Tag Archives: heart

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below the surface

I swim frantic
I am trying to escape
your beak piercing
my tender flesh
my heart pulsing
blood and death

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: pierce.

Taken yesterday morning at sunrise. The sunrise is affected by the fires, so a beautiful but ominous fire sky.

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Agatize

A long time ago, at least by a child’s time, he starts turning. He blocks things out. He locks his heart. He decides to be happy and do what he wants. His heart slowly turns to stone.

The blood roars through, pushed by each beat, how can a stone heart beat? Not normally, that is for sure. His brain controls it, cold, logical, no emotion, except happiness, that is what he says. He says it over and over, I am happy all the time, until he thinks he believes it. And then he believes it and his heart is stone.

But the blood flows and the body feels and emotions come anyhow. He refuse them, all but happiness, and blood lays down a wall of emotion inside his heart. Chalcedony, lining the chambers, coating the valves, coating the arteries that feed the heart. The heart doesn’t need the arteries open because it is not beating. It is stone. His brain is beating. Beating the emotions away, away, away, refusing the body and the heart.

The heart is hollow. Slowly it is lined with clear agate. At last his heart is full: no more chamber. Agatized, all the way through. When he is cracked open, far in the future, a chalcedony nodule will show the perfect interior of a stone heart.

And where does the blood go now? we wonder. Laying down the lining of agate, clear, colored lines of emotions rejected, all the colors of the rainbow, what he thinks of as impurities. That is how he thinks of his emotions: impurities, to be rejected.

What will be agatized next? His liver? His lungs? He says strokes are the end for his family. He calls it then, his brain is agatized. The part that controls the pumping, overriding his heart over and over, when that part turns to agate, he will be correct. A stroke. How long will it take, we wonder? One year, five years, ten? He says he won’t go past 80. That will be 13 years. How apropos.

Can nothing stop this? Chalcedony is hard, not hard as diamonds, but very very hard. Agates are common and we search for the clear ones, the lit ones on the beach. Almost nothing can wear them down: high pressure would kill him, high heat would kill him, what is left? Water. Water wears down rock.

Enter the sea. The sea of love, the sea of dreams, the sea of the unconscious. Seek help, before you turn yourself to full stone. Agatized and dead.

Maybe there are other treatments, I don’t know.

A stone shaped heart is rare, I hope. See how it catches the light. Beautiful and sad.

August 30, 2022

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sorrow

Most of the time I am fine (I miss you I miss you I miss you).
I am busy during the day (You said I needed my own life).
What shut you down, I wonder (the family event).
You said I always try to learn daily (you say you refuse to change).
I have friends that love me and my kids (you say you do not love me).
I don’t think I know what love is (your actions felt like love sometimes).
Mostly I don’t think about you (sometimes it is very dark).
I hope that you are well (I wish I wanted you to be happy without me).
I am patching my heart again (for you I use elk sinew).
The deer remind me (life goes on, even when one doesn’t want it to).

A previous poem, when my sister died: The deer remind me.

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Friends and illness

The good thing about getting deathly ill is that you find out who your friends are. They stay by you. Even if you are misdiagnosed, labelled, ignored.

It is harder to ignore me now that I am on oxygen. It is difficult to chalk oxygen up to a rumored behavioral health diagnosis. When you have pneumonia and are confused, that is called delirium, not mania.

The bad thing about being deathly ill is that you find out who is NOT a friend. They disappear like rats leaving a sinking ship. Actually I like rats better.

I have one person who says, “I like you well, not sick.” Um, I would rather stay well too. But having seen fully 20 specialists, including four pulmonologists since 2012, a cure seems unlikely, doesn’t it? Meanwhile I seem to be getting stronger in pulmonary rehabilitation. Treadmill, classes about the lungs, stretching and weights.

Another person states, “if you get sick again, I am gone for four months.” Not a friend, right? Not a true friend and never ever will be. They do not understand friendship.

A true friend shows up at my house in 2012. I am lying on my bed using my father’s oxygen. She glares at me. “YOU are coming to MY house.” My reply: “OK.” I survive, even when the hospital sends me home with strep A pneumonia and delirium. Helps to be a physician, though I had to just trust myself, even delirious. The true friends help save me. I can’t even say how grateful I am.

I have a new friend. She is ill. It is progressive. Her husband seems so surprised that I come to see her. But I know how terribly lonely it is to be abandoned when you are ill. I have been there four times.

Blessings on the true friends.

Here is my sister’s blog. I remembered this post as “caged”, but her word is “trapped”.

https://e2grundoon.blogspot.com/2010/12/

My sister died of breast cancer in 2012.

Over The Rhine – The Laugh of Recognition

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beach finds

On my journey in March, I bought a small light box. I thought it would be wonderful for lighting up the clear chalcedony that we search for on the beaches here, and it is! I found nearly all of these, except for the very round very large one on the left. A friend gave me that one. It reminds me of the “Venus figurines”, carved between 25,000 and 15,000 BC.

Here is one of beaches where we search:

Just a few rocks on the beach.

Here is a find (taken by my friend):

Chalcedony pebble lit among other pebbles.

They light up when the sun is out!

Venus figurines: https://www.dkfindout.com/us/history/stone-age/stone-age-carvings/ and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_figurine

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: chalcedony.

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half light

We had sun yesterday! But mostly, we have had rain rain rain and clouds on the Olympic Peninsula this spring.

With record breaking temperatures across the US, I can’t complain much about rain. I took today’s photograph a few days ago, in the early morning. We walk hoping the sun will peek through. It is peeking through but not on us. It is peeking far over the water in the distance.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: half light.

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Robust healthful manhood

The photograph of “a healthy man” to go with my Ragtag Daily Prompt conflate post.

I LOVE the caption. “Robust healthful manhood is the source of mental and physical power.” How differently the author portrays health womanhood, as shown in the conflate post. The book is Macfadden’s Encyclopedia of Physical Culture, in three volumes, 1911. Volume I is 500 pages. It is easy to read but it’s a different style from now. Here:

As a rule, if you will simply retain the idea that food should be swallowed at all times without effort, that is, that never, by any means, wash it down with water, milk, tea or any other liquid, that you should masticate it until it seems to disappear without swallowing, you can rest assured that you are masticating sufficiently. p. 97, volume I.

I plan to read the entire set. I think I will find lots of wonderful words for the Ragtag Daily Prompt (hey, I don’t think we’ve used masticate yet!) and material to write about.

Are there still interesting medical ideas out there? Oh, yes. LOTS. Only now they use the internet. I have subscribed to some of the series of videos, telling people how bad and wrong minded allopathic doctors are. Sigh. We do our best. The scam is that they let folks watch one a day for a week, or let them watch one, and then want you to buy the series. “Only $349.99!” Nice scam that is proliferating rapidly. I have now gotten emails saying “Health coaches should make as much or more than physicians and we can teach you how to market and target people and make that money.” Ugh and ick. Really?

I have patients in clinic who present by saying, “I don’t usually go to MD doctors, I go to a naturopath, but I am here because I need an antibiotic.”

I learn to respond gently. “Oh. If you need an antibiotic, maybe you have signs of infection? What are your symptoms?” I have to get past their dislike of allopathic medicine and find out what the symptoms are. Usually if I can diffuse them by getting the story, we can work together. Once in a while it doesn’t work: I have people come in and give me orders. “Do these labs.”

“Uh. Where did this list come from?”

The answer could be a video (by a naturopath, a biochemist, a biologist, whatever. I have watched some of these series. They start by saying that doctors are wrong/stupid/stubborn/misguided/etc.) or a “cash only” doctor or a magazine.

“Why are you coming to me?”

“I want medicare/my insurance to pay for it. I have done my research.”

“Well, medicare does not work that way. I have to list a symptom or diagnosis code for every lab ordered.”

“WHAT?”

I try to be patient. “Every lab has to have an attached appropriate diagnosis code or medicare will not cover it. There is a place in town where you can order your own, but it does not take medicare. You pay for it.”

“Just order it!”

“No. I am a medicare/insurance provider, which means I have a contract with them. It would be fraud and illegal to make up codes. Does your cash only provider use diagnosis codes? Can your bring their clinic note to me?”

One person replies, “My provider doesn’t take notes.” Oh, how nice. That provider does a very expensive panel of labs three times a year that the person is paying for out of pocket. “My provider checks EVERYTHING.” Um, and makes a boatload of money off you too, I think. That patient is very angry that I won’t take her orders and switches clinics. Oddly enough, this does not break my heart.

Some days I hate Dr. Google. There are lots of websites and people on line swearing that they can improve your health. There are scientific looking papers that swear something has been tested, but read the fine print: if the sample is 8 people, how does that stack up against the Women’s Health Initiative, where one arm of the study had 27,000 people? The evidence is weighted. We get multiple articles in medical school and subsequently about how to read a paper, how to weigh the evidence, how to recognize fraud or a poorly designed study.

I do not object to people looking on the internet and I have had people who came in and said, “Is it possible that I have THIS?” and who are correct. However, I see more fraud, always.


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Covid-19: Hope for Long Haul

I want to offer hope to the people with Long Covid-19. Having been through four bad pneumonias, with increasingly long recovery times, and now disabled for doing Family Medicine, I have experience to share. First I want to talk about chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia.

I am a piler, not a filer. Including in my brain. I have been adding to the chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia pile since I was in medical school.

In residency a new patient questions me. “Do you believe in chronic fatigue?” he says, nearly hostile.

“Yes,” I reply, “but I don’t know what it is or what causes it or how to fix it.”

For years different causes were suggested. Often infections: EBV, mononucleosis, lyme disease. Some people didn’t have any infection. I did note even in residency that my chronic fatigue patients all had one thing in common: they were exhausting.

Does that sound terrible? They were all type A, high achievers, often super high energy. Often they got sick or crashed when they were working three jobs, or working 20 hours a day on their own business, or doing something that sounded insanely exhausting and unsustainable. And most of them wanted that back. “Ok, wait. You were working 20 hours a day, seven days a week, got sick and THAT is what you want to get back to?”

None of the chronic fatigue people seemed to be type B.

Eventually I read that one in ten people with ANY severe infection can get chronic fatigue.

Then I work with the U of Washington Telepain Clinic, on zoom. They start studying functional MRIs of the brains of people with fibromyalgia.

They use a thumbscrew. They put a measurable amount of pressure on a person with no fibromyalgia. The person reports 3-4 out of 10 pain. The brain lights up a certain amount in the pain centers on the MRI. The doctors can SEE it. Then they test the fibromyalgia people with the same amount of thumbscrew pressure. The fibromyalgia people report 8-9/10 pressure and they are not lying. The pain centers in the brain light up correspondingly more. So they ARE feeling 8-9/10 pain.

Is this a muscle problem? A brain problem? Or both?

It appears to be both. Chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia and other disorders with pain out of proportion to the physical findings were being called “central pain processing disorders”.

I thought of chronic fatigue as a sort of switch. As if at a certain level of stress or exhaustion or infection the body would throw a switch. And force the person to rest.

I wondered if the type B people just rested and got over it, while the type A people fought it like tigers. Which seemed to make it worse.

And now we have Covid-19. The study getting my attention is saying that 20%, or 1 in five people age 18-64, have Long Haul symptoms. Over 65 it is 25%, one in four. And it can happen in people with no preexisting conditions. Preexisting conditions or not, this sucks. The two biggest complaints are lung related and muscle related.

I have chronic fatigue following my third pneumonia in 2014. I might be just a little type A. I went back to work too soon (6 months after the pneumonia) and after a half day would crash asleep at 3 pm. For another 6 months. Now that I have had the fourth pneumonia and have been off for a year and been on oxygen, I feel better than I have since before 2014, even though I still need oxygen part time. Guess I was in denial about the chronic fatigue. NOT ME!

So, dear reader, learn from me and don’t be like me. The biggest thing that I have had to get through my thick type A skull is that when my body wants rest, I need to rest. This can be hella annoying, as my son would say. I have to pay attention to my energy level and decide what to do. And some of my precious energy has to go to things like laundry and paying bills! How very frustrating. My markers are energy level and also pulse. My pulse tells me when I need oxygen and when I am really sick. With the first pneumonia back in 2003, influenza, my resting pulse stayed at 100. My normal then was about 65. When I stood up, my pulse went to 135. It was EXHAUSTING to stand up. I had to rest half way up one flight of stairs. It was hard to walk two blocks to pick my daughter up from primary school. And I looked fine. Neither my doctor nor I could figure it out. I finally guessed that it was lung tissue swelling and hoped it would go down eventually. It did, but it was a full two months and my doctor partners thought I was malingering. I tried not to wish it on them. It sucked and I felt awful back at work, but my pulse had finally come down. We even did a heart ultrasound, but all it showed was a fast heart rate. My chest film looked “normal”, because the tissue swelling is throughout the lungs, so it cannot be seen on a chest xray. It was very weird, but I recovered. And all the descriptions of Long Covid sound like my lung swelling. Fast heart rate, difficulty breathing, muscle pain and terrible fatigue. Go back to the couch.

Go back to the couch and wait. Do what you have to but if your heart rate is over 100 when you get up, you have to rest. Otherwise you will prolong it. Seriously.

More later. Peace me and sending love and peace.

Anna’s hummingbirds can survive below freezing temperatures by slowing their metabolism at night, until it warms up in the morning. Talk about resting!