I will spare you the details of the goopy stuff I had to drink yesterday beginning at 4PM in preparation for surgery today. Suffice to say, it took several hours to finish it all as every sip made me gag and grimace, and I can only hope everything's out of my digestive system. It sure seems like it. OK, TMI.
The Wookie will be here in a couple of hours and we'll head to the hospital. Which, by the way, sent out a press release yesterday saying that they're installing a new computer system throughout the complex and that wait times for labs etc. may be delayed and if you really don't have to go in, put it off for another day. The day for the new computer system? TODAY!! Anyone who knows me or has read my post about the Pauli effect knows that this is not a good omen. I have rotten luck with those systems and while I won't actually be using it, I still feel this is not a good sign. Hopefully, I'll be in and out of there in just a few hours.
I haven't had any solid food or coffee since 9 yesterday morning and I'm definitely cranky. And slightly sleep deprived. I will post, or have the Wookie post, as soon as we're back. Cheers!
S.
On the weekend, the Wookie and I took a little stroll along the Sackville River and stopped to look for caddis fly larvae. I found three beauties, at least I thought they were, and took some underwater green stuff growing in a pond connected to the river. We took them home and put them in my aquarium which I had prepared beforehand with beads on the bottom. I ended up adding some aquarium gravel as well, as the poor things couldn't get a grip on the bottom of the aquarium or on the beads to propel themselves forward.
After watching the little guys for a while and doing some interweeb research, I thought maybe I had diving beetle larvae instead of caddisflies. The pump in my aquarium also went kaput so I had to pick up a new one yesterday. And after thinking I had diving beetle larvae, figured I better get them something to eat. So I bought some feeder fish, making many apologies to the fish. But last night after putting the fish in with the larvae I really think now that I have caddisfly larvae. Which means that the fish will live and not be eaten.
There are two small and one very large mean-looking caddisfly. They brought their homes with them when they arrived, which means the hollowed out twigs they drag around with them for protection. It's quite amusing to watch these things. On their rear ends they have two pincer like legs to hang onto their home and they pull themselves along with the front legs. Depending on the species they eat plants and other animals. The ones I have appear to be quite content with the plants in the aquarium, perhaps eating decaying material and microscopic animals living on the plants.
My first task is to remove the "twig" homes to see if these little fellas spin silk or glue and use the beads to construct a home. If they are of a species that doen't spin glue then I'll have to go find other ones....I'll keep you up to date on this little experiment. And for a look at what these things can make given the right material take a look at this website:
Here is my third column for Atlantic Pedaler E-Zine to be published this week. The material will be familiar to blog readers as I've written about the subject matter before. Putting the whole of the ideas into one column has consumed a fair bit of energy over the past few weeks.
Several weeks ago I attended a lecture about neuroplasticity. That is a fairly new word and a fairly new area of study. Scientists are discovering that the brain is amazingly plastic; that is, able to adapt to change. We are now discovering that the brain, in certain areas, is able to grow new cells, something once thought impossible. And it makes new connections constantly. There is a whole new industry being promoted around "brain health", making new connections, and regenerating brain cells. Exercise your brain! Do crossword puzzles! Stave off Alzheimer's- do Sudoku! You've seen the headlines and heard about different "programs" that aim to improve your brain fitness.
There's no doubt that some mental exercise can help you relax, learn to concentrate, and perhaps help you become better at certain puzzles. But the best thing you can do for your brain is exercise your body and give your brain an optimal environment.
Exercise improves blood flow to all parts of your body, including your brain, and that improves oxygenation and the circulation of vital nutrients required by your brain for energy and function. Exercising your body involves a complex set of actions in the brain, causing neurons to fire all over the place in response, reorganizing and reinforcing the neural networks you already have and making new connections.
An optimal environment for your brain is one free of physical impediments like alcohol or drugs, polluted air, improper amounts of sleep and stress. That's next to impossible, so reduce the impediments you are able to. You need to feed your brain as well as your body with a low fat, high fibre diet. And for me, the occasional chunk of chocolate (that's good for the mental health).
When I was first diagnosed with MS, I asked the doctors about rehab. Was there anything in particular that I could do to get back the right side of my body? Was there anything I could do to not lose it or anything else? The short answer was "No". MS is a disease of the central nervous system; it affects the communication ability of the nerves to and from the rest of the body. Trying to work limbs that wouldn't cooperate was next to useless. So no amount of rehab would help me get back what I had lost. For people with MS, rehab is used to learn how to do things differently.
As it turned out, the type of MS I have is called relapsing remitting. It went into remission and I eventually regained about 97% of what I had lost. The 3% I didn't get back is unnoticeable except to me and my neurologist. I hardly ever notice a deficit and no one else ever does, so I don't think about it much. But at the back of my mind for the past 10 years has been the idea of rehabilitation. It works for many stroke patients; it's a matter of training your brain to make new and/or different connections, to go around the injured area. Wouldn't this somehow work for people with MS? It was and still is a good question.
So what does this have to do with cycling you might ask? Besides being an excellent way to exercise your body, cycling has an added benefit for your brain. The simple act of riding your bike requires paying attention to your surroundings, traffic, pedestrians, rocks and mud holes. This mental stimulation while biking is going to help your brain and probably help generate new connections. I suspect the combination of mental stimulation while exercising is what has attracted me to it in the first place.
Did I know all this two years ago when I began cycling? Nope. I just knew that I had finally found an exercise that I loved. Now I know that not only is it good for my body, it's good for my brain. Whether or not there are new connections being made or new cells being generated, cycling is good for me. Just recently the National MS Society in the U.S. awarded a large grant to the University of Northern Carolina for MS research that includes developing an MS-specific curriculum in physical therapy. I can only hope that their research will involve using the brain's plastic ability to overcome some of the disability MS causes. In the meantime, I will exercise my brain by jumping on the bike.S.
When I was 9, my friend Vanessa, who was 10 told me the facts of life. At least as far as she understood them. Her mom and dad were going to have a baby so they had told her how this came about and she decided to impart her new found wisdom. Vanessa told me that when I got married I was going to have to go to bed naked with my husband.
The horror! I denied that little bit of information. "No way!" I insisted. After all, I always saw mom and dad in pajamas, so I knew what she said wasn't true. "Well," conceded Vanessa,"you can wear your pajama tops, but not the bottoms." That made absolutely no sense to me. "You're wrong," I told her. And I promptly ran home. To ask my mother of course.
"No dear, when you get married, you can wear to bed whatever you want to wear." I knew it! I was vindicated.
"That's what I told her." And then I went to my room and read the "Fury" book I had started the day before. (The Fury series of books was about a stallion named Fury of course, and the boy who rode him)
It was actually the next year that I learned everything I needed to know about procreation. And I was horrified. And scared to death. At the same time we were doing the sex ed portion of our "Family Life" section of social studies, my mom was flat on her back in the living room. She has had back problems for years and would plunk herself on the floor in the living room for weeks at a time, not being able to move without excrutiating pain. Every day after school I would come home, sit on the floor next to her, and question her about what I had learned in class. For 3 weeks. Every day. It got to the point where my mother, a devout Catholic, finally had to assure me that when I got married and if I didn't want to have children, there was a pill I could take to prevent pregnancy.
Within a few years I had a better understanding of the whole sex and childbirth thing, but thinking back about what the teacher had "taught" us I really wonder about what was going through my head. I have very vivid memories of some parts of those classes but I know there's a lot I am repressing.
When I was 17 my folks and I had a discussion about when it's appropriate to teach children about sex. It came about after watching a talk show on the same subject. My parents always answered whatever questions we threw at them and we were taught from an early age to call a penis a penis and a vagina a vagina. There was no embarassment about bodies, their parts, and what they do, but sex was always in the context of marriage. When we were young anyway, as my folks were, and still are, good Catholics.
Anyway, the conversation about age appropriateness led to what Mrs. L was teaching me and my classmates. And my folks were shocked when I told them exactly what she had told us. I guess when I was 10 I didn't like to use some of the words Mrs. L had used, so my parents only knew that we were doing sex ed in class and mom figured the questions I had for her were only natural. Mrs. L would tell us the different ways you could have sex (standing up was one way I remember her telling us), the pleasure of an orgasm, the pain of childbirth, and all other fun things about sex. She told us the many different terms for sex including the swear words. Hearing your teacher use the F word is almost as shocking as hearing your parents swear for the first time.
I still have visions of Mrs. L at the front of the class, clenching her fists and squeezing her eyes shut as she told us about how good sex is. We were 10! I still shake my head and wonder about my classmates and if any of them were as frightened about the whole prospect of having sex, which led to babies, which meant pain of childbirth. Obviously 10 was too young for me but probably not for all of the rest of them.
This whole post came about as I was thinking about wills etc. this week. Before we had discussed the topic, I had already made the Wookie promise me that if I was hit by a truck or experienced some other fatal disaster, he'd go to my apartment and get rid of anything related to my sex life so my mother wouldn't have to deal with it on top of everything else. Not that there's a lot of stuff, or that any of it would be embarassing to me personally. It's not like I've got a closet full of rubber suits and heavy bondage items but we all have at least a drawer with sex related items in it, condoms, lingerie (to put it politely), that sort of thing.
And it's not that I think my folks don't know about sex. I give my parents sexy underwear for Christmas sometimes. I know some of you are going "Ick", but it's not like I ask them to model it for me. And I don't ask if they ever wear them. Basically I am acknowledging the fact that my parents, who after almost 46 years of marriage, are still in love with each other, and are human beings, and we know that human beings who are in love have sex. There. I said it. My parents have sex. At least I think they still do. Dad still pinches Mom's bum. Who knows, maybe they've got a closet full of rubber suits.
My mom is a teacher, retired now. Her sudents have ranged in age from 6 to probably 96. She taught high school for a while from Home Economics (called Human Ecology these days) to Math. And Sex Ed. It's only fitting that I continue the tradition. Last year, I was asked to be a facilitator with other MSers for a program called Journey to Wellness. I didn't have time to do the whole 8 week program but did the section on Healthy Relationships and Sex. Heaven knows, I've had enough unhealthy relationships to be able to recognize the warning signs and perhaps offer advice on maintaining a satisfying relationship. At least I think that's what the other facilitators thought. Besides, I was the only one who would say penis out loud.
S.
My co-worker, Shannon, told me yesterday that she squashed a bee the other night. I gave her a good talking to about that. Those little creatures are necessary for our food production. So I instructed her on how to safely catch and release a bee, or any other creepy crawley for that matter, using a glass and a piece of paper or cardboard. Put the glass over the insect and slide the paper underneath, lift the two together and let 'em out when you've reached the great outdoors.
This morning, Shannon told me that I would have been very proud of her last night as she rescued a slug that her cat or dog had inadvertantly brought into the house. It was on her bed and she automatically reached for a Kleenex to squish it but stopped as she was reaching for the slug. Then she recalled the crap I gave her yesterday and she got a piece of paper, pushed the slimy thing onto it and let it go in the grass. I WAS impressed.
So tonight I award Shannon the Bug Saver Superhero Award even though she doesn't have a blog on which to display it. She'll get a chuckle out of it and so will her son Christopher.
Slugs are simply homeless snails.
S.
Yes, I know that slugs aren't technically bugs. But if it's a creepy crawly and it "bugs" you, then in my books it's a bug.
My friends Kathy and Jane came by last night for a short visit. Kathy had already dropped off some skabetti sauce(I like to spell it that way) for easy meals during recovery and they both had enormous hugs for me and the Wookie. Good people those two. My mother has informed me she has some meat pie (the best in the world) for me to stick in the freezer and new pajamas and a bath robe. Seer sucker type material. Yay Mom!
The legal documents should be ready for me to sign by Monday so I think all my bases are covered. And tonight I was manning (personning?) the phones for Kinsmen TV Bingo on our local cable company. I may not have mentioned, the Halifax Kinettes made me an honorary Kinette last year and are extending it for another year. They contribute a lot of money and person power to the MS Society, so I'm happy to help out with the bingoes, and sometimes their charity auctions. Yay Kinsmen and Kinettes! It's been a busy week.
I met with a nurse and an anaesthetist this week for pre-op stuff, blood work and the like. And I also met briefly with the nurse, Judith, from the MS Clinic to fill her in on what's going on with the upcoming surgery. Judith had very good things to say about my surgeon and that he's very highly thought of. Someone else told me he was cute. Which is totally irrelevant. I want to know what his hands are like. Are they steady? Are they clean? Does he know what he's doing?
The anaesthetist gave me a little inside info. He said the surgeon's notes indicate he's not expecting any surprises and I should have a short recovery period. Yay doctors!
First, I've got a resident who's a real keener and now encouraging words from the surgeon. This just reinforces my belief that I've got a horseshoe up my butt. I must tell the surgical team to leave it intact if they come across it.
S.
OK, it's not a new post, but it's up at Charles' MSBpodcast. It's my true story of my father learning how to make biscuits on his own. It has caused no end of amusement in my family since it happened and it'll probably give you a giggle, too. It's totally non-MS related and should take your mind off weightier issues a least for a few minutes.
S.
