Happiness

Happiness is fleeting. Chasing after happiness usually means you land in a ditch. You run til you are out of breath and then you just fall into a ditch. Find happiness in the HERE and NOW.

Love & Messy Houses

Today I did my best in everything I attempted to do but finally it was late and I had to go home. Tomorrow is another day.

I got kind of freaked out because my son and I got our meningitis vaccines and THEN I learned that at one point there were concerns that it raised the risk for developing Guilláin Barré Syndrome, but apparently this was studied carefully by the CDC and it was determined that the number of reports of development of GBS within 4 or 5 weeks of getting the vaccine were not statistically insignificant. That does mean something to me, so it has basically set my mind at ease. I am a huge proponent of vaccines, but it made me angry to think that there is risk in something that is supposed to be benign and prevent life threatening disease. I mean, it made me angry that the doctor didn't really seem to want to discuss it with us. I even asked him why some people have bad reactions to vaccines and he said it was just from "a really aggressive immune response." Whatever that means. I did a little research and learned that there is something about certain viruses and bacteria that is thought to trigger an all-out assault by the immune system in a dysfunctional way that causes it to attack the body's own tissues. With GBS, the immune system attacks the myelin sheath of the peripheral nerves. It causes symmetrical paralysis starting in the legs and feet and moving up into the arms and sometimes affecting the muscles that allow us to breathe. Truth be told, GBS etiology is quite poorly understood and the answer is basically, "we don't know what causes it." Well, we can't know everything, now can we?

We don't know how a lot of things work.

What I do know is that body and mind are one and the same and that you are what you eat and that immunity is boosted with lots of laughter.

I have had all kinds of biology and physics and microbiology and organic chemistry, etc., and I'm pretty scientifically minded and I get irritated with vague responses to scientific questions and that has happened twice in the last two days. The second time was when I was asking questions of an infection control expert about plasmid exchange between specific types of organisms found in hospitals. I got the vague answer...I have decided that people give these vague answers because they do not know and they don't want to tell you they don't know.

I know, because I feel this way a lot in health care. We can't tell anyone we don't know. There are the egos of colleagues, the fears and projections of patients, and the soul-crushing competitiveness of certain caregivers. It would be nice if we could just be honest when we don't know something and just tell someone we'll get back to them on it...but then it would, I guess, call our credibility into question.

My sense of things is that it is very important to be compassionate and always be learning something and really, really try to help people and make the world a better place. And being funny makes the world a better place! Laughter heals and prevents disease. Laugh often, laugh loud, laugh at life, laugh at yourself, laugh with heart!

Today Is The Day!

Today I worked really hard to make things perfect with some issues at work. Perfect doesn't exist, but I tried to dot all of my i's and cross all of my t's and be at the right place at the right time, etc. I am still a little behind, but will catch up in the morning. I stayed late and got my desk organized. I can't really talk about anything I actually deal with, because it would be a violation of patient privacy laws, and I am glad those laws are in place to protect people.

So...I just want to say again that I feel so lucky and blessed and that I will move forward in my life to do as much good as I can in the world. My days of feeling sorry for myself are over. I know we all have stories and some people's stories are written on their bodies while others are written on the soul only (I assure you that if it is written on the body, it has been transcribed to the soul, as well).

My house is a MESS and I will clean it instead of being lazy this weekend. My desk, however, is not a mess anymore, and I can start with a clean slate tomorrow.

What was good about today? I shared some inspiring stories with some people who needed to hear them. They wanted more information, which I provided. I got paid to perform my job duties. I got home safely. My husband was here to greet me. My mother is doing better today. My son and I spent time together (going to the doctor, but still, had time together). My son and I got vaccines we needed. I ate french fries with gravy and it was pure decadent yumminess. I talked to my good friend on the phone. I learned new things. I found a source of inspiration: another person's blog. How someone can emit such bright light through a blog is a mystery to me, but I am benefitting from it!

Oh, and just a little icing on the cake, my vegetables are growing! They still don't look like vegetables, but they have emerged from the soil and are getting more fully plant-like on a daily basis! (The above picture is from another garden, not mine, but I will put up some pics of my "begetables" later.)

What a Week!

I'm so very grateful for this past week. My son is fine after a couple of scares. The first was an accident wherein the airbags deployed and he got neck strain and a wrist strain. The second was when he presented with weird symptoms that looked like meningitis (and if he had presented 2 days later they might have suspected swine flu). He is better & feeling good and that is just great. Regular old life with a couple of bumps along the road but nothing major or really exceptional, thank God.

I also gave a speech on Spinal Cord Injury & Rehab for my professional association. I enjoyed an excellent presentation by another speaker on spider & snake bites and jellyfish stings, etc. and took away some practical knowledge from that.

Now that swine flu is here, I'm a little nervous. I hope this thing can be contained, although clearly that is not easily done. Estimates are that between 1 and 4% of cases are fatal, which doesn't sound like a lot but it IS 1 out of every 100 persons or thereabouts. I think that is significant. The thing that is different is that it has killed otherwise vigorous young adults rather than old people and babies, as most flu does. Plus it is past peak flu season.

I am going to Houston tomorrow on business. Rehab related business, since that is my line of work. I will enjoy the change of scenery. I may have time to visit the art museum (MOFA, I think is is called). We shall see how the day plays out. I hope my plane ride is not too turbulent, etc. Just get me there and back intact, please.

I bought some flat shoes today, as I had been wearing heels to work for the past year, ever since I took a job that didn't involve direct patient care. I celebrate a bit of freedom for my feet, which have started to rebel with corns.

I also found a new sweater (for over-cooled indoor Texas buildings...must have a sweater all year-round for that) and got some new perfume, as my bottle of the precious stuff was near-empty. I feel naked without perfume!

The big thing I would like to state today is that there are people out there who have overcome unbelievable limitations and are more athletic, more positive, more connected, more amazing...than those of us who take our health for granted. I read a story on the internet about a middle aged math teacher who went into the hospital with an infection and woke up with no hands and no feet. He overcame this and continues to teach and has prosthetic limbs and is a very, very positive and active person. He says that life is 10% what happens to you and 90% how you react to it. I BELIEVE IT!

I spent years feeling sorry for myself because of a less than ideal childhood and I have been awakened to how extremely LUCKY I am and will not go down that road of self-pity again! There is nothing for me to complain about, as I have got it all and am so incredibly blessed with a wonderful husband and a great job & my health and the health of my family.

I have one lecture left to attend, then an exam, and then I get my BA in History! I'll be officially educated, for what that is worth. Of course, I've met some incredible people who were earth movers who never got a 4 year degree. It is about what you know, not what's on paper. It is a privilege to get a college education, though, and I'm glad I got mine.

Nurse Practitioner is my long term goal. It will take a few years. I won't stop short of it. Eventually, I'd like to be an educator. I really enjoy teaching when I get the opportunity (almost as much as I enjoy learning).

And, finally, here is the video in which Monkey Wit stars. We all get our 15 minutes (or was that 15 seconds) of fame! (I needed something demonstrating a polysynaptic reflex...I realized after the filming that Babinski's reflex is rather complex and that the medical community is in no way, shape or form in agreement as to its significance...but...here is a talented rendition of a positive Babinski).

Trans-Atlantic and Domestic Economies

I am reading for class a book called A Midwife's Tale about the life of Martha Ballard, a late 18th century midwife who did many things, including what was essentially empiric medicine as well as nursing. Her diary reveals the hidden work of women in the late 18th century, and shows how women took part in the economic life of the community in colonial New England. She was a seriously courageous woman, known to brave icy rivers to go deliver a baby.

A bit of bathroom humor

Took my mom for a walk today and encountered this sign.

Tree Time

Had a master arborist come out to the house today to discuss services. Here above you see a picture of our Live Oak in the back, which is old and beautiful and needs a bit of pruning and clean up. We have Hackberry trees sprouting up everywhere, which are just awful. Their structural integrity is not good and they start falling apart at a certain point and destroy a lot of property...these are prolific trees undesirable by homeowners. In the front, we have a crepe myrtle, which is small and produces pink-purply blossoms later in the spring. This will be pruned gently. The hackberries will be removed, other than a couple of big ones that we will deal with later on. I discovered I have a new pecan tree growing back there, a baby from the neighbor's stately pecan tree. It is going to be decades before our baby becomes such a being...but nice to have it. There is a dying mesquite that we'll deal with next year. Also, there are two mature pear trees in full blossom, which are a lovely first taste of spring. Now on the side of the house is a giant thirty year old Hackberry and it is already starting to fall apart. They will clean it up and reduce the canopy size to take some weight off and get the branches away from the roof. In the very back by the bedroom window is a large Gumbumilia, which has some ball moss in it and has some branches touching the roof. That will be cleaned up and branches removed from the roof. We also have a five year old Chinaberry tree growing between our fence and the neighbor's fence, which we'll deal with next year or so. It is already huge. First things first.

Yo Ho Ho (and...)

For the three plus decades that I have been on this planet I am still fairly ignorant of certain things that perhaps should not have escaped me for this long. Like Rum. Rum, it turns out, is made from molasses, which comes from sugar, and it was invented in the tropics in the 17th century on English sugar plantations in Barbados. I now understand the tropical association with rum. Like I said, I feel I should have been cognizant of this. Too busy trying to be a wine snob, I guess. Anyway, the molasses gets fermented to make rum. According to one scholarly source, plantation masters used to empty their chamber pots into the mix to keep the slaves from drinking it. I'm certain that it worked well if they did and the joke was on the folks back home in England who drank the stuff after it had been through the rest of the process that made it into the drink it was to become. (Source of my new knowledge: Sugar & Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624 - 1713, by Richard S. Dunn, which is one of the best written academic texts I've read-very literary in style-and a pioneering work of social history published in 1972, pointing out, among other things, yet another facet of Western society that depended utterly and completely upon the brutal and immoral practice of slavery.)

This also explains the pirates' association with rum, since pirates were well known in the Caribbean in the 16th and 17th centuries as the English and the French lusted after Spanish gold, Spain being there for a time the world's richest nation due to her infiltration of South and Central America and conquest of the great Mesoamerican empires. Pirates could easily get hold of rum, one assumes, both by nabbing rum cargo and simply by being in the right place for pirate living, such as the infamous hard-drinking town of wanton living, Port Royal of Jamaica, prior to the earthquake of 1692 followed a couple of years later by a fire that ultimately destroyed the town, which shifted things over to Kingston and pretty much ousted the pirates. (Same source as above.)

Rum drinks:

Bahama Mama-equal parts light, gold and dark rum and one part coconut liqueur plus orange juice, pineapple juice and a splash of grenadine garnished with cherry and pineapple wedge plus one of those cool little umbrellas (this sounds so very breakfasty to me...)

Cable Car-spiced rum, orange curacao, fresh lemon juice, stirred over ice (or maybe shaken?) and strained into a cinnamon/sugar rimmed cocktail glass (YES!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Blue Hawaiian-Light Rum, Blue Curacao, Pineapple Juice, Cream of Coconut, ice...mix in blender, strain into highball glass, garnish with cherry and/or pineapple (I do not drink blue anything...too much look like windex)

Hurricane-dark rum, light rum, OJ, passion fruit juice, lime juice, fine powdered sugar, grenadine, mixed and shaken with ice, strained into a glass, garnished with orange slice and/or cherries (would love to try a New Orleans original of this sometime)

Long Island Iced Tea-vodka, gin, triple sec, light rum, tequila, sour mix (many variations of this, served in a tall glass, geez, this would mess me up)

Mojito-spiced rum, mint leaves, sugar, lime juice, soda (good for summer)

Hot Buttered Rum Cocktail-this involves some chef work: cream butter, sugar, cinnamon, nutmeg, cloves, and salt. Keep refrigerated til nearly firm. Then spoon this mixture into serving mugs and pour rum over it to fill these about half full, after which you will cover this with boiling water to fill the mug. (sounds good for winter)

Zombie-Jamaican rum, light rum, orange juice, lime juice, and pineapple juice plus powdered sugar and Bacardi 151 rum; shake everything but the Bacardi and strain into glass, float Bacardi 151 onto it and garnish with cherry or other fruit wedge.

Naturally if you want proportions/ounces, etc, you can use the web to get those. My rum exploration is overdue...so...guess I'll be trying some rum drinks...one at a time, of course! The real test will be finding a bartender in Austin who knows what a Cable Car is (maybe they all do, who knows...). I went to Club DeVille and the bartender there did not know what a Vesper was (James Bond drink from Quantum of Solace). For such a supposedly hipster joint (and surely the stopping place of a few wanna-be pirates heading downstream to the heart of the Red River district), I was disappointed.

He's Just Not That Into SALSA

Ok...so everyone who knows me knows I married a man who could not possibly in any conceivable reality be into salsa dancing. I tried to change this. Change him. Change the laws of thermodynamics. And. We arrived at Copa at 9:00 p.m. sharp for the $5 salsa lesson. It is pretty informal, so they wait a bit for stragglers and random adventurers to be drawn in. I started out with a dry vodka martini, odd number of olives, Tito's. Sonic Stud started out with a dirty vodka martini. Dry & dirty, what a pair. So...we get started, doing the basic step (I've done this lesson at least three times in the last few years). I see that Sonic Stud (hereafter abreviated as S.S.) is having a bit of difficulty with the foot work. We get into turns: right turn then hook turn then right turn followed by a hook turn. S.S. is lost. I mean lost as in Land of the Lost lost. Just not in a salsa universe AT ALL. So we get started and he is bouncing up and down...and adding an extra step in the middle to increase the bounce. I tell him you can't just "add an extra step" and he says he will do it the way he wants to do it. I tell him that isn't salsa. He gets angry at me for criticizing him.

Fast forward thirty minutes. He is still not knowing the basics and I'm being spun around and around by some tiny nerdy latin lover type who has clearly done this before and is apparently there to introduce his date to the dance. I was like, wow...great things come in small nerdy packages. Well, who knows...anyway, I'm still invested in my marriage and wouldn't dream of dissing a great guy who has no soul (confer James Brown).

At the end of the lesson S.S. looked at me and simply said, "I'm done." I was like, "what?!" I had been looking forward to a fun evening of salsa and now S.S. is just as dour and uncooperative as he can be and emphasizes that he hates the music and he can't do it and he doesn't like it and that he doesn't mean to hurt me but that is just how it is and can we please leave now.

Hmph. Men take note: when a lady likes to salsa, you are a fool to hold back on her. Anyway, he agreed that it is fine for me to come out by myself and salsa and suggested I borrow Monkey Wit's husband for this purpose.

If I didn't have the most rock solid confidence in our marriage, I'd think this was a conspiracy to drive me away. But I know better. Next on the agenda: the Texas Two Step. S.S. says he'll try anything once.

Synthetic Chain of Being

I just finished Brave New World (Aldous Huxley, 1932). This is a must-read. I don't see it as prophetic in the literal sense but I do see it as a powerful and prescient metaphor for some aspects of the human experience in Western civilization, specifically the U.S. We do love our bread and circus, not to mention antidepressants. I find it amusing that there is actually a very commonly prescribed drug currently in use called Soma (generic name Carisoprodol), which is a sedative and skeletal muscle relaxant with anxiolytic properties as well. I am amused by the audacity of the drug developer...the joke is on everyone who hasn't read BNW, apparently.

Meanwhile I could use a Soma holiday (the fictional Soma) while this nasty cold (or allergy attack?) works its way out of my system. I've never had full blown allergies but apparently January is peak Cedar allergy time. I hear it is really bad. I feel it, too. I started taking Claritin-D, which caused me to have bizarre nightmares and to become extremely irritable. For example, see the following conversation I had with my husband about 45 minutes ago:

I am reading the encyclopedia while eating some microwaved spicy Thai soup and rice. My husband is in the kitchen making his own dinner.

"I would like to travel to Maine someday," I quipped after reading about Winslow Homer in the H encyclopedia (an American watercolorist and oil painter who spent a lot of his life in Maine where he painted seascapes and the like).

"Why?" My husband's question seemed to have a tone that implied that there couldn't possibly be a reason why I'd want to go to Maine.

"Because I've heard it's beautiful and I want to go there. To see the coast. The whole state. Why wouldn't I want to go?"

"Well, ok..." He was clearly bewildered by the hostility in my tone upon responding.

I then told him that it must be the Claritin-D. I had visited an online forum earlier in the day to see if other people had had bizarre nightmares while taking it, which, apparently, many had. I also read about everything from hallucinations to losing girlfriends to feeling like a zombie to hands itching and on and on and on.

Ok, so I got off topic. I read a lot of reviews people had written on BNW and I sense that people feel a bit obligated to say how it scared them and how we're headed in that direction. Crap, if we are then I hope to be an alpha who gets to go live in the tropics with other "individuals" as a "punishment" for being antisocial, aka willing to take my lumps in order to feel (and not at the "feelies"). Ah, well. I think we're pretty far off from such a utopia/dystopia scenario and are more likely to see such scary things as bioterrorist attacks on our soil than we are to start decanting our progeny. Not that there aren't lots of ethically murky scientific developments on the horizon, but BNW is not exactly the direction in which we are headed. Again, a great read, a must-read nonetheless.

Krav Maga

So I started Krav Maga on Saturday. I'm incredibly sore. I will take it easy Monday in class, to the extent that is possible. I primarily want to get in shape and learn self defense. I'm 115 pounds and consider myself to be a skinny person who is secretly fat (I'm pretty flabby). I hope to be toned and strong by the summer when we go to the beach house. My husband is doing it, too. We made a 12 month commitment and we're both pretty excited about it.

Reading Brave New World as an exercise to quaff my interest in utopian literature.