me a ceviche tostada that had to be tasted to be believed. I got a flat of outstanding organic peaches to dry for the winter. All this is much easier said than done, because today, for some reason, is pretty harsh as pain days go.

J wanted to know, in his brusque-backwards way, what I intend to do about it.

I replied that I’d probably trim his hair, then lie down for a bit, then watch a silly show, then come help with the wood — which means, bringing cold drinks and looking on admiringly.

I said, “Managing pain days is basically a matter of, move slowly and stay happy — to the extent that that’s possible.”

He liked that. He added jovially, “Used to be more like, move quick so I can get away from people — then I could stay happy,” he said, veteran of a socially hideous region.

We both laughed.

matchgrins-horsenwoman_decamps-pauline_4blog

Moments later, we saw people beside the road, one lying down. I saw CPR.

CPR

I barked, “Pull over NOW!” J knows my voice, and he’d never heard that tone before. He did. Instantly.

A first responder was doing chest compressions, and getting tired. CPR is incredibly hard work; if Mr. Universe did CPR, he’d tire even quicker.

I got down and planted my less-injured hand on the responder’s stacked palms and between us, we made a strong enough compression to create a pulse in the patient’s leg. This is what you want to do: create an artificial pulse, to sustain the vital organs until the heart itself can be restarted.

The runner had felt chest pains 5 minutes before, according to his workout partner. Then he went over. Just like that.

I won’t go into messy details, but by the time the helicopter was landing and I’d brushed myself off to come home again, I was aware of how strange it was to do this outside the ER, to snap into lifesaving mode from a standing start, and to find myself — without the mental shield of my work-badge and trusty stethoscope — turning away from a still-blue figure and not knowing if he’d make it.

J said of the man behind us, in his elliptical way, “He didn’t look like a jerk.”

I said quietly, “No. He had a really nice face.”

I’m sure he had good medical care. He worked out to keep fit, and had the muscle tone to show for it. He had a bit of chest pain 5 minutes before, then keeled over.

It’s not fair.

I took my clothes off carefully, keeping the dirt off me and turning them inside-out before dropping them in the laundry. I washed my hands and arms to above the elbows. I used to do that on coming home from work, every time. But I’m not able to work, and those weren’t scrubs.

I have some additional prayers to make now, and a body of my own to manage.

I have to move slowly, and stay happy, to the extent that that’s possible. There’s nothing else that could possibly help, because I’m no longer in the ER. I’m a 13-year veteran of the worst pain disease known to medicine, and I helped do CPR today.

I wrote this in the hope of coming to some conclusion that would make it easier to move on from this shell-shocked state of mental mumbling. I haven’t, yet… but let me add one thing.

This man had every chance, once he went down. CPR was started within a minute. The ambulance arrived within 5. He should be getting definitive care within 15 or 20 minutes of hitting the dirt. This is how it’s supposed to go.

In honor of this man who was given every chance, and in honor of my father who never had any, please learn CPR.

Even if your bones are too frail, as mine are, you can still provide the extra push that’s needed.

Even if you can’t risk infection from someone else’s fluids, you can still check for a pulse while others do the dirty work.

Even if all you can do is puff your chair a little closer, you can still direct the able-bodied, because it really helps to have a cool head looking over the whole scene.

Please learn CPR. You’d be amazed at what you can do with it. Those of us with disabilities get too much of the message that boils down to “can’t”, but when it comes to working to save a life, if you know the protocol and what to look for well enough, then there’s usually a “can” that you can go for.

I gave the police my name and number, and I hope to find out if our guy made it. (NB: Details were changed to protect his privacy… but I’m sure prayers and meditations and good thoughts will get through just the same.) I’ll post a comment to let you know.

In the meantime, here are a few links.

My ANS is going to be vibrating for awhile. I’ll start with lemon balm and see what else I can remember to do.