This my current favorite new holiday song. I didn’t get it until halfway through, because I wasn’t listening quite hard enough. And then! So, is this a carol? Hmmmm. Doesn’t quite meet the definition but it’s still a fabulous and creative song. I got to hear Vance Gilbert at the Nowhereelse Festival in Ohio two years ago. I did get this CD and really really like it.
I have not heard this one in the grocery stores yet. Maybe I should encourage them?
I am born today anew. Why does birth feel like a rejection, like a spitting out from the shelter of a womb, a body, a mother, a community, a job? I gasp in the new unfamiliar air, unsure how to use my lungs in this place. This labor was not terrible, not as hard as ones in the past. The air and light are shocking, I open my eyes, what is this place? Too bright, I close them. Hands have me and then I am back with my mother. Not inside but against her skin. The lights are down and I open my eyes. It was dark, dark, dark in that womb, so I open my eyes wide, to take in all the new information. I am shocked and afraid, but my mother’s heartbeat reassures me. I hope I won’t be eaten. What is this place? And now I am hungry and I start to search, not sure how to do it, search for food.
So is the tree vacuuming all of the nutrients and chlorophyll out of the leaves? Or do the leaves send the nutrients back themselves and glory in their colors before falling? Or both? Who is a tree expert out there?
The Great Port Townsend Bay Kinetic Sculpture Race has some serious designers. I don’t know if they use a forge, but the sculptures have to go in the 52 degree water and come out a few blocks away. They have to move in the water, not just float. They have to have functional brakes, since they go over a significant hill and they are human powered. They have to get through the mudbog somehow.
Some go for power and some try to go light. This one looked the lightest this year.
Many have been in more than one race and the racers and their support teams are happy to lift the hood and explain.
The two bundles under the hood are lifejackets and floats for the water course. They have to carry all the parts on the sculpture. Each team can have support personnel. Our local school kids’ STEM groups had a Maker’s Fair near the water course. We have a group that has made an underwater robot to fish out lost crab pots. If the pot’s line is lost, crabs and other creatures can be trapped inside to die. The robot helps to fish out the trash that traps creatures.
Wikipedia lists ten locations for Kinetic Sculpture Races. Ours has been going for 35 years. Will someone forge a new vehicle that we start using daily? I hope so.
In the Vatican Museum, I note that the paintings are attributed to men. I start really looking for a woman artist. Of course, some of the male artists may have stolen the work or be “passing”. I love this small sculpture, by a woman artist. I think I saw two works clearly by women. Dear Vatican: get a clue.
Around age 13, my son listened continuously to three bands or musicians. We had two years where I swear, he wouldn’t play anything else.
And this is where I feel proud as a mom.
Jimi Hendrix. Bob Marley and the Wailers.
And the third is Sweet Honey in the Rock. African American women a capella. And so he knows about Harry Moore and Joanne Little.
Prayers for all the people discriminated against, terrorized, or in the the path of disaster. And for all the motherless children, we who have had our mothers die. Dave Van Ronk: motherless child.
This is the Trevi Fountain. We can curate the photographs so that we can’t see the crowd. Here is the crowd.
There are lots of changes from 43 years ago, 1980, when I traveled there. More people. We were traveling in January and February 1980, so that’s not a fair comparison. But the crowd is more diverse. At that time we ran into Australian travelers, the same people in hostels as we traveled. We were mostly Caucasian. Now the crowd is much more diverse and I also do not know what language a person will speak. Race is a messy construct anyhow, very unscientific, but I really like the diversity and not knowing what language a person will be fluent in until I hear them speak.
Here is the Vatican Museum. Also crowded and diverse.
Here is a park near the train station in Rome with some “Olympics” for both kids and adults.
We were staying in hostels and only did one formal tour. I wonder if the expensive hotels have the same diversity.
The Ragtag Daily Prompt is change. Lots of that here, since I was gone for two weeks!
The evil squirrel has destroyed the third bird feeder. I was not home to chase it out of the yard yelling and it shredded the latest feeder. I am going to try one of those feeders that shuts when the squirrels weight lands on it. More expensive, but nearly equal to the three I’ve had chewed up!
I left in summer and return to fall. Leaves are down, colors are turning, it is cooler in the morning and evening. We had a high of 64 F yesterday. That feels cool after northern Italy.
I am stronger and slimmer. Carrying a loaded pack daily or every other day really made a difference! I was not sure my right shoulder would hold out, but it did, just. I went through PT earlier this year. I am doing my exercises again.
I had some wonderful time with my daughter. Not that that’s a change, but she is stronger too!
I traveled around Italy for two weeks with my daughter. We had backpacks and we planned it as we went. We usually had a place to stay two days ahead or a little more and both had return tickets. Hers is changable, mine was not unless I got sick. Then the insurance should kick in.
The last time I traveled in Italy was with two cousins in 1980. We traveled from January to March, with a Eurorail pass, and tried to do $20 per day. We did not like Italy very much because we felt terribly hassled by men. They yelled things at us, invited us into their cars, felt us up on buses and in general were awful. We were dressed in jeans, hiking boots, down jackets and frame packs. This made us obviously from the US or Canada, but we certainly were NOT dressed in a “suggestive” manner. We were very relieved when we got to Greece and there was less harassment.
I did not think I would be hassled since I am 43 years older. We were not hassled and I really did not see that behavior happening. I did see some outfits that I would consider rather sexy on young women in the hostels, but mostly people were in summer clothes. Narrow tank top straps, mini skirts and short shorts were frowned on in a number of the Catholic churches, and my daughter borrowed a large scarf from me as a skirt a couple of times. I liked Italy much much more this time. Thank you!
It was interesting to travel with a backpack in Europe again. There are other grey haired people in the hostels, though the closer to the tourist areas we were, the younger the clientele. I liked my pack better than a roller bag because honestly, there were stairs everywhere. At first both my feet and my quadriceps complained about the amount of walking and walking with a backback, but I got stronger. I woke up with terribly sore quads every day the first week.
My daughter wanted an open schedule. We had the first two night’s stay set up but no more than that. We took turns finding places to stay, getting tickets for big things like the Vatican Museum, and getting bus and train tickets. Google maps is quite amazing. We could put in our destination and it would tell us which bus and which stop and trains and metros. Back in 1980 we pored over maps, so that is a big change.
When I got off my last plane, I put the pack on and thought, either it is lighter or I am stronger. Both, I think, because I had eaten all the food while on the airplanes. Food is heavy!
I want to travel again next year, though I don’t know where. I have a long list of ideas.
It is hard to build a new life after pneumonia number four.
Running my own clinic and seeing patients and keeping track of a business for eleven years, along with two children, now adults done with college and masters and jobs, I did not have an enormous amount of time.
During covid, I started beach walking with a person. Two years into covid, they say, “I have to get back to my real life.” Oh. They say, “You need your own life.” Um, yes, and clearly they are not in it, by their choice. That was a year into pneumonia four and I was still on oxygen. The person bailed. I was a detour to get them through covid. Ugly, but I am trying to learn everything I can from them. About myself and who and what to avoid!
WordPress and the blogging community helps sustain me through this! I can write when I am ill (at least so far) and when the pandemic closed down. I am so encouraged that people contribute from all over the world. A small candle of hope.
I don’t know if I’ll be able to do a limited clinic or not. I am hoping so.
Meanwhile, I’ve been getting to know more people outside clinic and going to live music and dancing and doing open mikes. I am doing the poetry open mikes. A friend in a band says, “But you don’t come to mine!” “That’s a music open mike.” “We need poetry,” he says. So I’ve gone twice and it has been really fun and I am getting to know that community as well. Last Thursday someone said my poems are weird. “I don’t mean bad, just from a different angle.” Meaning unusual, I think. Perspective.
I have been here for 23 years. I know many people in the music community from singing in chorus all those years, I have a church community, I know many people in the dance community, my father and I were in the Wooden Boat community, I have both good and not so good connections in the medical community. The legal community knows both my children, through Mock Trial competitions. I was in the Rotary for ten years and that is another wonderful community. The exchange students going all over the world and people giving back also give me hope!
Suddenly I am busy. I will have to start choosing between things. I still have the aftereffects of Covid-19. I had mild chronic fatigue before it and still do. I think I am stuck with that, so I have to build in rest and quiet time. At least, physical quiet time. My brain doesn’t really do quiet, but that is ok.
Hooray for every day and for building the next stage.
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I took the photograph this week from Point Defiance, Mount Tahoma, aka Rainier.
I am attending multiple Zoom conferences on Long Covid and Chronic Fatigue and PANS/PANDAS and fibromyalgia. The speakers are talking hard science, digging in to the immune system to figure out what is wrong. Then they can find a drug to fix it.
Maybe it doesn’t need to be fixed. I think the immune system is smarter than we are and it knows that Covid-19 is a really really bad virus. What the immune system wants is to keep from getting any other infections so it shuts us down. It hits the chronic fatigue button, so we stay home or in bed. It hits the fibromyalgia button so that it hurts to move: we stay home or in bed. It hits the PANS button so that antibodies seriously change our behavior and we stay home or in bed. Anyone see a theme here? I think that the immune “over-response” is not an over-response. It’s not broken. It is trying to reduce exposure and just maybe we should pay attention. I thought that in residency, in the early 1990s, when chronic fatigue patients would interview me to see if I “believed” in chronic fatigue. Heck yeah, I said, but I don’t know what it is or how to fix it. My chronic fatigue patients had something in common: they were all either working 12-14 hour days continuously when they crashed, or they overworked and had insane stress, deaths of loved ones, car wrecks, accused of a crime, something horrible. The workers all wanted “to get back to where I was.” I would ask, “You want to work 12-14 hours a day again?” “Yes!” they’d say, “I want to be just like I was in the past!” “Um, but that’s what crashed you. Do you think maybe your body is not up to that?” “FIX ME.” I would try to improve things, but fix them back to what crashed them? No way and anyhow, that is not really sane.
There are some levels of illness where we have to intervene. In really bad PANDAS, antibodies to the brain are followed by macrophages that destroy brain cells. I was horrified and wanted to run around screaming “NOT MY BRAIN!” when I heard that. Then I thought, don’t be silly, I am in my 60s and if I had brain eating cells it would have happened by now. I consider myself really really lucky to have the mildest version. At least, that’s what it seems to be. (Officially we don’t believe in PANS or PANDAS in adults in the US but we do in Europe and Canada. Ironic.) With that version, especially in children, I am all for intervention, as soon as possible. And it’s not that I do not think we should intervene in these illnesses. I just think we need to step back and think a little and just maybe listen to our bodies and listen to the immune system. Slow down. Breathe. Watch some stupid cat videos. Whatever makes you relax and laugh. Reduce stress. Limit stupid hyper news to 15 minutes a day and not before bed, ok? Reduce the drama.
I am liking movies less and less. The drama bugs and bores me. I might last an hour. I have nearly quit going to our downtown movie house because it’s always “moving” and art films. Bleagh, drama. Also when it’s about illness or addiction, I want to argue with it. Easy lying endings which are nothing like reality. I like cartoons and sometimes superheroines, but it’s all drama too. I am tired of people behaving badly and don’t want to watch it on tv or a movie. There’s enough for me in the real world. I think it’s time to bring back musicals. I would watch them. Maybe. My father’s last movie was Blazing Saddles. He refused to ever go to another movie. I think I understand that now.
None of us are immune to stress or immune to infection. A person might be immune to Covid-19, or they might be immune until the tenth or hundredth strain shows up. I chose Family Practice for my specialty because I wanted to have children and be able to see them. I thought about Obstetrics-Gynecology or General Surgery, because I loved babies and loved surgery, but the Ob-Gyn residency was 4 years and General Surgery was 7 years and I was starting medical school five years out of college. Choose the more flexible and portable specialty and go rural.
Doctors and nurses are burning out because hospitals and administrators “maximize production”. Hospitals and administrators are stupid and destroying medicine. It’s not about money, it’s about helping people and science and healing. Having it be about money is soul-destroying and causes moral injury to any ethical provider. If we’d prefer unethical ones, keep on the present path. Otherwise we need single payer health care so that any physician or nurse can take care of whoever shows up. The system is breaking down more and more and it is hard to watch. Another nail of stress in the coffin of ethical medicine. I suppose when enough people die, change will come.
My working theory is that anyone can get one of these immune system illnesses: chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, PANS/PANDAS and so forth. Medicine says that Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis, antibodies to the thyroid is the most common autoimmune disorder, but that may change. The evidence is mounting that Long Covid and these other “vague” illnesses are immune system shifts. Immune systems in “Code Red”, let’s not catch anything else. Are they an illness or are they our immune system trying to keep us quiet to protect us? I think the latter. Time may tell. I am listening to the science and listening to my body, both.
The photographs are from 2016, when a flock appeared in my yard. They demanded money to be moved to the next house.
For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: fiddlesticks. Oh, fiddlesticks, we have to figure out the very very complicated immune system. Or listen to it.
Discover and re-discover Mexicoβs cuisine, culture and history through the recipes, backyard stories and other interesting findings of an expatriate in Canada
Engaging in some lyrical athletics whilst painting pictures with words and pounding the pavement. I run; blog; write poetry; chase after my kids & drink coffee.
Refugees welcome - FlΓΌchtlinge willkommen I am teaching German to refugees. Ich unterrichte geflΓΌchtete Menschen in der deutschen Sprache. I am writing this blog in English and German because my friends speak English and German. Ich schreibe auf Deutsch und Englisch, weil meine Freunde Deutsch und Englisch sprechen.
KO Rural Mad As Hell Blog 
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