Elsa hasn't been joining me when I go to bed for the night. It used to be that she would be on the bed shortly after I got in, if not while I was brushing my teeth. Now, she may come to bed in the middle of the night. I have no idea what is going on. I do know I don't like it. She still follows me around during the day, sitting near me. However, after dinner, she is fixed to a spot in the kitchen near the dental chews container. She knows she will get two each night. She is holding her post.
I woke up in the middle of the night, realizing that the email I got from 'FedEx' telling me to sign in, giving my yahoo password, to get my package from the post office, was a phishing email. Duh! on my behalf, it was only my second one. The first one I caught. I got up at that time, emailed everyone I could that I had that happen, and changed the password for my email. A little like closing the barn door.
My pedometer read over 10,000 last night before I went to bed. This is more repetitions without more miles. Some people measure their walks by time, some by repetitions, and some distance covered. I ran into Ron, my neighbor down the block, who used to ride his bike around the neighborhood. Now he goes on long hikes with friends all around the world. Since he can't travel, he puts on his full gear, grabs his walking poles, and takes on the neighborhood. He told me that from his doorway to the top of Kukuna, a mere .8 of a mile is a 500-foot increase in elevation. He reminded me that hauling ourselves up a steep hill counts.
Yvette was set up in the driveway with her yoga class when I got up at 8. She was expecting four people, but there were only three students. The first thing I did was take pictures of the group as she had asked me to.
I wasn't in the best mood this morning. After I went back to bed after my 4:30 am emergency password change, I thought a lot of Mike. I had spent a lot of time with him in the hospital, reading, writing, occasionally talking to him, or rearranging his bedsheets. Did I do enough for him when he was in the hospital? Could I have done more? Could I have held his hand more? Could I have talked to him more? I painfully remember him complaining about how lonely he was.
At the time, I told him to start a conversation with Jesus. I never followed up to find out if he pursued this idea. I think that's one reason I'm thinking about this because I'm feeling lonely. Another human being hasn't touched me in weeks. People are looking out for me, and I talk to people on the phone regularly, but that's it. I turned to Mike and said, "You were lonely!? Look what you left me with," arguing he had no right to complain about how I failed him. Although, I doubt he would ever have complained or blamed me for anything. It just hurts more and more to know how he suffered. I believed he would recover for most of his time in the hospital, and this suffering was temporary. I thought he would come out a deeper, richer person for the experience. I didn't know how to help him get there, but I hoped he would do it on his own, forced to by his circumstances.
Mike suffered from anxiety that drove him nuts. There is a good chance that the medication he took to deal with it caused his pancreatitis. He was taking more than the recommended maximum. No, I do not blame the doctor who prescribed them. I am sure he was told what the consequences might be. First of all, Mike preferred a positive outlook. Like a teenager, he believed the adverse side effects would never hit him. Second, he hated his anxiety so much that he would do anything to control it. I know he didn't look as if he was tortured by anxiety. Truth be told, he rarely let me see how much it impacted him. I knew about it because Mike told me that a doctor he had worked with told him he was surprised how high functioning Mike was given his mental state.
He did try therapy years ago. He finally concluded that it wouldn't work for him and quit. Shortly before we left Ohio for Hawaii, he tried again. He worked with a therapist that used EMDR. It offered some hope. Then we moved here. Kaiser did not cover the people who did EMDR in Kona. I offered to pay for it myself. That didn't happen.
Then, I found out that Kaiser would cover it if his primary care physician prescribed it. My dental hygienist son had been in a car accident, and his doctor recommended EDMR for him. He asked his Kaiser primary care doctor to prescribe it, and he could see whoever provided that service. Mike started seeing such a therapist. He had only seen the woman a few times before the pancreatitis hit. I was hoping that he could reduce his medication with the success of EMDR. Oh, well.
Brooks's The Social Animal is still my dinner companion. He is as interested in neuroscience as I am and as McGilchrist is. I find Brooks's writing on the subject more compatible with my own thing. McGilchrist is an advocate for the revival of right-brain thinking; Brooks sees it as I do. The object is finding a way for the two sides of our brains to work together to promote the best outcome for the individual and society. If either the right or left-brain dominates without the council of the other, we're in trouble as individuals and as a society. It should be a partnership between the two halves of the brain, where both halves acknowledge their limitations and the strengths of the other half.
I continued watching the Australian court drama, Crownies. I wondered why they changed the show's name to Janet King, only to discover that the Crownies show was shot after Janet King was well established to provide a back story.
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Musings:
Human suffering is caused by our emotional response when we don't get something we want or get something we don't want. The theory is that animals don't suffer because they don't suffer from the same expectations. I would say that any animal that has demonstrated an ability to grieve about the loss of a person or an animal they were attached to is capable of suffering.
Animals don't manifest suffering the way we do. They certainly don't talk about it or write long blogs about it, but that doesn't mean they are not capable of suffering.
How it compares to ours is another question? Do they continue to suffer after they have gone on with their lives? Are they capable of not going on with their lives because of a loss they have suffered? We know that human babies denied physical contact die. We also know that baby chicks who don't have at least one more chick to hang with also die. Are those babies and those chicks suffering when they die because of not getting the social stimulation they need? I don't have the answers. But I do know that the answers are not clear-cut.
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