Katherine here today.
I learned a long time ago that life is basically maintenance. I tried to teach Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance a number of times and it certainly taught me to maintain the bits and pieces of my life in any number of ways. I'm not sure what my students got out of it, but it always helped me.
I get up and I just start maintaining things in between what I do to earn a living. I maintain teeth, skin, hair, my weight, my fitness, my brain (I hope), my clothing, my relationships with friends and family, my nails, my emails, my car, my garden, my yard, and our finances. I maintain the lists I make of the stuff I have to maintain. If I had a motorcycle, I'd maintain it too just like Pirsig's book suggests.
Normally this maintenance business doesn't bother me too much. I just get up and start doing what needs to be done. I've even done pretty well when the maintenance demands have escalated. Stuff like cancer got in my way and increased my daily protocols, but I managed to keep plugging away like a good little soldier.
Last week I collapsed though. Two new sets of protocols entered the picture and the result was two days where I lived on the verge of tears when I wasn't actually crying. I wasn't sure I could take any more maintenance chores than I was already doing and I simply crashed and burned. I'm doing better now though thanks to Jim and C. Fite and Christine (my beautiful daughter-in-law) who somehow said and did the right things at the right time. No one else really knew I was in trouble at the time.
I have "frozen shoulder." Mastectomy patients like me and band leaders get it. Last spring my shoulder seized and I couldn't raise my left arm straight up and I couldn't put my left arm behind my back. I could hike and kayak though, so I decided to take weeks off from knitting and anything else that required my shoulder to go up or my arm to go behind my back. I was pretty sure rest would fix the shoulder.
Resting did not work. Now I see a physical therapist regularly and do all sorts of new maintenance work. She warned me it could take up to 18 months for my shoulder to return to normalcy, if it ever did. She taught me my stretches and exercises and 40 new minutes of protocols were added to my daily duties.
Three days later I stabbed a thorn under my right thumbnail while putting on my gardening gloves. I thought I removed the thorn. Two days later my thumb was a mess and I had a substitute doctor (mine is out of town) removed more of the thorn. Another two days passed and things were worse and I went in for a LONG procedure or a SHORT surgery where another substitute doctor lifted my thumbnail and dug around for remaining thorn fragments. This hurt a lot. This also added three 15 minute thumb soakings and four rounds with a heat pad to my daily protocols. This was when the good little soldier just died inside me.
My thumb procedure was last Monday and it's Friday now. Jim has hovered and brought me my favorite ice cream (Salted Butterscotch by Sweet Action Ice Cream Co.) and loved me in so many ways through my grumpy two weeks. He's even worried that I can't knit for now. How this logical fellow can love me like a pure romantic I'll never know, but I'm so glad he can. We are a perfect odd couple somehow.
C. Fite actually stopped by the house with flowers and a perfect card. The only card I've ever saved. Christine listened to me when I hurt and called me with good news about herself like she was truly my daughter. My heart soared. The world started getting better again and my little soldier self began to return.
Even though my heart hurt and I felt like I would never get back to having a normal shoulder and thumb, I never skipped a single protocol along the way--I just started resenting all the maintenance. Jim and C. and Christine made me remember that I should never resent the stuff keeping me here to love and be loved.
The seeds that Jim and C. and Christine planted all last week bloomed into a lot of hope this morning. Their love combined with finishing a wonderful book while sitting in my knitting den seemed to put me all back together. My little soldier inside is feeling pretty darn perky right now.
I promise to write about the book when my thumb is up to more typing. It is The Swan Thieves by Susan Kostova. I plowed through all 661 pages this week and it ended perfectly for me. I'm such a romantic idealist and it's rare for an ending to heal my heart in the way this book did. That's a lot.
I'm not sure what my point is today. If you're reading this, I hope you'll keep maintaining your motorcycle or the little soldier inside yourself even when you're feeling sad. You discover people love you and it's only your perception that is screwed up. I learned that long ago from Sissy Hankshaw and her huge thumbs in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (Tom Robbins). I just forgot to follow every lesson I ever taught.
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8 comments:
I think you are being way too hard on yourself here... For most people, the experience of requiring maintenence makes them turn completely inward and dwell on the fact that they alone are suffering. All you talk about is how others feel and how you rejoice in loving and being loved. That's pretty damn tremendous, if you ask me.
Thank you for pointing that out to her because you are absolutely right!
Hugs
Glad dad, cindy and christine were there to pull you out of your funk...sending lots of love. See you soon.
You ARE tremendous Katherine. You are always thinking of ways to please others and we love you for being you. Everyone crumbles now and then. Your PT will be worth it but maintenance does suck!!!!!
"If you're reading this, I hope you'll keep maintaining your motorcycle or the little soldier inside yourself even when you're feeling sad. You discover people love you and it's only your perception that is screwed up."
This made me smile and feel encouraged. Thank you.
I am so sorry that you hurt, but I am so glad there were loved ones there to help you along the way, and I am glad that you then wrote about it. :) Doing so was definitely an act of "paying it forward." I hope you heal soon.
Hi, Katherine.
I am a student from long ago. I found this blog through stumbling on James on Facebook, recently. You two formed more of my critical thinking skills between you, than perhaps any other single source in my life. For that, I will always be grateful. And I was thrilled to get to see a little window into your lives.
I am not sure if it might help you or not, but I have found, anecdotally, from a handful of people who have turned out to suffer similar problems to my own, that there appears to be some correlation between severe shoulder pain that prohibits mobility of the shoulder, with no obvious injury cause, and gut damage.
I have not figured out why these things appear to travel in pairs, but I have stumbled on it enough to think there might be a link of some kind.
For me, it was caused by undiagnosed gluten intolerance that I have probably had all my life, and a mother whose hypochondria extended to getting her children antibiotics constantly, whether they needed them or not.
But, I know people for whom the gut damage appears to have started with chemo, major surgery (possibly the antibiotics afterward), and people who can give no specific start point, but probably had food allergies all their lives. There also seem to be a few who do not produce certain enzymes well, which gives them a chronic problem on the subject.
There seem to be a lot of unexplained details in the how and why, from doing my own research about it, when doctors failed me. They're still learning to look at the larger puzzles and link the interrelated parts, rather than focusing on singular phenomena and their management.
As far as I can tell, though, a lot more people suffer gut damage than realize it in this country, and it tends to be a partial causal factor in a variety of longer term problems like cancers and heart disease, pain disorders, and neurological and emotional problems.
It is something we don't take very seriously as a culture, it seems, but your intestines are the source of your capacity to heal, manage pain and various other things. Aside from sunlight and air, just about everything your body needs depends on the success and health of the gut.
I don't know if you are someone in need of attention to healing your gut, or diagnosing what makes it unhappy, but it seemed plausible enough from what you said about various health issues in your blog, and the intense shoulder pain, that I offer the information, in case it is meaningful to you.
For me, I eliminated high flash point oils that the body doesn't break down easily, switched to organics, lots of raw plant material in my diet, no wheat, and dramatically increased plant diversity in my diet. I got rid of most sugars (other than from fruit) and caffeine. And I added a lot of probiotics for a while. I drank aloe juice for a few weeks, and found some good digestive enzymes.
It was a pain in the butt to change so much, and it didn't happen all at once. But the shoulder pain is gone. So are the migraines and a variety of other problems I struggled with. It made such a huge difference to me, to not randomly wake up in stabbing pain, if I moved my shoulder, that I wanted to share, in case it stands a chance of helping you, too.
Love to you both. You made a tremendous difference in my life, and my ability to believe in my right to my own identity, wants and needs. In your way, you taught me bravery, which was the skill I needed most, at the time.
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