moving/traveling – Life, CRPS & Everything

With a pet & chronic illness

Isy / March 5, 2025 / CRPS knock-on effects, documentation, food allergies, imp-possible, moving/traveling, perspective, radical presence/radical acceptance, self-care, survival, tips on traveling with pain

This is a long one. Grab something to drink and put your feet up, if you want to…

In the wildly unlikely event that, say, a vulnerable American citizen felt moved to respect the anti-immigration feeling and return to the lands that, say, my ancestors left in the 1600s and 1700s… how would that work?

It helps if you already have a passport. This is important. Go here:

https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports.html

and follow the instructions there – whenever you land on it. Passports are issued by the State Department, and the State Department is currently being defunded and depopulated, so their processes may change.

This hypothetical traveler – let’s call her Max Peregrine – and why not? – is female, disabled, poor, and has very short hair. This puts her in several categories of risk in the US in 2025, and she’d like to know what other options there are for someone like her. Her service animal, a minature goldendoodle, has to go with her.

This is important.

Max has learned that a pet leaving the US has to get a certificate from a vet specifically qualified to issue international pet health certificates. She asked her usual vet, who referred her to the USDA web site to find one.

The USDA has been running increasingly lean for years, and has recently been gutted by the incoming president and his team, so the list of vets qualified to give this pet health certificate is out of date.

Max has been disabled a long time and is used to this kind of disappointment, so, after an Epsom salt bath and a TV break, she called down the list of veterinarians in the area until she found one who can (theoretically) give this certificate.

It took the one vet she found 3 weeks to research whether this is even possible. The USDA (which supervises animal health certificates for travel) is running out of staff, after all, and every country people want to bring their animals to has its own peculiarities over what is required to clear a pet for arrival, so it gets very complicated very quickly.

Sadly, the information that non-vets like Max find about import requirements is less than half the story.

Also, the US export process is complex in itself, and requires a 3-hour minimum turnaround between the vet and the USDA for the form to be submitted, reviewed, inspected, corrected, approved, and printed out. That is, if nothing goes wrong.

This vet certificate has to be issued within 10 days of departure (in some cases, 3 days, depending on the country the traveler is going to) so it’s good to start this process well in advance, and be willing to stay flexible.

If, like Max, your pet had an uncertain history or belongs to someone with limited mobility, it’s possible you’ll hit a snag: if the initial rabies series was not done exactly right, you might have to start the series over, do a blood test in 3 weeks, and be sure to get the next one inside of a year.

If you travel to Europe, you’re in luck: go to a certified vet there and get your pet an EU Pet Passport. It’ll make everything a lot easier as it’s widely accepted.

It’s important to remember that Max belongs to a category of people who can’t afford a package trip, nor a concierge trip. She has to do all the planning and reservations herself, and track all that info if, for instance, her pet’s initial rabies vaccination did not happen exactly as intended, and every leg of her trip has to be adjusted, by herself, one piece at a time.

Every transport company has their own pet policies, so she also has to call every single carrier in the chain of the journey to make sure her pet reservation has followed her.

It’s fortunate for Max that her executive function happens to have extra bandwidth for travel planning. It’s in her DNA. Her ancestors have been traveling for at least 350 years.

Since Max’s mini goldendoodle, a girl named Sam, is a Service Animal, there’s no question of that pet being refused. She has to fly with her person.

However, her paperwork still has to be in order!

So, having rectified the rabies shot situation, changed the entire trip to 2 weeks later to make sure her dog can come, and found half a dozen places to get food that matched her dietary requirements in each place she planned to stay in, Max was smart enough to know she could not possibly relax until she actually had her toes in the sand and her dog in her arms at the same time. The preparation for this trip had only just started.

Max is probably a bit overwhelmed, but can get good advice and good tools. She got Smart Tags for her luggage, found friends willing to be phone buddies to use Find My Phone to watch her progress, set an alarm to remind her to turn on Location and 5G at every transfer to give Find My Phone a signal, and then returns to low-rad mode so she’s not battling cyclical vomiting syndrome (which is what happens when she’s around too much signal too close to her body) while conducting a long trirp.

Cyclical vomiting is never fun, but it’s worse all around when you’re packed into Economy class.

Max, who hates travel surprises and likes to be organized, has also prepared a travel folder with pockets and tabs:

Complete itinerary in the inside pocket in front.
First tab: Check in information for each stage of the trip. This also proves that she plans to return in less than 90 days, because that’s important in an increasingly immigrant-hostile world.
2nd tab: Visa related info: trip insurance coverage, with the coverages page copied and stapled to the front for easy reference.
3rd tab, more visa related info: Lodging reservations, printed in every language she’ll be travelling through, so each border can conduct its own checks. Arriving with nowhere to stay is a big no-no these days; no more turning up and finding the nearest hostel.
Health tab: vaccination info. A lot of places really care about this, so get your shots if you want to travel, and get printouts from your provider. If you can afford it, you can have a travel specialist doctor make a yellow International Certificate of Vaccination, which is accepted everywhere – like the best credit cards.
Emergency: this tab is particular because Max has underlying medical conditions. There’s a MOLST form, which providees instructions for when someone is unconscious and can’t tell you if they want CPR or oxygen. It should also have copies of prescriptions, which you can get by calling your pharmacist and asking them to print them out. (Some countries require prescriptions hand-signed from the doctor’s office, but electronics are making their way into this process more over time.)
The pet, naturally, has her own tab. Her health certification, rabies documentation, and whatever else is needed, go here. This includes her microchip number, because pets require a chip for travel.

At the back of the folder, Max has left space to keep brochures and flyers for things she most wants – from safe places to get food, to inexpensive trips, free/cheap sights, and bus schedules. Max looks forward to filling that up, but knows she has to be careful with money because she’s still poor … she’s just staying somewhere a lot cheaper than her home at the moment, somewhere the government is not (yet) committing very messy self-merc.

And then there’s packing. Max has to bring her own self-care mechanisms, which involve a lot of pillows and some extra gear. Being disabled is a lot of work and there’s just no getting around that. Everything that’s most necessary for that work has to come with, or be bought there, and she’s on a tight budget.

Happily, sunshine is free!

Max is an expert at enjoying the little beauties and making the most of whatever blessings come her way. She’s going to have a fabulous time, and so is her service animal.

I’m a little envious, but I’ll be sticking around for the foreseeable. I helped Max with some of her research, though, so there’s likely to be more to come…

New times; new topics

Isy / February 7, 2025February 7, 2025 / activity, ANS and fight-or-flight, imp-possible, moving/traveling, perspective, radical presence/radical acceptance

For audio version (with extra fun stuff), touch this sentence.

I’m not going to mention current events in my country.

This is a series about traveling…

Traveling in interesting ways.

The ADHD is strong in this one:

If a thing is interesting, it is ever so much more bearable.

If I were to travel, I would like to bring my pet.

I hear some of you shouting, “Why, you insufferable loon? Don’t you have enough to deal with??” (Sorry, Mom.)

For one thing, I like her company; for another, she keeps me on schedule and is really good at “body-doubling”, or hanging around to help me focus on a task. She literally holds the yarn while I crochet, and tracks the loose bits of thread when I’m sewing. Cats are supposed to be interfering, but she’s genuinely helpful.

Also… Traveling with a pet definitely makes this more interesting.

Chapter 1: pet passport

I was going to start with the effort to find a vet to make her travel certification happen. I’m not up to that right now.

Chapter 2: Trip planning

I’ve been reading up on alllllllll the aspects of this trip for a long time. Years, really, but most recently for about 3 weeks. It takes some noodling around just to find out if it’s impossible or just kinda weird.

In case it isn’t obvious, I’m okay with weird. Impossible takes a little longer.

Aspects to understand for planning a trip like this:

– The only way to get to my target continent is by air.

– Some airlines are pet-friendly.

– Some airlines that are pet-friendly for domestic flights somehow refuse to carry animals at all on international flights.

– Some airlines that are willing to carry animals on international flights, don’t allow them in the cabin. From my experiences before, I absolutely, flatly refuse to send a cat in the hold, regardless of the airline’s reputation. Never again.

– Am I overthinking/ over-explaining? I think I am.

Point is, there are all these layers and layers of information to dig through. I had to keep on digging through possibilities, then peel back the incompatible options, until everything finally got very simple.

Cats are not supposed to be in a carrier for more than about 7.5 hours. So, all I really had to do was get her from my airport to an airport less than 8 hours away; 3 to choose from. Flights within that other continent are all within that time frame, so the crossing was all that mattered.

Still with me? Good.

Flying into one of these 3 cities puts me at the heart of the high-speed rail line, something I’ve been coveting a ride on since it was first mooted roughly half a century ago.

At the other end of that high-speed rail line is a ferry ride, a 16-hour journey over one of the most adorable seas in the world, to an island that entrances me.

The total cost of the train and ferry (even with the pet) comes out to less than half the cost of another darned multi-leg plane trip *without* the pet, eating bad food, too far up to enjoy the scenery, and breathing other peoples’ air.

In short, if I were to organize such a trip, we’d have 3 modes of transport over 40 hours, lungfuls of fresh air, and moonlight on the Mediterranean to welcome me home.

I might love it. I might hate it and never want to do any of that again. Doesn’t matter from here… because it’s interesting, it’s affordable, and I want to give it a shot.

Another chance to get it right

Isy / January 10, 2025January 10, 2025 / activity, adaptation, basics, critical thinking, Dept. of Blith. Obv., humor, imp-possible, moving/traveling, perspective, radical presence/radical acceptance, realpolitik, what works

I’ve been chewing over something for awhile and recently realized that it might be time to apply that much mercy to myself. It’s a more coherent, whole way of thinking about what I discussed in some panic in my previous post.

Complex chronic spoonies tend to drive ourselves hard because we really have no option (the exhausting, but relevant, internal chorus of “adapt or die, figure it out or eff off, push through or give up, fight or fall” is inescapable) but does it need to be so ubiquitous?

A lot of these posts have been oriented on finding light through the cracks, on putting life itself into center stage somehow. I think I’m cooking up a new way of doing that.

The most basic of basics

Many years ago, when I was working as an emergency nurse, I realized that (despite the hype & excitement) our job was fundamentally simple: give people another chance to get “it” right.

Whether “it” was keeping up with their meds, staying off of whatever was poisoning them, choosing better company, finding the healing path that worked for them – whatever. There are fewer “its” than their are people working on them, which is why we are never the only one with our struggles.

That made more sense inside my head. Sorry.

People wind up in the ER because something bad happened, and usually human ignorance, stupidity, or violence was involved.

That’s not about blame. People don’t always get to choose their company or can’t always bear to be alive without some kind of buffer between them and their situations. Even if they did do something colossally daft (like the rich kids who decided to cut out the middlemen and drive 350 miles to buy their drugs from the distributor; 4 came down, 1 eventually went back), it’s not right to require mistakes to be terminal if they don’t have to be.

Of course people with heart disease should take their meds even when they feel fine, and get periodic blood tests to show that it’s working. Of course people with diabetes should keep an eye on their blood sugar and stay on their meds. Of course primary care when you first get symptoms is better than going to the ER when you start to fall to pieces… but it’s awfully hard to find a primary doctor these days.

Life is complicated and increasingly expensive. ER work really shows that.

Anyway, I saw our job not as holding back the sea with a broom (as some do), but as giving individual people a chance to figure out how to do things better. Lift properly. Drive sensibly. Stay off the hard stuff. Find an appropriate doctor who’ll listen – and then talk with them.

Nobody likes to be told, so reciting these mantras to them doesn’t often make sense. Oddly enough, it can be a lot more meaningful when you’re meeting their worried gaze as you administer the medication or fit their c-collar or go over the x-rays with them. Or tape and dress the wounds in their wrists.

There is so much we don’t control… sometimes we just have to remember what we could control, and how to put that in reach. It’s not easy, but it’s often very simple. When the universe is dropping its big hammer, where do I need to be when it lands? Under it? Or can I get off to one side? What will I have to let go of in order to get out of the way? Is it worth it?

The answers to this aren’t always obvious, and “worth it” to some is not the same “worth it” as for others.

What that looked like in practice

We had a lot of repeat customers. Some of them I wound up zipping into body bags, because what it took to get out from under the universe’s hammer was either too far out of reach or not ultimately worth the effort of letting go of what they were clinging to. They mostly didn’t want to die, but it wound up being too hard to do what it took to live.

I’ve got to respect that. It’s not for me to judge.

Some of them I saw come back just for ordinary bump-and-owie stuff, showing me the healing scars (inward or outward) of their old struggles. There are no words for the sense of sunrise I felt on seeing them. It made the rest worth doing.

It was all their work… but it was up to us to give them another chance to get it right.

My chance

I absolutely love to work. Being useful and productive is the bomb! If it weren’t so important to me… well, I probably would not have come down with CRPS, which stemmed from relentless overuse injuries in my case. I could not take a break to save my life. Whatever it was, I had to jump in with both feet, arms flailing and shouting “incomiiiiing!”

I imagine I could be pretty tiresome that way. Belated apologies to my friends and colleagues along the way!

I’ve been wrestling – for years (how embarrassing) – with recognizing that having fun… recreating… seeking diversion instead of merely a change of work… I’m not even sure how to put it… but that loose, apparently useless, seemingly non-productive use of my time, is really good for me.

It lowers my stress levels. It reduces my pain. It raises my spirits. I don’t know if it gives me back any of my lost abilities, because I find it incredibly hard to do and have never been able to hang onto the easy-going vibe long enough to find out.

What with one thing and another (I’m an American living stateside in January of 2025; IYKYK) I have a powerful inward pull to go somewhere glorious – and affordable, thank you very much – and simply muck about enjoying the diversions. Play tourist for once in my life. Soak up pretty colors and different sounds. Be warm every single day.

And, if I get bored or don’t like it well enough, simply go somewhere else.

At this point, a lot of places are more affordable than the U.S. (more on that later) and, for all the challenges of travel in this body, I do plan on doing nothing but recover and enjoy myself for a good while afterward.

…It’s a weird idea, honestly.

Good thing I’m used to maintaining and cultivating relationships via the internet, after a quarter century of having to do so. It makes love more portable.

It’s still a weird idea. Wherever I go, I still bring myself along, and I know I’ll have to leave my compulsiveness behind with my snowboots. That’s unnatural, but I’ll learn.

Learning to let go of that deep attachment to being productive and useful is not the same as not being productive and useful – but it could give me time and space to heal my much-clobbered systems.

That might be the point.

Rest and play is widely regarded as essential. I think that’s the “it” that I need to work on getting right. Get out from under the falling hammer of overdriving a broken system.

Still a weird idea! LOL!

The times, they are a-changing

Isy / December 27, 2024December 27, 2024 / activity, ANS and fight-or-flight, care team, critical thinking, Dept. of Blith. Obv., humor, imp-possible, marathon, moving/traveling, nature, nutrition, perspective, politics, radical presence/radical acceptance, realpolitik, survival

Without descending into the morass of modern U. S. history and politics, let’s just say that I’d like the first months – up to half a year – of the new regime to happen with me being somewhere bearable, where good produce is a lot cheaper and the medical care both stable and affordable.

None of this is likely here, where my food prices rose about 30% during the harvest season and there is much loose talk and planned chaos around Medicare and the dole (which I depend on to stay alive) – not to mention the cost of everything rising by 15-60%.

The pundits and those who follow them tell me not to worry, because there are rules and procedures “they” have to follow.

Given the Mump track records regarding rules and procedures, all I can do is smile sweetly so as not to worry my loved ones, and let my mental gears turn more quietly.

Hot tip #1: a tariff is a tax. These get passed on to the consumers, not sucked up by the companies from countries exporting to us.

Hot tip #2: as we’ve seen so clearly over the past 5 years, industries don’t just raise costs in line with their own expenses, but jack them up to see just how much the market will bear. Given a captive market, this has gotten really ugly. Remember eggs last year? The sub-prime lending fiasco leading to the 2008-9 crash? Yeah, it’s an established pattern.

So anyway… here I am: if I stay in one place, I’ll be wrestling hard with un-meetable expenses (my dietary needs are simple, but not cheap) and a constantly-cycling urge to run away. That’s neither stable, healthy, nor fun. Been there, did that, threw away the t-shirt.

I didn’t grow up in one place, or even one country. I’m not mentally stuck here, and I don’t believe I have to put up with the scrambling anxiety or insufferable expenses to come as the Mump Regime and its trail of chaos gets itself through the initial reality-checks.

I’ve been toying with the idea that it’s healthful and good to be warm, stable, and happy. That takes adjusting to, because so much of what makes me feel anchored to the world is about work. I love to be productive. It makes me feel superbly grounded to be useful/helpful to others. This is very compelling… but as far as my daily choices go, doesn’t have a lot to do with being warm, stable, and happy.

It does have to do with abusing my eyes and attention with falling down back-lit rabbit-holes and trying to turn the swarms of information floating around in my brain into streams of relevant words, pertinent to the question I’ve just read.

But I’ve got serious limits and, as it turns out, I am much more useful and productive after I’ve been taking really good care of myself and playing and recreating and being happy outdoors – a lot.

This doesn’t sound like computer-gazing, which is how most of my work happens.

This focus on making myself happy is a weird concept, and I’m still working out a lot of the details. I mean, not even details – I haven’t settled on where to start; even my departure date is unfixed. Getting the right people in to keep my place clean & warm while I’m gone is kind of a big deal too. I’m not prepared to move and won’t sacrifice my sweet little home – not until I’ve got a much better offer in hand, anyway!

Anything could happen. I’m trying to keep breathing properly as I say that.

Maybe it’s time to take a sabbatical…

Tough gift, but a good one

Isy / December 8, 2024December 8, 2024 / adaptation, ANS and fight-or-flight, brain care, critical thinking, humor, imp-possible, legislation, moving/traveling, perspective, politics, radical presence/radical acceptance, realpolitik, self-care

American Thanksgiving is the 4th Thursday in November. I had a gift that day – a difficult one, but I’ve been unwrapping it and wondering ever since.

My phone (which has my i.d. and my bank cards in it, and it provides my only internet access) disappeared on Wednesday evening.

While this is momentous for anyone these days, I have a disease-specific reason for being harrowed by it:

I listen to audiobooks to drown out my brain’s ongoing response to the ongoing pain, wonky signaling, and that disconcerting imbalance between what I need and what I have or can get to keep my environment safer for my body. To me, it sounds like screaming; I’ve heard others describe it other ways, as crunchiness or a kind of rattling wobble or other experiences entirely. My sensory processing apparatus decided that it’s a constant, ongoing scream from someone too upset to be the least bit self-conscious. Audiobooks and internet rabbit-holes are fantastic ways to manage this, partly by drowning out the internally-generated sound by the external one that I want to hear, and partly with the power of distraction.
Pain, reasonable & irreconcilable anxiety about how I’m going to get through anything from this day to the next chapter in my life, and the occasional neurological crumping (when my cognition shuts down and my coordination goes to hell, so I can’t make ideas or hold things) … all of these are best addressed by comfort and distraction. For me, books and memes and contact with absent friends are all good for that.

For Thanksgiving – when everything is shut aaaaaaaall day – I had none of that.

It was a sad day. I couldn’t make or receive any of the usual holiday calls with people I love. I couldn’t go out to eat, and the previous evening I’d had to put back all the holiday food I had in my cart and get only what I could pay for in the cash I had on hand.

I had the sweetest visit from 2 friends (I explained why I had nothing to feed them with) who made it their mission to check on me twice daily until I was en-phoned again, and that helped me get through several hours much better.

Apart from that, I had little to do but hear the screaming, and wonder what I would do next year in a country that has voted for unprecedented chaos that, on the showing so far, is liable to shatter a large part of what makes it possible for me to live. The litany starts off like this: “The level of daily chaos to come is unbearable to think about. Every time I read up on the latest plans or appointments, it gets worse.” Not good for dysautonomia, among other things.

At the end of the day, I began to apply a bit of cognition to this experience (as you do) and realized something important…

The screaming was a whole lot quieter than it used to be; than it was, say, a year ago.

Last year, it was a lot quieter than when I first moved in here, right before the Pandemic. That was a tough time and the screaming was so loud I had to play the audiobooks and dvds at a fairly ridiculous volume to get the benefit. (The neighbor knocked on my wall a couple of times.) That volume might be partly why I now have ongoing tinnitus, a ringing in my ears that’s always at a different pitch and volume from the inward screaming. Clearly, my brain decided not to confuse the two.

Also, I noticed that my mind had actually recovered some ebb and flow!

There were times of day where it was natural to fix things, other times for doing something creative, times to sit and be quiet and times to move around and chat with the cats…

Natural texture and dimension in my mental activity, which the constant audiobooks had smoothed out and neutralized since they came back until that day of enforced quiet.

To the able-bodied and -minded, this is perfectly natural. It didn’t used to be for me. I had 10 or 12 alarms set throughout each day to tell me exactly when to do each kind of activity, because that mental texture had been quite, quite lost.

I got through 2 nights and a day without any alarms. I survived, and I also realized that alarms are jarring.

Who knew??

It turns out that my slowly-healing autonomic system has finally agreed with me that a stable diurnal schedule is a good thing to do, so I wake up within the same half-hour every day, without needing to be kicked awake by a series of 3-4 alarms.

The phone climbed out of its hiding place the next day. (Of course, I had already thoroughly checked there.) I canceled almost all of the alarms, except the one for feeding the cat.

I can make a short list for each day and get through it by riding those mental waves – and being kind if I can’t get them done at the very time that I wish to. It seems that being kind to myself knocks down a number of stress-related barriers.

I’m still digesting this new experience of the world. It’ll probably continue evolving over some time to come.

It’s not exactly normal to have such a significant level of recovery when you’re close to pushing 60 and sitting on 25 years of pain-related neurological disruption, including 20 years of dysautonomia.

So yeah, it was a sad day and not an easy one, but what a gift it turned out to contain!

I needed such a gift. My life is about to change drastically, and it’s up to me to work out which path to take through it. None of them are easy, but some could be more rewarding than others.

Can’t wait to see, not only how I’ll screw up, but what I’ll learn from it!

I’m going to try something new, as I navigate this tricky shift in life: asking for input and advice from people outside my head and its rabbit-warrens of associated ideas.

I know, wild idea… and for that reason alone, probably worth trying.

What’s your forward path?

Isy / November 25, 2024 / adaptation, critical thinking, imp-possible, moving/traveling, perspective, politics, radical presence/radical acceptance, survival

I’ve seen more than the usual amount of material about having hope, lately.

I see why, of course. Many people view hope as an incentive to carry on when things are going badly and they can’t change that.

So, hope serves as a forward path or guiding light, a way to keep going when you’re not sure you’re going to wind up anywhere good.

Speaking as a long-term survivor of a pretty rotten condition, I certainly understand the value of that!

The point, I’d say, is the forward path itself, the guiding light that gives us the idea of having something positive to go for, when the usual ideas and activities don’t work or make things worse.

Hope is one way, but not the only way. Sometimes hope is counterproductive, and if you’re convinced that hope is the only way to keep going, that can be a real downer.

To me, hope is like a pretty lie: I’d like to believe it, but there’s no logical support for the hopeful ideas that, for instance, I could attain full remission and be able to work to support myself again, that the Atlantic circulation will strengthen again and stave off total disaster, or that my country could look forward to a survivably rational government in the new year.

And yet, some people cherish those hopes in themselves, and who am I to persuade them otherwise? Their futures are for them to envision. I’ve got to deal with my own, and that’s plenty!

My own sense of a forward path is something I have a hard time articulating…

It depends partly on the deep sense of history I grew up with, 10,000 years of the ebb and flow of human vanity, decency, terror, greed, and stunning insights.

I’ve read notes and letters from people burying their entire families in the Black Plague… between king and lord of warring states… Spanish merchants discussing trading alliances along the Great Lakes in North America in the mid-1300s, very hush-hush… Gilgamesh and his passionate grief for Enkidu… love songs from every age and between every gender… desperate missives from ancient Romans fleeing the fall of their government to families who never answered them, or told them there simply wasn’t enough to go around and still keep everyone else in their accustomed style and comfort.

Whatever we suffer, we are not alone in it. We are one more part of a very long course of events, and every problem has been faced before. It’s up to us to find the best solution for this particular version at this moment in time – and we have this great depth of information about how it has been faced before.

We are never alone in our terror, betrayal, or pain. Somehow, that helps me.

Another part is that – another lesson from history – there is a future worth having, if you can stay alive long enough and do what it takes to increase your odds.

This alone has gotten me through some things that should have been terminal: I had to see what the future worth getting to would be. So far, it’s been a fantastic outcome, relatively speaking. Well worth getting to!

The last thing, which is the hardest to explain although it’s the easiest to notice, is my stubborn idea that it’s my job to hew my best and truest path through this life – do my best while being honest about my capacity, be guided by my humane ethos, keep the long view, and don’t let the misery of my circumstances decide how I’m going to face them. That job belongs to my will. It has had a lot of practice.

Sounds really noble or something. It sure doesn’t feel noble! It feels messy and rebellious and defiant, most of the time. It requires me to disrupt expectations about how women, who are middle-aged women, who are white middle-aged women, who are white middle-aged women who originated from upper-middle social strata and good education… should behave. In short, people who are supposed to have options and protections and resources that I haven’t even been able to dream of for a very long time.

That’s what I felt I should have been. It’s a useless “should”, but a gluey one.

For all that I’m pretty cheerful (especially with the morning sun on my face, like now), I don’t have much truck with “hope”, because it feels like placing too much weight in an imaginary basket. I can bank on my diligence, curiosity, and determination, though. They aren’t imaginary at all; this blog reminds me of that.

I think that every one of us has to find the forward path or guiding thought that works for us individually in our own ways.

We’ve each got to play to our own strengths, and do our best to keep the deep-dyed “should” phrases in their place.

Sometimes hope is just another “should”, and it’s okay to set it aside for other motivators. You’re still whole without it.

Maybe it helps to know that the Darwinian statement, “survival of the fittest,” does not mean those who have the strongest minds or the healthiest bodies – despite the narrow libertarian/right-wingy assumptions and the hunter-gatherer-based ideas of cost/benefit.

It means “those most able to adapt to fit the new environment” and that, dear reader, means us: the disabled and neurodivergent are the OG adapters to strange environments, the fittest to figure out how to handle the increasingly worrying future.

One way or another, this era in history – with its uncertainties, intensity, and rising waves of change – is ours. Like it or not.

Collectively, we can do this. Individually, as ever, it’s an open question – but let’s find out.

I’m curious how this will go…

First aid at the roadside

Isy / September 7, 2024September 7, 2024 / basics, injuries & surgeries, moving/traveling, perspective, radical presence/radical acceptance, tools and techniques, what works

[Follow this link for the audio version: https://www.spreaker.com/episode/2024-09-07-1staidatroadside–61297573]

I headed to psychotherapy after texting, “I’m on my way. I’ll see you in person today, barring the unexpected”

I was feeling a bit cautious, because a couple hours before, the thought had come to me, “when things get hectic, trust your training.”

What training? Was I about to have a series of intrusive thoughts harking back to the times I’ve had to file restraining orders, one of which magically disappeared and I had to flee the area – right before Christmas? I hoped not. Martial arts training has certainly come in handy, but come on…

No, no intrusive thoughts, but I did wonder which set of training I should have in mind.

A few miles down the interstate, I saw a pickup truck stopped dead, and a sedan facing it.

People were only just getting out of the truck. I put my flashers on and pulled in behind.

I definitely trust my training in this kind of situation. I put my anxiety to one side and sailed in.

The only person to worry about was a littlie in the back of the sedan. Had spontaneous pulse – a good one – and respirations. He could speak, to the limit of saying, “I want my Mommy” (sound of heart-strings tearing), so I checked his spine at his neck. It was there, but not quite right. Once he could speak more, he told me his neck hurt where I touched it (I’d been holding his head & neck stable since I felt it). As I told the fire department medic later, “on me, it’d be a chiropractic adjustment. On a littlie that age, I’m not sure.” He nodded and sent his buddy in with a pediatric cervical collar.

Littlie’s mother was on the phone the whole time with him. So much love swirling around in that car. I told the Dad that I noticed it, and that it’s healing.

At each stage – or rather, just before the next round of excitement – I explained to Littlie that there would be more people, highly trained people who really cared about him being okay. Let him know roughly what to expect at each stage. Coached him to go along with things as well as he could. When the fireman asked him to squeeze his finger, he squeezed my hand instead (sound of heart melting).

I could see most of my words going over his head (as expected), but I could also see the sense of reason and structure calming his exhausted and shocky brain so he could tune in a little more.

I grew up in a musical household, so naturally I hummed pretty little made-up tunes and it visibly calmed him – and possibly his parents too, a little.

I’ve been working on learning how to stabilize a shocky system for 25 years, on top of my trauma nursing work. I’m only a patient – and a nerd – but still, I have lots of good training. I trusted my training in that, too.

I gave his mother my number right before the fire department and EMTs rolled up. I think it was a training day, because there were 7 or 8 more people there, one of them a cheerful charming know-it-all (every team needs one of those) who got the best responses out of Littlie.

I let the kid know I had to go but his Mommy would stay on the phone with him and he’d be cared for by these really nice people. Told his Mom I loved her kid and he was terrific (sound of heart-strings pulling).

Once his c-collar was on (definitely a training day; I helped get it positioned and sealed correctly in the end) and they had the gurney ready, I realized I had to stand up. After perching my crippled butt by one hip on a steel door frame for half an hour. In front of people. Specifically, a total of 9 or 10 fit, athletic slabs of beef (-cake) no less than 10 years younger than me, and most of them half my age.

This was not going to be great for the ego, but I knew I could get a laugh out of it.

So I used both arms and every available leg (which was slightly less than 2) to lever myself upward, saying, “I’m an *oooold* trauma nurse” by way of cover, and squirmed through the kindly, protective testosteronic press and into fresh air.

I signed off with everybody and retreated to my comfy car.

I called my psychotherapist and said, “Remember what I said about ‘barring the unexpected?’…”

We had a phone session once I was safely off on a side street and in a proper parking space. She was full of commentary about how I applied those psych skills and met psychosocial and informational needs appropriately, as well as the nursey stuff. So yeah, that was good…

… because my brain was churning constantly about every single moment and thought and decision for an entire hour. Looking for a fault. Looking for something I’d missed or where my training had lapsed or been forgotten. Cycling through, over and over, looking for any lapse.

This used to be how I improved my skills – look for errors, even tiny ones, and figure out how to prevent or avoid them in future. Now, it’s just my ADHD brain torturing me.

And computer says Nope. Failed to suck. I’m pretty sure I failed to suck. That’s a relief.

I’ve been thinking about it pretty much nonstop, but rather than worrying myself woolly, I got an organizing thing for my car and picked up some food. Both of these are calming, grounding things, perfect for pulling my adrenaline out of the stratosphere.

Then I crawled home and had fresh corn and gluten-free carrot cake for dinner. It’s good to have a little sweetness when your body is still convinced the world is full of excoriation.

I’ve had no calls from them and I don’t expect one. They’ve got to be absolutely wrung out regardless of how things went. The kid comes first, and then comes their own care and self-management.

They don’t have to think of me ever again: I know how shocking and painful it could be to revisit the moment.

I’d love to know. I hope like crazy that the kid came out of it OK. I never got to follow up with patients when I was a nurse (because confidentiality), and I’d sure appreciate it if this family wanted to give me a heads-up just to soothe that old itch.

All that being said, I want all you non-nurses to know that they don’t owe me one word of contact or one moment of concern. I was in the right place at the right time with the right training, and I trusted my training. That’s what we do.

They have the hard part: figuring out next steps with a shook-up and possibly injured Littlie who was going home early because he was already ill.

That kid was having a rotten day.

I sure hope it got better.

Forestalling future problems

I don’t have a jump-kit for my car. That could be a problem in the future. I was lucky this time because all I needed was my brain, arms, hands, and voice.

It’s probably the 6th or 7th accident I’ve stopped at and I really do know what’s needed at the roadside – and it isn’t much. I used to get confused by the fact that I didn’t have a stethoscope, oxygen on tap, i.v. gear, and All Tha Meds. Once I’m on scene, though, it gets very easy.

Any blood or, indeed, anything wet? Nitrile gloves, packed up in pairs and stowed in a closed outer pocket to keep them clean & dry and easy to get on.

Heaven forbid, does anybody need CPR? This very rarely happens, but when it does, I don’t want to have to dig for the needful. I physically can’t do chest compressions (though I can coach any able-bodied person properly) but I can darned well use a mask with a one-way valve as if I’ve had years of practice. Years. You don’t have to have that (the training has shifted away from doing rescue breathing) but I feel that I do.

Pressure dressing? Kerlix. Sling? Kerlix. Wound cleaning? Kerlix makes a great sponge. Wound wrap? Kerlix. Piece of clean water-resistant paper to slap over a bubbling wound? Wrapping off a Kerlix.

So, plenty of Kerlix.

Road rash? Plenty of saline rinse (and a Kerlix) then a petroleum dressing to stabilize the damage until the ER can do a better job.

And possibly most essential: disinfectant cleansing towels, individually wrapped and big enough to grab. Those get used before if there’s time, during if the patient wants cleaning up, and definitely afterwards.

Because allergies & neurological reactivity, I stick with ethyl alcohol 70%.

Secure the mess. A gallon-sized zip bag or 2 for garbage and wrappings. Having a garbage bag is one of the things that separates rescuers from ego-trippers.

Oh, did I say that out loud? Sorry. I don’t want anyone not to stop & help… I just wish that, if they’re going to the effort of bringing gear, they could pick up a bit. Seeing blood and mess is not good for survivors & passers-by.

I got all these online for about $10 each, and also got a clear bag (with outside pockets) to put the kit in.

I’ll keep backstock at home.

What I don’t carry

Blood pressure readings, stethoscopes, and pulse oximetry are at-home and in-hospital concerns: we want to know if what we’re doing is working over time and refine our understanding of the body’sfunctional state.

In the field, the main issue is not whether the patient has rales or a murmur, but whether the lungs and heart are keeping them alive – a much simpler, larger-grained issue.

So, these tools might be nice to have, but for a noodle-noggin like me, they’re an added complication and a bunch of expensive equipment to lose at the scene.

In the field,

You need to keep pulse and respirations going,

the spine stable,

make sure the inside stuff stays inside

and in place,

and (as much as possible) the outside stuff stays out – or at least doesn’t move much where it’s inside the person.

And that, ladies and gentlebeings, is Advanced First Aid and Basic Life Support in a nutshell. You’re welcome 😊 Now go get that training… please?

More on environmental insults on a hyper-reactive system

Isy / January 30, 2023January 30, 2023 / activity, adaptation, CRPS knock-on effects, imp-possible, moving/traveling, neurogastroenterology, nutrition, radical presence/radical acceptance, self-care, tools and techniques

I’m dealing with a mold-spore exposure in my home that’s only somewhat mitigated, and can’t reach a better state until the weather allows me to throw open all the windows for a week or so, to allow the super–low-tox coatings to dry and cure.

Honorary sibling & excellent friend Cougar came over to help with a related errand. I was singing my way through my tasks, which I don’t normally do, but apparently it’s sufficiently “on brand” that it fit right in with his expectations. I told him that I was going through a phase of illness where eating anything is treated by my body like a personal insult, and, in addition, the all-body pain and inflammation were through the roof. He said, “I never would have guessed. Your behavior doesn’t show it at all.”

Woo hoo! Yay me. We humans can have real personality distortion due to horrible pain, and when I can manage myself that well in the teeth of a flare, I take an inward bow and award myself a shiny gold star.

I got the Big Craptasms one by one: Ehlers-Danlos Syndrome (type not yet known), CRPS/RSD, dysautonomia, fibromyalgia, Hashimoto’s thyroiditis, mast cell/histamine activation problems, gastroparesis & sluggish gut. All of these require major lifestyle changes.

I could handle the rest, even the CRPS (given all the good neurotransmitter stabilizers we have these days.) It’s the worsening histamine stuff that’s really driving me crazy right now. I’m reacting to everything.

Reactions don’t stop with itching skin, itching eyes, pouring sinuses, and wheezing. Oh no. That would be too easy.

Reactions set off aaaaaall the other clowns in the circus.

So, here’s what that looks like in my case:

My tissues are more brittle and unstable, so I have to be extra careful doing things (and I’m always doing things. Did I mention being mildly hyperactive?) That’s the EDS.
The body pain of the CRPS I don’t want to focus on long enough to describe, but getting my skin sensitivity under control before bed is kind of a big deal.
The fibromyalgia is like a big spiculated cloud of aggravation that my body wandered into and can’t find its way out of.
The thyroiditis means I have to stay off cruciferous foods (the best winter veg, sob sob) or get back on the thyroid supplement/pituitary see-saw that I’ve struggled with before; meanwhile, the thyroid-driven struggle of having one day and one night in every 24 hours is taking up a lot of planning and will-power, especially at 4 or 5 am when I haven’t been able to go to sleep yet, but still have to get up in a few hours in the hope that my body will get the clue. With most sleep disruption issues, it’s important to fake it ’til you make it.
Gastroparesis is tightly tied to mast cell reactivity for me. That’s also so loaded right now it’s best for me not to think about it, especially since it’s almost dinner time and I have to give my gut some work.
It ties in with the fact that, if I don’t eat enough, my body creates more fat “to get me through the famine”, in that lumpy, painful, inflammatory pattern that just makes everything harder.
Also, the mold fragments themselves create a reaction in my body that’s a whole bucket of nasty by itself: more brain fog, more indigestion, more inflammatory-patterned everything.

And I’m one of the lucky ones. This could be so much worse!

As I think about life generally and my life particularly, I think about travel — as essential to me as breathing is to many people. I don’t need as much of it (obviously) but now and then, it’s essential. I have loved ones, few of whom are near; I can no longer go visit them. There are beautiful sights I’d love to revisit, and more I’d love see for the first time. There are fascinating people I’ve not met yet — some of whom I’ve loved dearly for years.

Yeah… but no.

I can’t stay anywhere, because everyone everywhere uses things that either smell or out-gas or both; moreover, at this end of the reactivity bell-curve, what sets me off might be fine for another who’s similarly sensitive. It’s a total crap-shoot.

Plus, mold. Largely invisible, uniquely ubiquitous above the 37th parallel, usually harmless — but astonishingly bad for me!

If I’m going to go anywhere, I’ve got to customize and control the environment I sleep in, at the very least. Sleep is when the body does its housekeeping and cleanup; it’s as if all the doors and windows are thrown open and the sensitivity gets turned up to 11 — any bad stuff that goes in then, goes in much more and makes things worse. The regular cleanup gets interrupted. It all becomes more crisis-manage-y than housekeeping-y. As you can imagine, in hyper-reactive systems like the one I have, that’s a real mess.

This has been creeping up on me for awhile, and I’ve blithely ignored it because gee freaking whizz, isn’t there enough going on??

I just need a moment to process this.I had to give up a visit to friends this week, because my immune system crawled into the blender and hit “frapee”. (I’m nursing a charming case of stomatitis with both canker and cold sores; my lymph nodes are creating topography a bit like the bumpier parts of Death Valley; and I’m having all visitors stay fully masked with windows wide open, because I’ve got nothing to fight off further pathogens with.)

Because I gave up that trip, I get to sit here and think about what a non-delightful level of fragility I have to plan for as I go forward in my life.

So, on the one hand, this is great information and I clearly need to know it, in order to avoid making myself sicker.
On the other hand… Oh FFS, life! Really? — I mean, really?!?

When I’ve gotten the particle-board in the kitchen coated, I hope that will buy me a couple of years of being able to stay in my adorable little flat without further toxic exposures. I’m benefiting hugely from this stability, and the location can’t be beat. I love it and I’m grateful. With the semi-permanent fix in place, I can probably recover quite a lot of the ground I’ve lost — although of course there’s no guarantee, and the best-case scenario involves many months of recovery and being very careful about avoiding other toxic triggers for a couple of years, until the mast cell “bucket” can drain.

Thanks to the diligence and care of my 2 new helpers, this is an attainable goal. Pheee-yew!

Beyond that, I’ve got some thinking and learning to do. I may revisit this subject of controlling my environment while on the go, when I have anything useful to say.

No wonder I can’t get up! Rad realities

Isy / January 20, 2020 / adaptation, CRPS knock-on effects, imp-possible, moving/traveling, neurogastroenterology, radiation, radical presence/radical acceptance, self-care

After the ghastly fiascos of last year, imagine my overwhelming relief to finally — FINALLY! — find a clean, safe place to live, in one of my favorite towns in the world.

The past weeks of unbudging exhaustion — starting from roughly the time everyone in the building got back from their holiday vacations — I put down to my body going into a “deep recovery” mode after the astonishing stresses it survived. I knew neighbors had wifi, as most adults do in this country, and noticed I felt better in the sunny side of my bedroom — behind an enormous brick wall, as the bedroom is an addition built onto a century-old, balloon-built brick building — so I’ve been spending a lot of time sitting there, letting all that earthing happen between me and the wifi signals.

Today, more or less out of the blue, two or three neurons fizzed together and I realized there was something differently-familiar to this feeling of having had all the air let out of my tires and my batteries totally drained. There was a knot of yuk behind my xyphoid — right about where the vagal nerve comes through the diaphragm and shakes hands with the stomach on its way past — which has rarely gone away.

Following these clues — my neighbors getting back, the bitter exhaustion, the yuk behind my xyphoid — I pulled out my elderly-but-spry laptop and asked it about the wifi signals it can see.

Here is what it sees in the living room:

Here is what it sees in the bedroom, behind the double layer of brick wall with a door in the middle:

That one bar of difference is definitely palpable, to me. Also, I know that one of my near neighbors has turned off their wifi right now (bless them!) because there’s sometimes another network on this list which has all 5 bars when it shows at all; it chases me right out of the living room because I can feel it like an incoming missile to my gut.

This exercise simply goes to prove my longtime suspicion that, indeed, wifi is the Un-Healer for me. I can’t get off the couch for long, simply because I’m being soaked in it all the time.

Give me a moment to get myself together, please. This is tough.

Detail of a Bosch painting. Whiskery demon holding and reaching for a misereable man. — Bosch knew.

It could be worse. I could be unsafe, breathing mold, AND being soaked in wifi.

Solutions

First, a key term:

Faraday cages are structures that use particle absorption, grounding, or deflection to create a radiation-free space inside. I’d expect to incorporate all three elements, for a more durable and predictable kind of protection.

Grounding

There are some low-tech, lower-cost things to try that can have the effect of minimizing my exposure to wifi signals:
– Grounded skin, that is, a grounding mat I keep my skin connected to, to carry away the signal before my body takes it up much. I haven’t had terrific results from these yet, but I may have gotten a bogus mat before. I’ll experiment with wire and foil before investing in anything better.

– Rad sinks (already in place), a mass of metal dense enough to act as its own ground — in my case, big heavy old-fashioned steel filing cabinets. I should really paint them thickly in matte black to get the best results (preventing signal-bounce), but it’s hard to think of a less useful work-setting for a colorist like me. I’ll keep thinking about it, though, because I’m pretty sure it could help.

After that, it gets a bit more iffy vs. more expensive.

Shielding

Make a Faraday-shielded pod I can pick up and move around, and sit in when I’m doing anything for long. Given the inexpensiveness and availability of pop-up structures, black felt yardage, and that shiny mylar stuff, I could cobble that together, probably with a zipped door and a couple of battery-powered computer fans. But dayum, would that be claustrophobic, gloomy, noisy, and a space-hogging eyesore! Also, it would render most furniture effectively unavailable for shielding time.

I’ve tried rad-blocking clothing. This poor challenged body needs a good few feet between my skin and shielding, or the feedback gets incredibly painful. Can you imagine that thing that microphones do with feedback, happening to your spine & everything connected to it? Yeah, that’d be cute by comparison to the experience of me wearing rad-blocking clothing for 5 minutes. So, rad-blocking clothing is not an option for me.

– Creating a shielded-fabric blockade around my bed, looking rather like a mosquito net but costing the equivalent in silver netting, which it often is. Silver is an excellent conductor. If properly grounded (always a consideration for a Faraday cage you want to use for more than an hour!) this can, at least, create a low-rad place to sleep that still has air flow — and room for the cat. It’s not the total radiation seal that a proper Faraday cage should be, but it’s a compromise that works well for many people. I can certainly tell if it needs to be better sealed for my purposes; boy howdy, is that clear to me now!

Shielding & grounding my whole space

Then there’s the costly, smelly-toxic, protracted option of having a minimum of 2 good coats of rad-blocking paint (at ~$200/quart, I’m guessing a total of 5 or 6 gallons for these high ceilings, plus the ghastly oil-based primer required), securely wired into the building ground at appropriate points by an electrician ($1k), with adequate layers of 3M UV-filter film ($?) cut to fit every single window ($hundreds for labor, because I can’t do that), the sashes of which will also have to be painted or filmed over… And do something to cover the gorgeous old maplewood floors to block rad bounce from the basement. That, given my abiding love and admiration of maple in every form, would be absolutely criminal.

So, that’s not going to happen.

Or, of course, there’s the prospect of moving again, to which my internal response is way out of the decibel range that blogs can carry. I have JUST gotten my hotwired system to stop leaping awake every hour or two, convinced I have to pack and move again. I really need not to move for a good while.

This is a great place in so many ways, and I really like being here right now. I aim to make it work.

I project that my solution, whatever it is, will be a compromise, like this home — so much going for it, but still missing crucial elements. I’ll have to come up with something that will protect me enough to heal while I’m here, since that’s the point.

First steps

I think the first thing to do is shield the bed. Like I said, not perfect, but it should improve my overnight recovery-time. The means to do that is readily available and I already know the better makers and materials-technology. I could probably get that up in a week.

After that, I’m thinking portable pod, big enough for a chair inside with a little writing desk. Might rig up a window or viewing port, using something reflective but not too dark.

Any engineers want to come play with these ideas and problem-solve here? 🙂

A 3-point reality check in the armpit of winter

Isy / January 6, 2020January 6, 2020 / ANS and fight-or-flight, brain care, CRPS knock-on effects, imp-possible, mortality, moving/traveling, radical presence/radical acceptance, self-care, tools and techniques

I’ve got a sweet, safe little spot all to myself now. I can’t talk about it much but the gratitude and relief is STUPENDOUS. It took over a month to begin to come home to the fact that I get to come home now.

Last week, I didn’t spend much time upright. Months of overdrafts on my body’s account were called in: colossal spoon-deficit.

If I’d had the energy to feel much, I would have been alarmed. I just couldn’t. I couldn’t anything: think, choose, feel, read, watch, be.

Just drifted through the hours, mostly lying down, listening to audiobooks I’d read (or had read to me; thanks, Mom!) at least a dozen times before. Drifting in and out of the stories. Falling asleep early, waking late. Weird, spacey surges of energy got the kitchen cleaned a couple of times, and enough whole food cooked (can’t afford premade) to keep me fed for another 2 or 3 days.

The laundry pile and state of the floors don’t bear thinking about. I’ve started cleaning the floor, one square yard at a time, and so far that’s one square yard. Yay!

Last week, I was incredibly seduced by the idea of giving up the considerable ongoing effort of living. Oh, the peace, the comfort, the over-ness…

Eventually, I made an agreement with myself to simply wait until summer. That’s all. Anything else I did would be pure bonus. Even knowing I’ve got dreadfully important things to do, I had to be ready to put them aside to get this internal agreement to work.

Reasons

Of course, part of this is the wacky human version of hibernation, an unsatisfying slowdown without the restfulness or calm feelings that make it pleasant.

Cold dark winters are brutal. I never stop thinking about 2 things: deep warm baths and warm places to go in the winter. There’s no tub here and I’m not doing any more packing for awhile, though.

Compounded by longtime central pain, dysautonomia now with heart effects, bereavement, and recent protracted survival-stress, it’s really no darned wonder that letting this ride stop appealed to me!

I made promises which I take seriously, and there’s no question of my hurting myself. That’s just not going to happen.

I only wanted so badly to stop pushing back all the time, stop doing the relentless self-disciplines around every life activity — eating, sleeping, moving around, taking care of self and pet and home, making it to all those appointments, staying on top of my tasks, tracking the endless cyclogram* of signs & symptoms & exposures & feelings & barometric changes & solar weather & functional levels… you get the picture.

What chores await

I want the business from my failed homing efforts cleaned up and moved on as soon as possible, so I can stop paying rent on a useless space. Going back to it is a desperately nauseating thought. The place nearly killed me, I realize in retrospect.

At least one of my friends realized that at the time. Sigh.

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

I’m used to pushing past feelings, of course — “CRPS R US!” — but this stage of illness makes an issue out of being too dizzy or vomity to drive safely. (The vomiting is really intense and leaves me no control of my arms and legs… or anything, actually.)

I toy with the idea of a tree falling on the thing hard enough to trigger an insurance writeoff… happy thought! Well, actually, I’m not fussy; anything that totals it and doesn’t harm anyone would be fine with me.

Dreaming is free. Meanwhile, I’m working on healing as hard as I can. This is one of several weighty and important things to manage, and I know a few of you know how much that’s like trying to run with no legs.

But I’m getting better

This morning, I could actually taste the raw sugar in my tea. That’s kind of amazing. I didn’t realize I’d simply stopped being able to taste sweetness. It’s these little things that give me some rational hope.

This first day that I’ve been well enough to get out, I loaded up on blue fruit and low-FODMAP carbs.

Hubris, meet Reality-check

I’m sitting down to give these palpitations a chance to calm down before heading home. If I’m up to it, I’ll get some digestible protein; if not, I’ll go home and get back to horizontal.

Something about that statement seemed odd. H’mmm…

I know what to do when a statement seems odd: do a simple 3-step reality check!

Isy’s 3-step reality check**:
1. Review what I just said.
2. Take a moment to notice the totality of how my body feels, right now.
3. Think back over past 24 hours and look for other symptoms.

That took 5 seconds for the first 2 steps and another 6 for the third. It gets very efficient with practice.

I said to myself, “Self… Palpitations and breathlessness now, and seeing spots last night & this morning? You’re going home to lie the heck down, pal! No argument!” (The spots relate to blood flow, in my case, so heart symptoms have been acting up in a non-chest way.)

Can’t argue with that.

…Well, I could, but it’d be wilfully stupid and I disapprove of wilful stupidity — not just in politicians, but also in myself. So I’d better get stable enough to drive and then go home and lie down.

1 hr later…
I did.

Footnotes
*A cyclogram is a way of charting multiple changing elements in a single system, using a circular graph. It can be useful for seeing overlaps, backtracks, correlations, and other patterns among the different elements. Whether it’s better than an oblong line-graph is a matter of taste, but I find the sense of spinning-ness very apt here!

**Step 1 keeps me on track. I had two professions where everything depended on my getting things right, but I’m not perfect (despite best efforts!) so I got into the habit, very early on, of mental review and double-checking myself.
Step 2 is nearly magical in its effect. I stole it from the stress- and uncontrolled-pain-management skillset. It’s key to getting on top of any mind-clouding moment. Try it out, it’s magnificent!
Noticing the body response is a tremendously powerful step to getting back in charge. Once we can notice the physical self in an overcharged state, we can learn to steer it to a better physical state — breathe better, stand or sit better, lift the neck, release the shoulders — and wow! Suddenly it’s not about being so overwhelmed, it’s about a single moment (in a whole life) which we’re managing and moving more gracefully through. Great tool. Gets better and better with practice.
Step 3 I add for health issues, because chronic conditions need more context so we can figure out what’s going on. I started doing that for patients 30 years ago, so there’s a special rolodex in my brain for recent symptoms. When that rolodex went missing during the Hell Years, I noted symptoms & signs in my journal, which lived by my berth on the boat, always in reach. Over time (time which was passing anyway) that ability gradually got rebuilt.
Tracking matters. It really matters.