Category Archives: healing

March 21, 2016 · 3:45 pm

Time Marches On

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The basketball weekend was wild and wicked and mostly unsatisfying.  ISU advanced to the Sweet Sixteen.  But Iowa was taken out easily by Villanova.  And the UNI Panthers fought the Texas A&M Aggies to a two-overtime loss.  It was a better showing than last year.  Better than Iowa has done in a long time.  Still, it would’ve been better if there had been even one more victory.  Sorry.  Success makes me greedy.  Maybe the Iowa State Cyclones can win again and make it better.

Over the weekend I discovered that giving up taking the blood pressure medicine I was on because of rising drug prices may have saved my life.  The drug they put me on reduces blood pressure by suppressing adrenaline.  It has side effects that robs the body of energy.  It has also been proven to elevate certain chemicals in the body that collect in the lungs and hamper lung functions.  This explains why I have COPD.  It also explains why I have been feeling better after I stopped taking the medication.  Maybe I have to start thanking my piratical health insurance company for refusing to pay for anything and forcing me to give up medication that may have been killing me.

I have been getting viewer traffic on this blog at higher rates than ever.  I just went through a period of ten straight days of 50-plus views per day.  I went as high as 150 on Sunday the 13th and hit over a hundred one other time as well.  I am looking at it as a good thing because I don’t actually believe the NSA takes my conspiracy theory posts seriously and isn’t closely monitoring me as a potential tinfoil-hat problem.  (You know the tinfoil hat is supposed to make it harder for the government to read your mind, right?)  So, there is some degree of confidence that I am getting away with stuff because I am hiding behind the mask of writing humor.

Anyway, today’s post is merely a time-waster meant to keep my string of every-day posting alive and keep me in practice writing down words and ideas.  There is never a guarantee that they will be funny ideas, or thoughtful ideas, or even coherent ideas.  That is the nature of writing.  You can’t always be Tolstoy.  Even Tolstoy wasn’t Tolstoy sometimes.  (Except that technically he was always Tolstoy.  You know what I mean.)  Now let’s see what the NSA makes of that.

 

 

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March 9, 2016 · 5:49 pm

The Survivor

Elf on Patrol

I am trying to bounce back.  Yesterday I survived the possible end of the world.  No heart attack.  No asteroid hitting the Earth.  But also no writing contest win.  A huge delay in the publication of my novel.  My writing world is in danger of expiring because my life is winding down to its finale, and I’m running out of time.  I can still do it, though.  I have come back from down and out before.

In 1983 I had a mole removed from my face.  It wasn’t a vanity-type thing.  Removing it wasn’t going to cure ugliness or anything.  But it had gotten larger and had a strange color change.  So, my ancient and doddering Czechoslovakian  doctor removed it just to be sure.  As with any such removal, the excised tissue was sent to the lab for analysis.  Malignant melanoma in the very first stages.  At the time, the survival rate for such a cancer in Texas was less than fifty per cent.  But most cases were not discovered so early in the crisis.  I went back in for more surgery.  They ended up cutting a hole through my right cheek and stitching it back together again.  The new tissue underwent very close scrutiny and it was determined that all the dangerous cells had been removed during the very first surgery.  No evidence anywhere of creeping metastasizing cancer death.  It was decided that chemo-therapy would only do harm and would not help anything.  So I got to keep my hair.  It did eventually mean the removal of two more moles and three lumps, but they were all benign.  Cancer was fought off and beaten 33 years ago this month.  I am a cancer survivor.

I often marvel at the fact that I am still alive and still able to write.  I have had innumerable near misses.  Car accidents that didn’t happen by a matter of inches.  The skidding truck on the icy street in Iowa City missed the front tire of my bicycle by about three inches.  Facing down irrationally angry youths with weapons intending to strike out in anger, and somehow having the right words to calm them and prevent the tragedy.  One of them told me it was because he looked me in the eye and saw no fear there that he couldn’t do it, couldn’t strike me down.  By rights, I should be dead.  It is a supreme irony of life that an almost-atheist like me believes in guardian angels.

I don’t know what the ultimate goal is.  I don’t expect to be a wealthy published novelist like Stephen King.  I don’t know if it is even important that I break through the bookstore barriers and get my work on the shelves for a few paltry dollars.  It is really only important that I write.  This blog has become important to me because I have developed a small readership that actually reads and provides feedback.  I do occasionally reach the heart of people I don’t actually even know.  And I have made friends and relatives a little bit misty.  I have written 849 posts, posting every single day of 2015, and every single day of fifteen months in a row.  I have written six complete novels and gotten two actually into print with an ISBN number and everything.  My writing, like me myself, exists, and it will survive.  I am a survivor.

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February 17, 2016 · 4:07 pm

A Simple Matter of Recovery

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Ah, my poor little Ford Fiesta has been declared dead by the insurance company.  Soon I will have to give up the chibi clown car I have been driving and buy something new.  Can I get a used car for the money they will give me for the accident?  I was counting on not having a car payment every month after June of this year.  Ah, but it means a new member of the family to replace the loved one I have lost.

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The ghost dog continues to haunt me in the night.  Last night, outside my bedroom door, I heard a whining and whimpering again.  I checked (had to make a nocturnal potty-stop anyway) and it was not our family dog.  The downstairs family room door was closed to her and she sleeps in the other end of the house in my son’s room.  So, either it was the ghost dog whom I totally don’t believe in, or I was dreaming that part (do I really have dreams as weird as that?), or maybe I am going insane… the most probable explanation.

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I am still working in dedicated fashion on my hometown novels.  I have added to the rewrite of When the Captain Came Calling and I have started a new novel project I am calling Recipes for Gingerbread Children.  It is a novel about the old German lady who inhabited our little town in the 1960’s and 70’s.  She was a Holocaust survivor with a tattoo on her forearm.  Mother still can’t talk about her without mentioning what a terrible life she must’ve had, yet she was one of the most sunshiny people I have ever known.  It is a new idea that excites me, like the one that became Magical Miss Morgan.

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I am also still desperately trying to overcome illness without doctor’s visits or medication.  A lot can be done with careful monitoring of diet and blood-sugar levels.  I owe my life to over-the-counter Mucinex and Vicks Vaporub.  My son is also suffering at present, and I have to talk to professionals about it today, because I will not risk his health to protect my empty pocketbook.

So challenges remain challenging and I keep moving forward and upward.  What more can be done?  I have in the past couple of months not only faced several different difficulties, but I have reached new levels of success with this blog, much of it by writing a lot in ways that are full of self-medicating thoughts with healing words and ideas.  People seem to like that.  My average daily views is up above thirty.  I am nearing 800 followers.  I may not have writing income, but I do seem to have a personal brand that others respond to.  So, if you have read all the way through this recycled oatmeal post with nothing but old pictures in it, please be reassured… oatmeal is good for you… and for me.

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February 15, 2016 · 5:36 pm

Down and Blue

Life for me has always been a struggle with poor health and depression, ill fortune and difficult circumstances.  I have always been a “make lemonade” sort of life-gives-you-lemons problem-solver, but the more I make lemonade, the more my sorry old puss gets puckered.  I am having chest pains and breathing problems again.  I don’t have money for doctor’s visit co-pays and medication.  My car is in the shop with more than $6,000 dollars worth of damages, hit by a passing motorist going too fast while it was parked outside my house.  Insurance is probably not going to pay that much to fix a five-year-old car.  My family in Iowa have recently been buried under huge snowdrifts.  And the grim reaper has been knocking on my bedroom door asking if I want to play a game of chess.

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But I will tag this post as humor.  Because, ironically, humor is not always funny.  Sometimes it has the sour puckering effect of lemonade with too little sugar in the mix.  When you have worked hard all your life for very little reward, it’s hard to appreciate the tiny amounts of sugar you have been allotted.  I see myself ending much the way Mother Mendocino ended, except the community will not even hear about my passing.

My Jester

The more I sing songs, and rattle the boards, and try to make my puppets dance, the more arthritis crabs up my fingers and makes me ache.  Sometimes happy simply comes hard.  But self-pity is easy.  And I am a pratfall clown most of the time.  I use my injuries to make others laugh.  And there is still magic to be found here and there in my art.  Today’s paffoonies were all culled from my Postable Paffooney file.  They are all old artworks of which I am pathetically proud.

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Pathos is a part of humor too, you know.  You tell a story about someone whose been on a lonely journey, and he finally gets to come home to the ones he loves, and you smile at the end of that.  If you laughed at the clown for falling down, you smiled too when he got up again.  After all, he wasn’t hurt.  In many ways we are all made of spoof and rubber, and while the bullets don’t bounce off, we are more like Superman than we think.  There is definitely wisdom buried somewhere in this pile of old quilts I am calling an essay today.  I just wish I had the words to make it clearer than I do in this poor excuse for a paragraph.

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My sister reads posts like this and tells me they are too depressing, that I need to write happier stuff.  But don’t worry the way she does.  I do spend a lot of time writing about the low spots.  But I would like to point out that most of the time I am climbing out of holes.  So I may start the essay in a very low place, but the direction I am going is always up.

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Now I have said my 500 words for today, and while I still need bed-rest… there is no doubt the sun will come up again.

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April 22, 2015 · 12:44 pm

A Year Full of Sick Days

Dr SeabreezA year ago, I had to make the tough decision to end my teaching career of thirty-one years.  I had a run of about three months where the sick days were costing me $330 apiece and my monthly paycheck kept sinking lower and lower.  It was a choice between continuing to work hard, catch every virus that germy school kids carried into my classroom every day, and end up owing the school money at the end of the month.  Teacher paychecks are earned during the nine months of teaching time, but spread over the twelve actual months  (actually we work for ten and a half months because holiday breaks are always filled with paperwork, homework, and preparation, but you don’t actually get paid for that… eleven and a half months if you teach summer school for $20 an hour), and retiring on a fixed income that would turn out to be more each month than I was taking home each month while working.

After a year of headaches and breathing trouble… visits to the heart doctor… dealing with family bouts of social anxiety disorder and bipolar disorder… along with the resulting depression and physical pain… I am beginning to believe I made a good decision.  I never could’ve weathered another year of teaching.  I would’ve physically given out.  But I have had ample time to write, to talk with and spend time with my children, and heal.  I am still not well enough to get a part time job to supplement my income… but the chance to achieve good health again is closer now than it would’ve been if I hadn’t retired.   Goofing off and playing with my toys has been good for me.

During the school day, with my kids in school, I can sit and write stark naked.  (I know that sounds kinda perverted, but with psoriasis chewing my skin up in all the covered parts, that is far more comfortable than wearing clothes.  Sitting in a hot bath is even better.)  I have taken up Facebooking and WordPressing and playing Facebook games like Magecraft (I am now level 35 and gaining).  I can’t keep playing and wasting time for too much longer, but I have never been more creative than I have in the last year.  I wrote and finished four novels.

So, why am I telling you this instead of creating some humorous post about city driving or why bankers are better pirates than Blackbeard ever was?  (Hmm… I think I better write those topics down).  Because I can.  I have recently undergone several setbacks with family and health, and that takes some meditation and healthy thinking to recover from (especially when you don’t have enough money to get help from the doctor).  And besides, you all read my posts and offer words of comfort and pity… and I have a perverse need to write things that elicit comment and other proof that readers are actually reading what I write.  Most of my fiction-writing life has been addressed to the unseen ghosts of future readers… and I’m always a little bit afraid of ghosts.

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