Saturday, May 29, 2021

 Saturday, May 29, 2021

            On one of my walks, I started picking up garbage. I haven’t done this since Covid started. We were warned that we could pick up the virus from objects. Now, we have been told that is not the case; the virus can only be transmitted through the air.  There hasn’t been a lot of trash during the year. Everyone stayed home. There weren’t a lot of people driving around throwing trash out their car windows.  Slowly, as things came back to normal, I started seeing fast-food containers and bottles of water and beer and soda cans. 

            I continued focusing on walking heel to toe, landing lightly on each heel. It feels good. I have been using a walking stick as I walk for quite a while. It allows me to use my weak leg more than I would otherwise.  As I put weight on it, the muscles build up. 

            I had adolescent D at 10 am.  He was willing to work on the same material we had focused on in our last session. I feel I can push phonics patterns in a more concentrated way.  I thought, he knows he can learn now.  That creates more room for me to maneuver.  His work was so focused that I was beside myself with joy. I always share my excitement with students.  I like to overjoy students into doing things my way.   Positive feedback is very seductive.  I don’t fake it.  I really do get excited. I told him I was so happy with his work that I was starting to cry. 

            I wrote his mother an email detailing all the positive things his filling out that questionnaire represented.  When I started working with adolescent D, I told him that getting started took the greatest amount of time and energy.  I said it was like starting a stalled car.  It took more time and more energy to push it to gain enough speed, so the engine turned over. Once it turned over, the car might move slowly, but it is moving on its own. Following that analogy, his engine turned over, and he is running on his own power.  There is a possibility I will get him so he can read grade-level material – with extra effort on his part. I don’t know if I can ever get him reading like an average person of his age.

            I had A at 10:45. He has a terrible problem determining what comes first and what comes second. This applies to letters or parts of words.  He can’t consistently say if the curve in the letter d comes before or after the start line; we read from left to right in English.  I wrote the curved line, the c, far on the left side of the screen. Then I put the straight vertical line on the far right side. I had to call his mom to help him put his left hand on the c and his right hand on the straight line.  I continue with this work; he continues having problems with this exercise.  This applies to words as well; he reads am and ma. While A is doing better, this problem persists.  

            I have tried to use BrainManagementSkills with him, but he says he doesn’t experience disturbance to his visual field; the letters don’t move around either on the page or in his mind. Because A’s concern about “appearing normal” interferes with acknowledging his problems, I’m unsure what he is experiencing. He could easily be lying about it.      

    After I finished with A, I headed out immediately to Office Max to pick up the printout of the design for the plaque for Mike’s gravestone.  I wanted what Sandor designed for his cremation ashes box. “Deacon Michael David Ross, Ph.D2; (he had two Ph.Ds.) a Jewish star before his date of birth, and a Jerusalem cross in front of his death date. The engraver took a picture of the design.  I asked him for mockups of various sizes to lay them on gravestones to see which one I wanted.  It took some effort to get the printout in the correct dimensions; my printer printed them all the same size.  I had to send Office Max a copy of the email from the engraver. They couldn’t do it on Friday immediately. I had to come back on Saturday. And here I was to pick them up.  

       I had to wait quite a while before the Office Max clerk could serve me. When he showed me the printouts, I was overly anxious and declared they all look the same size. They were supposed to be three different sizes. I was wrong.  The difference between 6 x 12 versus 7 x 14 versus 8 x 16 is just not that great.  The clerk cut each one to size. The size difference between each one was obvious then. Then I was off to the cemetery to try these mockups out for size and meet with Judy, who was going to help me decide which was best.

        I got there before Judy. Judy and I had checked out the cemetery before.  I had already decided I wanted two small gravestones.  The stone will be something like 12” x 24” x 3”, resting on a wedge, angling face of the stone.  I like this for two reasons: you can see the inscription easily, and rainwater will drain off quickly. I lay the mockups on top of various gravestones. The two smaller sizes were inappropriate.   I pretty much decided to use the 8 x16  size. I’ll consider the larger a 10 x 20, too.  Since I’m going with brass, it will be expensive.

            I had an appointment with the stem cell guys at 1:30. I considered walking to the edge of the water to spend the half-hour before I had to head out.  Instead, Judy and I sat in the ‘shelter’ in the graveyard.  It contains two wooden folding chairs and a wonderful statue of Mary embracing the baby Jesus.  The shelter provides some cover, or at least it once did.  The thatched roof was disintegrating.  Judy told me that Fr. Lio is planning to replace it with artificial fronds inside of the natural ones that were on there now. Judy and I were treated to a lovely breeze. Peaceful.

    My appointment with the stem cell guys was a follow-up appointment.  On the first visit, I received the stem cell implant. It’s a brief event involving injecting the whateveritis into the hip joints. There was no anesthesia.  There is some discomfort when the needle, the long, long needle, went in and the whateveritis was pushed into the joint, but other than that, it was a nothing procedure.  After the first injection, I was in pain for the next two days. It was a little scary. I wasn’t expecting it. The follow-up treatment involved three ozone injections and three injections with blood platelets.  I had my first ozone treatment two months ago; today, I got a blood platelet injection.  I have two more rounds to go.

        The doctor, and he is a certified doctor of orthopedic surgery who hated his chosen field and moved into stem cells, drew some blood.  Then I had to wait while some machine processed them before whatever the final brew was injected into my hip. I just suffered the discomfort of the injection; other than that, it was just fine. 

         In the middle of injecting me, the doctor said something about my bone spur.  When I was initially diagnosed in 2009, I was told I had a bone spur and a large cartilage cyst. When I was done today, I had no trouble getting myself home alone. Judy was on standby should I need help.  I went home for a nap, but I wasn’t really tired. I just lay there and listened to my Saturday NPR shows. Love those shows.

       I was finally inspired to clean behind my refrigerator.  Scott had moved it away from the wall about two weeks ago so he could get back there to shut off the water supply.  The water dispenser leaked. If I just let it go, Yvette and Josh would have had damage because the water would have leaked through to their quarters.  I put it off cleaning because I had trouble figuring out how to do it in that small space.  I could slip into the space between the edge of the frig and the cabinet; the problem was getting cleaning equipment in there and bending down to scrub the floor.  It all worked out. I started vacuuming with my wet/dry Bissell. That got up a lot of the dirt, most of which was dead bugs. Then I added water and wiped the floor using my foot and a rag. I followed that with another vacuuming with the Bissell. Done. Ah! How much happier I would have been if I had taken care of it immediately.

      Before I went to bed, I got a call from Judy.  She was in grief about the loss of their dog, Beau. That grief triggered old griefs. She figured I’d be able to deal with her grief. She was right. If her grief did trigger mine, I would deal with it on my own or get help from another friend.  

         Ah, I wonder. Some people accuse me of having no boundaries. Is that because I share feelings with whomever because I think everyone should be able to cope? 

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Musings:

 

       What it means to “live in the present” when the past no longer exists, and the future isn’t here yet.

     I think I know where this ridiculous advice comes from.   When I went on a ten-day silent Vipassana retreat, that advice made sense. I didn’t have to think of the future. The only decisions I had to make for the future were when to shower and what I needed to take to the bathroom when I did. Everything else was taken care of.  I didn’t even make eye contact with another participant for ten days—no interaction with others, nothing to resolve-no drama.  I didn’t have to think about what we did yesterday. We meditated.  There really was no reason to think about the past or the future. The Buddhists created the extended meditation retreat to create a space and a time for precisely that purpose.

            The instructions are to focus only on the present and not to associate any feelings that come up with the past or the future.  That’s a challenge in that context. In daily life, as a “householder,” it’s a nonsense set of instructions. We need to figure out how to balance the present, the past, and the future. We need to be taught how to evaluate the value of our thoughts about the past and the future: when are they beneficial and when are they not.

            I had an interesting experience today affirming the great wisdom of the Buddha.  He said not to label our sensations- just to observe with equanimity.  Observing sensations with equanimity without labeling them is healing. For the past few days, I haven’t been feeling well. I tried to figure out why- label those feelings.  Is it grief? Is it malnutrition? Is it debilitating neuralgia? Is it self-hatred?   I landed on self-hatred at one point. I realized I was looking for an explanation. My explanation made me feel worse, not better.  I had a new appreciation of the principles of Vipassana.