I got up at 6:30 after sleeping reasonably well. I had a lot of REM sleep with weird dreams, not nightmares. I lived in a two-story house with walls decoratively painted with flowers. My mother was there. ( She died in 2001.) There were too many people in the house for her. She retired to one of the upstairs bedrooms. There were only two. It wasn't her bedroom. I was concerned she didn't have a comfortable place to be in this environment. I have no idea who the other people in the dream were. I had never met them before. It wasn't a bad dream, just the usual social discomfort that accompanies being with people you don't know very well.
When I put my pants on this morning, I got a great stretch in my left glutes. This is new. They are usually rock hard. I think they're releasing because I am using my right leg differently. I am pushing further over to the left with my right inner thigh. I couldn't walk for long, too much strain.
I called Dorothy while I walked. She said she was just walking up to a friend's house to swim in her private pool. She would call me back. She did later In the day. She also sent a video of this person's backyard—a little paradise.
I called Jean M., my friend in Arizona, who is almost finished with her chemotherapy for her breast cancer. She has been exhausted by the process, but nothing much worse. We haven't spoken in a dog's age because of her exhaustion. Today she was full of energy. What a delight! We had lots of ground to cover.
Jean had a bad experience with her GYN, who didn't follow procedure, referring Jean immediately to an oncologist. Instead, she did the surgery herself, subsequently ignoring Jean's complaints when she said her breasts hurt as she was healing. A severe breast infection took Jean to an emergency room, where she got the care she needed and put in a cancer doctor's hands. When the oncologist looked at her mammograms, it wound up that the GYN hadn't even read the images correctly. She was unqualified to do any of the work. Jean's oncologist has been trying to reach the GYN to discuss her work. The woman refuses to answer.
I told Jean to file a complaint with the AMA. This doctor was clearly at fault for gross negligence on any number of counts. Jean started with a personal injury lawyer. I knew they wouldn't take her case because there was no injury. There would have been if she hadn't made it to the emergency room and gotten proper care for her infected breasts. But due to her actions, she didn't lose a body part or her life. No personal injury lawyer will touch it. It's an unwinnable case. I told her she has to complain to the supervising board that oversees the profession. If the doctor accrues enough complaints, she can lose her license.
I meditated, sitting on the kneeling bench again today. I could only do that for ten minutes because it put so much strain on my thigh muscles. Again, I had to rock over to the side to get out of that position. Fortunately, it is a folding bench, and the legs collapse as I lean over to the side, making it easy for me to fall on the floor. I completed the meditation in my chair.
I am feeling sluggish, mentally slow again. This isn't like me. I have no idea what is causing it. I don't think it is the grief over Mike's loss that has finally caught up to me. Not that I don't have moments like that.
Our wedding vows hang framed in our hallway. We got married after living together for nine years. Mike wanted to get married right away. Today as I was doing my steps indoors, I read our wedding vows when I passed. "She reaffirmed the promise she made to him many years ago. And now stepping with him into the stream of tradition, she prayed with Divine Assistance their relationship would deepen and grow." I think we accomplished what we set out to do. We were in a committed relationship pretty much from the beginning. We didn't get married because I didn't want to ruin the relationship. My father told me that marriage is a good way to do that. I have heard that from other sources as well. A therapist once told me that women become their mothers as they walk down the aisle. Boy, did I not want to be anything like my mother.
I did figure out how to fix the PowerPoint I had created and sent it and the audio files to Elise. She could combine all the separate tracks of each audio file, so they played sequentially without interruption, but she couldn't combine it with the PowerPoint I had created. She said it was undoable. I have to choose between a continuous audio file with a single image or a multiple image PowerPoint where the listener has to manually start each track. Not ideal. That made me very sad. I have to figure out some way to get those audio files out there. Just listening to them will make a difference for so many people. It seems to impact changes in the brain; I have seen it improve speech and reading with several students.
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Musings:
I'm watching Silent Witness again. The show is in its twenty-third season, and there have been tons of episodes per season. I stopped watching it because it became too scary. The main characters were the victims. Jean had the same complaint about those later shows but told me they switched themes again. The main characters were no longer under attack. I watched a show on domestic abuse. The varieties of abuse were spectacular.
There were three cases of husbands who abused their wives, two physically and one mentally. There were three whites couples. Then there was a white biker type abusing his black girlfriend, and a black woman abusing her very white girlfriend, then a court judge trying to get out from under sexual abuse charges. They had every variety under the sun, making it clear that domestic abuse was not the sole domain of any particular class or race.
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