Tag: Health

Mindfulness, Nature & Spirituality, Sickness & Health

Taking a Nice and Easy Day

Diana

2017-02-10-taking-a-nice-and-easy-day-dianaklein-com

Yesterday was a busy day.

So was the day before.

And the day before that.

Life has been piling up. Mostly it’s been good things.  It’s been me taking steps in the direction of my goals.  It’s been me investing in my family and my community.  It’s also taking care of my ailing cat (who is completely recovered now, by the way!).  And unexpectedly having to take my car to the garage.  It’s been a lot.  And, somehow, there always seems to be more.  One more thing I must do today, this week, this lifetime—just so that everything will turn out the way I want it to.  Do you hear God laughing at me right now?  Yeah, me too.

I still have several things on my to-do list for this week, but I know I’m not going to get to all of them, so I am making accommodations. For one thing, this was not the blog post I had planned for this week.  I was going to make a video and write about making art every day.  I was excited about it, but it’s too much.  A part of me says, Hey, just push through. It’s just one more thing.  Pour another cup of coffee.  You can do it!  And that part of me is right.  I probably could do it, but at the cost of becoming more energy indebted and less, well, me.  Does that make sense?  Have you  noticed that when you overextend yourself for too long that you turn into an ugly, ungrateful, wretched, slobbering monster?

Or is that just me?

Anyway, the biggest problem with my monster is that she invariably makes things worse. Every little molehill becomes Mt. Everest.  Every tiny slight becomes a gaping wound.  Every mistake becomes life-threatening.  This attitude perpetuates a cycle of unhappiness and, ultimately, under-productiveness.

A few months ago I read a blog post on Kris Carr’s website titled The Myth of Finding Your Purpose. She says it’s her most popular post of all time and I can understand why.  In it, she begs the question, “What if finding your purpose is about . . . nurturing yourself?”  At first, I felt a little perplexed by this.  How can that be a purpose? Isn’t that just something that happens when you pursue and achieve your true calling(s)?  But when I thought about it, I realized that my callings—literally, the things that call to me—are simply things I do in service to my purpose.  And my purpose is to be the best—the healthiest and happiest and kindest—version possible of this particular conglomeration of cells and spirit that my parents happened to name Diana.  My purpose is to spend as little time in the monster skin as possible.

So today, I am taking a nice and easy day. Not a vacation day.  Not a sick day.  I thought about both of these options.  I thought about not blogging, but I realized this is one of the things I do that feeds my spirit, and I didn’t want to rob myself of that.  A nice and easy day means being honest with myself about what I can and cannot accomplish.  It means not expecting too much.  It means reminding myself that even though all those things on my list seem imperative, probably none of them are actually life and death  It means going slowly, taking the most important thing first, and letting it take however long it takes.  It means remembering to breathe, to release my shoulders from their defensive stance next to my ears, and to enjoy the sunshine flowing through the window.

 

Sickness & Health

The Worth of a Smile

Diana

I want to smile at the woman in the bathroom. I want to put her at ease, let her know that the bandage covering half my nose and mouth is okay, that the orange wash of Betadine on my face is nothing to fear.  I want her to know that I am not scary.  I am not other.  I want the bridge of connection provided by a simple exchange of smiles.  But this is impossible.  Because, for the first time in my life that I can remember, I am physically unable to smile.

In November, the surgeon told me that he would remove the basal cell carcinoma above the left side of my lip using Mohs surgery—a procedure during which tiny patches of skin are removed, then processed to determine if all of the cancer has been eliminated. If it has, the wound is closed.  If not, another excision is performed and those cells are processed, and so on and so forth, until all of the malignant cells are gone.  When, during the consult, the surgeon informed me that the recovery from such a procedure would require that I move my mouth as little as possible for a week afterward, I had thought only of the frustration of being restricted to a “mechanically soft diet” and not being able to talk.

These were indeed challenges. I experienced a second babyhood as I learned to drink from my Finding Dory sippy cup (I could not manage a regular cup or a straw) and fed myself with the silver baby spoon my father’s company had gifted to my parents on the occasion of my birth (back when companies did things like that).  For many years, I had wondered why I had held onto the seemingly silly utensil that had my name engraved boldly on its handle, and now, I knew.  As I pushed little pieces of flan through the small aperture not covered by bandages and scraped gently under my lip to remove the inevitable bits that fell short of their mark, again placing them mouth, I remembered the babies I had fed in just such a way.

I was thankful for the smart phone that allowed me to communicate with family members more quickly than pen and paper would have, but even with the phone’s assistance, I began to feel the isolation of not being able to jump into a conversation and insert my opinions and ‘witticisms’ in a timely fashion. I began to give up trying to express myself. What was the point? I thought, when the punch line doesn’t arrive until two minutes after the joke?

I had anticipated all of this—to some degree, anyway. But it wasn’t until the night before that I realized in a ‘duh’ moment, that, of course, since I wouldn’t be able to speak, I would not be able to sing, either.  I spent a little extra time with my harp that evening, singing Christmas carols to an empty room.  I thought about how it would be if this was the last time I could sing.  What would I want to bring to it?—even if just for myself, without anyone else to perform to.  I felt tenderness and gratitude for my voice and my harp.  I wondered what it would be like if I approached playing and singing with this mindset all the time.

Another thing I didn’t expect about my recovery week, was that I would not be able to brush my teeth. I won’t disgust you with the details, but suffice it to say, it was gross.

I had not given much thought to the surgery itself, either. It was something I had to do, so it didn’t bear much thinking about.  In addition to the facial surgery, I needed to have abnormal cells on  my leg excised, and I observed, with interest, as the surgeon sliced open my skin, taking a football shaped patch, exposing the bright yellow fish eggs of fat beneath.  I watched him stitch up the skin with what, I, as a crafter, would call a blanket stitch.  I marveled at the fact that I was witnessing, with complete detachment, something that should be quite painful to me. Thank, God for anesthesia, I thought.

Later though, when it came to repairing my face, the painkiller was not enough to disengage my emotions from the procedure. I could not see the surgeon working, but I could hear the scissors snipping along my lip.  I could smell my skin burning as it was cauterized.  This felt personal, intimate, inescapable.  I couldn’t help but worry about what I would look like after as the surgeon threw stitch after stitch.  And later, when I faced my swollen visage in the mirror, I had thoughts of Frankenstein’s monster—before I reminded myself that I was being ridiculously hyperbolic.

But those moments of tension under the knife and those bloody, bloated stitches are not what I will remember most keenly. What I will remember are those moments in the bathroom mid-surgery while I was waiting for them to process the tissue from my face the second time.  Instead of spending the 45 minutes by myself in the procedure room, I was allowed to use the restroom and join my mother in the waiting room.  It was then, as I tried to relate nonverbally to the various people around me, I realized how meaningful, how powerful, a smile can be.  The many signals such a tiny, seemingly insignificant thing can relay: friendliness, approval, connection . . .  I realized how lost I felt without my smile, how alone, how helpless.

It’s now been seven weeks since the surgery. I am healing well.  Though I do still have some swelling, the redness around my scar fades with every day.  And I have one more aspect of my face to make me look ‘distinctive’!  In a way, I am grateful for it, because it has taught me, a little, about the true worth of a smile.

CFS, Mindfulness, Sickness & Health, Writing, Writing & Reading

The Power of Small

Diana

I crashed last weekend—exploding pain, unforgiving tiredness, the works. It was particularly disappointing because I had been starting to feel like I was building up a head of steam—moving in the direction I wanted to go.  I had plans.  I had thoughts and ideas sprouting and multiplying.  There’s so much I want to do!  And then plop—the other shoe drops.  It happens to all of us—we feel energized to make exciting, positive change and something happens that we didn’t plan for or something reoccurs that we should have seen coming.  A fly gets in the ointment.  A wrench is thrown into the works.  Our best laid plans go so infuriatingly awry.

When this happens, my instinctive reaction is to do a post mortem: What happened? What did I do wrong?  What did I not do?  This picking apart usually takes place in the presence of my mother, who listens patiently and then says, “Or maybe it’s none of those things.  Maybe it’s just the cycle.  Maybe it’s just what’s happening now.”  At which point, I take a deep breath and grumble, “Yeah, maybe.”

Of course, she’s right. Most of what’s going on is beyond any sense of my control, and I just need to ride it out.  My struggle with it, however, has to do with my expectations.  They have a tendency to get away from me.  I do one thing and then want to, or feel I should, do more and more.  Some years ago, a member of my then writing group brought up the notion of setting a deceptively small goal.  I took to the idea and kept telling myself to “start small”.  However, in the hands (and mind) of a Type A personality, this mantra developed a major flaw.  I might be willing to start small, but all too soon, my mind says, Hey, we better put the pedal to the medal if we’re ever gonna get anywhere! Which, of course, devolves into a wild attempt to do more, which in turn tires, overwhelms, and frustrates me to the point where I am ready to throw in the towel.

start-small-snail-dianaklein-comIn light of this, my new motto is: Start small—and then keep going small until you get whatever the thing is you need to do done. It doesn’t quite trip off the tongue, but, when I think about it,  it is pretty much how I made it through college.  When completely cowed by the mountain of writing I needed to do and the soul-crushing fear of not being able to do it, I would start by opening a document, forcing myself to add one sentence (more if I could) and then, moving to the next paper, do the same.  I would rotate through all of my current projects in this fashion.  Write a line, switch, write a line, switch.  After I had a draft down, I could go back and check for cogency and fix any problems, but it was getting that first layer down that was the biggest challenge—which I overcame only by taking it piece by piece, sentence by sentence.  I still write this way when I am stuck.  I ask myself, What’s the next line? I don’t think about what will come after.  I only have to write one sentence.  And once that’s done.  I do it again.

It can be hard to commit to small steps like this because societal norms so often tell us that if you can’t have the thing you want by tomorrow, you’d best not pursue it at all or worse, it’s not worth having.  I mean, why even bother?  Many of us, when we decide to turn over a new leaf, want to jump in feet first. You see books on lifestyle makeovers and they are all about making wholesale changes to one’s life.  We tell ourselves, we will do everything according to this new code: eat better, sleep better, do yoga, meditate, be creative.  And we forget that our lives are still our lives.  I think people feel either: that they want to change everything all at once without regard to whatever else is going on in their lives or that they are too overwhelmed by their lives to make any changes at all.

do-the-thing-you-can-do-the-power-of-small-dianaklein-comThere is an alternative. Start small.  Do the thing you can do—this is advice I have given myself regularly over the past 20 years (when I haven’t been busy trying to outsmart myself).  If you can meditate for two minutes a day, then meditate for two minutes a day.  If you can eat more vegetables, but can’t eat less sugar, than eat more vegetables and don’t eat less sugar.  And, *this is key*, don’t let your mind sell you a bill of goods that you are somehow falling short!  The saying A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step is, perhaps, a cliché, and, of course, you do have to take all the succeeding steps after that first one if you want to get to your destination, but if you tell yourself that that first step is not, won’t ever be, enough, you will never take the second.

I have big goals. I don’t know if there are enough steps in this body to get me there, but I want to keep walking towards them.  I want to do the thing I can do, consistently, and be proud of each step, giving it the recognition it deserves, because, in a one million-step journey, step number 45,682 is no less important than number 999,999.  Without either, small, seemingly insignificant movement, you will never reach your goal.

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Running, Sickness & Health

Interval Training with Runkeeper

Diana

I love running, like love it, love it.  I love the sense of freedom I feel when I’m trotting down the road, an easy breeze in my face, a powerful playlist in my ears.  I love it.  But I also have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  As you may imagine, the two things are somewhat at odds with one another.  That being said, it’s important for me to stay active.  Though doctors don’t know a lot about how to help CFS patients, most agree that regular exercise is vital.  So I walk every day.  I’ve noticed that although I don’t always feel good doing it (and sometimes I feel downright awful), if I don’t do it, I won’t necessarily feel any better, and often, I’ll feel worse.  So there has been many a day when I have shuffled through my neighborhood getting blown past by friendly, speed-walking grannies and gazing jealously at runners bouncing down the street.  But there have also been times over the last 20 plus years, during which my body has been able to run and—praise all that is good and wonderful—this is one of those times.

When I began in August, I determined to do it slowly. I have the tendency to go whole hog on things.  I always want to push myself to do more, achieve more, but my long experience with this stuff has taught me: that way ruin lies.  In light of this, for the first few weeks, I simply ran on the days I felt up to it for between 10 and 15 minutes and then walked home, always making sure that I was covering at least the same amount of ground that I would have during a regular walking day.  I was using the Nike app to track my runs, but after several annoyances in the past and a recent update that caused still more irritation, I finally threw in the towel.  I decided it was time to shop for a new workout tracker.

After looking at a few, I finally settled on Runkeeper. It tracks my runs via GPS and gives all the statistics one would expect—time, distance, pace, calories burned, etc.  There are even a selection of fun voices to choose from to give you those stats and to cheer you on—such as Boston Fan (think Good Will Hunting) and Yinterval-training-with-runkeeper-dianaklein-comour Conscience (somewhere in the realm of a goofy Tony Robbins?).  My favorite is Mademoiselle—a spritely French lady who tells me that I am fast (though, clearly, I am not) and maybe not completely helpfully encourages me to “Think of all the pain au chocolat now you can eat!”(I have thought about it—a lot.)

Runkeeper also offers a series of challenges to help motivate—one of which was that if I did a mile workout in the following two weeks, it would give me a month free of its premium service.  As I generally walk more than 2 miles a day, this was not too difficult.  Among other things, the premium service offers a series of workouts for each week based upon your previous running experience and the goals you are looking to achieve. Cool, I thought, let me try this.  It only took a quarter of the way through a 30-minute workout, for my thinking to change to: Argh!!! It wasn’t the length or the intensity of the workout that had me swearing, it was its interval nature.  What I hadn’t realized prior to the “run” was that each minute I would be alternating back and forth between walking and running.  I would just be getting into a nice groove with my running when a signal would come though my ear buds telling me that it was time to walk. Never again, I thought.  And then, Yeah, this kind of sucks, but maybe you should just keep with it and see where it goes.

I did stick with it. In the last four weeks, I’ve been following the prescribed four workouts a week and doing my regular walking on the other three days.  As I have progressed, the intervals of running have generally become a bit longer, while the walking intervals have stayed the same and while I don’t particularly like having to stop and walk, I think it’s been good for me.  It’s demanding that thing that I am so often reluctant to give myself—rest.

When I began running as a chubby middle-schooler, things were different. Those first few weeks of cross country practice our coach would lead our team of seven, five girls and two boys, over the lovely grounds of a local college campus.  I huffed and puffed at the back of the train, knowing I was holding every one up and hearing about it once or twice from the cute eighth grader with the floppy brown hair—as if my face hadn’t been red enough from the exertion.  It got better.  I got faster and stronger, and though I never made it to the front of the pack, I ceased to feel embarrassed by my every step.  The problem was that I always seemed to be dealing with some pain or other—knee, ankle, what have you—probably because I had gone from doing nothing to running somewhere between nine and fifteen miles a week.  That’s the way they did it back then.  You started running and just expected the first two weeks of training to be a hell during which you hobbled everywhere as your legs continually screamed about how mean you were.

In contrast, interval training eases a person into the process of running. And, as I’ve said, it seems to have been useful to me as I attempt to rebuild my running practice, but a few weeks ago, I discovered there might be even more to it than that.  I found out that the Runkeeper training program is based, in part, on the work of Jeff Galloway—an Olympian who trained with all the greats in the seventies during the last golden age of American men’s distance running (though, if the last Olympics are any indication, we may be on the verge of another).  Interestingly, despite the fact that the old school version of training dictates that walking during training is a fate worse than death, Galloway’s Run Walk Run Method advises one do just that.  He claims that not only does it help to reduce injury, but it also produces faster times.  He even suggests walking during races.  Doing so helps physically, by allowing the body to recover slightly, instead of going deeper and deeper into oxygen debt, and cognitively, by giving the runner a series of smaller goals to reach (just run these next two minutes, then you can rest) rather than an overwhelming one (run a whole 10k).

My month of free premium service on Runkeeper ended last week. Will I continue?  I’m not sure.  I have to admit, I would get a little excited each Sunday morning waiting for the notification that my workout schedule had been delivered to my app. What’s in store for this week? I’d wonder, What’s next? The drawback for me is that I fear the workouts will progress too quickly for me—demand too much.  As I am not a regular healthy adult, I can’t just expect that I will be able to continue upping my mileage and exertion.  There will be a cap, and I have to be careful that I don’t get caught up in the excitement and do too much.  It would be nice if the app offered a maintenance program or that a user was able to indicate how fast he/she wanted to increase.

Regardless of this, I think I will stick with the interval training. It seems to me that I am running more than I would have if I trained the old way.  I am certainly running faster—which hopefully improves my muscle development.  The big test will, of course, be longevity.  I am hoping that the interval training—if I’m cautious with it—will help me keep my compromised body running (and walking) for several weeks (months? years?!) to come.  We’ll see.

Now, about those chocolate croissants . . .

What about you? What running apps do you use?  What do like and dislike about them?  Have you tried some version of the Run Walk Run Method?  What do you think of it?

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Sickness & Health

The Shameful Truth(s)

Diana

    So, since the goal is audacity, I think today I will summon up the gumption to write about my biggest source of discomfort—the thing that, for more than 15 years, I have been reluctant to discuss.

    I bet you guys are thinking I’m going to start in on something really juicy here—sorry, it’s just the fact that I have Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.  Only, there’s no “it’s just” about it for me.  I don’t really know how the people around me feel about it—if they are silently accepting me as I am, or if they find my continuing plight tiresome, or if they simply don’t believe in it.  For me, it has been, not unnaturally, a burden, but also a shame.  I have feared the rejection of others if I were to talk about it.  And I didn’t want to talk about it anyway, because the whole thing was stupid and boring and distasteful to me.  And, also, just difficult to speak about—I do not mean emotionally, but practically—it feels as though we don’t actually have words in our language that can say what wants to be said about this.  Our lexicons don’t have room—and I’m sure it’s not just CFS.  It’s other things too—subjects that are literally unspeakable.

    But I have tried to write what I could not say.  For the past five years, I have been working on a memoir about my experiences with CFS.  It’s been a labor of faith because, from the beginning, I had no desire, whatsoever, to share my frustrations and general humanness with the rest of the world.  And it has felt like hubris to imagine that others would find my (very) personal recountals in the least way edifying.  (Much as I am hoping you do now!)  I guess a part of me is still trying to play it cool, although, now that I come to write that, I remember that I’ve never actually been anywhere close to cool, so I’m not exactly sure what I’m worried about. 

    Anyway, Something told me to write the blessed thing, and now that Something is telling me that I have to really get serious about getting it published.  Or at least I hope that’s what’s happening.  It would be nice to believe that I am following some potent Divine guidance, rather than just meandering around in my own garden of absurdity and delusion. 

    A few years ago, when a friend of mine suggested to me that I should contact Oprah and Dr. Phil—try to get on their shows to promote my book, help me get a publisher, I cringed because I pictured myself becoming the poster girl for CFS—horrid thought indeed.  Here, is possibly the biggest of my shameful truths: I had no desire to be associated with people like me. 

    It’s as though I have been living two parallel lives at the same time—one in which I was ill and a pathetic excuse for a human being and one in which I was healthy, beautiful, and strong.  And in both of these lives I was an actor playing the part—but not quite adeptly enough to pass muster.  I could tell that people saw the cracks in each persona.  When I was acting the role of the sick person, they could just see the healthy one lurking below my ill-applied make-up.  And when I undertook the character of the robust, vivacious woman, I felt my physical/emotional/mental disorder bleeding through.  I haven’t been able to trust myself, because it’s not supposed to be this way.  It’s supposed to be one or the other.  The people I live with, the people I encounter, should be able to depend on the steadiness of my being.  I should be able to rely on the steadiness of my being.  But I could never quite commit completely to either role, because, as we all recall from high school math, parallel lines simply do not meet. 

    But I’m a reasonably intelligent woman.  After 15+ years existence in this attitude—over half my life—I must realize that some kind of new figuring is required here.  I can’t keep meandering around my garden of absurdity and delusion feeling ashamed of myself all the time.  And I must realize that I do not know what others think about my having CFS because I have been afraid to ask, because I have rebuffed them when they have broached the topic—eager to get on to something, anything, else.  I wouldn’t have trusted those around me anymore than I have trusted myself if they told me that the circumstances of my life do not bear on their love for and approval of me.  I would not have trusted that they were not being disingenuous or simply polite if they said that they were proud of me; that such words wouldn’t be just a pat on the head of a reasonably well-behaved dog—like I had done good enough . . . for a sick girl.

   I have felt that my value has somehow become intertwined with my illness, and I am coming to a point where I am not sure that that is wrong.  My illness has value because I have value as a unique expression of the Divine.  My illness has value because the Divine has laid it at my feet, has given it to me as a mantle—to wear for as long as needs be.  The why of it is probably not a whole lot my business.  My business is the integration of those parallel Dianas, to know that I can be, that I am, both personas in one life.

    And I am certain that CFS suffers don’t have the monopoly on trust issues—with themselves or others. 

    So, in the name of audacity, I am entrusting you with the knowledge of my illness: I was diagnosed with CFS when I was 15.  I have never held a full-time job.  I live with my mother.  I don’t know what to say to people when they ask me “what I do”.

    I am entrusting, to you and to myself, the awareness of my determination to eat, drink, and breathe compassion, my desire to live a joyful and constructive life, sick or well.

    And in the name of audacity, I challenge you to trust someone (including yourself) with whatever hidden truth you have heretofore labeled shameful.