Trails and trials

Occupational Therapy was great today.

I have someone rooting for me...in the present; face to face; hand to hand.

I feel hopeful...today. Hopeful is good, even if it may be false hope. Hope helps me to continue to put one foot in front of the other.

My full-time job is self-care and to keep my limbs working and maybe even to get some muscle tone back. But, if that isn't possible at this point, perhaps I can forego more atrophy.

I cannot hike the Appalachian Trail in my current condition. But if I could, my full-time job would be to put one foot in front of the other. My current journey is not a trail through physical woods; it is a trail through physical trials. Any trial is more than physical.

Soul trials. Soul trails.

Every trail has its trials - lonely, arduous, taxing miles. Every trail has its triumphs - sun ray kisses, zephyr whispers, wildflower scents, aroma of cedar, discovering one's self.

I can draw on trail memories I have forged and apply them to my current trial.

Will this current trial ever end?

"End." What an odd thought. Perhaps it will never end until my last breath. And damn it, I'll die trying. ("You damn straight!" says my self to my self.)

This morning I opened and read an email that in its signature stated:
“You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean, in a drop. ~Rumi”

Later this morning I continued my reading of the book Grandma Gatewood's Walk.

In 1968 when Grandma Emma Gatewood was around 81 years old her ex-husband, P.C. Gatewood, was on his death bed. P.C. physically beat Emma for decades. She divorced him in 1941, after 35 years of abuse. This morning I read on page number 244:

"According to [P.C. and Emma's son] Nelson, [P.C.] made one dying request in his final days. He wanted to see Emma. He wanted her to come stand in his doorway just for a moment.

The woman who had walked more that ten thousand miles since she left him refused to take those steps."

Upon reading that last sentence I enthusiastically hooted, Good on you Grandma!! Go Emma!!
And then, I pondered.....

Online. Offline. Freedom. Limbs. Red Rocks and the South Rim...

Online
Offline
Inline
Outside the lines

I have become weary of online life.

Sometime sixish months ago I thought along the lines of (there's another "line" phrase!), "Social media feels like the new rat race. I want off the track."

I'm sure the so-called "rat race" exists in all sorts of environments, from religious retreats to Wall Street. The word "race" indicates competition. Competition gets tiring. Life is competition enough. But then being a rat is life, to a rat.

Oh my, I'm wandering and could go into a full ramble (regarding life, competition, rat race, human race, culture). But then I might miss getting out of my noggin what it is I was thinking about blogging.

My recent online weariness mixed with my health challenges, has put me on a side path, on the sidelines of (another "lines" word!) social media. And my blogs as well are on back burners.

Some months back I changed the settings on my public blogs to "not visible to search engines." In that same time period, I deleted my personal Twitter account. I've pondered whether or not to delete my personal Facebook account. For now, I'm keeping it. But I'm not checking on it as often, and I'm commenting on a limited basis.

Facebook can overwhelm me and I often feel tired (and not a good tired) when I log off after visiting Facebook.

And it's not just Facebook. Conversing in text has become wearisome for me.

I sometimes wonder if all this text communication has taken away some of my joy of writing. Maybe not, but I think it has had some effect. I do tire of looking at a screen...unless I'm watching XFiles, my current series kick.

And now I think of all my friends that communicate on Facebook and elsewhere via text, "What about the news in their lives? Don't I care?"

I do care. Maybe too much. And all that news overwhelms me; I simply don't have the energy to process it and respond how I would want to if the news came more slowly. I know I'm not alone in that feeling.

My focus these days is to keep my limbs mobile. I don't share that on Facebook because I don't want to get into a discussion about it. A long online discussion is not where I want to (or need to) put my energy.

In light of all that, I don't know how long my blogging sabbatical this time around will last. Nice thing is, I have the freedom to choose how much and if I want to engage and share online, or offline for that matter.

Freedom of choices. "Choices," plural. That causes me a big smile. There were decades in my life I felt I didn't have that kind of freedom. Choices were limited to, dictated by, "What does the Word say? Will this give glory to God?"

I've about finished reading the book Grandma Gatewood's Walk: The Inspiring Story of the Woman Who Saved the Appalachian Trail by Ben Montgomery. Grandma (Emma) Gatewood was the first woman to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. The year was 1955; she was 67 at the time.

As I read the first paragraphs relaying the beginning of Emma's trail journey, at the end of each paragraph my noggin added the sentence, "And she didn't have a cell phone." Which led me to remembering life before cell phones, before computers, before voice mail, before answering machines. (Oh my, another ramble could tumble if I let it....)

On my health front:

• I received my spinal injections on March 30.
• The relief was sweet, though my arms didn't fare as well as they have in the past, especially my right arm. I'm training my left arm and hand to do tasks they are not oriented toward; my left is my less dominant.
• I am now entering the more challenging weeks until my next round of injections in seven weeks on June 29. I have to wait 13 weeks this round; my doctor is on vacation during Week 12.
• I began Physical Therapy and Occupational Therapy last week.
• In all activities/tasks involving movement of my body, I estimate that I'm one-and-one-half to three times slower than I was pre-polyradiculitis. It takes me 35 minutes to walk 1-1/4 miles on level ground. I'm very conscious of my limb movements.
• On 4/24, I discovered a lump on my back at the base of my neck. I saw the neurologist on 4/30. On 5/01 I got a CAT scan and gave blood for lab work. All is good, which I figured it would be. The lump (which is smaller now), is probably just more fatty-like cysts that come and go with this condition. Or it might be the beginning of a "buffalo hump" which is another wonderful side effect of steroids, along with "moonface." I thought I could change my name to "buffalo moonface" and don a wide brim leather hat with feathers. ;)
• My current focus is to keep my limbs mobile, my back straight, my head and eyes up, my heart happy; to laugh and move and sing every day.

Along the line of injections, Hubby and I went to Arizona for a week in April. It was during Week 3 post-injection. (My best post-injection weeks are typically Weeks 3 and 4.)

I've been thinking about writing a blog post or six about our trip, but I don't know if that will happen. Below are a few pictures. I'm still in process of getting the pictures on my computer and all labeled and in order.

Our time among the Red Rocks and at the Grand Canyon were magical. By the end of the week, those Red Rocks felt like home.

View from Fay Canyon Trail. Sedona, AZ. "Ruby City" (my term)  in the distance.

View from Kaibab Trail (I think it's Kaibab). Grand Canyon South Rim.

Bicycling the top of the world on rental bike, Ruby. Grand Canyon, South Rim.

Let it rain....

It's been a horrible few weeks.

I continually adapt.
I endeavor to come up with coping strategies...to manage the emotional darkness this god-damned illness exacts.

I try to find words to metaphorically help describe my symptoms. Somehow that aids me as I live in this bodily prison. Perhaps it softens the cold, hard facts.

I tend to personify all sorts of aspects of life...and aspects that have no life...material things, like bikes and cars.

At times in the past year, I have gotten angry and have broken things...
...a full-length door mirror. (Boy that made a racket..and a mess.)
...a plastic Tums bottle with Tums still in it. (That just made a mess.)
...and earlier this week, while hollering some sort of frustrating obscenities, I chipped one of the window blinds as I repeatedly slammed my shirt against the inside of the bedroom window covered with the blinds.

I ended up lying in the back yard that night...
...in the dark
....on the grass
.....crying.
Sobbing, I rolled on my side and looked at the treetop shapes in the distant darkness. The animal tree-shadows brought to mind when I was young girl and would camp in the yard so I could stargaze and look for animal shadows and listen to night sounds and wonder at the vastness of the universe and think that surely extra-terrestrials would come visit me someday and that there had to be more to life than my time on earth.

Yesterday and this morning...
...with the incredible heaviness in my limbs
....with the feeling that I'm dragging around a dead body
.....as I made the effort to defy gravity and pull my body to an upright position
......and then consciously thought to myself, "Move Carol. At least you can still propel your body forward,"
.......the earth felt like a giant magnet (which it is) and my body was filled with slivers of iron and the earth was pulling the iron with all the earth's might. I was going to be sucked right into the center of the earth.

The heaviness gets incredibly unbearable...almost. I do bear it, because I'm still here.

I thought, what can I do? what mental image might help me?

I know.
I'll picture a rubber covering under my feet that will buffer and interrupt the pull of the magnet. 

But I love the earth. 
I want to feel the earth.
I don't want another separation between me and the earth. 
I don't want to think of the earth as my enemy, as something I need to shield myself from.
The earth is not my enemy.
My body is not my enemy.
I don't want to even think of  terbinafine (the drug that precipitated this unkindness) as an enemy.
I don't want any enemies.

E-n-e-m-y .
Innie me. 
That's when I was my own worst enemy...when I as an "innie me."

I took terbinafine for about six weeks in Spring, 2011, that caused, or at least was the catalyst, for this dis-ease of polyradiculitis that robs my limbs of functions, that has stolen my dreams.

(As I type this now, I feel hatred toward that medication.
But I don't want to feel hatred.)

Anyway, I wrote down the word terbinafine.

I asked myself, If I scramble the letters, can I come up with something I can embrace ... instead of hating the culprit, instead of viewing terbinafine as my enemy?

terbinafine
or
train be fine
or
benefit rain

Benefit rain...
Shower me with benefits...let me once again dance, light-footed, arms outstretched, open face toward the heavens as the rain freely falls, life-giving, nourishing, replenishing...

I prefer a benefit rain to terbinafine.



Dancing in the Rain
by Hillary Weeks

"...And I danced in the rain
I let my dreams know I hadn't forgotten them
I let my heart take the lead and
I told my hopes to get themselves up again
And I danced, I looked, yes I danced..."