Monday, February 29, 2016

ARTHRITIS PIRATES

WHO AM I?
I was a landlubber who was “free” but not adrift in any way. I lived in New England, inland, far from the sea. I was not a sea man, I was a land man. My longtime love and joy was hiking in the beloved Green Mountains. I loved the forests. I felt free. Expansive. The Appalachian Trail. Now I have been captured. My freedom to ramble was taken away from me by a War Lord. Like the War Lords of the 1600s who came ashore in New England to “impress” or imprison landlubbers through force, and compel them to work on sailing ships, Lord Arthritis captured me, took away my freedom, and bid me do his service.
For more than a year since I was impressed into Lord Arthritis’ service, I have been bound on a sea of pain over which Lord Arthritis is commanding Admiral. My once, joyful earth-bound gait, became a lumbering, painful, awkward side-to-side cartoon across the deck of my life. Arthritic grit and bone spurs in both knees grinding together, took the wind out of my sails, and held me painfully captive day by day. Pain foamed and swirled through my knees like sea water drawn in and squirted out of feeding bi-valves. I heard later that in the same way that sand polishes the inside of bi-valves, my hinge joints had been polished smooth and shone like mother of pearl as the bone began to wear through the bone.
Lord Arthritis’s physical war on humanity offers a grand opportunity for Pain Pirates. An armada of large, brigantine, regional hospitals anchor in the major cities. These larger vessels deploy small, specialty clinics, like quickly moving attack sloops to combat each War Lord - Arthritis, Cancer, Cardiology, Urology, Surgery. You can see a virtual armada of these sloops lying in the lee of the larger hospitals. They ply the social coastline which connect the surrounding villages, the community islands: the club, arts guilds, community centers, libraries and elder-care facilities to find and capture patients. The large hospitals provides the big guns, the technology, surgery suites, hospital beds, the cannons of warfare to protect the sloops. But, the specialty sloops are where battles are waged and prisoners taken.
In the physical battle, specialty sloops Lord Arthritis had stopped me, captured me in pain. Then I was sent aboard an Orthopedic Clinic Sloop manned by hardened, experienced fighters. You can see it in their swagger. They offer me an array of battle plans which I must take “or else!” I had to pay them, and handsomely, or they would not do battle with Lord Arthritis. They would maroon me to the War Lord’s tortuous work. “Take it or leave it!” they smirked. And, I knew what “leave it” meant. My blood ran cold with fear. It took a treasure chest of the booty.

WHY AM I HERE?
Before the surgery I was told that having a knee replacement would take “20 years off your life”. But, what kind of change can a metallic peg-leg contain? The brochure for the new, replacement said that many people have surgery and are up and walking with support “quickly”, “independently mobile” within several weeks it said. Maybe.
Less than two weeks after Medicare funding was granted, the tide changed. Pain Pirates no longer threatened me. I was prepped. I was given a cocktail of pain relievers which had me floating on a sea of imaginative warmth and sunshine. My life floated away from me. I am sure that the anesthesiologist launched me on a small boat which took me over to the side of invisibility where I could not physically see.
Then the Pain Pirates, like a small, assault group, followed a captain armed with weapons that were sharpened to precision, lit special lights and wielded saws, cutlasses and drills. I was ripped and had one of my arthritic knees sawed off. They replaced Lord Arthritis’ playground with a new, titanium & plastic knee. Lucky me!
I was marooned in time. I viewed the my past as a vast continent. In the foreground, a land of gnarled and attrited experiences. I did not want to go back there. Then further away, the brighter it became. I arrived in the sunny days of youth with a longing for bright sandy shores. I was on a new island - my Treasure Island.
Does one really recover? Go back? I remember coming to in the recovery area looking around wondering who were these smiling, friendly people? They had put pulsing, swelling plastic sleeves on my legs, like something breathing me. I was sweetly told they were going to get me up and out of bed so I could walk behind a walker down the hallway – down the first path of my Treasure Island.
Like a drunken Long John Silver between my wife and a nursing aide, with my rear sail a’flappin’ we pulled an i.v. pole along behind us down the hallway. “See, you can do this!” But what am I doing? Oh, yes, I’ve replaced my old pain with my new pain.

WHAT DO I WANT?
            In the end, there is no recovery, really. You can’t recover and go back to where you started. You are changed. It is precovery.
            My old days were filled with teeth-gritting movement dealing with Lord Arthritis. My days are now filled with teeth-gritting therapy. I wake in the night and lumber cartoonlike to the kitchen to get plastic bags of frozen English peas to ace bandage atop ice my swelling knee. My freezer is a treasure chest of frozen peas and corn. Booty call.
            The Pain Pirates have been replaced out patient Physical Therapists and exercise regimens. “If you don’t do the exercises,” they warn, “you’ll never walk.” What happened to 20 years off my life?
Oh yes, that 20 years is out there! You just have to go get it. Being set adrift on your life. Being marooned in time. Going at a different pace. Being alone until, as you walk down the beach of Treasure Island, you find footprints of someone else. Someone new. Not the Pain Pirates, not Lord Arthritis, someone else because you are someone else.
Aaarrg!

© Copyright 2016, Jean W. Yeager – All Rights Reserved.

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Monday, February 8, 2016

“PICK AND ROLL” - RAGE AND COMPASSION

WHO AM I?
I volunteer and teach a self-development program Stone Valley Correctional Facility.  I like the name “Stone Valley” because usually when someone feels they are “between a rock and a hard place” they may take on the difficult work of changing their self, or their selves. Yes, selves.
     Rudolf Steiner, a spiritual scientist (1861-1925) in a lecture in 1913 spoke of these two “selves” within each of us: a wiser person and a less-wise one. Nobel Prize winning psychologist, Daniel Kahneman, confirmed the presence of two selves by scientific research. Kahneman named the “less-wise” one our “System 1 or S1 self” and the “wiser one” our “System 2 or S2 self”. S1 is our in-built, automatic, intuitive, spontaneous way of thinking, feeling and behaving. Our S2 way of thinking and judging controls S1 but takes effort and practice, and S2 is easily distracted by S1. There is a struggle between them.
     My program makes use of six exercises created by Rudolf Steiner in the 1920s. These exercises are designed to strengthen S2 thinking, feeling and willing. They are ridiculously simple but are amazingly hard because they challenge our S1 self. I compare these “soul gym” exercises to basketball exercises like “pick and roll” drills. Such drills require inner self-control of S1.
Each week I assign a homework exercise. Last week was Control of Thinking. This week is Control of Will or intentionality. As in sports training in which you are trying to change habitual physical behavior, these exercises call forth resistances. For example, when assigned a S2 exercise for thinking, the typical S1 response is doubt: “That won’t work.” “That’s stupid.”

WHY AM I HERE?
My class is adult education, not therapy. But, S1 – our habitual ways of thinking, feeling and willing - complains and resists, After all, S1 is who we are. S1 is totally habitual, and we have carefully built up habits of mind and feelings. These are our “done policies” of life – how we’ve always done things, how we will do things. Many of these unconscious ways of being have contributed to why these men are incarcerated and why they are now “between a rock and a hard place.” Like a basketball team, we need to see who has “coached” us.
     We live between “the rock” - our self and “the hard place”, world. In the world, we are “under the influence of” and coached or directed by family, culture, friends, laws, economics, our desires or many other forces. Our “self”, our S1 and S2, respond to the demands, obligations, duties of the world. Do we have choices to make about what we allow to influence us, good or bad? This puts S1 and S2 in a struggle. “I like this.” “You ought to do that.”
     We have built ourselves up through our experiences: life has been easy, life has been hard, I have certain capacities and certain lacks. Patterns. Habits. At every level. We rarely go into the soul gym.

WHAT DO I WANT?
Some of us feel that our S1 self “calls the shots”. I gave an example of a “pick and roll” choice I made to control my S1 self years ago.  I think quickly. In the corporate world, where the value is placed on “expertise”, having quick responses to situations is very valuable. In a non-hierarchical world, where team work and shared decision making is valued, relying on one person is counter productive- even rejected, it works against a team’s build-up proficiency in decision making
In basketball, you “set a pick” by stepping in front of a hard-charging opponent. I decided I would set a pick on my speedy intellect in team meetings by literally putting my hand over my mouth – shutting me up to watch the group deliberate.
One man in my class said that for him, the major motivation were his emotions, his rage. For years he had been filled with rage, that he was rage! He “set a pick” on his rage by crossing his arms in order to hold himself in an attempt not to get into trouble. His S2 was “reminding” himself.
     We discussed that when you “set a pick” and stop any opponent, you are then free to “roll” toward the basket. He sat and thought about this while the class concluded.
     Before he left, he commented about a band-aid I had on the back of my hand. I told him it was a minor cut. He then gave me a recipe to make a healing salve from an aloe juice and honey.
     How about that? He set a pick, stopped the S1 rage, and then his S2 compassion “rolled” its way through, or around, his rage. Nice.

© Copyright 2016, Jean W. Yeager

All Rights Reserved

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