Saturday, April 26, 2014Announcing new blog!Happy to announce that we've set up a new blog to honor the shift in content. It's called "Living into the Answer: My journey with breast cancer and beyond."All new writing will be posted there, for the foreseeable future. AIJ will still remain active and available. Thank you for your interest! # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 5:57 PM 0 comments  
Pain Management: Part 1 (Post op)Pain. There's a bunch of different kinds of it, and over the last week I have become a connoisseur.There is muscle pain, such as when someone slices into your pectoral and then expects you to move your arm. There is incision pain, such as when someone slices into your skin to remove a body part. There is nerve pain, such as when nerves are severed and then flip all over the place like live wires snaking all over the ground, sparking and flipping out like in a horror movie about tornados or earthquakes. There is deep pain, so deep you don't even know it until you realize your teeth are clenched and your face is frozen into the permanent rictus of a brave half smile. There is surface pain, so evanescent that even a breath of breeze, or a wrinkle in the sheets, or a sleeve brushing up against the skin makes you inhale sharply and say (to yourself) (usually) what the FUCK? And there is everything in between. This week we've been exploring these things. And let me make something clear: it's not been horrible, it's not been excruciating, I've never cried from it (well, more on that later). On the scale they tell you to rate these things it's been a continual 3 (at the best) to 6 (at the worst). Usually like a four. Which, all things considered, is really standable. The thing that finally made me cry is that it's just been incessant. Grinding me down at a low, psychic level, until I caved in and started really being unable to deal with it. That's the end point of this week, the second full week after surgery. Let me walk you through the whole timeline. After the surgery: fabulous! Dancing the fandango. I had this orb thing hanging around my neck, plugged right into my body to keep a steady infusion of numbing agent dripping into the area. Fantastic. No pain. Loved it. This was supplemented by a steady regimen of two Percocets every 4 - 6 hours, whether I wanted it or not. Loved that even more. Nighty night. Slept like an angel. Coming home. Still pretty good. Infusion thing still dripping into me steadily, everyone saying keep ahead of the pain. Lovely blissful long moments of just lying in bed and breathing deeply, feeling lovely, wandering through the gardens of my thoughts for hours, enjoying the relief of being post op, the sense of being taken care of, the flowers and love permeating the house. Three/four days post op. Well, the annoying little infusion thing ran out, as it was meant to. That caused a little bit of a problem. Now I was living completely on the Percocets. Starting to get a bit nauseated with food, when I ate, which was seldom. Starting to need to deal more aggressively with constipation. A little tenuous on the pain spectrum, but hanging in. Then, the weekend. On Sunday I realize I'm going to run out of Percocet before my doctor's appt on Monday. That's when the fun begins. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 1:33 PM 0 comments
Pain Management: Part 2 (My life as a junkie)I call the pharmacy (not our regular one, the one across from the hospital). A snippy woman with a thick accent and an attitude that implies I just got between her and her favorite reality show answers. I tell her I need a refill and start to give her the number: "201--"She stops me before I get to the fourth digit. Oh NO, she says, we can't refill a prescription that starts with a 2. That's a controlled substance. I say, well, I know it's a controlled substance... I was just calling to find out -- We can't refill it, she says. I say, I am getting that, but what I need to know is what I need to do to -- We can't refill it, she says. What if I get the doctor to call you-- We can't refill it, she says. Excuse me. What I was saying is what if I get the doctor to call you and fax a prescription to you? We can't refill it, you can only refill this with a physical handwritten prescription, and by this point her voice and tone are super harsh and judgmental, like I'm some fucking tweaker from Modesto trying to game the system and get some fun stuff for me and my greasy haired biker boyfriend. I get pissed off (as all good drug addicts do when someone is standing in the way of their fix) and say Hey, you don't have to get mad at me, I'm just asking a question here and trying to figure out how to get this to work. We can't refill it, she says. I hang up. I call the prescribing doctor's office. The clinic is closed; I can't get a physical Rx until Monday. I call my own pharmacy, where we've been going for years. Here's my problem, I say. The guy listens to me. Just the fact that he's listening is helping my pain level go down. He suggests I switch to something called Norco (not the town in Central California, I'm assuming, although I'd probably be having better luck up there on any given street corner). He gives me the dosage that will best match the Percocet and says it's about 20% less powerful but close enough and will get me through the day until I can see my other doc on Monday. I call the prescribing doctor's office back. They have their doctor on call call me back. I talk to her and she says the Norco is fine. She calls it in. Roger picks it up. Done. Now I can get through to Monday. Monday I see my oncological surgeon. Everything looking good. I tell her the Percoset/Norco saga. She says, OK... but at this point we want to wean you off everything, so I'm going to prescribe 600 mg of ibuprofen every 6 hours and you can take the Norco as needed for breakthrough pain. That's where the problems start. Because I'm both a weenie who can catalog five differentiations of pain (as evidenced earlier) and because I'm a tough little soldier. If they don't want me on the narcotics, fine. I won't be. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 1:27 PM 0 comments
Pain Management: Part 3 (The weaning / the keening)Monday: OK. Norco every six hours; ibuprofen every six hours.Tuesday: I wake up semi frozen in pain; it's been all night and I am EMPTY. I stagger to the bathroom and take the ibuprofen, stagger to the kitchen to eat a banana, and stagger back to bed. I have a busy day. It's actually OK. I still take the Norco every six hours. It's OK. Wednesday: Wake up even more frozen in pain. Stagger, stagger, stagger. I can do this. I try to sleep a lot. I notice I'm not moving as much. Thursday: Wake up super frozen. I think I ask someone to bring me the ibuprofen. I stagger through the day. A better day, a little more movement. And it's good to have the narcs out of my system. It's just that I have this ongoing nerve pain. It never goes away. I go to acupuncture and she works on it. I'm starting to crack. Thursday night I get weepy. I realize that I'm just so so so so fucking sick of all this. That there are more horrors and depredations coming up. That I'm still not well from the surgery. That I'm sick of the drain and the pain and just the overall LENGTH of this thing. I'm barely 15 minutes into this and I'm just so... damn... tired of it all. It's not going away. It's not going away until I get through all of it. It's the crossing of the desert, the march across Mordor, the trial by fire, Ulysses' struggle to get home, the slaying of the dragon. I can't quit, I can't shirk, I can't refuse. I can only do it. And I'm so so so sick of this ongoing pain in my arm. It's not unendurable. It's not excruciating. It's just there, and always has been there, and I'm so sick of it being there. I get weepy. I lose heart. I crumble inside before this silly, stupid, really little thing. And then today. Today is just one long series of cluster fucks after another. It starts with my Bright Idea. The Norco that they don't want me to take is part acetaminophen. Like 325mg. Why couldn't I take an actually real grownup size dose of Tylenol instead of the Norco...and not have the narcotic issue but actually enhance the pain killing efficacy? Good idea! I call my oncological surgeon's office this morning to check out this new plan. Her assistant gets the problem and suggests I try out my Bright Idea for the rest of the day and check in with her later. Great. Got it. I take the double Tylenol and wait for blessed relief. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 1:25 PM 0 comments
Pain Management: Part 4 (The antibiotics sidebar)Meanwhile.There's the sad sad tale of the antibiotics. The day after the surgery, Roger went to a place we now call "the pharmacy we've never used before and will never use again." These are the same people who yelled at me for the Percoset questions, but I'm getting ahead of this part of the story. He ran across to this pharmacy (which you'll note that I'm trying to politely refrain from naming, except to mention that it's in the Von's across from Huntington Hospital) while I'm being discharged to fill the two prescriptions -- the Percoset and an antibiotic. He gets two little prescription bottles. One with the Percoset, and one filled with 26 capsules of the antibiotics with instructions to take three, eight hours apart daily for fourteen days. Now, please... just stop for a second and visualize this with me. Three capsules, eight hours apart, for fourteen days. Even in my blissful stupor, I can multiply that and come up with... uh... a boat load of pills. Not 26. Not a small bottles' worth. We all look at these instructions and the bottle of capsules and back at the instructions again, and the only thing we can conclude is that what they REALLY mean is to take ONE capsule every eight hours for a total of three a day, because otherwise they've only give us enough for, like, almost three days?.... with one dose being short?.... it makes no sense. So I take one capsule every eight hours, three times a day, starting a week ago Tuesday. On Monday I take the little bottle and show it to my oncological surgeon to see what she thinks; she's confused; her assistant is confused. We're all confused. (Just to kinda sorta clarify: the plastic surgeon prescribed this stuff but I was visiting the oncological surgeon; they work as a team and are fully interchangeable, so either can make a call about medications etc.) At about this point I realize that on top of all this weird confusion, I'm going to run out on Thursday rather than making it all the way to next Monday for the full course. I actually believe at this point someone called in the good pharmacy to put a prescription in, but it's probably still sitting there because on Weds of this week I get an automated call from the pharmacy we'll never use again saying the prescription is ready to be picked up. OK, fine. Well, I think, at least they're kind of on top of things, right? And maybe their sophisticate auto dialer system knows that I'm about to run out on Thursday? That's cool. I guess they may be good guys after all... blah de blah de blah. I'm actually chilling out about this pharmacy (this is after the tweaker insinuation call I detailed earlier), until Roger picks up the new prescription yesterday, and gets a whole honking CANISTER of pills, 100 of them to be precise. WTF? Well, it turns out that that's the remainder of the pills they owe us. Roger questions the quantity when he picks up the boatload of pills; they tell him this is the rest of the Rx and the original wasn't completely filled. Well, we kind of knew that (as obviously we had to come back), but... did we understand the instructions wrong and take completely the wrong amount this whole time? Like, why would they give me an amount for only two days without telling us? I look at the hundred capsules, add them to the 26 I got originally, decide to finally do some math and multiplied nine (three capsules three times a day) times 14, and get 126. Which means, yes. They gave me 26 first, without telling us, and then -- a week after those 26 ran out -- informed us that the remaining 100 were now available. At this point I email the prescribing doctor (I know, about a week too late.) I tell her the whole sad story and she does confirm, yes, 3x3 a day. So I feel like a doofus because, really, I'm a technical writer! I know how to write and to follow instruction! And we did really not follow the original instructions to a tee... but, on the other hand... tiny vial? 26? No notification? No instructions to come back? It made no sense. I heft up this humongous vial full of capsules and I call the pharmacy we'll never go to again myself, asking them nicely if they have an email that I can write a formal complaint to. I do kind of become my dad when I'm laying around the house all the time; a perpetual crank, he was always getting into verbal fisticuffs with the people he did random daily business with. But really... seriously...26? No notification? I could have died here, people, from some horrible infection.... Hold please, they say. Several people pick up and several times I say the same thing and get put back on hold. Eventually of course I get someone who is actually now interested in what I have to say. I tell her the story. Oh, so sorry, she says. Yes, this was only a PARTIAL fulfillment of the prescription. Only a couple of DAY's worth or so. I'm, like, I GET that now.. but... you know, shouldn't you have told us about this? She's, like, absolutely. I am so sorry. They should have told your husband. I'm, like, you do understand that if I got an infection it would be totally your fault, right? She's like, oh yeah, we are so sorry. And I'm, like, OK. So you give us this weird small amount and you don't tell us, and ... they're going to run out in like two days... so why did we get the message to pick up the rest of the pills, like, you know, a WHOLE FUCKING WEEK LATER? And they're like, oh yeah, we're so sorry about that too. Maybe your husband signed for the other pills and since he signed for something the automatic call back thingy didn't trigger to call you back when the other Rx was actually FILLED, but actually a week later. And I'm, like, did you get the part where if I got an infection I could sue your fucking ASSES and end up owning your stupid Von's? And by the way I was going to CC my attorney on the email that you still won't give me the ADDRESS FOR? Depending on how cranky I feel, I'll probably call the manager back on Sunday, when she's there, and do the same thing again with her. And hope nothing infects in the meantime. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 1:24 PM 0 comments
Pain Management: Part 5 (The Home Depot sidebar)Meanwhile.My mom's condo decided to get vacated in April. The lovely tenants, no sarcasm, who moved out happened to cause enough damage to part of the kitchen that we have been needing to rebuild the cooktop and counter, in our spare time, during all of this. So we went to Home Depot the weekend before my surgery and opened up a Home Depot credit card and put the cooktop and a buncha stuff on it and they then hooked us up with a service called Red Beacon that shoots out a description of the work that needs to be done and contractors bid on it and then you pay Red Beacon online and then Red Beacon pays the contractors and it's all cool. The plan was to put all this stuff on the new HD credit card and have my mom pay it off and we avoid cash flow issues for everyone and get the job done now. Easy peasy. So we buy the stuff and we meet the contractor dude and between clients and driving people around and fetching things for me and taking care of the dog and feeding us all, Roger has been going back and forth to the condo. The work got done Wednesday and finished up yesterday and, thanks to the miracle of modern technology, I get an email from Red Beacon that says your invoice is ready, just click HERE and pay for it. Voila. We are SO on top of things that we can remodel a part of a kitchen AND deal with breast cancer and maintain our schedules (well, some of us) and juggle kids and the dog and the cat because of TECHNOLOGY and our amazing facility with it. I click the button, I whip out my Home Depot credit card, I enter the numbers, I enter the funny three digit goodie on the back, and then I start... looking... for the... expiration. Date. Of which there is none. Whaaa...? No expiration date? I turn the card around and around about twenty times. No expiration date. That's... weird. I plug in something thinking the field just needs something filled in. I work in the software biz. I know how easily these things can be tricked. I'm smart like that. I click Submit. Nada. Won't take it. I figure out how to call Red Beacon. A guy answers who, I'm sorry, sounds like he just woke up from about a two year nap out behind the hay barn after a six year moonshine bender. I tell him the problem and ask if he can plug the numbers in manually. The answer, after he puts me on hold and checks with someone: They don't take Home Depot credit cards. WTF? Nope. Don't take them. But...but... that's why I... we... but I'm going to get nowhere with him. I call the woman we worked with at HD. She has no idea what I'm talking about. Of course it should work. She calls her manager. Her manager confirms: no HD credit cards can work with Red Beacon. I call customer service to see if they know about this. As a matter of fact, they do not. The first guy I talk to in customer service sends me to his manager (who knows nothing about this), and then I talk to that manager's manager. THAT manager had no idea this doesn't work so he puts me aside while he calls the district manager. THAT manager has no idea this doesn't work so he has to talk to HIS manager. I'm so not kidding. And then meanwhile the manager I've been talking to says he may also call the bank manager because it really should work because, after all, Home Depot OWNS Red Beacon. At the end of the call, the district manager's manager is going to have to call someone back, so I leave my number, hang up, and put the charge on my own personal card and we'll figure it out later. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 1:23 PM 0 comments
Pain Management: Part 6 (Return to the new normal)Remember my arm? It still hurts.While dealing with all of the above -- the antibiotics, the Home Depot, the crankiness, the pain -- yes indeed, I start feeling dampness below the place where the tube inserts into my chest wall. Like, my tube is leaking. I have felt this on and off for the last few days and now it's happening when I'm not moving or stretching too much. Not good. No bueno. For the second time now I call my doctor's office. Hiya remember me? Yes, the pain is still there, AND I'm now leaking. Hmmmm. This is kind of a problem. I need to come in before the end of the day. So I round up Spencer, he drives me up there, I go on in, my doctor's assistant fixes the tube, puts some new gauze on me and says oh, yeah, regarding the iboprofen/acetaminophen idea? the doctor says that sometimes the pain just doesn't respond. And then she writes me a prescription, a physical handwritten non-fax, non-voice mail, prescription for Percoset. (Remember Percoset?) Just take some of this, she says. No need to really be that uncomfortable. Alrighty then. I tell the whole sad story to the pharmacist at our regular wonderful caring Ralph's Pharmacy down on Garfield. He says, wow, that's quite a step down from Percoset to Ibuprofen. I'm like, all, tell me about it. He hands me the vial, says there are 30 in there, and really, truly, I should just go home and take it easy. It was the most compassionate phrase, and the most logical and straightforward interaction, I'd had all day. So. Here we are at the end of the day. I'd say the whole day could be categorized as one big huge "Unavoidable Other." (Or, was all the back and forth avoidable? I don't know. I really don't.) Body points? Well, I'm no longer leaking, so there's that. Soul points? Salvaged by a terrific dinner procured by Roger from Carmine's followed by a whole family viewing of Fantastic Mr. Fox. And some great moments wedged in between. Driving around with Spencer, picking up Taylor at the train station, running through good names for the new blog. So, oddly enough, there was a lot of soul going on today. Just in the most unlikely moments. Mind points? I think I lost all of them for the entire week. And... I did come home. I did take Percoset. I did manage to enjoy the movie. But my arm? Still hurts, baby. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 1:19 PM 0 comments
Friday, April 25, 2014Body/Mind/Soul exchanges (part II)I've been playing with this mind/body/soul thing for a couple of days now and it has yielded some interesting insights and results.Two days ago, Wednesday, I kept track of just about everything I did that took more than 15 minutes or so. I gave everything a point value. This included taking a shower (2 body points, higher than I probably normally would because it was the first shower since surgery), taking my dog Sam on a walk (2 body points plus 2 soul points), and paying bills (4 unavoidable other points). At the end of the day, I added everything up. I had about 32 body/mind/soul points and 8 other points. This worked down to a ratio of 20% body, 35% mind, 25% soul, and 20% other. There were no unavoidable other points. Tracking these things led to some interesting choices as I went through the day. For starters, I did not check my email obsessively every 20 minutes. Checking once every four hours or so could be considered an "unavoidable other" activity or even lead to something nutritious. Checking every 20 minutes would have to be counted as an "avoidable other" activity -- so I didn't. Then, later that evening, my son was in his room on his computer (as usual) and I was in my room reading or looking at my phone (as usual). I looked at my values and realized I'd done plenty of brain work, enough body work, but I was low on the soul points. I could sit and continue reading (which would have been fine), but actually making some popcorn and watching a good movie would be even more soul enhancing. Because I don't do it very much, cooking is very soulful for me, especially now when the act is a little bit of a challenge and therefore a little more satisfying. So I decided to do that. I made the popcorn, invited Taylor out to join me, we flipped on the telly randomly, found a delightful little coming of age movie, and ended up watching the whole thing together while munching on popcorn. Bingo! Huge soul points, and a perfect ending to the day. It was a good day. I felt good at the end of it, there was a rough balance between the various parts. I did not prod myself into doing more editing work, as I could very well have. I made sure to give the dog at least one walk, as I could have easily avoided. The act of tracking these things worked pretty well. Yesterday was not so good a day. As the day went on, it just didn't feel like I had that much to track. I did an errand with Roger, I ate lunch out in the real world, I got my hair washed, I even treated myself and my friend Jane to a manicure at the local salon (where I got a cute little pedi.) It was a day of pretty high activity (for me these days), and a lot of conversation, and I got stuff done. But when I came back and wrote everything down I realized that my total points were about 14 points, breaking down to be 48% body, 40% soul, about 1% mind, and 1% unavoidable other. And I felt crappy. My pain is wearing me down, I felt listless, my brain was going down paths I really didn't want it to go down. I hadn't written anything, I hadn't done any billable (or even non-billable work). I just felt blah. Once I wrote everything down I realized that even though I had been enjoyably busy all day it ended up being kind of an iceberg day, rather than a spinach day. Both days tasted like salad, but the overall point value was higher the day before. Additionally, there was a distinct drop in the mind points, which I found interesting. Usually the brain work is the stuff that overwhelms everything else. But yesterday there was none, and I felt the disparity. Interesting. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 11:13 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, April 23, 2014Vibrant, ecstatic healthI wrote this the night before going into surgery. Must have forgotten to post it. Here it is... a good "before" snapshot for me to remember, as well as an "after" snapshot for me to strive for.I had a moment driving back out to the west end of the valley where my body remembered some long ago summer morning, driving to the beach. I think it was Big Sur, while I was living in Santa Cruz. The trigger was this profound sense of vibrancy and health I felt in my body. It must have been the endorphins I'd generated on my bike ride. It was a high so rich and so deeply felt... my body just feeling so in tune with the music and rhythms of the world. Better than sex, is how Spencer classifies a good bike ride. And, while that was more information than I strictly needed, and while I would hesitate to go that far, boy... it comes close. I had a lovely day. I had to drop Taylor off at his martial arts studio in the valley and kill about four hours before picking him up. I packed the new bike in the truck, dropped him off, and then headed back to Griffith Park, to ride my old loop and see if I still had it in me. I did. After 30 years.. which sounds like such a long time ... I still remembered certain aspects of the trail very clearly. This is where I start gathering up momentum because there's a hill right around the corner. This is where I really can pick up speed, hunkering down and crouching into the bottom of the dropped bars. I have to attribute it to the new fangled bike, but the time to make the 8 mile round trip was the same as when I did it in the 80's, and the fatigue factor was not significantly worse. I ended up covered in sweat, having screamed and sung and talked to myself for the 40 minutes of the ride. I pumped it out, bobbing to the music from my iPhone, and got a whole lot of yayas out. It carried me the whole day and into the evening. Afterwards, I had lunch with a girlfriend, and we talked and laughed and had a great time. She gave me a beautiful plant for the back patio, and a little statuary of a meditating frog, and we talked about all the stuff we talk about. A good day. Tomorrow will be a good day too. I am no longer seeing it as losing a part of me, but more that I am gaining something new. It will be a new part of me. It will also be mine. Not the original parts, true... but hopefully close enough. And, it will be disease free. Tomorrow at this time, I'm trusting that the cancer will be out of me, at least as much as we can possibly know about. That will be good. The cancer has done its job, its soul-awakening, life-affirming job... and now it's time for it to go. I will be making a descent into the depersonified world of hospitals and procedures for a short while. But I always find places like that somewhat fascinating. Hives within hives. I'm sure they'll take good care of me. And while I'm being prepped, I'm going to remember all the support I'm getting from friends and family, all the emails and texts I received today. The love I'm feeling is palpable, immense, and deeply affecting. I'm going to remember that, and the image of the pavement zipping by underneath my pedaling feet. I'm going to remember the feel of sun on my face and the breeze on the water as we sail the bay, the Golden Gate bridge high overhead. I'm going to remember that feeling of youth and vibrancy of that long forgotten day, going to the beach in Big Sur, my body humming from the simple joy of existence. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 6:14 PM 0 comments
Weight Watchers for the SoulAs I'm feeling better, I now am needing to start thinking about how to prioritize my time. Since I really intend for this to be a time of deep contemplation about how I live my life, I think the prioritization of time and energy expense is a vital thing to grapple with.So, here's what I'm noodling on today. First, I need to rearrange the queue. It's the oxygen mask dilemma: do I put the mask on myself first so I can better save the others around me, or do I save the others around me and die in the process? Obviously the former. Which is already a challenge to me. But, let's assume I can change my default impulse and keep myself in front of the queue rather than always being polite and letting others' needs cut in front of me. I get to have a say and a priority here. Assuming that, how do I manage that prioritization myself? My working model for today is that there are three categories of things in life that need to be balanced and nourished: body, mind, and soul. If these three areas are well taken care of, I think that makes for a pretty healthy life. Let me define some terms. Health, to me, means balance and harmony, in whatever area. Eastern medicine strives to bring balance and harmony to the body, by balancing the qi. Once balanced, the energy should flow evenly, bringing harmony to the being as a whole. I think that overall health means making sure that body, mind, and soul all need to be nourished, thriving, and in balance with each other. A nourishing activity is an activity that produces greater net well being. The act of consuming a food, or performing an action, that results in more energy, greater balance and harmony, than there was before, is a healthy activity. A negative nourishing activity, is an activity that results in less net well being. Either the act of the activity is so draining that it ends up depleting rather than enhancing the resources, or the activity itself is simply not aimed or devoted to increasing health -- either way, it's a negative nourishing activity. How to judge if something is a nourishing activity or not? I think you can tell in two ways: 1) before the activity, do I have a sense of excitement or dread looking forward to doing it? 2) After the activity, do I have a sense of being enhanced or depleted? I can be tired at the end of something but still enhanced (that sense of "good tired"). Or I can be drained and depleted, which is no bueno. So, how does this work out? For now, I'm dividing my life into the three categories of body, mind, and soul, and then putting activities into each category. Like this: Mind:
In a bit, when I'm done with this, I'm going to do some editing work on a book about Armenian musical history. It pays me a bit of money, it uses my writing skills, but it's a slog. It's not necessarily a negative nutritional slog, but it's not as highly nutritional as writing this has been. So maybe I'll allocate it a Mind point value of, say, 2. I just had a conversation with my mother. Talking to her gives me some soul nutrition, but it's also an Unavoidable Other. So maybe I would give that a Soul point value of 1, and an Unavoidable Other point value of 1. If it had gone on very long, or become counterproductive, maybe those numbers would be in the negatives, or move into an Avoidable Other category. Negative values can also be attributed -- if something is depleting or of negative nutritional value. I could also argue that there could be occasions where there are mixed values, say, indulging in a beer after a long sweaty bike ride. The beer would be low or negative on the body point scale, but high on the soul scale. And, of course, I'm in a false modality right now, as I'm not working. Working, for the most part, will change my balance around. I won't have the option to stop work after two hours to get some soul time in. But it will fulfill most of my daily Mind requirements, and also inform me what I need to do off hours (work more? NO! Read more, walk more, visit the nursery, watch a good movie with the kids? YES!) Also, it may help to prioritize within work hours -- to maximize the high nutritional value of writing well, analyzing thoughtfully, using the brain that they're hiring me to use, rather than to engage in meaningless chit chat or waste time in the myriad other ways one can waste time in a corporate office environment. It's like Weight Watchers for the soul! Striving to get balance in the various categories. The point is not to become a complete anal retentive jerk about this, but to actually make me conscious how my prioritization of tasks lead towards or detract from balance and harmony. Maybe this is me with too much time on my hands. But it seems to have some interesting possibilities for someone who is looking to overhaul a lifestyle at a molecular level. More later. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 11:39 AM 0 comments
Tuesday, April 22, 201410 things I've learned so far1) Daylight is a nice time of the day.2) My house is a very peaceful place in the middle of the day. Peaceful to the point of looking somewhat post-apocalyptic. The dog looks like road kill, asleep. The cat is stretched out on the bed, extravagantly relaxed, and asleep. Occasionally my son comes home from work, watches an episode of something on his computer, and stretches out on the sofa, asleep. Sometimes even my hard working husband slips home and takes a quick nap between clients. Who knew??? It's siesta time, and no one sent me the memo... until this week. 3) Narcotics are good for pain. They are good for sleeping. (See #2 above). They are excellent for feeling very very peaceful. 4) Narcotics are not so good for the digestive system. Narcotics suppress the appetite, and the bowels, and everything in between. 5) Narcotics are not a good way to come up with creative ideas. (My brilliant tagline for a constipation remedy came to me in a blinding vision around Day 3: "Choosing to defeat social candy") (I know. WTF.) 6) There are some good books out there. Currently in the middle of The Goldfinch, by Donna Tartt. A long mother, but super good and an excellent way to fade in and out of reality. 7) Walking: good. 8) Eating: good. 9) If you lose a body part to cancer, it's much more healthy to say "I've gained a cancer free body" than "I've lost a body part." 10) There can actually be a point, or I think I'm seeing that possibility, where one can be awake and not be tired and longing for the next nap. I think that's called being... relaxed? rested enough? Haven't felt this way for a long long time. I'm exploring the idea and will get back to you on this. More later. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 10:26 AM 0 comments
Sunday, April 20, 2014Easter Morning Easter. The ascent from the underworld. The cycle of the seasons. The celebration of movement from death and dying, to life and rebirth. It's a good holiday to have today. It's good to take a moment to appreciate the true nature of things in this world. Because our planet turns, we have the seasons. We move from periods of life to death and back again.  Spring is the season of starting fresh, creating new life. The birds are nesting and soon will be hatching. The hummingbirds are mating with crazy erratic air shows. Feathers are brilliant and joyous and enticing. Spring is the inhale, bringing it all inside, gathering the widest spectrum of life and embracing it fully. The summer will soon be on us, throbbing with heat and the pulse of youth. Summer is surfs up, long evenings of barbeques and laughter, tanned skin that smells of salt and sun. Summer is life being well lived, with long days of sunshine and plants that gulp in the vitamins and grow to their fullest expressions. Summer is the pause at the top of the inhale, where we assimilate life, holding it within ourselves and basking in its nourishment.   Today we are celebrating rebirth and life. I am still in the underworld, but am taking my thought process today to images of a full return to life. Boogie boarding, bicycling, walking, breathing the air in the freshness of the morning when we go out to bird. Feeling whole in body, without pain, without disease.  The ascent will happen, as it always does. And it will be followed by other descents, as it always will. The circle is the beautiful thing. The circle is the paradox and the heartbreaker, the thing that causes us to lift up our hands in supplication and joy.  Thank you to my friends, family, and colleagues for all the beautiful flowers, which are making my home a glorious celebration of life, beauty, and rebirth during these difficult days. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 8:37 AM 0 comments
Sunday, April 13, 2014The second cakeThrough a lovely set of serendipitous events, a book has come into my life which has really been an amazing read. It's called Close to the Bone, by Jean Shinoda Bolen. It's about the soul-deepening experience that a life-threatening illness can open us up to.As a Jungian specialist, she uses a lot of mythological metaphor as a springboard for her exploration of this subject. The first one she gets into is the story of Persephone. Picking flowers in a field one day, the earth suddenly opens in front of her and she is abducted by Hades and taken into the underworld. Her whole world is stripped and turned upside down. Bolen makes the point that this is what being told you have a life-threatening illness is like; you are suddenly in a world where none of the old rules apply, none of your strategies for coping are relevant, and other people are in control of your fate. Another story that really resonates with me is the story of Psyche. Psyche is given a task to go into the underworld. She is given two cakes -- one to distract Cerberus, the watchdog at the gates, when she enters the underworld, and one to distract him when she is ready to leave. She is also told that she will be tempted to provide help to others, but she is instructed to say no each time. As she was forewarned, she encountered an old man carrying a large bundle who asks her to pick up some twigs for him. She encountered three old women who asked them to help her with their weaving. She saw an old man floundering in the Styx who held out his hand for her to grasp. Each time she had to say no, because to say yes would require putting down the second cake. And if she did that, she would never escape back to the light again. As I prepare for tomorrow, and the journey ahead, these two stories really resonate with me. The first thing that I will have to give up as I descend, is electronic communication. First, it will be my choice as I try to spend today getting physically and mentally ready. Thereafter, my radio silence will be enforced by whatever physical state I'm in. I am also saying no a lot. I have already canceled an opera board meeting tonight, which felt good on some levels. On other levels, I hate putting things off until later... but in this case it was necessary. I am going to have to say no to good friends when they want to visit, if I don't feel up to visiting. Instead of doing everything I can do, I'll do everything I should do. For myself. I'm going to try to learn how to answer the question of what do I want more readily. It's always been a stumper. What are my needs right now? What would nourish me best? It's the difference between not eating badly, and eating actually well. I used to say I ate pretty well because I did not always order onion rings, nor did I have a beer with every meal. There's a big difference between that and eating really nutritious foods on purpose to really nourish all your cells and body. It's going to be an interesting challenge to do that with other aspects of nourishment as well. Instead of merely avoiding toxic situations, I need to actively engage primarily in activities that will feed my soul, strengthen my spirit. So that's where I'm going. I may be unable to communicate for awhile. I may need to be quiet. I may be making choices that are different than they might once have been. Most of all, I will be making sure to hang onto that second cake, so I can come out of this first part of my journey quickly... and with enough strength to get me through the next part. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 8:19 AM 1 comments
TMIIf you ever find yourself at the very beginning of a long, slow, year-long train wreck, my advice to you is to not spend your hours researching train wrecks on the web. There is so much information out there about how badly trains can wreck, and what the precise trajectory of most derailments are, and how many survivors can be expected (depending on how fast the train was going and what the weather conditions are), and whether people sitting in the front of the train are more likely to have their heads severed as opposed to suffering spinal compression and be paralyzed for life.You can read all the stories about people who survived train wrecks, and also people who blame the train industry in general for their lack of safety and protocols. You can read about people who never go on trains for this very reason, and then you can change to reading about car wrecks and roller blade accidents and how many former train riders are implicated in those. In short: too much information. Knowledge is power. And yet, really, do I want to know how prevalent depression is after a train wreck? Or how radically life expectancy is liable to change? Do we really really want to know these things? The other day I wrote that we freak out because of our need to have an illusion of control. We also believe that researching everything will also give us control. These days it becomes utterly addictive to learn, and research, and browse. It's totally depressing. And yet, even as I'm writing this I found myself branching off and researching online web sites that help you determine which adjuvant therapies are best suited for you. I completely advise against it, even as I do it. Insidious. Maybe knowledge is not power after all. Maybe knowledge is just the illusion of control. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 7:36 AM 0 comments
Wednesday, April 09, 2014Getting SeriousI have a life threatening illness.That statement still seems absurd to me. There is a huge disconnect between that statement and how I consider my life, and how I feel in my body. It simply does not compute. But apparently it is true. I was laying in my acupuncturist's treatment room the other day, stuck like a porcupine, feeling extraordinarily relaxed, and I started thinking about the ordeal before me. How radically upset the apple cart is, and how it will continue being upset for the foreseeable future. How long (and short) each day has become as I savor its sweetness and race against the clock to get things done. How my prioritization of time has become so very important. How many things have changed for the better and how many things have, let's be honest, changed radically for the worse. I was thinking about who I would be when this is over. Whether I will learn my lessons or whether I will just say, whew, ducked that bullet, and go back to my old wearying ways. I was wondering if I would remember the good things that have changed in my life in the last 23 days. The way I'm eating now is making me feel vibrant, light, energized, nourished. My increased exercise keeps my anxiety at bay, my mood buoyant, my brain clear. (Well, most of the time. It is an extreme moment, after all.) I hope I remember these lessons. I was thinking a lot about my tendency to take my responsibilities too seriously, always striving for completion, always pushing towards excellence and the fulfillment of my commitments. I was wondering if that was truly a fatal flaw or if it's actually my greatest strength. (Like all super powers, it's both.) I was wondering if that was going to change with this illness, or whether I would just keep striving and working and pushing through the second I am able to again. I was also wondering if I would ever get the hang of being able to stop a project in trouble before it's finished, in order to take time off, in order to stop for a moment, in order to regroup and replenish my body and soul. I was wondering, as always, what to do about my outside commitments, and how to extricate myself from them without letting my colleagues down. I was wondering about the people I love, and whether it would ever be possible to tell them no, for now, because I came first. I love doing for others. It does give me pleasure. I am a fiercely interested person, interested both in people and in their ventures, and that has always translated into too many projects and too many commitments. I love them all, I do. And I tend to find my pleasure in fixing problems for highly challenging projects, finding the creativity in that, finding my job in other people's solutions. I rent my fulfillment rather than owning it. I suddenly realized this is a call to adventure. It has all the makings of a quest, one fraught with actual mortal peril, and one in which the stakes are high. It was not my choice to initiate this call, but I have answered it. I will take the journey. And at the end of this journey, I will be different. I don't know how, but I can set some intentions. I can determine the nature of this quest and follow its unknown path with that in mind, a guiding star to follow. Like all heroes' journeys, this one will be transformative. I am being plunged into the unknown, down into the abyss, and -- with the aid of helpers and guardians along the way -- I will eventually return to the land of the known. But things will be different. I will be different. It's up to me to determine which treasures I will be seeking. I need to understand what the true nature of this quest actually is. For better or worse, deservedly or not, I'm going to have many months in which these questions are going to be put to the test. I am going to have to learn, with agonizing repetition, how to read the needs of my body and put them against the needs of my outside commitments and people. I am going to have to look at my deepest, most entrenched habits and desires, and weigh them against time, and health, and rightness for my soul. I am going to have to learn where to put my creative energies and when to spend that energy on myself or others. I am going to have to get good at this. It's time to get serious. It's time to get serious about laughing more, and playing more, and stopping more. It's time to get serious about this thing called relaxing. It's time to get serious about understanding what the balance should be between my doing for others and my doing for myself. It's time to get serious, so I can continue on with a whole new set of weapons in my arsenal. It's time to get serious about writing. It's time to note that the incessant flow of words from my fingertips needs to find their path again, be channeled into something that only I can bring into the world. It's high time, and past time, to tend to my own creative projects, whether that is running my own company or writing my own words. To own my own challenging projects, rather than to commit my talents to other people, getting my satisfaction by helping others succeed. It's time to get serious about who I am, why I'm here on the planet, and to spend my days actually being not so serious. It's time to both loosen up, and get down to the work at hand. It's time to find the lightness and the space, rather than just keeping my head down and doing. I have always had a life threatening illness. I just haven't been so acutely aware of its nature right now. It's called life. And we are all afflicted. # posted by Katherine Doughtie Nolan @ 7:50 AM 2 comments
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