Joyous Moments....

It's been an undisciplined gratitude month.  Oh, I've been grateful, every day, truly.  But I've been lax about getting it down on paper.  But the month has been full of those odd, funny, joyful moments...

The laughter of a child at a made-up nonsensical joke.

Getting the giggles so bad you forget what you were laughing about to begin with and laugh more because you are laughing until it hurts, and then you laugh more.

Meeting the eye of your love across the room and smiling because you both just Know.

Coming through the door and smelling dinner when you thought you'd be the one cooking.

And watching a big, clumsy old dog take off across someone's yard to attack a spinning pinwheel flower, and seeing him laugh and prance away like he did something AMAZING when it stops spinning.

Our lives are full of things to laugh about, if we pay attention.  There are moments of joy, quiet and loud, dark and bright:  They surround us at all times if we have the eyes to see and the ears to hear.  The day-to-day struggles of our lives sometimes feel overwhelming.  I need to remember to SEE, to HEAR, and to FEEL the joy when it is struggling to make itself heard!

DeeDee

Cherries and Maple Leaves.....

It was about this time, two years ago, that Mom took the fall that ultimately took her home. There's a two month blog-gap between the first December  (General Health Updates....) and my annual kidney transplant update post (Four Years....) that was utterly taken up by her hip fracture, hospital stay, nursing home transfer and decline.  (By the way, my brother offered the nickname "BamBam" for JuJu's baby - it never stuck - they all call him Bubbies. I have no idea why.)

Time passes.  The raw emotions that follow the loss of both of your parents (and one of your best friends) in less than a year don't really go away, exactly.  They just hit less frequently.

Sunday afternoon I wrapped Christmas presents.  Don't judge me - there are a lot of grandkids to keep track of!  I'm pretty efficient.  Wrap, label, add to the list.  Wrap, label, add to the list.  Wrap....

My dad adored chocolate covered cherries.  I'm not sure why - personally I think they're pretty gross - but he loved them.  So every year, I would buy him a box.  Once, when Curlygirl was very little, she started eating his cherries before he could even get the first one:  I had no idea she like them.

So, every year for nearly 20 years after that, I bought and wrapped TWO boxes of chocolate covered cherries.  Until last year.  I don't actually remember if I bought them for Curlygirl then, but I bought them this year.  And wrapping only one box just made me cry for a few minutes.

Next day: 

First, the background.  When Citygirl moved out west to learn wine making, she sent my Mom a picture of herself holding the biggest autumn maple leaf I've ever seen - far bigger than her head. That picture sat on my Mom's dining room table, and she commented on it at least once a week over breakfast.  The photo went with her to the nursing home, although she was too out of it to really notice at that point. I remember picking it up with Mom's 'personal effects' a few weeks after she died.

So, walking into work, still a bit tender from the Christmas memories, I spotted an absolutely enormous maple leaf on the sidewalk, not as big as the one in the picture but monstrous compared to what we usually see on trees here, and, BLAM, I was sitting at Mom's table, sorting pills and drinking coffee while she ate her peanut butter toast and chatted about whatever thoughts were wandering through her mind at the moment.

Weeping as you come through the door of the office is bad form.

Grief is a funny thing.  You can be fine - truly FINE - and then. Then.

Oddly, someone today randomly mentioned that I seemed to be handling my Mom's loss well. He's facing losing his own mother and isn't at all sure he'll do well. It left me at a bit of a loss as to what to say.

There's no real point to all of this, and it's a bit out of place in the gratitude month concept, except...I'm not UNgrateful for grief, truly.  I've met people who would happily dance on the graves of their parents, and who grieve only for the sadness that was their childhoods.  The things I miss are happy things, good things, grateful things. My life hasn't been all sunlight and roses, but my parents did their best to give me better than they had, and I miss them.

DeeDee

Grocery Stores....

Today was stock-up-on-everything day.  Beginning at the Farmer's Market, moving through Aldi's, Walmart and Price Chopper (in order of ascending price LOL), there was really nothing that we could have wished for that we couldn't have found.

Of course, our wishes are modest.  We aren't looking for fresh truffles and two carat diamonds.

But we could have had live lobster.  We bought mangoes and pomegranates. We could have had any of an almost unimaginably large number of luxuries without driving more than five miles from home.

I remember life in Pakistan.  I lived in a wealthy neighborhood (lower upper class, if you will). The family had one full-time servant, and at least three part-time.  We could afford to but enough water to have a flower garden and a lawn in the middle of our desert city.  There was a refrigerator, and we fired up the hot water tank every morning for (brief!) hot showers, saving the grey water for the lawn. But shopping?

Once a week a bazaar sprang up in a dusty grassless field.  There were a lot of things you could buy: Clothing, undergarments, cloth, towels.  There was food also:  Garlic, spices, two or three types of fresh vegetables, some canned goods. Fresh yogurt in large open clay bowls. Fresh chicken as well. Well, actually, LIVE chickens that were slaughtered and plucked on site while you shopped. Nothing like flying feathers to help you work up an appetite....

The entire place was a transplant recipient's nightmare.

Farmer's market food requires a couple of extra minutes of preparation.  Cut the tops off the carrots.  Snap the Brussel sprouts off the stem.  Make sure you didn't bring home any little green worms with the broccoli.  But even our most inconvenient food is easier to work with and far more plentiful than what the majority of people all around the world deal with day-to-day.

I'm grateful.

DeeDee

Warmth...

I remember the heat vent upstairs in the house I grew up in.  It was in the hallway, by the windows.  If there was another source of heat for the bedrooms up there, I don't remember (although I don't recall ever being cold, exactly).  I DO remember standing over that vent in my flannel nightgown on more than one Christmas Eve, warm and waiting....

I remember the steam radiators in my old apartment in Buffalo.  They were slow to get going, but once they did, they'd fog the windows with warmth...

I remember the beach house that I lived in during medical school.  It had only one heat vent for the entire tiny house.  The last person to bed opened everyone's bedroom doors to let in some heat, and the first one up closed them to keep in the quiet.  All THREE of us would stand over that vent in our nightclothes to warm up...

Today was our first really cold day of the season.  When I went out to walk the dogs this morning there was a gust of cold wind, the kind that makes your nostrils pinch and your throat shut tight so you can't breathe for a minute.  It soaked into me, and lasted until now.

But now I am sitting on the heat vent in my living room, with a blanket to keep any of the warm air from escaping.  My fingers and toes are finally warm, and my ears can't be far behind.

Thank God for the blessing of warmth.

DeeDee

Pedicures.....

I will never, ever stop being grateful for the blessing of a good pedicurist. As I’ve aged I’ve come to realize just how much pain I’d be in if I hadn’t found someone I could trust to keep my ingrown toenails in check. I mean, who wants surgery for that when there is a more pleasant alternative?

It seems like a small thing. But I am an absolute baby about pain, honestly. Having let things go once to the point where I need the less-than-tender mercies of a podiatrist, I RUN to get a pedi at the first pinch now. And the plus? Pretty toes.

Hey! No one said that all gratitude needs to be profound! LOL.

DeeDee

Puppy Love....

How can I not be grateful for our dogs?  Simon is going to be 15 this spring, and he still greets every day with a smile.  Larry's age is an open question, but he's 10 if he's a minute. He's proudly learned how to play for what appears to be the first time in his life over the past year since he moved in with us.

And then there's Capone.

He's hysterical.  He's adorable. He's loving to me, and a world-class jerk to his brother dogs.

While we were trick-or-treating with the grandkids, I stopped to say hi to an enormous GoldenDoodle on a neighbor's porch.  "He's so calm!"  "Yeah, he's pretty good."  I told him my dog's not so good with crowds of people in costumes.  "I think you've seen us walking. I have the Shrieking Beagle."  "Oh, yeah - I know that dog. He's, uh,.....cute."

Yeah, pretty much everybody knows Capone LOL.

DeeDee

Headache Meds....

I missed yesterday's gratitude post:  I came home from work with a puking light-avoiding headache after another day of struggling with our recently installed 'new' electronic medical record system.  I wasn't feeling grateful.  Or up to typing.

But in the (subdued) light of (medication-hungover) morning, I am grateful for the medications that brought that headache from Oh-Dear-God-Take-Me-Now to Pretzels-Are-Dinner-Food-Aren't-They over a period of a couple of hours.

I'm grateful for the medications that I take daily that took away the daily headaches that came with hallucinatory auras.

I am NOT grateful for the new operating system.

DeeDee

PS If you see me today, remind me to call in a refill of my migraine medication. I had to borrow Babygirl's last night.

Safe Havens....

I've been fortunate that for most of my life I've had a Home.  I lived in the same town for the first 18 years of my life, moving into my childhood home when I was a toddler and into a house just outside of town in my mid-teens. I left for college, and returned for a couple of years afterward. And then I became a nomad.

I moved dozens of times during medical school.  If it didn't fit in my Toyota Corolla, I didn't keep it.  I moved from one hospital to another every 4 - 6 weeks.  I lived in Long Island, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Detroit, and Buffalo, sometimes moving 12 hours between the end of a shift on Saturday and the start of another on Monday.

I've been where I am now for almost 30 years.  This is MY kids' home town (which still seems odd to me).  I don't have to move again unless I want to.  It's Home. And for every time I have to leave with Babygirl to park ourselves in some hospital elsewhere, there is an endless sense of safety and relief when we get back.

For those of us who have been uprooted and thrown from our safe havens, finding Home is a miraculous and wonderful thing.  It isn't a place, necessarily:  It's the knowledge of belonging.  Every once in a while someone will ask me about some bit of local history and I'll have to admit that I'm not 'native' here, but I belong nonetheless.

I looked ahead on my schedule for the week, and I have a new patient. She's a brand-new baby, whose mother I cared for when SHE was a brand-new baby, and that is just another aspect of Home.

Gratitude for our safe places, amen.

DeeDee

Farmers.....

We city dwellers rarely take the time to think about where our food comes from.  And the majority of us, if we think about it, agree that factory farming isn't a good thing, but we still don't really change much about how we select our food in the grocery store.

Guilty as charged.

We still buy milk (hormone free, but I'm pretty sure the cows aren't running loose) and we aren't looking to become vegetarians anytime soon.

But...

We faithfully go to our local farmers' market, almost every week. An increasing percentage of our grocery money is going directly to the people who grow our food locally.  I'm willing to buy smaller apples, odd-shaped carrots (we saw some the other day that were of 'inconceivable' size, making my friend and I giggle and inappropriately reference adult movies), and food I've never heard of (Dragon Beans, anyone?) to improve our health and decrease our carbon footprint somewhat.  I've had my own little veggie patch long enough to truly appreciate the work that goes into growing cabbages that defy the "Never eat anything larger than your own head" rule.

Generally speaking, this is better for Babygirl. Food that is grown in a local organic farm is far less likely to be contaminated with some deadly bacteria like E. coli or salmonella.

We owe our very being to people who are willing to live close to the land.  But it is hard for smaller local farmers to compete with the big factory farms.  This is where Community Supported Agriculture comes in.  The idea is this:  You join a CSA group, and pay a set amount either weekly or up front for a box of fresh produce, weekly or biweekly, that you can pick up at your farmers' market (or in our case, my place of employment if I'd prefer).  The farmers are guaranteed a certain income up front. You might get 2 small heads of brocolli instead of one big one, but you'd still get your brocolli (or whatever is in season).

Here's a link to a site that will help you find one: Local Harvest

I haven't done a farm share yet.  I like going to the market, and we spend as much there as we would on the farm share, but either way is a great way to show your local farmers that you are grateful for what they do.

DeeDee

Card Games.....

Mom had multi-infarct dementia.  In a nutshell, she had tons of little strokes that did progressive brain damage.  It's not the same as Alzheimer's:  You don't fade backwards into time, you lose chunks of what you once knew, at random moments.  Sometimes it's so subtle no one notices, but sometimes...

My Mom loved to play games.  Clue, Chess, Monopoly, Rummy, Nertz, Sorry.  She loved them all.  And she played mercilessly.  She knew more card games than anyone I ever knew, and was always willing to learn a new one.

Until she couldn't. One week she could play cards. The next week, she couldn't hold them, couldn't understand them, couldn't remember the rules, couldn't figure out what to do with them at all. The ENTIRE skill set disappeared in the space of one week, with no other notable deficits.

It was one of the most depressing moments I can recall of her overall decline, a watershed moment:  There was no mistaking the loss, and no going back.

Tonight Babygirl, Em and I played Blokus (a board/puzzle game) and a round of Phase 10 and one of SkipBo.  We laughed, ate chips and salsa, and enjoyed each others' company, and remembered Mom.

I am grateful, today, for the ability to play.

DeeDee

Delayed Gratitude....

It's traditional to think about thankfullness in November.  It's not that we shouldn't be thankful all the year 'round, of course, but I think there is a great wisdom in picking the waning days for this purpose.

It's easier for me to settle into gratitude when the days are lengthening. It's easier to stay grateful when the days are warm and the gardens are blooming.  But on a day like today, when the skies are grey and the air is cooling and I can feel in my left ankle just exactly WHAT is coming, well, I need to think about it more.

So lets update the medical, because there is much to be grateful for there.

Babygirl is 18 now.  When I announced her birthday in church a couple of months ago there was a collective gasp that startled the visiting pastor:  Everybody loves her, and everybody remembers her from her toddler days to her holy-cow-don't-set-the-altar-on-fire accolyte days, to now.  That congregation has prayed us through incredibly hard times, and thrown money at us when we'd have gone under if they hadn't, but I think they never imagined her as a 'grown up,'  It was an entertaining moment.

We saw her doctors last week.  She is now 5 1/2 years post transplant.  The kidney is doing astonishingly well in terms of function, still a bit acidy, and her body is putting forth some hormones that indicate that something is a bit wonky somewhere, but overall, an excellent report.  Usually at this age they'd transfer her to adult doctors, but because her health has put her 2 years (!) behind in school, she qualifies to continue there until she finishes high school, so we are good to continue with the pediatric specialists in Philadelphia for a couple of years.

The headaches remain a different issue.  She is off all the preventive medications, which is likely why the kidney is happier.  She is getting Botox injections every 12 weeks, and they work pretty well for the first 8 or so, and then wear off.  Still, this is a VAST improvement over what life was like for the previous 4 years, so we'll take it.  As with the Philalelphia doctors, the doctor in Wilmington (Delaware - yes, we are now seeing pediatric specialists in TWO different states, neither of them the one we live in) will continue to care for her as long as she is in high school.

I get a lot of questions about Botox.  No, it isn't just for movie star wrinkles. It is an FDA approved therapy for chronic refractory migraines.  It involves something just under 40 separate injections in Babygirls forehead, scalp, neck, and trapezius muscles (the upper border of the shoulder).  One time this paralyzed one eyebrow for a week so she had a bit of a Spock look going, but otherwise she hasn't had any side effects.  No, they won't give me the leftovers.

So my November 1 AND 2 Thank You are for ongoing health of Jorge's kidney, and fewer headaches.

DeeDee