You may have heard of trephination and trepanation from your history class. They're the ancient arts of removal of parts of the skull and piercing the skull, respectively. The practice dates back at last 7000 years, and it's a way to manage migraines. It actually works. There is even evidence on skulls where the surgery was repeated after the first surgery was healed over and the bone had grown back. It's an extreme surgery to do, to be sure, but that is testament to how awful migraines can be.
The reason trephination and trepanation work is because of what goes on in a migraine. The brain has found a spot on the membrane that encases the brain, and mistakenly decided that it's injured there, even though it isn't. The membrane, also known as the blood-brain barrier, becomes leaky at that spot as the brain sends all sorts of healing chemicals to that area. It's why many migraineurs (people who suffer from migraines) can point to a spot and say, "That's where it hurts the worst." And that's where the ancient surgeons would remove part of the skull or drill a hole. As a result, the brain actually would have a wound to heal, and those chemicals could be used up. That would relieve the pain.
(If you haven't guessed yet, this roller-coaster weather has got me a bit preoccupied with my migraines. You'll have to forgive my publication slow-down...)
This is a hilarious and informative piece I just had to share. "The worst thing you can do is to come into a doctor's appointment with a strong body of knowledge. Your doctor spent eight years in medical school. How dare you do your own research! This makes the doctor think you think you know more than he does. Harming his or her ego is an unforgivable error. Your best bet is to remain completely, totally ignorant and to rely on your distracted physician to take a complete health history, order tests based on their wisdom - never yours, and correctly diagnose you and write a prescription in under five minutes. They have practice quotas to fill, after all."
I believe in using denial as a tool, sure. But I also require that before that tool is used, I take responsibility. I never use that tool to deny my responsibility or my part in something. That's just being an adult. I will believe that people are basically good, but I'll also lock my car doors and the door to my house even if I'm home. It's one thing to be hopeful. It's quite another to be delusional.
I don't delude my self to the fact that kids like to create mischief and go through unlocked cars. They may also take high-priced items they think they can move on eBay. When I was a kid living in New York, every house on our street got robbed... twice. Except ours: we had a very noisy German Shepherd. Hope for the best---prepare for the worst.
Sometimes that means swallowing a bitter pill of "my part" in a situation. I don't always get things right. I may think I see reality, but I could be reading the signs all wrong. I may be missing some key piece of information that unlocks a mystery and changes my perception of the whole situation.
When I get that information, and I realize I was seeing everything wrong... oof!! That's a blow to the ego. "Aw, crap!! I hoodwinked myself! D@mnit... *sigh*" Then it's time to look at things under this new light and change my behavior to match reality.
I may have used this analogy for acceptance before, but here it is again. It's like when I'm driving in traffic. I may not like that the car in front of me has slammed on its brakes, but I'm going to hit my brakes in response. I accept reality, even though I may not approve. Otherwise, I may crash.
But then after that difficult work of the soul is done, then I can allow my spirit to soar. I can remind myself that each day is an opportunity to do another great thing, share another cool insight, discover some new wonderful media. Life is hard, sure. But it doesn't have to be a drudgery.
"I couldn't have wished for better!!" I told my roommate in shocked disbelief. "This kind of good luck just doesn't happen to me." I have an appointment on April 6th with my old endocrinologist in Seattle. She was just promoted to the head of neuroendocrinology at one of the hospitals where I used to be a patient. Talk about hitting the lottery! This is the woman who saw my disease go into remission. She was the one who worked for a year to get me to see an neuroendocrinologist in the first place. And now she's the head of the department?! Thank you for your prayers and well wishing, as they obviously have worked.
This blows my mind. When I say I couldn't have wished for this, I mean I really couldn't... not and still like myself in the morning. To make this happen, I would have had to find a way to make someone lose their job, just to put her in their place. I simply wouldn't do such a thing. I wouldn't even be able to pray for such a thing. But it's happened of its own accord anyway, and I am the lucky benefactor. Holy cow...
It's going to be seeing an old friend. I bet she's going to be so proud of all the weight I've lost. She never knew me skinny. She only had the pictures to go on. We even tried to get the weight off with phentermine, an ingredient in the now infamous phen-phen, but it stubbornly stayed. I bet it will be good for her to learn it was the prednisone dose I was on at the time. Oh, and I'll be able to got T3 replacement again because she's up-to-date on information like that. I'm absolutely giddy with excitement.
This is such a relief after dealing with that q**** at CU. This isn't a doctor who has to go on someone else's lab results. She was there. She ran the tests herself. She witnessed my transformation first-hand. I don't have to prove anything to her. I don't have to plead my case. She won't doubt me because she's the one who diagnosed me. I'm coming home, in a way.
There are many logistics to think about. I have to get from here to there. I have to stay there. I have to come back home. None of those are simple or easy decisions. My body has some very particular ideas on how it likes to be treated. Being thrust up to 30,000-ft in a pressurized cabin isn't generally on the list. Financial costs are another issue. The plane ticket alone will be at least $200, and that's a lot of money to me these days. I used to be able to spend that on dinner. Not often, but I could do it without it hurting. Nowadays, that's a month's supply of food if I'm careful.
Still... the work in front of me is an opportunity. Yeah, it's scary and looks overwhelming. Travel is a big deal for my body. I have a lot of careful planning to do. I can't just rely on Plan A. I need to set up safety measures in case life decides to do something else. After all, as John Lennon put it, "Life is what happens to you while you're making other plans." I have a lot to think (read: worry) about, but it's so much better than having no options left.
There's a great greeting card flowing around the internet. Here's a censored version of it. Most people would look at this and laugh for the obvious reason. Everyone understands that we hate waiting. Places to go! Things to do! People to meet! My time is important! Yes, yes. Ha, ha. But hold on a second. When we rush things, is it actually easier for us to be successful? Does going faster actually cause less accidents? Are we able to see things clearly when we only see the briefly? Do we type things out correctly the first time, every time?
You may know this joke: A man is drunk. He's heading towards his car and accidentally drops his keys. So he starts looking for them... a block away under the streetlamp. A stranger, seeing all this asks the man, "Why aren't you searching for your keys where you dropped them?" The drunk answered, "Because the light's better over here..."
It does us no good to always be right. It does no good to surround ourselves only with the safety and security of what is known. We want to repeat our successes and avoid our failures. That's primal too. And it's scary to go into the darkness. It's scary to be unsure. Our autonomic nervous system actually goes into fight or flee mode. We're primed for action, but unable to take any because we don't know what to do. That's a tough spot to be in.
We need patience because success is not a straight line. The path from a to b is unknown. We may have a direction, but we have no idea of what life is going to throw in our way. We may have a goal, but we may have no actual way of getting there. We may have a map, but that's no guarantee the landscape is going to match. And acknowledging those facts, embracing our insecurity, and giving ourselves the time to be cautious are all important.
And we're not training our kids to learn how to have a willingness to be wrong. We're teaching them that there's right and wrong and you always want to be on the side of right. We've associated being right with righteousness. The person who is right should be given the authority. They know what to do. They're right.
This time.
But, as I've mentioned before, success isn't a straight line, and success isn't a destination either. It's not like you become successful and stay successful, never making another mistake again for the rest of your life. We can't hold on to success any more than we can always be right. And yet, these are the expectations and heroes that we parade around. These are the stories of rags to riches that we eat up with a spoon. S/He made it to the top and lived happily ever after. On the flip side, we have the shaming "s/he never really amounted to anything..." and "s/he never really did much with their lives...." We put such enormous pressure on ourselves, and we can be so mean to ourselves when we fall short.
I say let's put away the abuse and self-abuse and let ourselves be okay with our not-knowings. It's okay to be unsure. It's okay to be cautious. It's okay to dip your foot in to see if the bath water is too hot. It's okay to have to take time to figure things out. It's okay to need time to figure things out. In that time, it is appropriate to feel insecure. That is a perfectly reasonable response to not knowing something. It's not bad to realize our own limitations. To be limited is to be human. We give a patience to ourselves and others as an act of acceptance and forgiveness of our limits.
We're trained very early on that to be wrong is to be bad, that we made a mistake, when we saw reality wrong, it's because there is something wrong with us. Getting the "right" answer and being able to show how you got the right answer is all important from the time we start school to well after we retire. But the truth is, no one knows what reality is. We're all observing this world with fallible human organs. We want to get things right so badly. We remember our mistakes so easily. This is a primal instinct. Figuring this stuff out is how we survive.
When a situation is new, we can feel overwhelmed. We can feel out of our depth. And we are so rushed in this culture that we never give ourselves time to acclimate. We want to jump into a situation and fix it now! But we're not giving ourselves time to learn what we're working with. We're so enthusiastic to show that we can do it, that we don't pay attention to what's going on around us. We're going so fast in our efforts to be wonderful, that we make simple, catastrophic mistakes. Our history is saturated with this behavior: Katrina, Afghanistan, Iraq (just to name a recent few).
I am insecure about my health problems. They're rare, they're difficult to manage, and they're interfering with my life in a major way. That's scary stuff. It's perfectly reasonable for my doctors to feel insecure too. But they have a culture wherein they always have to get the right answer or it's their @$$ on the line. The stakes are REALLY high for them. They have to have an answer, it has to be the correct one, and it has to make the patient better. When that doesn't happen, they freak out. They're out of their comfort zone of rightness. They "ran into the table" and the first person they're going to "scream" at is the patient. If the patient would just go away, the problem would go away. They never would have to face being wrong.
What a perfectly, self-sabotaging way to approach medicine. In this modern day of machine and perfectly pressed pills with the same microscopic amount... with all our amazing diagnostic technology that can see into the human body in ways we've never imagined... we've forgotten that medicine is an ART. With all these health programs and websites based on wellness, we've forgotten that people aren't one-size-fits-all. As a culture we've forgotten that what's good for your life may be bad for mine, and please mind your own business. We've place this expectation that because we have precision industry, because we have this diagnostic technology, because we've had all this very expensive education, that that somehow makes us immune to mistakes and immune to insecurity about the situation. Why?
Insecurity is okay. It doesn't mean there's anything wrong with us. It means we're in a place of learning. We need not view it as failure: to not know. We need not be afraid of this. That's where discovery lives. That's where wonder and surprise are. We need to not be so concerned with making reality match what's in our mind, and need to concentrate more on matching what's in our mind with reality. That takes humility. That takes vulnerability. That takes a willingness to be wrong. That take willingness to admit: there's no such thing as a human machine.
We don't like insecurity in this culture. It's a sign of not knowing. And if you don't know, well, how can you tell if you're wrong or right? How do you know what's correct and what's a mistake? How do you know what to think about yourself? Are your efforts good enough? Are you measuring up to the moment? What's the East German judge going to say?!?* Do I have any idea what's going on? Am I even seeing reality?
Have you ever seen a toddler run, without watching where they're going? Invariably they smack their head into some piece of furniture. Then they look at you as if to say, "If only you hadn't been there watching, I wouldn't have hit my head!!!" They are so angry in their pain, so angry that it hurts, so angry that it disrupted the fun they were having just instants ago...
We are all still that toddler inside. When we get sick, when our lives get disrupted by something we did not want, have no power over (besides mitigating the consequences, that is), when it hurts, we get angry. DO. NOT. WANT. It makes us mad that we have to deal with it. We want to escape it. We want a reason why. We can easily fall into blame-the-victim, both towards ourselves and towards each other.
But the truth is, just like that toddler, we can't see it coming. The future is something we anticipate, not something we know. Our incredible capacity to imagine is how we compensate for the fact that we're never really living in the moment. It's actually biologically impossible to live in the moment. It takes "it takes the brain at least a tenth of a second to model visual information." That is, it takes 1/10th of a second for the reality in front of us to reach the vision center of our brain and tell us what we're looking at. Think about this: you're driving in your car, the world is moving around you, things are happening, and you're watching the road. You look away. You look back. Suddenly you have to slam on your brakes. Did you miss seeing the car in front of you? Yes, quite possibly. That could be entirely true. If the movement happens in that 1/10th of a second window...
Let's think about that in terms of baseball. "At 85mph, it takes a ball approximately .425 seconds to go from the pitcher’s hand to the hitting zone." That's approximately 4/10th of a second.
More math, the average human reaction time is 3/4 of a second. That’s .750 seconds [7.5/10ths of a second]. What does that mean if a player simply reacts to the ball from the time it is released? That’s right, if you are good at math, you figured it out. Go have a seat on the bench, strike three went right on by you before you could even swing. Hitting is timing. A batter must begin his swing at the same time the pitcher begins his motion. There is an old saying, and I am not sure which hitting instructor first said it, "When the pitcher shows you his pocket, you show him yours." In other words, when the pitcher kicks his front leg up to begin his delivery to the plate, the hitter should begin his "cocking" or "pre-swing" motion, preparing the bat for a swing at the ball. If he does not, it is physically impossible to react in time. Be a Better Hitter
We anticipate the world. All the time. For survival. For sport. But sometimes, when our mind is calculating what that future is going to be, we get it wrong. We don't see the table. We strike out. Something happens that we had no intention of happening. We don't get that job. We don't get into our choice of school. We can't afford to live in that neighborhood anymore. We're sick with a disabling disease. Life happens and throws us off our game.
If we're aware we don't have enough information about how to calculate what the future is going to be, we become anxious, worried, and frantic. Where do I stand? What do I do now? What's going to happen to me? My family? My love... Those can be difficult pills to swallow. But it can also give us a sense of wonder, surprise and magic, like not knowing the end of the story or watching a Penn & Teller magic show:
Why do we run from our insecurity? Shouldn't we acknowledge it? Shouldn't we stop for a moment and go, "Hey, I'm feeling insecure. I wonder what's going on here?". Why do we try to insist, "I'm okay! I'm okay! Everything's alright!" even though we're scared? Why don't we stop and identify what's making us insecure? Insecurity lets us know that we don't have all the information we'd like. It identifies places that we should investigate, rather than avoid. It lets us know where the mystery lies.
*(Cold War Olympics humor) Edited by Brigg Baldwin
I hadn't heard the news until today. I have lost a hero. You'll have to excuse me, I'm at a loss for words. "All of us are irreplaceable to someone—but few are irreplaceable in the public sphere. Siobhan Reynolds, 50, founder of the Pain Relief Network, who died in a plane crash Christmas Eve, was the exception. She tirelessly, compassionately and at huge financial and emotional cost to herself, worked to debunk myths about opioid treatment of chronic pain that continue to emerge even now.
"The aspiring documentary filmmaker and mother of one was moved to activism by the overwhelming chronic pain suffered by her husband. Further spurred by learning that her son had inherited the same genetic disease, Reynolds was relentless.
"Why, she asked, when opioids can help treat chronic pain, are they frequently only available to the dying—but not if your agony will last years? Why, when addiction to opioids is actually rare, do we treat them as though everyone who takes these drugs is likely to get instantly hooked? And why do we seem to see addiction—even in the dying— as a worse side effect than agony or even death?
"To answer these questions, she educated herself in the intricacies of pharmacology, public policy, medicine and law. A master at simplifying complex stories for the media, Reynolds then used every means at her disposal to bring what she found to public attention."
I gave up the holidays with my marriage in 2005. It's just all too much. I can barely manage the small "workload" I've set to myself on any given week. Going above and beyond is just not physically possible. It's not that I don't like the holidays. I do. I'd love to be caroling and baking holiday cookies, decorating and planning family meals, and making personalized, holiday gifts. I just can't. I haven't been able to for a very long time. But I've come to a place of peace with it. I don't fight the holidays. I'm not all "Bah! Humbug!" But nor do I let myself get caught up in the moment of the season. The holidays far enough away, I've got plenty of time. Oh, look, aren't the lights nice. Hey it's New Year's already? Sweet! Another year done! And just like that, I'm through. It's still just winter and cold again, and nothing to worry about.
It's easy for me: it's just me and my cat. If I had kids, it would be an entirely different story and frankly, I don't know how some of y'all do it. But for me losing the holidays is not a big loss. The peace with not having the pressure of the holidays is certainly nice. It's just Wednesday. Or whatever day of the week it happens to be. I use the increased time inside to catch up on indoor activities like painting and reading. I let all the festivities and rituals be something that happens to somewhere else. It's not my concern. It's like music from another room. I can enjoy it if I want to listen, or I can ignore it all the same.
I've had to scale back so many of my activities, that I really need to pick and choose what is important and what isn't. If it isn't important, I don't worry about it. It's a celebration any day that I am well enough to be in the kitchen cooking from scratch, whether it be dinner or a batch of cookies. I do not need to exhaust myself trying to match my ability to bake and cook with the timing of a holiday, no matter how old. I rejoice every time that I'm able to take on an extra activity like visiting with friends or having the patience with my hands to make a gift. I don't try and force my hands to work overtime for gift giving. I am not one of Santa's elves. I do my gifting year-round, as my body allows. I take my joy as it comes, not from the calendar.
I could spend every day morning what is not perfect about my life. My I am amazingly blessed. My mind is, arguably, still with me. I am not a prisoner in my body. We're not on the best of terms, my body and I, but the relationship has gotten better in recent years. Life has taken me places I never expected, good and bad, and given me a sense of fulfillment I never thought I'd have so young. I never thought I'd find a reason to celebrate being poor, but some desperate measures have resulted in some surprisingly wonderful breakthroughs. I never though I'd celebrate being crippled, but the wisdom and strength I have had to forge as a result I wouldn't trade for anything.
My "Holy" days are spontaneous and without warning. They are without ritual. They are without tradition. But they are precious still, and I mark their passing. It was that Friday that I was able to stay out and keep pace with my friends in an evening of socializing. It was that Tuesday we were able to meet up for lunch and a quick peek around the local shops. It's any time I'm able to post a picture on Facebook about what I made in the kitchen. It was that day I felt brave enough to risk going to the movies, and didn't need to take any medicine as consequence. It's the couple of days of good planning that got me through a period of pain without it being a catastrophe. These moments, these times, are sacred to me. They are gifts. They are blessings. They are my holidays.
I make sure to breathe in these random moments as though is Christmas morning, as though it's New Year's Eve, as though it's the 4th of July. I drink up the joy in the moment that I am able to experience it in. I'm mindful of consequences, of course. It's difficult to be successful in my condition and not be mindful of consequences. But I will take my chances where I can get them, as they are so few and far between. And a very merry unbirthday to you too! So it's not so much that my holidays are somewhere else as they are somewhen else and someway else. My holidays don't come in familiar packages at predictable times of the year. They are moments that magically unfold in front of me, that I marvel at in hind-sight, and say, "Did you get a load of that? Wow... wasn't that somethin'! Man. Amazing. I am glad to be alive."
