Tending The Body

   The amount time I spend taking care my body leaves me with very little time to do much else. If I am not tending the body, I am recovering from the exertion of having tended it. There are days were I wonder if this is to be, in the end, the total of my life. I know there are days where I am asked "What did you do today?" and my answer is "I took care of my body".

    "She spent the whole of her life tending to her body", a statement I imagine someone could say after I die. That doesn't appear to be a productive way to live. I have no choice in the matter. The loudest voice in my life is the cry of my body and its systemic complications.

    To find meaning in in this condition, I turned to spirituality. There arose yet another struggle: modern spirituality is NOT body based! You are supposed to be striving for heaven, or Nirvana, and you are NOT allowed to bring your body with you!  You end up, on this non-body-based journey, looking everywhere outside yourself to find the kingdom of heaven, or god, or enlightenment, or samadhi.  The "new age" philosophies often regard illness and death as a complete failure. "You don't really want to be well or you would be", says one well known "new age" healer. Or a well meaning "spiritual" friend who says "Why did you give yourself this illness?" Then there's the "spiritual counselor" who asks "What is the pay off for remaining sick?" The sad thing here is the "spiritual persons" just mentioned have completely immersed themselves in delusional thinking. True spirituality includes the very conditions you are in right now. You cannot escape your body, and achieve spiritual wholeness. Your body is your vehicle. That being the case , we need to work with spiritual principles that include our body, as it is. Each of us who bears an illness such as this has a right to demand a body-based philosophy from their spirituality. To believe any other way does not contribute to wholeness.
 To tend the body IS to tend the soul, the spirit, the mind-stream.

Beauty in Nature

I grew up in an isolated area along the Canadian Border, in Northern New York. It was time when a time the land still talked to the people. Nature was my mother in many ways, and interacting with nature taught me invaluable lessons. She is both fierce and beautiful, but always awesome.
On my other blog, mythicmusing, I have been writing about my experiences with a numinous image: reindeer goddess. Due to my interest in reindeer, I discovered the story of baby Blue: he his the first wild reindeer born in England since the Ice Age and he was born on May Day.

photo by Adam Gerrard/SWNS





In prior posts I have told stories of my adventures in hummingbird triage and rescue.
A colleague of mine at Pacific Paranormal Investigations recently pointed out a hummingbird web cam to me; meet mother Phoebe and her hatch-lings Hope and Hoku.

I hope these images are as inspiring to you as they are to me.

Me, ME, and Vitamin D

I have been incapacitated for weeks. A friend of mine, artist Teresa Mill, came to visit me. She brought freshly cut roses from the garden. They smell heavenly! Thank you, Teresa!

The past 2 weeks have been very painful for me. I have spent many hours at my doctors office, on 2 separate visits. The first visit was preceded by the worst body aches I have ever had. I was actually crying. I didn't have a fever, and there didn't seem to be one thing that was causing the all-over excruciating joint, muscle and bone aches. My kidneys hurt, too. I had to be seen by nurse practitioner. He was very thorough, but he did say one of those things that make ME/CFS patient's blood pressure go sky high: "Sometimes we give pain patients anti-depressants and the pain just goes away." I said, "Look at my chart. I have been on nortryptaline (20 mgs a day) for 16 years! And I have tried them all!"
"True", he said, after reading the chart.
So he ordered many tests for things I've never heard of, and other things I've been tested for numerous times.
Three days after the Dr. visit, I discovered the culprit for the horrible body pains: vitamin D supplements. I stopped taking them because I felt so terribly sick. Three days later, most of the pain was gone. (Last month I was found to have a severe vitamin D deficiency with a level of 16. This is in spite of my diet containing foods with a daily intake of 100% of vitamin D. )
I had to go back to my Dr.'s. It turns out that because my body can't absorb the D, taking the supplements makes me very sick. It's part of a mal-absorption syndrome. My Dr. explained that my bones are at risk, and need D asap. Normally, your body absorbs D through sunlight. Due to having zero thyroid function, going out in direct sunlight causes me to have abscesses on the skin. (Did I mention I have very pale skin with no chance of tanning?)
The other tests showed that my pernicious anemia is alive and well. No wonder I feel sad and blue. I've also got a virus that attacks the vocal chords. I can't talk. I was told this will take 6-8 weeks to run it's course. Chances are, I was exposed to it at the clinic. Oh Joy!!
Now comes the task of experimenting with different supplements and food combinations. Fortunately, my husband works for a health food store. Oh- and he is a musician who plays the Blues... and plays it like he means it.

Quakes and Naps

This is Lilah. She is one of my daily companions, along with Thomas (a large Maine Coon).
I haven't been able to write much these days. I am feeling too achy-all-over. I feel downright poisoned. There's a few things going on with my blood results, but nothing that can be solved. I can't even sleep for any length of time, but that's just part of the ME/CFS experience. That's were Lilah comes in.... She's the Master Napcatcher. She naps all those naps I miss. Lucky Lilah!
Meanwhile, we are still having quakes every day, every hour since the 7.2 Easter quake. It still feels like I'm standing on a dock at the edge of the ocean. Maybe I'm just sea-sick?

Some moments I feel pretty sad. Other moments I count my blessings. Moment by moment...

Happy Orchid, Moving Earth & NOW

It's been 10 days since the Pacific Coast Quake. Since the 7.2 rocked the ground here, there has only been 5 hours of quake free activity. By Sunday 4/11, there had been over 3000 logged quakes. It's very edgy living with ground moving so much. For me, it feels like I am standing on a dock moving with the waves. My two furry buddies, Thomas & Lilah, have been very nervous cats. My hummingbirds and other bird friends have been very lethargic and quiet. Only the ravens are chattering, with the occasional hawk "scree" chiming in.

My orchid is very happy and just opened it's 6th bloom today. I know next to nothing about orchids, so I thought I'd check out the symbolism. It turns out that they are very temperamental to grow. They represent fertility, but also can symbolize the death of a child when the blooms are cut. They also symbolize abundance and luxury. On a deeper level, they symbolize purity and spiritual perfection (Chevalier & Gheerbrant/1994). It has cheered me up a bit to see the happy orchid in the morning.

At this time, my body is very achy and tired, day after day. The word for how I am getting through life is this: I feel like I am slogging through. Though I wake up in the morning with the idea I'd like to read something, or write something, or maybe DO something... the reality is that I am too tired after breakfast to keep moving. The next challenge is to shower. So, you see that I don't get very far.

The advantage to moving so very slow in life is that I get to see the process of the orchid blooming. I get hear the ravens talk, and what their different tones might mean. I get to watch the hummingbird babies grow up. And I get feel the earth move during quake clusters. I get to be here when my husband comes home from a long day at work. I answer the phone when my daughter calls.

I am here.
NOW.

Earthquake Experience

This is a re-post of my blog entry on mythic musing. I didn't start having physical symptoms BEFORE quakes, tsunamis & and volcanic eruptions until 2004.


Sunday, April 4, 2010
7.2 and a Cluster of Quakes
Last night I started having dizziness, headaches and a feeling of malaise. My ears felt plugged. I had a disturbing night, and felt terrible when I woke up. I told my husband that something was very wrong with me, but I didn't know what it was. I even felt disconnected from my body. We agreed that if it got any worse we would go to urgent care. Then I did something I rarely do: I went back to bed. I couldn't function! I dozed in and out all afternoon. I had earplugs in so I didn't have hear the neighborhood noises. Late in the afternoon I was alerted by a sound that was similar to wind chimes. I knew there are none nearby, so I ignored the sound. Then the bed started to shake. I realized we were having a quake, but this one wouldn't stop. I got out of bed and opened the bedroom door. My husband wasn't home... he had gone to the store. I heard the whole building CRACK. I ran outside to find all my neighbors outside as well. The shaking kept going on. When the ground stopped moving we all went back inside.
This quake was 130 miles away and it was a 7.2. We're still having aftershocks with different epicenters up and down the fault line that the original quake was on. This is the worst quake I've experienced and the first major quake in my local area since I became sensitive to quakes. To read more about these experiences click here and here. Trish & Rob MacGregor have written about others who are sensitive to earthquakes on their SYNCHRONICITY blog: click here and here.
Damage assessment is still in progress, and reports from the epicenter in Mexicali are just starting to come in.
I didn't see Reindeer Woman (which may signify an axis shift)-- unless you count the book Creations Heartbeat: Following the Reindeer Spirit, by Linda Schierse Leonard. It was in may mailbox late yesterday afternoon...

Orchid Thriving, Debra NOT

This orchid has been in my kitchen for 1 & 1/2 years. It started blooming recently.

Another visit to my doctor.... Nothing has improved since the last visit. In fact, things are worse in several ways:

1) Some of my muscles in my digestive tract are completely, permanently paralyzed, and there is no treatment. Combine the digestive problems with chronic functional hypoglycemia (low blood sugar) , and I am in a constant struggle to keep the body fueled. I am losing the battle with this.

2)I have also had more frequent, longer lasting, migraines than ever before. Bad enough to wear sunglasses at night, if house lights are on. Certain smells are intolerable.If anyone comes near me with perfume, I am immediately overwhelmed with dizziness and weakness. My eyesight is also effected my the migraines. Forget about cognition! Probably, my I.Q. has dropped by about 40 points!

3) My upper body muscles (head, neck, shoulder, arms, chest and upper back) are all in a Charley-horse type freeze. I can barely hold my own head up. My DR said,"Usually when the muscles get this bad we use steroids. But with your condition they may be too harsh."

4) I am in a prolonged cycle of insomnia, waking up *suddenly* every 20-160 minutes. Exhaustion has set in.

All the above amounts to this: for the first time since acquiring this illness in 1979, I've had to submit to a program of pain management. I have avoided pain meds all this time. But I can no longer function. This makes me feel like I've lost some kind of fight.

My Dr, her intern, my husband, and I spent our time together trying to work out a treatment plan. We even discussed medical marijuana

I am feeling very heavy-hearted at this point.

Thanks to the recent health care reform passed by Congress, the Senate and signed into law by President Obama, I will be able to go deeper into testing my body without fear of losing my health insurance coverage. This fear had limited how my Dr and I approached diagnostics and testing for my illness. My health care facility still isn't set up to test for XMRV, and I cannot afford to pay for the test out of pocket.($600- $800) The lab took 7 vials of blood for all the tests my doctor ordered. Now we wait.