Catching Up

I wondered how it would be trying to live through Fall without a writing project to fill my abundant time. Well that challenge has been considerably ramped up by my damaged back. My recovery progresses, but very slowly. If I walk too far, I suffer all night. Pooey.

The most difficult thing is sitting. Hence my absence from here. But thanks to reading and living close to many good food stores, I survive. And I mentalbate: I feel almost autistic when faced with certain challenges. Instead of scaring me, these certain challenges are like a drug. I was good at aspects of math as a kid and, for a while, took Math 101 at UBC starting when I was eleven. I still cannot believe that.

Anyway, PAL needs a lot of data stored, tracking the ongoing activities of a lot of people going through a multi, multi-stage process and with different cohorts starting at indiscriminate times. And it has to be a very flexible system. I took to the challenge like a drowning man to air. Here is a sample of a work in progress, wherein I try to chart how data will flow.

And of course, I bake.

And my course has started at Emily Carr — two sections of the same course: one section has seventeen women enrolled and the other has eight women and one man. I am using new lesson plans and assigning fewer assignments and the change has re-energized my teaching — even with back pain.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

Hallelujah! I have awoken with faith that my back will heal. Optimism returns. I am still uncomfortable, but I am getting better and I have faith again. The psychology of illness and disability is a challenge. What a treat it was watching Soapdish last night.

Back to the physiotherapist today. Another term of teaching starts on Wednesday and it is a big class.

I'm Lovin' Janelle

YouTube for a bad back.

Do You Know an Amputator?

 Pee.

 Searching for drugs.

I need my back amputated. Know anyone who can do the job?

I have gone from a person who regularly walked three-to-four hours a day to someone who walks two-to-four blocks with rest stops. I swing between optimism when I can feel less pain, to depression when the pain is acute. I hate it. Thank God for books to read.

Last night, I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey and I loved it all over again. Then I watched the series finale of George Gently. GG is a delicious diversion; the actor Lee Engleby who plays Gently's sergeant, John Bacchus, is a fabulous study in acting.

About the photos: Urban life makes me often go to bed dreaming of living in a country cottage in a place like Midsummer or Oxford. One photo is of the garbage dug out of a dumpster across the street from me. I assume it is street people looking for drugs because the garbage is from a medical building. The other photo is of the parking lot right behind me. Every night there are traces of the people who pee at night in the lot and not all are men — trust me, I see it.

How to Die

Breath

I was diagnosed with asthma after my third acute asthma attack two years ago.

Every morning, one of the first things I do is measure my breathing. I do that by blowing into a calibrated tube called a "peak flow meter." It measures the volume of my capacity to exhale. Put another way: it measures how alive you are. Asthma is a disability to exhale, not inhale as you might think.

Measuring my breath is also one of the last things I do at night, so I am always aware of my state of respiratory health. I use the flow meter to know how much medicine to inhale but I never wrote down the numbers and they rarely varied. My baseline became 500; that became obvious after a few months of writing down my numbers.

The challenge was not feeling down when the number was low. I loved the high when I blew high numbers, but I had to stop the roller coaster and that became easy once my baseline was clear so I stopped writing down my numbers and, after a while, even measuring my flow.

Then, in mid-July, I got sick and I blew 240; I could barely breath and had to go into the hospital, for antibiotics and steroids in industrial doses.

Once I was better, I saw my Pulmonologist, Dr. Dorschied whom I love. Now, my base meds are double what they have been for the past two years and if I blow 425, I have to double my meds again to eight times the original base rate, so 425 my fear factor.

The point of telling you all this? Today I blew 565, an all time high.

Heat / Pain

LOVE that heating pad!

The Bad News
I have not been comfortable since waking Monday morning but I  feel like God's BFF because I had an appointment for that afternoon with a physiotherapist due to a sore hip. But as of Monday, I was walking with razor blades in my back. It made my legs feel thick and heavy and the pain was relentless.

Boyd the physio cracked my back like a chiropractor would and I survived. I had feared that all my life and if I had known what Boyd was going to do, I would have freaked out.

He gave me exercises. I did them throughout Tuesday. Wednesday was like living in a torture research station so today I am not doing those exercises as much. I have earned a BS in self pity.

The Good News
Because Pacific Theatre here in Vancouver took an interest in my play and because of the encouragement of my friend, Stephen, I wrote to the artistic director of Centaur Theatre in Montréal, to ask if he might be interested in reading my script.  I wrote to him because Centaur has a small space as well as its big theatre.

Well!  Yesterday I got a lovely email from Roy, the AD. What has thrilled me about his response is that he had heard of my play and by coincidence he is coming out here in a week to direct a play that is happening at — wait for it — Pacific Theatre.

Regardless of the outcome of the readings by these theatres, I feel an incredible mix of positive feelings from just their interest in the script. All this and a fresh batch of (as yet uneaten) babies in one aquarium. I do feel like God's BFF.