 |
| March 2008 As we get ready to turn the clocks ahead this weekend the Ojai Valley is ablaze with the colors of spring. Carpets of yellow mustard and yellow oxalis blanket every open field and most roadside verges around town. The acacia trees are arrayed in distinctive varieties of vibrant golden plumes. Everywhere I wander as I make my way to town for errands, front and back yard ornamental and edible stone-fruit trees are flowering in endless shades of cream, pink and fuchsia. Lush magenta and white magnolia blossoms take my breath away. Along the trails and on the foothills that ring the valley the recent heavy rains have spawned patches of early spring wild grass velvet. Poppies, lupine, tree tobacco, wild hyacinth, wild pea and old man's beard are blooming along with a small fuchsia and white ground cover flower that has a most delicious scent. All the seasonal trailside creeks are flowing and the frogs are in full voice every evening. In my own garden the daffodils and jonquils are just about done blooming while the starts of tulips are poking up their chubby leaf clusters in and amongst various other potted plantings. The rosemary bushes and periwinkle ground cover add their blue-violet flowers to the mix of pansies in all colors of the rainbow and the deep purple of bearded iris. The rose bushes are setting out clusters of blushing new leaves while the potted lavender is full of fat buds about to burst forth in pungent pale purple blossoms. All my so-recently crew-cut green potted plants are filling out with new growth. The herbs, salad and steam-able greens are flourishing as I set out this year's cherry tomato starts. A flock of cedar waxwings made their annual appearance this past week, perching on clusters of deep purple berries in the tall tree-like privet at the edge of my patio, feasting and chattering exuberantly in their particular voice. The bird population in and around my little meadow seems to multiply daily as does the constant twittering and calling. Hawks and crows play raucously overhead while the resident mockingbirds outdo themselves with their extensive repertoires. Much as I love our fall, early spring in Ojai is a particularly magical and exhilarating time. Sitting in my garden, wandering about town or in the foothills surrounded by all this awakening and burgeoning opens my heart wide and fills me with joy. Finishing with my tax preparation appointment in early mid-February marks the end of the cycle of closing down the year past. That moment, the planting of the first tomatoes and the arrival of our early southern California spring mark for me the beginning of my engagement with the new year. And, what an engagement it's already been! It started with co-facilitating a workshop in Ojai led by my oldest friend Carol Munter. This was the latest in her long-standing series of advanced workshops offered to women who have been practicing the Overcoming Overeating program for some years. In this second time of our working together, we continued to interweave our east coast/west coast takes on transforming the inner critical voice and developing the internal caregiver/mommy, our focus: moving beyond the practice of demand feeding into more complex levels of emotional self-care. It's awesome to work with groups of women so ready to dive deeply and openly into the middle of their struggles/material. The nineteen of us had an enlivening, poignant, often laughter-filled journey together. I'm immensely grateful to Carol for having created the community and the opportunity, for holding the container and for inviting me in to contribute my two-cents whenever I have something to add or counterpoint. As in our first workshop together in Santa Cruz last August, we marveled at the seamless delight we experience in each other's voices and in our collaboration. We're looking forward to doing it again this summer in Santa Cruz and next February in Ojai. (If you've been working with the OO program for a while and are interested in the workshops, email crlmunter@gmail.com for more information.) After the workshop weekend I anticipated spending a long, lusciously unscheduled week of drifting into wherever Spirit might take me. Where I got taken was into two weeks of dancing with the virulent chest cold that's making its rounds out here (and everywhere else, it seems). Though with all the herbal immune support I use I didn't ever feel sick-sick, the intense fits of deep bronchial coughing and subsequent non-stop nose blowing got to be pretty exhausting. Some acupuncture and powdered Chinese herbs magically put paid to it all late the second week. For two days after the acupuncture treatment (that included needles at my temples and between my eyebrows) I was having some weird sensitivity and tingling on one side of my scalp, forehead and temple. The eyelid on that same side was feeling strange, too, almost as though I might be developing a sty. On the third and fourth post-acupuncture days, I developed a wide patch of bug bite- or hive-like bumps all through that side of my scalp. By the fifth day I had two bumps on the outside edge of my weird-feeling eyelid while my temple and eyebrow area continued to feel strangely sensitive and tingly. It's amazing all the stories one can invent to account for such odd and seemingly random physical symptoms: an allergy to the shampoo/conditioner mix I'd used that week, flea bites (even though my kitties didn't seem to have fleas), irritation from the seam of my satin eyeshade and then, maybe something stirred by the acupuncture treatment. When, by the sixth day, I was sure the eyelid bumps were not from sleeping on the seam of the eyeshade, I called my acupuncturist to see if we could have an appointment to rebalance whatever might have been triggered by our last treatment. She said that it sounded like shingles and that I should get to my western doc and start on the appropriate anti-viral immediately. I was stunned and scared! I knew that shingles was connected with excruciating and persistent pain but I had no idea that it could occur anywhere other than on the torso or limbs. Though neither my western doc nor the integrative medicine guy I've been working with recently had space to see me that day, she called in a standard prescription for acyclovir. While I'm usually quite resistant to taking western meds, this was a no-brainer. I started on it within the hour. The integrative medicine guy (who'd long ago been an ER doc) emphatically advised a trip to the ER with likely hospital admission for IV administration of the acyclovir since the rash was emerging around my eye. Apparently shingles near the eye can cause corneal and retinal damage and the possibility of loss of vision. At the same time, he told me about a local alternative practitioner who works with an apparatus that generates micro-currents. Apparently a particular frequency combination of this micro-current has been known (since the 1920's) to sometimes immediately stop the virus from proliferating. Reading tons of the stuff that googling shingles turned up, I learned enough about dermatomes (the mapped sections of skin connected with each of the cranial and spinal nerves) to know that shingles on the tip of the nose is what is indicative of the optic nerve (and the threat of blindness) being involved. Shingles is an opportunistic infection caused by a virus that usually lives dormant in our bodies long after we've had the chicken pox. The virus, when it breaks through our usual immune barrier, attacks/inflames any one of our cranial or spinal nerves generating a rash along the dermatome/particular section of skin (usual only on one side of the body) connected with that nerve. Though my rash was not involving the optic nerve dermatome, there was still the threat of my eyelid shedding the virus onto my cornea. With all this acquired knowledge and additional input from my physician assistant sister and her contingent of friends and resources, I opted for the oral acyclovir and a two-hour treatment with the alternative guy my patient-with-my-weirdness sister called “the zapper” and consults with both my western doc and my eye doc to follow the next day. After all the endangering, life threatening experiences many of my family members have gone through during their hospitalizations over the past several years, hospitals terrify me. Going in for an IV infusion of an anti-viral felt like it could expose me to way too many other random risks I had no interest in taking until or unless things were to escalate beyond where they were at the time. The reading itself was pretty overwhelming: intense, intractable pain; the seemingly interminable course of the outbreaks; the high likelihood of long-term post-herpetic neuralgia (persistent nerve irritation and pain after the rash itself is gone) consequent to viral damage to the myelin sheath of the involved nerve. Herpes Zoster (shingles' medical name) is scary stuff! It took a lot of talking to my frightened self to calm me so I wouldn't be adding emotional stress to the viral stress to which I was already being subject. The mommy reminded me to stay just in the moment, to go one baby step at a time, to pray for/trust that I'd get whatever support and help I needed to get through this challenging time, to be grateful that it was all happening on a not-working week when there was all the open time I'd need to cope with everything that was happening in and to me. After many years of blaming and beating up on myself whenever I might get sick or have some physical issues come up, the mommy was loving and tender with me helping me to know that none of this was my fault or anything I needed to blame or criticize myself about. How much unnecessary self-generated stress the mommy's messages helped me to avoid. Amazingly enough, though my eyelid and cheek swelled considerably from the rash on the lid and my brow, I had no real pain. There was a lot to handle with the burning and irritation but it was all simply edgy discomfort-way different from the excruciating pain usually associated with shingles. The zapping not having worked to stop the process of the virus (though who knows how much worse it might have been without having had that treatment), it took five days for the rash to move into and through blistering (vesicles like chicken pox) into scabbing and then the shedding of scabs. During 10 days of taking the anti-viral and doing several repeat check-ins with both the western doc and the eye doc (who had me using artificial tears hourly to help keep the shedding virus from lodging on my cornea) I've used ice packs and occasional doses of ibuprofen to manage the discomfort. Bach's Rescue Remedy Cream has been a godsend for putting out the fire/irritation when the ice alone wasn't enough. The rash, which never was particularly wide spread, is leaving some redness now that the scabs are falling off. The discomfort/irritation continues to come and go managed mainly at this point with the Rescue Cream. It's all gotten kind of old at this point (two weeks from the first experience of sensitivity and tingling) and, after a long day laying 80 square feet of new shredded bark on my garden pathways followed by two long days of working with clients, I've been feeling quite tired out. Napping helps and otherwise open time these past three days has been wonderful for recuperating. My quiet, unplugged week was anything but that, so it's being wonderful to finally be having some respite. What I've learned through all of this is that shingles is becoming quite common in people over 50 and particularly over 65. While being immune suppressed or highly stressed creates an environment in which the virus can proliferate, it often emerges without any particular precipitating event(s). There's a vaccine out currently being recommended (by my health insurance's wellness program and others) but who knows about vaccines in general and this one's still fairly new with not much track record as yet. Although having had shingles may, like the vaccine, create some degree of resistance to further outbreaks, there's no guarantee that one won't have another episode down the road. The main thing is to get started on the anti-viral as quickly as possible, certainly within the first 72 hours of the symptoms' appearance. So, be alert to any unexplained sensitivity, tingling, burning or irritation on any one-side patch of skin anywhere on your body and get to a doc as soon as you can. Lots of the worst of the experience can apparently be finessed by starting early on the anti-viral meds. After all this year's hype from the laws of attraction as described in The Secret, and all we may also have learned from whatever the faulty, impatient parenting to which we've been subject, it's extremely important to remember to be loving and tender with our health-compromised selves. Blaming ourselves for getting sick serves only to stress us further. Being loving and gentle with our selves as we tend our health, calming our selves when we get frightened or overwhelmed by the information or symptoms with which we're dealing, these are more likely ways to promote our healing process. Having fur people around to pet and cuddle with has been a boon. My babies have been especially attentive since the rains, the bronchial cold and the shingles have kept me sleeping indoors with them hovering close by or on my body. While I hate having humans hovering around me when I'm ill, furry hovering feels delicious. (They're both lounging and napping right here at my elbow as I type this.) On the tail end of this siege, it's been wonderful to have the window and carpet cleaners in, to slowly get to laundering all the slipcovers, area rugs, sleeping bags and tent bedding and to send my Flokati rug out to the cleaners. A day of dusting and deep cleaning the kitchen and bathroom when I've enough energy for that and I'll feel purged of any residue of sickness in my space. In the past six weeks in and around all of this intensity, the friend with whom I'd had such a disruptive falling out about 18 months ago has returned to my ongoing life. We've had a couple of dinners-cum-walks as well as several phone conversations that all have been easy, deep and nourishing. Our soul-friendship (of almost 24 sometimes interrupted years) has survived, yet again, intact. Reconnecting has been seamless, both of us feeling as though it's only been days since last we shared so regularly. Some of the impetus for returning to contact has been around health issues each of us have lately had to deal with. But, mostly, we both agree, it's just been right-time to re-engage on the so-called real world level with the enduring soul-world connection that never seems to be disrupted by the real-world comings and goings between us. Though neither of us particularly missed the connection while it was in eclipse, we're both clearly delighted to have it back as a part of our ongoing lives. In this threshold-on-every-level feeling moment, I'm curious about where I'm to be taken next. I'm hoping to be able soon to continue working on the mask (She Who Shelters the Sorrows of Women) that started seven and a half years ago and only recently began continuing its emergence. But, who knows! To visit the Bulletin Board Archive Table of Contents Site Directory (for non-frames viewing)
* |
