Quick shots of me

Quick shots one morning before work, for Rod

It’s So Nice to Have Tokens of Home

Little messages from my lovin' packers.













My Terry Redlin print of the old church like I went to as a child, Mt. Zwingli in Wadsworth, Ohio.

Today It's All About Pain, and Riding the Edge

I've had a rough day, worrying about money, getting myself into a tizzy. Silly me, I'll be OK. I'm just wrestling too many accounts and homes and bills at the moment.

(image from the American Pain Foundation's video)

And I seem to have a bit of food poisoning, if there is such a thing as "a bit" of food poisoning. Either that or the flu. Or maybe I've just gotten myself into a lather.

And my pain has been rough this week. I miss my massage therapist, the wonderful Christopher Hannan. The pains in my neck muscles, shoulders, and back have been flared up this week, and I know if I just had an hour or two with him, I'd be righted - at least as well as I ever am.

Something made me think of my fellow sufferers from the APF video, and then of an article I read about "Understanding Chronic Pain", so I'm sharing the link with you. It's a helpful depiction of what chronic pain does to the mind, body, and spirit, and the doctor has wonderful quotations from literature and the Bible about pain. They comfort me.

Rod's helping me to try to avoid pain more, and abide with it less, which is my tendency. I try to ignore it and everything about it, to stay in denial until it absolutely takes me over, and only then do I bow to it. Rod's suggesting a more preventive plan, and I'm ready to try it.

In the past I've been approaching this disease with the idea that I want to give it as little as I possibly can give it in terms of time, thought, anguish, adaptation, and of course money. My thinking was that the disease takes enough of me already. It already robs me of my time and energy and what I want to do with my time and energy. I didn't want to give fibromyalgia any more of me than it had already taken. I wanted to give fibromyalgia its due, as minimally as possible, doing just enough self-care to keep it at bay, and no more. I have wanted to ride the limit, pushing as close as I can to it without going over the edge into extreme pain and fatigue. I wanted to maximize what I could do and how much living I could get out of life.

Look at it this way, if my healthy self allowed me 100% of my time and energy, and if my fibromyalgia self, on average, gives me only 75% of my time and energy, I wanted to ride that limit right up to 74% without going over the edge into being "down" for the day, or several days. The problem is, with this disease, one never knows where that edge is, whether its at 41% or 62% or 73% on any given day. I never know how many spoons I have to work with each day, so it's a guessing game (see Spoon Theory). It's a wonderful illustration, but The Spoon Theory's author explains it as though one always knows how many spoons they have to work with, but we don't do we? Even so-called "normal people" :) don't know how many spoons they have in a given day. But if I played it right, and guessed the right number of spoons, and monitored myself through the day correctly, and fibromyalgia gave me a good day, I could maybe get 74% of my allotment of living for the day. What's wrong with that? Doesn't everyone do that?

I was being stubborn, as usual, something my Dear Mother says I have had a talent for since birth. And stubbornness has gotten me pretty far.

But I have to wonder whether I am cutting off my nose to spite my face. My stubbornness and refusal to deal with it has gotten me into trouble, too. What if I tried a more even-keel approach? I don't know. A lot of the experts recommend it. But what if the more careful approach would give me a consistent 60% every day, or even most days? Wouldn't I be giving up that other 14% I might have had if I had ridden up to the limit? Yes, yes, I know. I'm ignoring the times when I ride the limit so close that I fall over it into the other side, into the state of fatigue and pain that takes me out for hours, or days. On those days I have to deduct from my percentage of successful living, and maybe I go backwards for a while. I've been gambling that I can maximize my living by riding that limit. Now, I'm willing to try a consistent routine and less of a roller-coaster.

But I have a feeling that with this disease, there is no even keel. That's been my experience so far. By definition, fibromyalgia is a f***ing roller-coaster!! I don't think I even know how to do the even keel any more. The disease has had me in its grip since....1994(?). That's almost 15 years that I've been riding its waves up and down, trying to get a handle on it, trying to out-guess it, and wondering which element in the routine may be throwing me off. Was it the new medication? Was it the weather? The angry husband?(!) Or maybe the long commute that day,getting stuck in traffic, or the stress and cold of scraping ice off the car and hoping not to get mugged while doing it?

At one point I considered trying to create a database and programs to track every element in my routine, my environment, the weather, my diet, sleep, the meds, etc. in an effort to find a pattern to the flares. But I had barely begun the database design when I realized that there were so many variables that could possibly contribute that it seemed nearly impossible to expect a pattern to emerge. Every time that I had come close to thinking I knew what it was, the pattern was disproved. The only consistency was the inconsistency - and that certain weather (coldness or low gray cloud-cover) would put me down every time.

So why spend that much time thinking about it? I want to spend my 74% not thinking about fibromyalgia. I feared that if I spent that much time tracking every detail about myself that I would start to think of myself as a sick person who needed that much charting, and I did not want to get that self-obsessed. I have too many other interesting things to think about.

All o f that leads to where I am now: in Arizona, away from that sort of weather, and with an opportunity to start new with a clean slate stress-wise. I can manage my own stress picture by choosing what to worry about. That should work, right? Maybe.

So I am going to try for an even keel. A consistent routine, good diet, exercise, low stress. We'll see what that does to the disease roller-coaster. [Right. Being away from everyone who loves me is low stress. Right.]

I am committed to trying it, though. And I'll let you know how it goes.

But...I'm still not sure that I'm made for the even keel. By nature, I need to shake things up, try new things, do different things. Oh, I'm going to fight this. It's going to be a huge battle against me. I wonder which one of us will win. :)

At TMC outside the IS building

This is a typical scene outside the IS building, in front.

They use “surreys” here to tote people and equipment around this large campus - 30 acres all on one level. So that all patients have views to the outdoor patios, it's constructed on a grid system. It was a former tuberculosis sanitorium when the "sunshine cure" was a popular idea. It’s a long walk from one end to the other.

This week I saw a volunteer driver tooling through the building on one of these with a patient passenger exclaiming, "This cracks me up! I can't stop giggling! You actually run these things through the hallways!"

Yep, they actually do.
















Beautiful tree

My Commute Home This Evening

This is even better than my commute to work. In the evening, the sunlight and shadows lie on the mountains in a most restful way.

In LA Again This Weekend

Near Rod's Place 2/22/2009
































Airport construction - doesn't it look neat with the scaffolding on? Seems like it should be part of the structure, but it's not.





























Santa Monica in the rain

Found a new massage therapist – a very good one!

2/20/2009 (Another old post - I've been writing offline when I have time at the airports and such - but then I get behind posting them - I'll get better, this is all new stuff for me)

Tamera Snelling posted her availability at our condo clubhouse. Turns out I had seen her walking with her husband the day before, on his arm with stick in hand - because she is blind. Such a sad story – she lost her sight in her early 20’s from a pregnancy complicated by diabetes. She lost her sight and her baby.

I don’t know how one would recover from something like that, but she has done it very well. She has a flourishing massage practice in Portland, Oregon where she lives most of the time. She and her husband bought the condo here initially as an investment, but liked it so much that they decided to keep it for themselves and family instead. So they live here part-time only, his career being in computers which he can do anywhere. Her massage style was excellent, with very good myofascial release, and some active stretching as she released the fascia in my neck and shoulders. Yeah! I’ll be making an appointment again when she is back in town, but will still keep looking for one here in town, as well.

Weekend Rod came to Tucson

(Sorry for the old post - I'm way behind with EVERYTHING! Luckily was able to get my taxes done...now for those pension rollovers.)

2/13/2009 - This weekend Rod came down from L.A. on Friday and had car troubles on the way down. A warning light had appeared on the dash. Before he even arrived, I made calls and found a place to take it to and, since he hoped to leave Monday morning, we decided to take it right away to the shop. On the way, the car broke down. Luckily I was following, and Rod has training in directing traffic. He was stopped dead, the first car at a red light, in the left-most of four lanes, in the left-most of two turn lanes.

Like the pro he actually is, he got out and started directing traffic behind us while I called the shop, their recommended tow service, then finally AAA who committed to come within the hour. Meanwhile, Rod with blue-tooth in ear, was directing all of the left-turn cars around us to the other left-turn lane. I updated him about the tow by cell phone as he did that – for about 50 minutes in quite busy traffic. With his insistent direction to all comers, the traffic flowed freely in spite of our block, and several people thanked him. Only two disobeyed his direction and my blinking hazard lights, and pulled up behind me before realizing what the trouble was.













Pics of my handsome, handsome, man.








Rod directing traffic, as seen from my rear-view mirror










Rod’s Disabled Car
















Rod directing traffic, as seen from my rear-view mirror






That was our big adventure. The rest of the weekend was spent quietly, running errands, checking on his car, which did not get finished until Monday afternoon, so his return was later than he liked.

My "Rod Shrine"

His recent cards to me. Rod has always dreamed of sailing around the world on a sailboat. Those plans may change a little now that he has found me - and the one time I was on a sailboat I turned green. And that was on the Chesapeake, not even on the ocean.



















Still, I love the image of us sailing off into the sunset together in our little dream boat.

My Commute Route

Today I took some shots for you to show you what it's like along my commute to work. It's all easy driving, 2-4 lanes, a few lights, light traffic, residential with many sprinklings of open desert between complexes. I set up a traffic alert weeks ago on my Blackberry GPS system, to have it instant message me about the traffic morning and evening on weekdays. It has not shown me a single incident along my route, so I'm just going to turn it off. The commute takes about 10 minutes.

Snow on Mt. Lemmons - and Cold is Cold

Snow on Mt. Lemmons today when I returned from Rod's. It has been chilly here, down to 45 at night, no more than 64 during the days. Those of us newly relocated from northern climes debate about whether this can really be considered cold, when we're used to such worse cold. But cold is cold. The body still knows it's cold at 45 degrees. I haven't been up in the mountains yet at all and am eager to go. Soon.

More pictures of what it looks like at my apartment complex

My mailbox area. If you get a package, the mail carrier puts a key in your box to one of the lockers you see at the right side. It has a number on it and you go to that locker, get your stuff, then the key stays stuck in it for the carrier to get the next day. Cool, eh?

The wreath Chris (sis) made for my door - looks good, huh.


My stairs.

Pity the men who carried my piano up those stairs, around the corner to the right, up a few stairs, around a tight turn to the left and in my front door. I couldn't watch. Good advice, Erica! They grunted almost as much bringing up the entertainment center because that thing is really heavy, too. They were great guys! And packers, dear packers, I had ZERO BREAKAGE! Must have been all that bubble wrapping you did, Jess!

Our "club house"

Our pool

More pool