Discovery And Discernment

I have struggled for several years with the issue of trying to get well or what I am capable of given my limitations. How do I improve my quality of life given several chronic illness and chronic pain? Unfortunately I have seen this as big C Change. I'm finding that it is more like little c change. Like St. Theresa says, It is the little things that matter. Last Sunday I got out and made some calls for a political party at a community center nearby. Took my own cell phone so I could use my headset and made 17 calls in about an hour. Was able to make contact with 5 people and encouraged them to vote. The rest of the people were not home. That’s typical for an early Sunday afternoon. Most people are not home. With all the people I talked to, I learned about their feelings and about them. I also asked them if they would support our Governor's Candidate and other party candidates too. All but one said they would. That was a positive affirmation of me as a person. It was just what I needed and something I don’t get much of being at home most of the time.

One person was an 85 year old woman who talked to me about the ballot layout. Is it all in a straight line? I said, Yes. It's been like that in all the 14 years we've lived in Minnesota. She was relieved to know that. I asked her if she knew where to vote. She did. She said you sure are working hard there aren't you? I've gotten called by 3 volunteers. I said, yes we all are. To myself I said whew, bad call coordination here!! I said, goodbye Cecilia and thanked her for voting and for her support. Each conversation was a version of this one with variations. One person was an immigrant and she was very busy, but would be voting for us. She would vote for us this year and would consider calling our supporters next election. One person was probably a young man just out of college by two or three years. He supported us all the way. One woman was very mad at us and her husband was too. I said, please be sure to get out and vote. When you do that our democracy works better. Don’t let any conversation turn into a duel.

The beauty of all this time spent on calling, learning a script to vary as I'd like, recording the calls on the statistics forms, and thinking about how to do a little better on each call was getting out of myself and into a normal routine just for an hour or so. Life is not very normal for me because of pain, arm and hand cramping, and lack of stamina. If you are like me and have several chronic illnesses, I’ll bet you crave being able to go back to a normal life. I had a friendly, low-pressured hour of conversation on Sunday afternoon. At the end, when I decided I’d done as much as I could handle, I wrapped things up by talking to a young man with blonde hair and a dark-haired young woman (probably his girl-friend) working with him. They told me they’d been active doing this since their high school days and loved calling people and putting their fingers on the pulse of their community like this. I was impressed with their commitment to our Democracy. That friendly conversation allowed me to stretch out my very stiff and painful legs and arms and move them around. It let me exercise them with the drainage movements I've been taught to help the swelling decline a little. Time to relax at the end and to head home. I had done as much as possible and felt good about that human contact.

Did you know that about 40% of people 45 and up are quite lonely? I read that in my newest AARP Magazine (for folks 50 and over) So, that conversation had been good for me and good for some of them too. Yes, it is the small things, small actions that make for change and for discernment. I had never done anything quite like this before. Have to tell you though it was much easier than selling Kiwanis Club Pancake Dinners by walking through a neighborhood. Only sold two or three dinners after visiting almost forty homes back in the mid 1980’s. Hundreds or thousands of small experiences combine together to create a mental landscape of what my world is like. Those experiences allow wisdom, kindness, and most likely, discernment to grow. It was another important step in discovering what I enjoy and am capable of given my circumstances.

News and Subject Information At Your Disposal

Hi, Mary, my wife, shared a wonderful online resource with me. Popular science magazine lists it as one of the Top Fifty Science Sites on the Web. It's called Science Daily and it also has a more general section called: Newsdaily. It
covers almost any subject area in depth and breadth. I'll share a few links here from it. You can follow the developments related to many major illnesses. These are all links to various parts of the same huge web site.

For All Kinds of General News go to: http://www.newsdaily.com/
There are tabs at the top to specific subjects

For All Kinds of Science and Medicine News go to Science Daily at:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/about.htm There are tabs at the top to

 go to all kinds of other subjects including the one
below:

For Medicine and Health News go to:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/health_medicine/
On the left hand side of the page you'll find a list of illnesses. (I had to play around with the illness list a little to get it to display fully sometimes.) If you click on most any of these you'll get many stories about that illness and some further subdivision of it. This will be a useful info tool for some of us.

For Multiple Sclerosis. I picked from the list of illnesses I mentioned above. It's The link right under Mental Health.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/news/health_medicine/multiple_sclerosis/

When you get to that page for M.S., it's further divided into Articles, Videos,
Images, Books, and even a breaking news section for very recent articles. The most recent news about M.S. is that stem cell transplants are showing some amazing results. The same Dr. Richard Burt that did the stem cell transplant for Victoria Chavez, our friend on Carepages is reporting the promising results in the very important, widely read Medical Journal entitled: Lancet for January 29th.

If you establish a Google or other newsreader account, you can set up an RSS feed for yourself for Science Daily. This means that new articles or any of these categories of items you want would be placed within your iGoogle page or
the News Reader part of your Google subscription. For example you could subscribe to the Asthma part or M.S. part of Science Daily and then feed it to your Google account. To make this happen you would have to register for a free subscription to Science Daily. The advantage here is that most of what you wanted to follow could be fed to one place for you to read. (Your iGoogle Homepage)
rather than your having to jump to multiple sites. This is exciting to me as I get into it more and more. Can you tell? Ha..

I've set up several news feeds for myself. One is for new articles from the New York Times. Another is from the Christian Science Monitor. I also follow about 25 blogs on the web and subscribe to them through a Blog I created on
Google. It's called FrankLivingFully. It's at: http://franklivingfully.blogspot.com/
My friend Cheryl Quist from carepages has a blog too. She's a talented artist who posts her painting almost every day. I love what she writes about the process of painting. Her blog is:http://cherylsdailyblog.blogspot.com/ Its name is: CHERYL'S CONSISTANT, CREATIVE & COURAGEOUS BLOG. I follow Cheryl's blog through my blog because my Google Homepage was getting too crowded. There's kind of a strange humor in this. Something like my computer has too many computers to keep track of. Ha… Hope I made some sense here.

Daily Miracles

Hi everyone, I’m struggling with swollen legs and feet again. The vascular center has agreed to do several lymphedema massages for me to get things back under control again. Need to start my recumbent bike riding again too. The muscle movement helps the lymph fluid move up and out of my legs rather than staying there. Just haven’t felt like much exercise at all with my breathing being so tight the last several days. My appetite has finally started coming back following Dad’s death. Things will turn around soon. Need to be patient as I go through the stages of grief. Need more roughage and fiber in my diet so that I can get over this darned constipation. It’s too bad that methadone stops the wave’s of muscular contractions that mean blessed regularity. Oh well, this too shall pass. Ha….

I just get that feeling of being stuck recently and not wanting to nor having the energy to do very much. I think this is just a passing feeling as I adjust to limits in stamina still there, fatigue which pops up, and pain that I need to respect. When I look at it, I’ve been getting groceries for us recently, have been feeding Charley at evenings and cleaning his litter pans, have been paying the bills, and play with Charley each morning. I read about and keep up with the world and fill my days in a calm and relaxed way. Yesterday, I had three health care appointments and drove around in the downtown area to get to them, coming back home once. One was with my pain specialist. That’s the hard one because there are always two or three other residents or pharmacists or other doctors with him. It makes me tense. Then I had my lymphedema massage at the other big hospital in town, Abbot has a very good vascular center. Then I had an allergy desensitization shot. I’m trying to space my three shots further apart because I’m having some itching and breathing difficulties when I get all three injections together. Then finally, home; in a lot of pain. I was exhausted and shaky from fatigue too and then got hot and sweaty, all signs of too much on one day. I only do that when I absolutely have to. Because of office schedules I had to make it a hard day. Thankfully, I could just rest and relax when I got home about 3:15. Oh what a lot of freedom I have with my life.

So, you see, I shouldn’t be feeling so stuck. There were even opportunities to help two older women who were having a terrible time putting groceries in their cars. They were both disabled and had made it all the way to the grocery store and driven themselves and had managed through the store. The last step got them both. For one, I calmed her down after being so upset when all her groceries fell on the parking lot. Another young woman helped her pick them up. Then, she was so frazzled and upset that she couldn’t find her keys and couldn’t start her car. What do you do, but try to help her feel proud for what she has accomplished and say this is ok. It’s not so bad. She said that she felt she was just becoming a shell of herself. Maybe, but getting to the store is a big victory. I knew how much help I need and how much help I get from others to get along.

The other woman had gotten to her car with an electric grocery cart and her cane. She just didn’t see how she could get those bags into her car. I could see her staring at those bags and shaking her head slightly with a tightly pursed lip. I said almost immediately, “can I help you?” “If you’d like to”, she said. Well I did and loaded them all into her trunk. It just made me feel so wonderful inside when she gave me that big smile and said Thank You! ; so warmly. She saw me a few minutes later at the Post Office dropping off mail. She grinned and smiled again. We waved to each other. I guess all I need is some small sense of accomplishment. Life is not made of a few BIG moments, but of many small meaningful moments of love and caring that bring us closer to each other . I call them the background to my living. My life is not moving along so much in big jumps, but in small daily miracles, reaching out .