First World Problems

my bangs need a trim ...

BC has been trying to flatten the COVID-19 curve for almost 6 weeks now. According to our provincial health officer, who’s become something of a folk hero out here, we’re actually succeeding at it—but we’re not out of the woods yet. This means the parameters put in place when all this started will remain in place until mid-May at least.

Rats.

On the other hand, it’s not without purpose that we are asked to stay home, that businesses have had to cut staff, that non-essential services are on temporarily hold. Ah. Non-essential services. Here’s where I recognize how incredibly fortunate we are to be more worried about getting our eyebrows done during a pandemic than we are about dying from it.

Not that I get my eyebrows done. I just know people who do. Still, after six weeks of “doing without”, I am beginning to miss some things.

My monthly chiropractic treatment, for instance. Working from home has certainly helped my structural precondition, but I know I’m out of alignment. My chiropractor had to self-isolate on his return from the States in early April, then I got a call cancelling all appointments until further notice. I’m sure he’s fine; it’s just the closing of (how do I say this?) “non-essential” medical services that’s put my maintenance on hold. Ter’s chiro has had to do the same thing. They’ll take an emergency call, of course, but neither she nor I will play that card unless we’re well and truly immobilized.

Almost worse is the root growth and fading colour in my hair. Maintenance on the mane is a major operation every two months, with drop in tweaks to keep the bangs trimmed and the pink vibrant. My stylist makes no real money on me anyway (she mostly likes to play with colour and I’m fearless about it), and I miss visiting with her while she works her magic in the salon.

And have I mentioned lingering over tea with my office buddies? I’m able to nab a tea break with Treena when I drop by the office for printing/scanning/supplies once a week, otherwise I’ve resorted to buying my Blenz favourite in bulk and drinking it at home on workdays.

I understand the concept of social distancing, but continue to misjudge it. Most people are better about skirting around me than I am about eluding them, though I’m not out and about as much as usual. Being an introvert, I’m quite content to stay home for days on end. I sure am snacking a lot more, though. I’ve heard the “19” in “COVID-19” is because the disease was named in 2019 … but I suspect it will actually come to mean the number of pounds I’ve gained before house arrest is over.

Stay safe, stay healthy, stay positive - we've got this.

With love,

What’s in a Brain?

Not only is my chiropractor enthralled by my crooked spine, he’s a great audience. I’m guaranteed to get a laugh every time I see him. He’s also a sports therapist, so I like to ask him random questions when I’ve been pondering the unique oddities of my compostable container. I’m so strangely wired, in fact, that sometimes we both learn something.

Lately I’ve had problems with my teeth aching, but rather than going to the dentist like a normal person, I decided it was a nerve issue better addressed by chiro—and I was right. A couple of visits and some postural instruction later, and my teeth are quiet again. It also got me thinking about my nervous system. So I asked him:

“All our nerves are contained in the spinal cord, right?”

“Yes,” he said, “except for seventeen facial nerves. (He knew this because my teeth quandary had sent him back to the manual; boy, we had a laugh about that!) Everything else runs through the third and fourth cervical vertebrae via the spinal cord.”

Now was the time to spring my logic on him, but not before I got his expert take on the subject. “So, where does it start?”

“In the brain.”

So much for logic. “Oh!” I exclaimed. “I thought it started at the base of the spine and spread upward, like a tulip bulb!”

He thought this was hilarious. “No, no. The nervous system starts at the brain and continues from the base of the spine into your legs and feet. I’m surprised at you, Ruth. I thought you were smarter than that.”

“Yeah, well, I guess it shows how much I value my brain!”

I’m really more of a heart person.

Fast forward to the ancient Egypt exhibit at the Royal BC Museum.  It’s a fabulous meander through life on the Nile in the time of the pharaohs, spanning everything from geography to society to the afterlife. I’ve read a bit about the ancient culture and the rituals around mummification, but the exhibit taught me a few things I hadn’t previously known about the process of prepping the body. I knew the internal organs were removed and given their own individual jars—lungs, liver, stomach and intestines—but I didn’t know (or remember) the heart was replaced in the chest cavity and (get this) the brain was discarded. Turns out you don’t need it in the afterlife!

It’s not that important in this life, either, no matter how hard it tries to convince you otherwise. It doesn’t house your soul. It’s the mortal version of Windows: it keeps the compostable container alive, but it doesn’t know a darned thing about life.

Well, maybe it knows enough to fear dying. It runs the machine and houses the self-preservation software. It’s also got an impressive array of tricks to keep us believing it’s smarter than it really is. As the comic Emo Phillips once said, “I thought the brain was the most important organ in my body. Then I realized who was telling me that.”

Sure, when faced with imminent danger, the fight/flight response kicks in, but the brain is part of the standard mortality package that includes motor skills and bladder control. I suppose the intellect resides in the brain as well, as intellect lacks compassion for anything and anyone save itself. Intellect ridicules compassion and empathy. It sneers at getting by on what you need rather than raking in the lion’s share. It’s all about survival of the fittest—but not necessarily the smartest. It believes what it’s told (sort of) and makes up what it doesn’t hear the first time. To its credit, the brain is a good storyteller—the writer in me likes that point—but it does tend to focus on horror rather than hope, keeping itself relevant in the guise of keeping us safe.

I could go on, but I’m not a neuroscientist. I don’t even play one on TV. I do know, however, that my heart is far smarter than my brain will ever be. I suspect this is because my heart houses the innate wisdom of spirit, that which connects me to each of you and to the greater source of All There Is. What resides in my heart is truly eternal, limitless, immortal and divine. What resides in my brain is temporary, transient, subjective and useful only until I reach my carbon-based expiry date. It is utterly fallible, and utterly human. It provides the contrast our spirits need to help us experience this phase of existence. It’s not as smart as it is shifty, but if I’m going to be a true creature of spirit, I will be glad of my brain for as long as I am here. It serves a significant purpose, after all, but let’s get real.

I won’t need it in the afterlife.

Voodoo Medicine Man (4)

how the wrist grounding point feels!

There are four main “grounding” points in acupuncture: one between the first and second (or is it the second and third?) toes in the top of each foot, one in the soft spot between the thumb and forefinger on the top of one hand, and the fourth between the tendons in the underside of the opposite wrist. This last point is a particularly shallow spot and tricky to hit; if I didn’t trust my voodoo medicine man implicitly, I would never ever have gone there the first time. He tells me it’s important and (I don’t know why) I believe him. Our compostable containers may generate their own current, but matter is bound by physical law, and one of the dandies is that electricity should be grounded or bad things can happen.

Anyway, once placed, the points are activated in the same manner as the lug nuts on a tire: top left, lower right, lower left, top right. My guy tries to spare me as much as possible, so we always get the shallow wrist point over with first.

The first time this point was activated, a small star exploded in my palm. More than a mere carpet shock but less than a lightning bolt, it was so intense that my thumb and two fingers were numb through the next three points. Adding insult to injury, my guy likes to shake them up after twenty minutes, giving each point a little twist to keep the energy humming. I’m pleased to report that the intensity of this little point hasn’t gone supernova in some time, though it remains worthy of a summoning breath before it’s activated.

Last visit, my voodoo doctor set about placing the grounding points—but this time, he reached to start with my right wrist. I gave him a quizzical look and said, “We usually do this one on the left.”

He caught himself at the same time. “It’s the right wrist on a male patient,” he told me.

I could have said, “Gee, thanks,” but I find the subject fascinating so chose to pursue the line accordingly. “Really?”

“Yes. Right on male, left on female.”

The human body is a universe unto itself. I pondered this in silence for a second, until he followed up with something that had me howling from more than the zap of an activated acu point:

“I don’t know how it would work on a trans-gender patient.”

Both Eyes Blind (Part II)

After my eye exam, I walked out of the doctor’s office and into a blaze of full summer sun, amplified a zillion times because my pupils were cranked to the max and my vintage Transition lenses barely darken at all anymore.

Augh!

Literally blind, eyes streaming despite the lame shade of my hand, I bumbled my way back to work by cutting through malls and the View Street parkade. Gaining the sanctity of my office, I immediately dimmed the lights. I sat in the dark for a few minutes, then decided to post the eyeball pic on my F***book page to make my misery selectively public.

Co-workers started coming to see how I was doing. Our office manager stood silhouetted in my doorway and asked if I recognized her voice. “I’m blind, not deaf!” I snapped, trying not to laugh. My program cohort told me that my eyes were creeping her out and maybe I should just go home. “Can’t,” I replied. “I have a coffee date in an hour.”

Surely my pupils will relax by then.

Wrong-o. The only reason I got to the café alive was by falling in with a gang of tourists as they crossed the street. I stayed with them down the block to where my coffee buddy stood on the corner, waving like a lunatic when she spotted my work clothes in the shorts-and-tank crowd. I don’t remember much about the conversation except that it distracted me from how frikking bright everything was, and when just before we parted, I leaned in to ask if my pupils looked any smaller. She peered close, then gave a rueful smile and shook her head. Great. My return route was directly into the sun. Walking downtown with your eyes almost completely closed—actually, my left eye was completely closed—is hazardous without the added bonus of blurred vision. At least I didn’t bump into anything, and even as I blundered in the same general direction as the traffic, I was clinically amazed at how white the world appeared. The only colours in evidence were the rainbow rim of every globular shape in my path. Honestly, it was like a grand mal Horner’s episode! (Ru note: when the syndrome kicks in, my vision goes a little warped and blurry. It’s like looking at light through a prism. It doesn’t last long and, more importantly, it’s not painful.)

Back in the sanctuary of my shadowed office, computer work was out of the question. This did not stop me from coaching our office manager through how to upload documents to a Sharepoint site or IMing Ter to let her know how I was doing. I finally squinted through running a database report to give me a paperwork project for the afternoon. With the aid of one desk lamp, I managed to get some of it done before Coffee on the Wall.

My eyes felt little better and the pupils were still huge at 1:30. We found a shady spot in the library courtyard, partly for my eyes, but mostly because my wee sister is on medication that will make her burst into flame if she gets too much sun.

Geez, I wondered aloud, how long before my eyes get back to normal?

“It takes a while,” Boy Sister said, sympathetically, “but when it starts, it doesn’t take long.”

A half-hour later, I widened my eyes at wee sister. “Are they any smaller?”

She made a scrunchy face. “Not much.”

And I’d hoped they were shrinking because the tears had stopped.

One more hike back to the office before quitting time. I was dousing the orbs hourly with the drops I’d got from the doctor; they were burning and scratchy and blurry and by the end of the workday, I wanted to cry except my tear glands had packed up and left town. I took a final look in the mirror before I left work, half-fearing I’d get on the wrong bus and wind up at UVic instead of home, and did my eyes deceive me? Probably, since it looked as if the left pupil was almost back to normal while my right was stuck at full throttle. I looked like David Bowie. How the heck had he managed with one pupil fixed and dilated for most of his life? (I read somewhere that it was the result of a blow to his eye when he was a young ’un.)

As luck had it, I ran (figuratively) into a neighbour at the limo stop, so she got me onto the right bus without a clue that I was guessing at pretty much everything; how I picked her from the crowd would have been a miracle except that she saw me while I was still trying to figure out if I was seeing her. I was safe in my comfy chair with a cup of tea and a cookie when Ter came home, and by then, all that remained of my Big Eye Stuffie impression was the dry scratchies when I blinked.

So. What did I learn from this experience?

From now on, I book my annual eye appointment in November.

Both Eyes Blind (Part I)

This is what I get for waiting eight years between eye exams. I didn’t mean to let so much time pass, but who does? Life has a way of happening when you have other plans. In the grand scheme, I reckoned my vision would tell me when it was time for a check up, and that time came last week.

Since my last visit, my optometrist got married and had two children. She’s a lovely young woman, very gentle and soft-spoken, and she knows my history so well that, though I had entertained the notion of starting over with someone new, it made sense to remain with her and take my lumps for being remiss in making regular appointments.

“Welcome back, Ruth,” she said, opening with a smile and lump number one. “How have you been?”

I was pleased to report that I’ve actually been pretty well. No health disasters, no prescription drugs, and no family doctor required in the past near-decade. But my glasses need updating, and have done for almost a year. My Transition lenses don’t transition that well anymore.

“You’ll be amazed at the advances in their technology,” she said, lobbing lump number two as if it was a softball. “They change really fast nowadays.”

We did the field and focus tests. She’s already aware of my misaligned eyeballs and how my brain has given up trying to interpret letters on a screen when my left eye is called upon to transmit the image, but gods bless her, she tried to encourage me. I guessed wildly at the top line and nailed it (from memory, but she didn’t have to know that). “How about the next line?” she asked.

I sighed. “I know they’re letters, but I can’t tell you what they are.”

“Can you tell how many there are?”

“No. I just know they’re there.”

“Try the first one.”

“Ummmm … ‘K’—I think.”

“Good! What’s next?”

I hemmed and hawed, stalling for time until the magic happened. Suddenly, my brain switched sides and the string emerged in a triumphant rush. “ ‘K’, ‘O’, ‘V’ ‘H’!”

“What’s the one between ‘K’ and ‘O’?”

“There’s one between ‘K’ and ‘O’?”

My doctors all think I’m a riot.

She played with lens options and finally settled on a prescription that turns out to be a little better for distance and should clarify the written word at closer-than-arm’s-length. So far, so good.

Then came the drops to dilate my pupils. I was warned when I made the appointment, but I thought the statement to bring my sunglasses applied to prescription shades, which I don’t have on account of the aforementioned Transition lenses. Besides, my office is only two blocks over from the eye doctor’s; how bad could it be?

Fifteen minutes later, I was back in the chair with the lights dimmed while she aimed a thousand watt penlight directly into my brain and I tried not to scream.

Forget love. Light hurts!

But she got the reading she was after—no sign of diabetes, hypertension, cholesterol or glaucoma, and my corneas are thickening in accordance with my age, yippee aye ay. In short, nothing out of the ordinary. She gave me some drops and sent me on my way with my new prescription and a more forceful lump number three: “See you next year.”

to be continued …

Voodoo Medicine Man (Part 3)

I was extremely lucky to get “the needle guy” that day in 1995. During the following years, he helped to:

a)     alleviate my PMS. Acupuncture, however, wasn’t as effective as the B-compound vitamin intra-muscular injections he dispensed—we referred to those visits as his civic duty and the treatment as my anti-homicide shot;

b)     manage my allergies. Naturopaths test allergies via a machine that reads the body’s energy fluctuation when a suspected allergen is brought into proximity. No cuts, scrapes or scratches required. Just an ability to read my aura. (Early on in my alternative medical journey, my wee sis began calling him my “voodoo doctor” and it stuck);

c)      deal with a kidney stone. He sent me to Emergency when I called him at home one Sunday night, in so much pain I could barely breathe. After x-rays and a shot of Demerol, I was released on my own recognizance and went home to bed. I won’t lie; I took the prescription pain killers when necessary because pain that blows off the lid on a scale of ten demands immediate relief, but acupuncture helped my system to rid itself of that pesky little nugget without resorting to surgery;

d)     cure a back seizure that had me off work for six weeks in 2002. and

e)     generally kept me healthy with immunity booster shots, various supplements, and regular acupuncture tune-ups.

When you’re cooped up in a room with someone for hours at a time, you get to know them pretty well. We shared stories of family, personal history, politics, religion, and philosophy. We talked cars, hockey and chocolate. Books and music. Poetry and medicine. I could tell him anything, knowing he would keep my confidence and maybe offer some useful advice. He was a genuinely caring, compassionate, unconventionally conventional individual whose primary mission in life was to help and heal others. I fondly referred to him as a free radical. Bureaucracy drove him crazy, and it didn’t help that he was smarter than the folks who raided his clinic in search of infractions. (They never found anything.)

People drop in and out of your life as required. As I was beginning to rethink my health strategy, circumstances conspired to part me from my voodoo medicine man. Over the next few years, I began a program of therapeutic massage coupled with chiropractic to keep me on my feet, but I didn’t sign on with another naturopath. I didn’t want anyone else, so I dawdled. And dawdled. And dawdled.

I occasionally wondered about my voodoo doctor, about where he was and how he was doing. Ter and I would laugh about our history with him, because some of the stories are hilariously funny but you really had to have been there. Recently, “occasionally” thinking became “often”, and I found myself at the sink one night, wondering aloud about what had happened to him.

Two days later, the phone rang and guess who it was? I was so overjoyed that I shut my office door, propped my feet on the garbage can, and raved at him for fifteen minutes. “Where have you been? How are you? Oh, I’m so glad you called; Ter and I were just saying the other day …”

Turned out he had been thinking about me, too. “We’re on the same psychic network,” he said, to which I replied, “Well, yeah! Weren’t we always?” He learned that my life had done a complete one-eighty, I learned that his had done pretty much the same thing, and here we are, come full circle and reunited once more.

Part of me worries that he’s back for a reason, that some sinister health issue only he can fix is lurking in my future. The greater part is simply delighted at reconnecting with someone who means so much to me. He’s been put to work on my trick ankle, trying to coax it toward “a new normal” following an untreated incident from a zillion years ago, and so far, we’ve caught up on family, politics, medical theory and the best cocoa content in chocolate. Oh, yeah … and the ankle is coming along nicely.

Welcome back, Doc.

Voodoo Medicine Man (Part 2)

I am lying on a table. One pillow under my head, two stacked under my knees. The blinds are drawn, but the windows are so big that the overhead light isn’t required. It’s a nice room. Peaceful, quiet. The only sound is my heart hammering against my ribs.

What the heck am I doing here? More mysteriously, how did I get here?

The doctor comes in and I am reminded. Oh, yeah. Blue eyes.

He asks me how I’m doing and I say let’s get going. He smiles—if the eyes don’t get you, the smile will—and my first acupuncture treatment proceeds.

It was so long ago now that I don’t recall the details. I’ve had so many treatments that it’s almost become a snore, but something interesting always happens whenever a point is activated. Be it a spark, a zap, a rolling wave or a lightning bolt, my body feels it. I do recall asking the doc if the points were plugged into anything to generate the response. He said, “No. It’s all you.”

The needles, by the way, are not needles in the conventional sense. They vary in length, not so much in thickness. An acupuncture point is like a metal fishbone, so thin and delicate that it will quiver if you blow on it. The doc sets them in place by tapping them, one by one, along the circuit wherever he senses an energy blockage. Millennia ago, the Chinese healers mapped out the human body’s circuit board, identifying meridians through which our internal current runs; if a snarl occurs and energy is blocked, physical and/or mental symptoms can result. Acupuncture frees the blockage and allows the body to reset naturally, without chemical interference. Sometimes the symptoms disappear at once. Other times, a few treatments are required but, hey, that’s why we’re called patients. A precondition or a longtime trouble spot might not be relieved at first crack, so hang in there. Eventually, the treatments will take.

After the points are in place, the doc gives each one a little twist to activate it. This is where the fun really starts. A surface spark can happen right away, a bright little ping! not unlike a carpet shock. Sometimes I get a deeper, rolling sense of an engine trying to turn over before the point ignites. Sometimes it feels like a charley horse, other times I get an oh my God thermal implosion. By the time all the points are in play, each response, however intense, has faded out to nothing. That’s when the doc leaves me in peace, to rest and let the points do their work.

I usually fall asleep. The doc can tell when I’m cooked by taking my pulses. I can tell because I shift from dreamy mental meandering to a disco beat reverberating in my head. The points are plucked pretty well in the same sequence in which they were placed, and I’m good to go. My energy is better, my mind is sharper, my emotions are stabilized … and during the next few days, I’ll occasionally feel the ghost of a particularly intense point as my body continues recalibrating.

To be continued …

Voodoo Medicine Man (Part 1)

My time with conventional medicine was done years ago, though I stayed on file with my GP until he retired. He had been our family doctor since the early 1970s, when we had just landed in Victoria and my mother found the clinic in the Yellow Pages. He was the junior partner at the time and man, did we luck out with him. He was the one who diagnosed my bones, referred me to the eye guy who pegged my Horner’s Syndrome, and kept the rest of my family alive throughout his career. I liked him enough to trust him, and that is no small favour when you’re dealing with someone’s compostable container. I was also fortunate with most of the specialists I knew growing up; though Mum was continually apologizing for my attitude, I think (hope) most of them appreciated my spirit.

On leaving the nest and hooking up with Ter, my medical route veered off the beaten path. I started seeing a chiropractor. Ter had her allergies tested. We began paying attention to our diet, not to count calories or fat grams, but to monitor the components of what we were eating. Ter was reading up on alternative medicine, i.e., naturopathy, homeopathy and acupuncture, as a more proactive approach to health care, something I agreed with because of my control issues. I believe in pre-emptive measures rather than calling in the experts when it’s too late; I’m unsure when this belief took root, but it feels like I’ve had it forever.

So, in the mid-1990s, when a warning light went on within my system, rather than call my GP, I called the naturopathic clinic located near my home. By then I was all for natural remedies; tell me what herb to make my tea from, point me at the right supplement, take me off sugar, whatever, I’m good with it. Just don’t stick me full of needles, okay?

I made an appointment for that Friday morning. The clinic was a partnership between four or five practitioners, each specializing in something but all fully licensed naturopaths. The fellow who came out to greet me had the purest blue eyes I have ever seen. He spoke softly, held my gaze when we were talking, and took copious notes. I answered every question as honestly as I could considering the personal nature of my symptoms. It takes real courage to describe a female malfunction to a total stranger—especially when that stranger is so attentive that you forget what you’re saying in mid-sentence.

When he had filled up two pages with notes, he looked me in the eye and said, “We can fix this easily enough, but I really think you’d benefit from acupuncture. Would you be willing to try it?”

I immediately froze.

“Does acupuncture scare you?” he asked, when I said nothing.

“Yes,” I replied. No point in lying, since he’d already figured me out. I had no interest at all in trying acupuncture; I had done my time with needles and it was never fun. They were all the size of darning needles, for one thing, and blood was always a factor. Mine.

Well, my magical voodoo man explained the basics and cleared up my misconceptions. I threw a hundred questions at him and he never flinched. His voice never changed its timbre, his eyes never left mine, and when he was finished with the overview, he turned up the voltage on those pure blue eyes and said, “Will you come back and try it?”

“Okay,” I heard myself say.

I walked out of the clinic with a follow up appointment and a disquieting sense that I had just surrendered my will to Dr. Svengali. Only when I was in the car and heading back to work did the charm lose its power. %&$#*%! I thought in disbelief, I got the needle guy!

To be continued …