Healthy as a Horse

Sometimes you just don’t want to get on that treadmill. Most times actually. I can think of a thousand other things I’d rather do than get on that thing. Yesterday for example I sewed up a hole in the fingertip of some gloves I never even wear - they smell like onions no matter how much I wash them - and THAT kept me away from the treadmill for a whole hour.

They’re great gloves and I have like eight pairs of them, bought on the Internet and hoarded away because I’m pretty sure they’re no longer making them.  I also love the way you’re supposed to clean them: you just put 'em on and then wash your hands in your favorite liquid detergent. It’s as easy at that and every time I do it I think “THIS is the way to bathe a baby: just figure out a way to put the baby on like a hand puppet!"  Or even if they just came with a terrycloth handle on the back.These are the things that are too weird for me to say in the paper but there’s evidently nothing you can’t say in The New Yorker. In the latest issue here's Tiny Fey using the F-word right alongside all the fancy ads like the one for that mystery camp that shows a close-up of a 12-year-old boy staring fixedly into the middle distance. The F-word! In the piece she’s agonizing about whether or not she should have another child and finally says “Maybe I’ll just wait ‘til I’m 50 and give birth to a ball of fingers.”See, she’s funny AND she’s willing to put herself in a bad light: a girl after my own heart. I tried to take up swearing ten or 15 years ago but I was too old for it; couldn’t get the hang of it at all. Plus it wouldn’t really fit with my image as a person who only uses the Mother Teresa stamp on her bills and letters.....I could go on but I turned the treadmill on like 40 minutes ago and then wandered away to get a bottled water before getting sidetracked by you guys here, and that's sure a waste of electricity! Better go turn it off and read more of this New Yorker. :-)

(Note the old guy in the background. Dangerous practice!)

Monkey on Ya Back

This faded old photo to the left is me trying to smoke on the last day of camp the summer I was 14. People were packing, and later, after the weepy rituals of Candlelight Ceremony and Good Night Circle, the friskier kids would climb onto the cabin roof and gorge themselves on contraband sweets obtained by “sneaking out,” darting down the road ducking behind trees and bushes to get to the corner store.

This was the only time I ever tried tobacco.

(I've cropped the picture to spare people the sight of a child coughing her lungs out.)

Since I seemed to be focusing on health topics here lately let’s round out the week with some observations on smoking from a site called Medicine.net. here I learned all over again that smoking:

• Stains your fingers
• Puckers your mouth
• Squints up your eyes
• Puts vertical Clint Eastwood-style line in your cheek (ha ha same cheeks!)
• And makes your skin inelastic

The funny thing is, in time all this happens to non-smokers too. I work so much with dyes and woodstains my fingers are always pigmented strangely and I have to tell you all of these other conditions are fast becoming mine as well.

To see pictures of all  of them just click on the colored hyperlinks above. Have a look, then ask yourself if  you wouldn’t just as soon stick with your more harmless obsessions like tweezing your moles and watching dumb TV.

(because it's tough to have just one :-))

and because it's not this easy to quit

Little Sir Echo

So this is me having an echo-cardiogram. The lady tech and I cut our hair and grew beards for it,  just for laughs. OK not really but she sure was funny as she sat beside me the whole time. “I don’t go on Facebook,” she said out of nowhere.  “I don’t go online at all when I’m home. I sound like Ted Kaczynski, I know, right, but seriously I have ENOUGH COMPUTER TIME here at work!”She was certainly having enough then as I lay beside her, bare from the waist up, the hospital johnnie pushed pretty much completely aside and 6 or 8 electrodes planted like so many leeches on the skin of my torso.“Sooooo, any holes?” she cheerily said, peering at what looked like a pregnant woman’s ultrasound. It was all I could do not to ask if she could see a little stem on the apple as they say, but then I realized I was looking at a site that sure does get your attention: a rhythmically repeating shimmy and jerk, a shimmy and jerk, and at the core of it this weird little valve flinging itself open and shut again with a wet sucking sound.It was, in short, my heart.But from then on it was all fun. We had me standing with all these electrodes comically affixed to my chest and a swaying pack of God -knows-what kind of circuitry affixed to my hip. I felt like a cow hooked up to a milking machine. We had me breathing hard in and out and  fast as I could, which brought me clear back to my blue ribbon fainting days as a little girl.  We had me trotting along on an up-tilted continuously-accelerating treadmill to the point of failure as they say in the gym, then hopping quick back onto the gurney to measure how long it would take for my heart to stop screaming in panic.A young exercise physiologist was also present who told me she had been a gymnast and a dancer as a girl. “Hey I didn't know you were a gymnast!” said my pal the echo-tech who owned as how she had once been a figure skater. So then we talked butt muscles and thigh strength and how the younger girl always loved old Tonya Harding bless her crooked little heart, and in general I have to say the time just flew by. I was outa there in under an 70 minutes, smiling my face off -  that is until I remembered the world-famous heart doc. "I hate how he's always after me to lose ten pounds and exercise 60 minutes a day and all that," I whined to my new best friend the echo-tech.“Pffft!” she said  “First of all you're NOT overweight and anyway what does he know, a skinny guy like that? Take it from me you NEVER wanna listen to some skinny guy!”And with that  we shook hands and I danced out the door, free as a bird until the next echo- test in late 2012. Oh yeah, that is after next Tuesday, when Skinnyman and I sit down to talk about what it showed.  :-(

resting comfortably afterward

Trout to Angelfish: Mammo-time!

A pause in the fun to note that it’s Breast Cancer Awareness month. I don’t have breast cancer in my family - we favor the sudden heart attack and the quick Fade to Black - but where we’re all living longer the chances are great that we’ll all get some kind of cancer, especially after all those years of cooking on Teflon and dancing in the mists of DDT whenever the Bug Man came to spray the neighborhood. (You’d have to be over 45 to remember that guy!)My column this week is about the despised mammogram. Just picture taking a nice fat trout and turning into an angelfish even for a quick 30 seconds– yeowch!) I'll put it in its usual This Week's Column spot above but will copy it below here too just because  it’s  important.+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++Last year when I had a mammogram I wrote about it in post called “It’s Cryin’ Time Again, You’re Gonna Squeeze Me,”  echoing the old Ray Charles song. “I have to warn you, I’m a fainter,” I told the imaging professional administering the exam as she screwed together the two icy plates of her high-tech vise.The truth is I mostly fainted in my early years, like in church when I could often be found gurgling in the pew, half caught under the kneeler. Or like that time a creaky old doctor offered to remove two tiny warts for me, causing me to still have twin scars of the exact kind you’d get if someone stabbed two glowing cigarettes into your flesh.The mammographer just smiled. “People only faint if they haven’t had breakfast. And nobody faints after 11 in the morning.” “OK” I said as we stood there, she fully clothed, I as naked from the waist up as the Venus De Milo. It was well past 11. It was, in fact, 5:30 at night.Then she asked if I did regular self-exams, causing me to blurt out the terrible truth. “Oh sure.  That is, sometimes. Well, no, not really.”“Nobody does them,” she said, all the geniality in her voice suddenly gone.She didn’t chastise me the way they do at the dentist’s when they ask about flossing and you lie and say you do it all the time. She didn’t give me a lecture. She didn’t so much as sigh. If I wanted to get sick it was fine with her, is what she was saying in all but words.“I’ve been doing this since 7:30 this morning.” And now here it was almost 6. “I’m dead on my feet:”“It’s been a long day for you,” I said sympathetically, hoping for the return of her former warmth.But “Yep,” was all she said back. Just one little tight-lipped “yep,” and in the ensuing silence I felt the full weight of her frustration with a group of people who leave themselves open to all kinds of bad possibilities just because they‘re too “busy,” or too distracted, or too limited in their vision to slide their hands around on their own bare skin now and then.The memory of this visit lives vividly in my mind and now here we are again in the month dedicated to breast cancer awareness.We women over 40 should get mammograms if our doctors recommend that we do. But even if it’s true that a lump is hard to detect with self-examination we should also show some sense and check ourselves out, in the shower, say, when the skin is soapy and we can really feel the tissue underneath.

Skinny Syndrome

7:00 am:Weatherman says snow and wind and end-of the-world rain due today. Been watchin’ the school systems marching past on the crawl line of the local news here and wait: The Pincushion School? What is that, a place devoted to instruction in the dark art of voodoo?Speaking of voodoo how many times have we all wished we could stick pins in gorgeously thin people and hit ‘em where it hurts, like right in those tiny waistlines say? Thinkin’ of thin here and wondering if my Weight Watchers meeting will still be on. (I go to the local Senior Center for my meetings because those cheery older ladies have such a sense of fun and perspective. Everyone laughs the whole time and last week we made fun of our husbands it's great.) And OK yes I've ost only half a pound in since I joined in April but hey: at least’s I haven’t gained. And when I look at the National Enquirer I feel almost glad. Tori Spelling with her long face like a horse’s faces and ribs all down her back? Ahslee Simpson like one of those big-eyed  Keane kids? Courtney Love, who used to be all curves and pouts?  Just look  at her here! Five-ten and 111 lbs.  She looks like a kitchen witch. Worse!I’m five-six. When I got married I weighed 130 but by the time my last baby was born I was down to 115 so I know: once you start losing weight it sort of IS hard to stop and I was eating normally, but maybe they all say that. Maybe Courtney and Ashlee and Tori think they’re eating normally too but you just know they aren’t. Bad as Courtney looks check out these two pictures below. See the breasts this one woman doesn’t have? I mean you can see why they didn't bother to  hide them with black rectangles.  See the hollows in the sides of this other woman’s pelvis?  Those hollows are designed to cradle the great muscles that keep us upright and allow us to lift our legs and bend and move around some. Without them what can you do but lie on the couch? And PS the heart is a muscle too which is why you die. It’s a cautionary tale, guys. Humans are seriously prone to crazy and you and I are no exception. Now go find that shovel but for God's sake eat something first!

This  young woman on the right got lucky; she recovered

Open Your Mouth and Say Ahhh!

“I got this PAIN doc.” Bet that’s what our man Obama heard  from 20 different places the second he walked into the Oval Office today and boy don’t we ALL have pain.

I have a steady pain in my neck that requires me to see a specialist in ghost-buster gear at the world-renowned Mass. General Hospital. He puts me on my side like a horse, covers my face with a cloth like I’m dead, then takes a lethal-injection needle left over from the Dead Man Walkin’ wing at Alcatraz and slides it THREE TIMES into the wee facet joints of my neck, the teeniest places imaginable where the delicate shell-like bones of the cervical vertebrae touch together - tap! - like the baby teeth of the littlest children.

The needle has in it this super-steroid called astroglide, no analog, no no wait I know, kenalog that's what it is and the first time he gave it to me in the fall I nearly threw up on his shoes. Two weeks later when he asked how it felt I had to give it to him straight. “How did it FEEL? It felt like gray death entering my body! Tell me, Doctor, has anyway ever done this to YOU!?”and he blinked a second, not really getting it, the joke of it, a doctor having a taste of his own medicine, but then burst out laughing: “NO no one has ever done this me! I’m about the only guy who knows how to do it!”

So off I went today to have this second injection because I was desperate. My man was desperate. Even my cats were desperate because no one wants to be around a person with neck pain.

The Doctor finally admitted today he could give me a couple of little pills ahead of time to take the edge off, like what people take before that big Roto-Rooter Exam everyone over 50 has to have and as I swallowed them I thought of our shiny new friend walking into the Oval Office for the first time today to see 300 million patients just like me lined up at the door.

“I have this PAIN Doc, I lost my house, my kid is both fat AND anemic and I’m out of work…"

If we had a cloth over our eyes for a while during the last eight years it is sure enough gone today, and we can finally SEE how bad things are..... So now here comes your medicine; just open your mouth and say Ahhh!

Wednesday in the Park

Today it's raining though my column for this week evokes a sunny day. It's raining and Wall Street is crumbling but I look around and see this:

1) People moving about and smiling at each other's dogs just the same.

2) Acts of kindness: the liveried man outside the big hotel notes my troubled face when I find his lot full and takes my car for me and parks it smack in front and charges me just ten bucks though I am gone nearly three hours.

3) The chance always for a smile: The Gypsy Rose School of Pole Dancing is right there beside the fancy photographic studio where I am going to get my picture taken because the Girl Scouts have asked me to as a former Leading Woman. Ruth Bramson, the great new CEO of these Girl  Scouts of Eastern Massachusetts, wants to activate all us former Leading Women; hang our portraits and get us back to mentoring those 55,000 young ladies, which is more than fine by me. Last year, when I offered a class for their Beyond Bars program I had so much fun my face hurt from smiling. (Beyond Bars brings Girl Scouts and Brownies into our two women's correctional facilities so they can have their troop meetings with their mums.)

But I guess what I should say is that I saw these things rather than that I see them because it was yesterday really and the sun shone just as it did the day I wrote this column which you will also find at the top of my home page here.

So let's have some pictures of that day now: The smokers referred to there, looking so calm and iconic you'd think they'd been there forever, like the hillside they sit on. 

The new and the old: Boston City Hall finished in 1968 and therefore brand-new in our minds,  juxtaposed with the Old North Church of "One If By Land Two if  By Sea" fame built almost 300 years ago: 

 

 

And finally a man waiting for what he needs to feel normal...

 

    

...which is all any drinker is trying to do when he drinks: Just feel normal. Just feel the way the rest of us feel when we get up, come sunny day or rainy day. We stand and stretch and the molecules sing and the bright blood froths and even the dourest among us must think - HAS to think - "Thank you God, for quick life and this new day to enjoy it in."

May He - or She - watch over us all today, the dogs and the pigeons, the smokers and the drinkers, the pole dancers, the troop leaders and the elected officials especially in whom we have placed so much trust.

Vesuvius

Remember the old 1890s Baltimore Catechism that some of us could once recite quicker than our multiplication table? It went like this:

 Q. Who created Heaven and earth and all things?

 A. God created Heaven and earth and all things.

 Q. Which are the chief creatures of God?

 A. The chief creatures of God are angels and men.

 Remember? Well, I came upon a different sort of catechism while hanging around Mass. General Hospital this past week where my doctors performed their usual funny parlor tricks, resting their tummies on my lap to peer into my nose and eyes and so on. There in the lobby they had a special booth on aneurysms with pamphlets on Defusing the Time Bomb In The Brain, a video running on a  small TV and, behind the tables, a team of kindly people to help you once you have scared the living bejesus out of yourself by stopping to read them. See if you don’t think THIS little rundown has the same matter-of-fact feeling as that primer, that Catechism of Christian Doctrine, Prepared and Enjoined by Order of the Third Council of Baltimore:

Q. What Is A Brain Aneurysm?

A. An brain aneurysm is a bubble that forms on the side of the brain artery, very much like a balloon. There are two types of aneurysms, ruptured and unruptured.

Q. Are There Any Warning Signs?

A. The classic symptom of ruptured aneurysms is the worst headache of your life.

Q.  Can Aneurysms Be Prevented?

A. Unfortunately, no!  (exclamation point theirs, believe it or not.)

Q. What Are the Odds of Surviving a Rupture?

A.  50% die outright. Of those who survive, one-third recover with some deficit, one-third with substantial deficit, and the final third may require institutionalization.

So there you have it, kids, if you had any doubt at all: We sure DO we live on the slopes of Vesuvius and either sooner or later that nice old God of Baltimore and Surrounding Towns  has fixed it so that every last one of us from the littlest sweetie-pies to the biggest bigshots, will, like it or not, ALL be together in Heaven - and there's a topic worth peering into for sure!

You’re a Mess (But We Like Ya Anyway)

(No, this is NOT two gay guys sneaking into the Kama Sutra. It's a picture of the first two cervical vertebrae, our friends C-1 and C-2, called Atlas and Axis by the folks who know 'em, the atlas because he shoulders the world, get it? The atlas bears the weight of that big old HEAD we all have wobbling atop the broomstick. Anatomy baby! There's nothing cooler!)

Three days ago the doctor explained my recent MRI to me. “The joint degeneration in your neck is much worse!" he said with a great big smile and sent me to have an X-Ray, where one of the jauntiest guys in the business was doing the honors. I explained to him what the deal was: “Next week this doctor's going to inject stuff in there, then make me have these huge boring amounts of physical therapy. First, though, he wants to see if I can even bend my neck without having my head fall off. There’s trouble in there I guess.”

“Wo, I GUESS!” he exclaimed when he looked at the image of the vertebrae in question, that little pile of Pop Beads.

“Sucks to be me, huh?”

“What did you DO to this neck?”

I sighed. I thought about telling him I fell out of a tree like my cat did, leaving her with a limp like Walter Brennan as Stumpy the Cowhand but said nothing.

“Long story, huh?”

Later, when he had the pictures actually in front of him and let me peek at them real quick I tried to get him to SAY what HE thought looked so bad. Was it the bony growth that Osteoarthritis deposits, or was it the silly putty of the bulging discs squooshing out between the Tootsie-Roll segments of this uppermost part of my spinal column?

But darned if he would say. “We can’t say a WORD,” he told me, going all businesslike.

So I was disappointed but I'm still glad I’d made him so happy earlier. I had stood in the EXACT RIGHT WAY for the magic X-Ray eye to take a picture of Pop Beads One and Two, which can only be done by opening your mouth REALLY WIDE and holding your head at just the perfect angle because IF YOU DON'T, your lower teeth and jawbone or your occipital bone in back obscure the view by trying to get in the picture too.

But the shot he took of me? Perfect in every way. See?

AWAY FROM HER & THE CAT SHAMPOOS

I’m away from her now, home again in Boston, and my big sister Nan is still in Florida; still in that Boy-in-a-Bubble world that this MRSA infection has put her in, where she can’t even take shower on account of the crucial porthole the hospital opened up in her arm. Since her week-long stay there in mid-June she's only been allowed to have little kitty-baths  - and this in a household where the real cat showers daily.

Nan and Chuck designed their bathroom in such a way that instead of a curtain the shower has two walls made of chunky glass tiles, which the cat scaled one day to oversee Chuck in his ablutions. Now Chuck is crazy about this animal and so “asked” him if wanted a little spray to the face and what do you think, the cat loved it. He now BEGS for out-and-out shampoos, complete with an Irish Spring lather-up to the head and ears. It must be like getting massage for us humans, or even massage with the special dessert thrown in for the folks who go in for that sort of thing because this cat just adores Chuck now, and follows him all over the house thanking him and licking him and sleeping in his truck when he can't get at his lap.

Nan named the cat when he first wandered into their yard as a homeless kitten. Duke she dubbed him, like they called John Wayne because little as he was he had that certain leadin'-with-ma-big-wide-shoulders-style swagger - or anyway he had it before a kitty stroke a couple of springs ago rearranged his posture some. Now he wears his head in this permanent cocked angle so now Nan calls him Two O’Clock. “Hey, Two O’Clock!” she’ll call out when he slinks by. The cat pays her no mind though; he’s too busy following Chuck, hoping for more shampoo and lap-dancing.

If you read the post underneath this you know that I went down to Florida to help Nan and Chuck as they weather this summer of Nan's sickness. This past Monday she let me go with her to the clinic that houses the Hyperbaric Chamber she must lie in for two hours every day because its oxygen-rich environment promotes healing in her foot, the site of this grievous infection. The thing looks like a big Tylenol capsule and she eases into it after the handsome tech Brian takes her vitals. On Monday he closed the cover and there she stayed, for a little over two hours before the doctor undid the dressing and looked at her poor foot, which even inside the bone is infected with this highly resistant staph infection capable of claiming your toes, your feet, your limbs and even your life.

I meanwhile sat stunned in the waiting room. I looked at the big live oak tree outside the window, wearing its Spanish moss like the torn lingerie the young Elizabeth Taylor wore in all those movies where she was for sure SEXUALLY AVAILABLE but strictly in that violet eyed upper-class British accent way.

I looked at the other clients waiting their turn, the woman who gave birth ten days ago and is one big open wound in the C-section area and so has to come have that seen to, poor dear, falling asleep in her chair.

And I brooded over the thought of what it costs to come here: a whopping $4500 per session and even with Nan's insurance she still has to pay $150 per. That will have been five days a week times ten weeks and well, you do the math.

And yet still she smiles and makes her funny remarks. She introduced Brian to me as "the Crypt Keeper" for example. He didn't mind. He gets her. He just smiled his nice smile and undid the blood pressure cuff around her little arm. "Wave to your sister," he said and she did that and he closed the lid and the session began.

Recipes for Healing

THIS IS NAN ON THE LEFT, WITH COUSIN ELEANOR

I’m in Florida, the land of scooting lizards and drinking water that smells like a swamp - only here at my sister Nan’s house Nature is banished. Her husband Chuck saw to that: he built this place five years ago and all night long the ceiling fans turn in rhythm with the comforting rumbles of the seeming dozen of systems all working to keep thing cool, dry and varmint-free.

The two of them were five years into their marriage when they came here. Chuck’s beautiful wife Betty had died of cancer and Nan’s high-energy husband Tom had died of a heart attack. Tom was one of the only two men I have ever known who would smoke while downhill skiing off the trail. He also would eat six raw hot dogs, chased by six-hard-boiled eggs, chased by a pint of ice cream. Nan and their 15-year-old daughter Gracie suffered so much when he died, as did the four wonderful kids from his first marriage all in their 20s, that tender and precarious decade.

Now Nan is suffering again: For the third time in four years she has a MRSA infection and this one is bad. She wants me to do a kind of 'public service' column about MRSA and I can try to do that as soon as I get home to Boston, but right now it's 8am and I'm sitting in this lovely tree house of a home on the bayou and the fans are turning and Nan is quietly infusing herself with the killer antibiotic Vancomycin, the only drug at all shown to be effective against this methycillin-resistant staph infection.

She has an opening in her arm where the PICC line enters, then heads north, then south again and straight to her heart. (The abbreviation stands for Peripherally Inserted Central Catheter.) It’s very important that that site remain clean and a wound care specialist comes every day to look both at it and at her foot, where the infection began. It’s in the bone still, even these seven weeks into treatment, and everyone is praying she can keep her toes. At one point they thought the foot was even a goner. At its worst Nan says it looked like a shark had bitten her. It was raw and open, pulsing and red.

She wouldn’t let me come until now. “I'm fine. I have Gracie,“ she emailed me the one time. “I have Chuck.” But every single day she has to go for what could end up being nine or even ten weeks to lie for two hours each time in the Hyperbaric Chamber which is said to speed healing. And then there are the doctor’s appointments. And Gracie couldn't work from this house forever. And on the phone once Chuck said in a very small voice, “I’m just having a little trouble with the meals."

So I got on the plane the second Nan gave me the green light. I here came Thursday at 4:00 and I will leave tomorrow morning at 10:00 and in that time I have made a Chicken Cassoulet meal and a heart Meaty Loaf meal; an old-fashioned Roast with Pan Gravy, and a Baked Ziti that would feed a dozen; a hot Pear, Pork and Arugula Dish with Walnuts and Bleu Cheese and a Chopped Broccoli Salad with Bacon Bits Cheddar and Red Onion. Yesterday I went to the Winn-Dixie and bought ten Tupperware containers and today I will start freezing it all, because they have barely made a dent in it, natch.

It’s funny though: I’m just looking at this list to see that that while the Pork and Arugula Salad is a new favorite of ours everything else has meaning: The Roast with Gravy and the Zesty Meat Loaf were our Mom’s specialty. My girl Annie-the-chef told me to make the Baked Ziti and sent me down here with the recipe that bears her quirky stamp (“Mix the whole mess up in a bowl...”) The Chicken Cassoulet is our cousin’s Carolyn’s specialty and the Cheesy Broccoli Salad is Cousin Eleanor's. I’m pretty sure Eleanor herself is coming at the end of August. I know Cousin Sheila arrives in just two weeks. My girl Carrie is sending a CD and a book down. And faithful-hearted Cousin Mary Lou calls and calls, expressing love and compassion though Nan is too weak yet to tackle a phone call.

Dodson is a beloved honorary son of David and me and he might as well be son to Nan and Chuck too for how they love him and his new bride Veronica - just as much as we do. They came here to Tarpon Springs from Sarasota just for the day Saturday and just sat with us on our couch. We are all on the couch it feels like. We are together in spirit, and hoping for our miracle.

The Grouchy and the Hurt and the Kids All Going to Proms

Kind of a cold rainy darn day here. I had my session with John at Fitness Together where the motto is One Client One Trainer One Goal, the goal being to separate you from your money as fast as possible, JUST KIDDING GUYS, John is wonderful! I have a messed-up neck because I jumped out of bed during a leg cramp six years ago, fainted, fell to the floor like a tray full of dishes, woke after a bit, got up and thought I'd better go to the bathroom and see if my head was still attached, lurched toward the john and fainted THERE, this time smashing the corner of my skull on the pointy Corian vanity top, bouncing off the tile floor and coming to rest at last, out cold. I have scant memory of that tumble to be honest and not much more about the one before it and only really KNOW that I had these two falls because when the lovely people hosting me at this gracious home saw me in the morning they said “Um, how did you sleep?” and when I said “Great!” they said “Then WHAT IN HELL were those two loud crashes five minutes apart at 1am?!"

Anyway it yanked my neck into a state of permanent weirdness and then I got the arthuritis in it so I have to be careful is the best I can say. Oh and plus (how boring is this?) now I have scoliosis too and a rib cage that’s trying to screw itself into my pelvis, rotating down and down to collapse entirely onto my hips (and do what? send my internal organs out through my mouth? ) So John stretches me and we strengthen the weak parts and note the places where movement is constricted etc… He is very kind and also funny and smart and he can really “see” structure.

Some bad things happened in the last 24 hours: I got into a very uncomfortable situation with a guy who I was slow to realize has HATED ME FOR YEARS plus I’m still bleary with fatigue and now I've burned the onions I was making to bring to Uncle Ed along with the pork tenderloin I made him and the fresh corn and all but some good things have happened too: David was supposed to go to Kentucky for three days yesterday but they cancelled his flight and he basically decided 'Screw Kentucky' and came home to his nice wife instead and we went to be early, and he’s coming home to me AGAIN TONIGHT and we’ll make a fire and drink wine and read our books and how great is that to be a married lady? They HAVE to come home to you every night! And then there’s this awesome gizmo at the top here that I saw in a catalogue and so maybe I'll send away for that and stretch my little neck daily while going to see John too of course. I haven’t leapt out of bed with leg cramps since my doctor told me to embrace the pain instead so maybe all’s right with the world after all and let’s bring that food to Uncle Ed and then come home and get COZY!

The young people in our town have their senior prom tonight so maybe if he finds a minute God could look in on them and keep them safe, and all children and even stupid Bill Clinton who broke our hearts and his poor exhausted amazing wife too and really all of us, the ones we love and the pains in our ass and even the ones who hate us Amen.