Human Shield, Part One

I have always had this “thing” in my life. I didn't really know where it came from, but it has always been there--beneath the surface or flashing brightly in the sun. Until now, I didn't understand why. I originally thought that it was simply a human trait. That everyone had a similar feeling, but experience screams otherwise. The "thing" to which I refer is a sense of being a human shield to those who can't defend themselves. I have always, always defended underdogs. I think that's where my soft spot for animals of all kinds arises. I think it's why I always defended kids in school who were picked on by bullies. I think it is why I still defend adults even who are bullied. I never viewed it as anything as grandiose as a hero complex. It was just a sense of needing to stand up for those could not or would not stand up for themselves. Only when I'm the one needing an advocate to stand up for me, I haven't always been there for myself.

I have come up with various analogies to try to explain this feeling of needing to be a human shield to others to myself. I have used metaphors like being a mama bear protecting her cubs, only I'm protective of anyone I perceive as an underdog. An example of this is when I was on a public bus near Seattle, and I encountered a group of teens who were picking on this grown man with a bag of groceries. The man was probably in his twenties. Apparently he was giving off a scared rabbit vibe because these teens rather blatantly swiped a bottle of wine out of his grocery bag and refused to put it back. The guy was clearly outnumbered by the teens and overwhelmed by their bully energy. I suspect he had been bullied as a child and a familiar scenario was taking over his will to stand up for himself when he was outnumbered. Had someone not stepped in to help him, I suspect he would have gone home one bottle of wine short.

That someone who stepped in was me, a thirty-something dyke, who looked more like a mom than law enforcement. Still this mom-like dyke spoke up after about a minute of their bullying behavior. I had been watching them, hoping that their better selves would override their bully selves and do the right thing by returning the bottle to its rightful owner. When that was clearly not going to happen, and no one else seemed inclined to step in, I told them to cut the crap and return the bottle they had stolen. They, in the form of a snarky teenage girl, denied that they had stolen anything. Being quite used to confronting snarky teenage girls from my years in social service, I said something like, "Come on. I saw you do it. Just give it back and leave the guy alone." Never doubting for an instant that she would comply, I kept my eye on her until she gave it back. Then she and her friends moved away from the guy and me. I guess all those years of working at an emergency shelter for teenage girls paid off. That authoritarian tone had not left me and the battle ended peacefully. The guy thanked me and that was the end of it.

It wasn't until later that it dawned on me that in this day and age, the punks could very well have had a gun or a knife and things could have ended differently, but they didn't. My angels were no doubt keeping them in line. They were just punk bullies, and someone older, with authority in her voice, and a strong mama bear energy in her aura stood up to them. It wasn't my fight, but neither was it right to sit idly by and let the bullying continue.

Related to this sense of being a human shield is the concept of being a Rescuer. To use archetypal terms, it's like being a knight in shining armor, or is my case, a knightess in shining armor, coming to the aid of damsels in distress. I'd say that at least half of my romantic relationships started out as rescues. That's not a good way begin a relationship unless you're talking about rescuing kittens. I think it was the Buddha who said that a relationship based on need will always be a needy relationship. My need to rescue and another's need to be rescued adds up to a needy relationship every time. Even when I've tried diligently to stop myself from acting out the Rescuer archetype, I seem only to postpone this scenario for a time. A few years at best. 

It has only been my shift into a role of being the one in need of rescuing that this theme of rescuing has abated somewhat. It's really hard to be both the rescued and the rescuer simultaneously, and yet I continue to try. Like the time a hawk zoomed down and snatched a squirrel from the magnolia tree in my front yard. Somehow the two of them ended up by the hedge in front of the house. Had I not been in a wheelchair, that squirrel would have lived to see another day. I would have run the hawk off and saved the squirrel. Instead, I had to sit in my wheelchair on the sidewalk and try to figure out a way to get the hawk to leave its perspective dinner alone long enough for it to escape.

I played great horned owl sounds on my phone in hopes of scaring it away by making it think that one of its few predators was nearby. Unfortunately, the sound quality was poor and it sounded too far away to be a threat. I prayed and grappled with this moral dilemma for a while, trying to scare it away by tossing an empty water bottle at it. Physics worked against me and the light as a feather empty bottle landed uselessly several feet away from the hawk. That effort yielded not even a blink of the hawk's eyes. Sadly after a half hour of being able to figure out nothing, I had to roll away and allow nature to take its course. That felt awful to me, particularly since a van full of ambulatory people sat in my driveway watching me, offering no help whatsoever. If I had been in that van and abler to walk, I would have jumped out and chased the hawk away in seconds. It was a prime example of how few people there are who will protect the underdog, or in this case, the undersquirrel.

I had to go inside  because I couldn't bear to watch as the hawk ate dinner, when dinner was a small creature, who had called the tree in my front yard home. I guess I've spent too many hours watching squirrels cavorting in the trees not to feel a kinship with them. i didn't know this particular squirrel, but then neither did I know the man on the bus whose bottle of wine was stolen from him in the presence of a host of witnesses, who remained silent except for me.

There are other incidences when I stood up for kids in school, who were being bullied for one reason or another. I befriended them and sent would-be bullies on their way, mostly just with my presence. My presence at their side demonstrated that this victim was no longer alone. No longer prey to a bored bully with nothing better to do than pick on someone who was at a disadvantage because of a handicap, shyness, poverty, or some other trait that set them apart from others.

I've never understood bullying and my bully alarm goes off quite easily. Bullies make me angry. No matter what the circumstances, and I will stand up to them. The hawk was less of a bully and more just another one of God's creatures who just needed to eat to survive. No amount of discussion over the benefits of a plant-based diet was going to change that.  So I yielded to the higher intelligence of nature. That wasn't easy to do, but I had no other choice that I could see. I certainly had no intention of harming the hawk. It was simply following its hawk nature. Still I haven't forgotten the squirrel or this difficult situation, as this blog attests.

This story brings home the point that sometimes I am the only one who stands between the victim and the victimizer. I don’t try to be a hero. I am sometimes just forced into it by circumstances. I don’t particularly like the feeling of standing out there alone, being a human shield to protect someone who cannot or will not stand up for themselves. So why do I do it when I have nothing personal to gain from it? I finally reached the conclusion that it might either be something in my DNA or very early life experience. It could be both, of course, but I'll skip the debate between nature versus nurture. It just is what it is. I feel compelled to stand up to bullies to protect the victims. I'm less compelled to stand up when I'm the one being bullied but I am getting to that point too. 

Always a Little Homesick

Having Hurricane Irma arrive two years ago in the middle of the night before my birthday then waking up to no power on my birthday was no fun, particularly in Florida in the summer. I survived two days with no air conditioning only because it was in the low 80s the first couple days after the hurricane went right over the top of us. There appears to be a grace period after a hurricane when it’s drier and less hot than before the storm. 

On the morning of the third day of no air conditioning, with temperatures forecast to go back into the 90s that day, my friends got me to safety and air conditioning at another friend’s house, where I stayed for two more days attempting to get my core body temperature down. I fell in the bathroom after two days there and ended up in the Emergency Room because my blood pressure was ridiculously low. After four or five hours in the morgue-like air conditioning of the ER, I returned home, where power had finally been restored.

My body temperature was back to normal, but that bout with heat exhaustion had lasting effects on me, as did the move six weeks later to a new house, where I am still. I have had heat exhaustion too many times to count. I got it the first time in 1984. As a result of that experience, I have spent the past 35 years trying not to get hot. I know, moving back to Florida wasn’t the greatest idea with a goal like that, but it was something I had to do. My buddy needed me to be here for her. I just didn’t know why until after I got here.

This is where intuition comes in handy. For nine months, I had been clearing out my bookshelves and my house overlooking Puget Sound with a view to moving back to Florida. Did I want to leave Washington state? Oh no. I very much wanted to stay. Did I know why I was moving back? Not exactly. I suspected it had to do with my friend’s or my mother’s health. As it turns out, it has been both and my health as well. All I really knew then was that I was being summoned by heaven to report back to Florida, where I had spent the first 25 years of my life.

I had been blessed to lived in the Asheville area of North Carolina for eight years snd spent another seventeen years in the Puget Sound region near Seattle. Both areas are noticeably cooler usually than Florida. Moving all the way to Seattle illustrates the lengths to which I will go to stay cool. 

After an arduous journey in a moving van, dragging my Honda Civic behind me all the way, and lugging my three cats and me in and out of hotels every morning and night, I finally arrived in Central Florida a lot worse for the wear and tear of packing and loading up what was left of my life as an autonomous free spirit.  Three days after my arrival, my best buddy and lifelong friend was diagnosed with breast cancer. Lo and behold, there I was with my two cats (my oldest cat, Dustin, had died two days after our arrival), awaiting divine assignment. Ahem. 

On the fourth day after my arrival, my buddy underwent surgery. I took care of her cats and house while she was in the hospital. Her cousins and a dear friend stayed with her while she was in the hospital. I stayed with my two cats and my friend’s five cats. Her boy Jack needed twice daily insulin injections for his diabetes, so someone definitely needed to be focused on her babies while she focused on her health crisis. I was that somebody. Had I not been being urged incessantly from within to downsize and get back to Florida as soon as possible since fall (my favorite time of year out there), things would have gone differently. I’m not saying that no one would have been there, but my buddy didn’t have had to worry that someone who loved her fur babies was right there in her house, keeping the home fires burning, so to speak, so she could focus on getting through that ordeal with the help of others.

When she came home, I took on the job of tending her incision site and changing her bandages, driving her to and from various doctor appointments, making sure we had food, and cleaning up after seven felines, most of whom were primarily indoor kitties. That’s a lot of cat box duty, I’m here to tell you, but if I had it to do all over, I would do it without hesitation. That’s how important my friend is to me.

A few years later the tables turned, and I was the in need of a surrogate cat mom for my babies and someone to take care of me. The friend I had cared for and moved back here for became my care taker. The roles had reversed in a big way, and I learned how truly hard it is for me to be taken care of at that level. 

I had gone through an earlier bout of cancer with my friend while I was living in North Carolina. I was closer and circumstances were such that I was able to drop everything and drive to Florida in the middle of the night to be with her in the hospital and check on her cats. She had to have emergency surgery when her ovary exploded, spewing cancerous cells throughout her abdominal cavity. I was afraid I was going to lose her then, but she made it through that with amazing courage and strength.
The following month, I flew back to Florida to spend a week with my friend while she underwent a complete hysterectomy. We joked that they should have velcroed her back together after the first surgery so they could just open her up again without the use of surgical steel. During that stay, I slept in a  hospital chair beside her so she knew she wasn’t alone. I stayed with her for a week to make sure she was okay. Then I flew back to Asheville and grad school while she went to stay at her father’s house once she began chemotherapy.My friend survived the two surgeries and beat that battle with cancer. She never even lost her hair from the chemo. Once she beat the breast cancer years later, silly me thought she might catch a break, but on one trip to the oncologist, a year or two later, they discovered that she had a treatable form of leukemia. That is in remission too now, although she’s experiencing some other related health issues that have resulted in a couple of hospital stays recently.Why am I sharing all this? I’m not sure really except to explain why I moved away from a place I loved so much and why I won’t be leaving any time soon. As long as my buddy is here, I’m shelving my desire to return to the Pacific Northwest. It might be my favorite location in the world to live to live, but being near my friend and my mother are higher priorities in my life. I’m fortunate to have found my adult home even if I don’t go back any time soon. I used to long for “a place where I can feel at home,” as I wrote in a song back in the early 80s. It took over ten more years to find it, but I did find it and cherished my time there for seventeen years.Will I ever move back? That all depends on what else happens in the future. Until then, I remain always a little homesick yet certain that I am where I belong at this time in my life, no matter how much the situation may chafe periodically.

My Buddy, Buddy

This photo of Buddy was taken in 2012 when I was back in Washington.

Buddy is currently tethered down the hill so he can eat different grass down there and help with the upkeep of the property, something goats do well. When I came out to take him his carrot, he wasn't in his pen. I didn't know if he had gone on the lam again, so I called his name and he started nattering from downhill. I walked down that way until I saw where he was tethered. He sounded a little frantic when I called out to him, so I walked down to him and found that he'd gotten himself tangled, much the way a dog does. I untied and untangled him then tied him back again. On the way down the hill, I found some great bunches of fresh dandelion leaves that are out of chicken roaming range I suspect. I'm disinclined to harvest any out there for my smoothies when they're in range of the chicken walkabouts out there. Chicken poop is NOT one of the ingredients for my green smoothies. Ick! Anyway, I gathered a bunch of tender ones for him and took those with me to go with his carrot. He seemed happy to see me. Particularly when I untangled him. Silly ol' goat (spoken affectionately the way Christopher Robin called Winnie the Pooh a "silly ol' bear"). 

I loved Buddy so much. Buddy was my name for him. The owners didn’t give him a name because they had lost several of their farm animals—two to coyotes and two to poisonous plants. They felt that it hurt more when you lost them, if you named them. I understand the reasoning, but I took food scraps from my smoothie-making activities out to him every day so it seemed fitting that he should have a name. Everybody needs a name so that when they hear you say it, they know that you know them. Anyway, I started calling him Buddy, and my Buddy he will always be. I got to spend only 5 months of my life with him, just a smallish slice of my life, but he will always be part of my story because of our daily interactions during those five months. 

I loved him so much because of his brave spirit in the face of loss. Shortly after two goats showed up together (a brother and sister), the sister ate some noxious weed and died, just as one of the llamas (Autumn) had done. So almost immediately after being uprooted and brought to a new home, the sister died and the brother remained in an open pen with a whole bunch of chickens. Being the empathic animal lover I am, my heart went out to the surviving goat instantly. I hated that so much change and loss had occurred so abruptly in his life, so I took him under my wing so to speak. Though actually it was the hens in the pen who ultimately took him under their wings since they had them, and I don’t a single wing anywhere on my body. As much as I long to soar with the eagles, I am perfectly content to traverse through this life completely wingless. Now a spare pair of strong legs I could use. But I digress. Ahem.

I loved Buddy so much that he now appears in a novel I am in the middle of writing. Yup. He became a character in Silent Snow, appearing eventually in a bookshop near you. I will give you plenty of warning when I finish it. I will finish it. I just have to get some dedicated time for writing. I will get that at some point. I always do. I just need my life to fall into a gentle rhythm where there is peace and a space in my head where creativity has enough energy to work and play. I personally don’t do well physically or emotionally when I don’t have space and time to breathe a fresh breath of creativity.

Healing at a Snail’s Pace

“Even a snail makes progress if it keeps moving.”—me

I suppose it seems a little vain to quote yourself, but I truly say some of the darnedest things sometimes. It’s like every once in a while, my Higher Self sneaks in and drops a shiny pebble along the path to get my attention. I stop and pick it up, rolling it over and over in my hand, marveling at its simplicity and beauty. I tuck that shiny pebble into my metaphorical medicine bag. Then when I need it most, the pebble tumbles out of my medicine bag and brings healing to some broken part of me or someone else.

Thus the above words are for a heart that is weary of needing so much help. I had been making slow progress up until I got my new wheelchair. Then for several different reasons, transferring got tricky again. First I had to have the leg pads removed because they were making it difficult to impossible to step out over the footplate upon transferring. Then I quickly discovered that the footplate was far too long for me to pull it up out of the way without scraping it along my calves, causing blisters and scrapes.

The added difficulty of calculating the exact positioning of every molecule in my body, the dimensions of the new chair, and the precise trajectory needed to execute successfully eight different transfers, proved to be too much. After scratching and scraping my legs for a few days, I was able to get a couple of friends to put the footplate of the wheelchair I had been borrowing onto my new chair, making it much easier to transfer. While things went much better after the footplate switch, I was sporting several new open wounds as a direct result of the new chair. 

Eventually I fell again in the bathroom twisting my knee and slicing back several layers of skin on my right foot.  I bandaged my foot but later that same day, I tried to transfer and my knee gave out, being too weak of a link to support my iffy transfers. I had the EMTs take me to Celebration Hospital in Orlando. I spent four days there letting them bandage my wounds and allowing my knee to heal. I went home four days later weak from the down time but with a mostly healed knee. 

It took four days to regain my strength, even though I had not yet completely regained my stamina. That took several more days. Once I was back up to par for me, I noticed that I was having spells of feeling weak suddenly when I transferred in the bathroom. I wasn’t sure what was happening but I knew something wasn’t right and I suspected that it was related to my blood pressure. In talking to a nurse yesterday about it, she suggested that I might have orthostatic hypotension. Many times I have wondered if I needed to be on medication for hypertension when my blood pressure is nearly always low when I get it checked either at the hospital or at home. Only sometimes when I go to the doctor does my blood pressure register high. This sudden drop in blood pressure is, I suspect, the reason I fall sometimes. 

It’s exhausting to have to figure all this out on your own or to tell your doctor only to get a quick diagnosis of this or that, which someone else has already ruled out via tests and observation.

After another hospital stay of eight days, they finally approved some home physical therapy to help me in strengthening my body so I can successfully transfer consistently. I am showing signs of improvement on days I don’t have to push myself to keep going. If I push too hard, I feel the sudden fatigue and my transfers are iffy at best. I have had to call Fire Rescue three times since I have been home. That’s so discouraging but I do feel that PT is helping. They are supposed to evaluate me this week to see if I am benefiting from the PT. I see a distinct improvement when I am not experiencing one of those sudden weary spells. 

I sometimes wonder if there is something else I need to learn before I can finally turn the page and finish this particularly long and difficult chapter in my life. I am getting better and stronger but most of the time my improvements have come at a snail’s pace. I’m not happy about that. To use the tortoise and the hare analogy, I’m usually the hare. I don’t like being the tortoise. It is not my style. Or at least it didn’t used to be. Right now I guess it is until enough healing occurs so I can begin to walk then run finally. I look to Isaiah to remind myself that it’s not a bad thing to wait on someone else’s timing. 

“But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk and not faint.” Isaiah 41:31

I’m ready any time now to mount up with wings as eagles. I’m ready to run without weariness and walk without fainting. Any time now. Until then I guess I just have to wait and watch, since I have already been told that God is doing something new and I need to pay attention to it (see earlier blog entitled, “Behold, Something New” at my Mystic Angel Healing website). I’m still not sure what the new thing is, but I am still watching and waiting. Although  I do admit to some drumming of my fingers while I wait. I am human after all. 

(Http://mysticangelhealing.com)

Hunkering Down in Florida

I get a kick out of language and the humorous side of difficult situations. Since we are currently watching and waiting to see what Hurricane Dorian is going to do, this is a perfect time to look at all the catch phrases that leap out of our mouths when a really bad storm is threatening our way of life. 

 

I don’t know how many times I’m encouraged to “batten down the hatches,” “hunker down,” and “ride out the storm.” Last I checked, hurricanes aren’t horses. I’m not sure I can hunker in a wheelchair. I’m pretty sure I don’t have any hatches to batten down, and I am not sure how to go about battening down anything, much less a hatch. Despite my asking people what this means, I have so far garnered only puzzled looks from the speakers of these phrases. They are as clueless as I am, so I decided to do some research in between the battening time and the hunkering time. 

Now I know the phrase “batten down the hatches” is a nautical one. According to the Oxford dictionary, it refers to securing a ship’s hatch-tarpaulins in preparation for a storm. So when a storm threatens, everyone in the US, including those in landlocked states, turn into a bunch of shipmates, using nautical terminology that otherwise stays locked away in Davy Jones’s locker (Google this if you don’t know what Davy Jones’s locker is. I don’t have time to explain jokes while I’m preparing to hunker down. Hint: It has nothing to do with a late British pop star of Monkees fame.). I’m rather surprised we don’t go buy macaws to sit on our shoulders and start sprinkling our conversations with outcries of “har!” and “ahoy!”

So once we’ve battened down our hatches, we have to await the arrival of bad weather so we can start hunkering down. One definition of hunkering is to squat or crouch down low.” I know I can’t do that so I will have to improvise in my wheelchair. Another definition is to “apply oneself seriously to a task.” College students, when someone tells you to hunker down, this is what they mean: “Study hard and don’t waste that money I’ve spent a lifetime saving!”

If you’re going through a bad storm, you need to crouch in a defensive position. Face it, you’ll be better prepared to bend over a little farther and kiss your arse goodbye, which is particularly appropriate if you’re in the path of a Category 5 hurricane. 

Now that we’ve battened down our hatches and are prepared to hunker down, we just have to “ride out the storm.” This idiom is explained by the Cambridge Dictionary thus:

ride (out) the storm. to manage not to be destroyed, harmed, or permanently affected by the difficult situation you experience: The government seems confident that it will ride out the storm.

What is particularly disconcerting about this definition is their example of usage about the government. I’m not so confident that our country will not be permanently affected by our current administration. Nor am I confident that we will all ride out Hurricane Dorian without being permanently affected. At least one family in the Bahamas will certainly be permanently affected by the storm. Their seven-year old boy has drowned.  

So while we bandy about these otherwise unused phrases, let us pray for those who are already being adversely impacted by the storm, figuratively and literally. Peace be to all and mercy.

A Rolling Stone Loses No Cats

Sometimes when your present situation is a challenge, it can be helpful to look back and recall a time in your life when things were better or at least different. Think about Maria in “The Sound of Music” when she is trying to allay the fears of the children when they were frightened by the thunderstorm. She encouraged them to think about their favorite things in life. For her it included “raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens,” etc. She has a long list but the first two of hers are favorites of mine as well. Some other favorite things for me are memories of my travels and scenes of the views outside my favorite dwelling places. 

Because of the nature relaxation videos I was watching while I wiled away the hours in the hospital, I started thinking about my trips back and forth across the United States. I mentally counted the number of times I’ve driven across the country. Unless I am forgetting a round trip, it has been only ten times rather than a dozen as I had thought previously. Of course, there were also dozens of airplane flights too but that topic is for another day and another blog maybe.

On each of these trips, I have had at least one cat with me and 5 times I had 4 cats with me. I nearly lost Bingo on one of those trips, but thank God Jan and I found him in the bushes when we doubled back to the hotel to look for him. He slipped out unnoticed when we stopped to check out. He never got out of his carrier, but for some reason he did during that brief stop and he slipped unnoticed out of the car.

On the first trek, there were 5 people so I had lots of human company, 1 cat (Sandy), and a small amount of time when I wasn’t driving. There were 3 drivers and 2 vehicles so we took turns. When I wasn’t getting a break, I was driving the 27-foot moving van. That cured me of any desire to drive a big rig. A 27-foot truck was plenty big enough for me.

My friend Jan was with me on 4 of those trips. I drove solo for all the rest, including when I drove from Seattle to Minneapolis and back for GCLS in 2012. My cats stayed in the hotel while I attended the conference. My high school friend, Gail Patin, was with us for one trip. She ended up changing a tire on Jan’s van. “We don’t need a man! I can change the tire.” That was the best quote from that trip. 😂 She was right. She still roars her woman power to this day. She’s definitely one of my heroes and favorite friends. 😃

The only other time I blew a tire was on my Civic, which I was towing behind my moving truck—only a 17 footer that time—when I was moving back to Florida from Seattle. There was no way I was changing that tire on the highway side in (BFE) Wyoming. I was far too close to the interstate and the speed limit (read, “mere suggestion”) was 70 mph.

I know for a fact that people use that freeway through nowhere as a speedway. I used it on one trip to see how fast my Honda Civic would go. I got up to 95 mph three times before I spotted another car in the distance and slowed down just in case it was a cop. I finally figured that 95 was a respectable number for an economy car. 😉 Yes, I have gotten numerous speeding tickets over the decades but for nothing anywhere near as fast as 95 mph. 

Please don’t attempt this experiment yourself. I had been driving my Civic for five years already and on trips like these, I had already caught her sneaking up to 85 mph without me noticing it. She liked speed and she loved deserted highways. Her favorite road however was 101 along the Oregon coast. That had lots of curves and hills. She giggled a lot on that road. 

The amazing thing is that my Civic just hummed the entire time I was driving that fast. No rattles, no hiccups, just a well-oiled machine smiling because her driver was letting her stretch her legs for a change. Yes, she was a she. I named her Amaterasu after the Japanese Goddess of the sun. She was a Japanese car and was pretty much all windows. That wasn’t a big deal in Seattle where drizzle is the forecast much of the time. On the few hot days of the year, the sun really heated up that little car, thus the moniker. 

The first cross-country trip, with my then partner and her two children, was the one when I drove the 27-foot moving truck. That trip was what you might call “eventful,” kind of like how you use the word “interesting” in the Chinese curse, “May you have an interesting life.”   The best thing that happened to me on that trip was when the Olive Garden waitress dumped an entire glass of iced tea in my lap. Expecting me to let loose a string of expletives, I looked right at her and said, “Thank you! That’s the best thing that’s happened to me all day.” I wasn’t kidding either. It was a hot summer day and the air conditioner in the truck had stopped working that day so we had to stop to get it fixed in St. Louis. So you see, it truly was the best thing that happened to me that day. They even gave us free dessert. 

For better or worse, I have had an “interesting life.” Would I do anything differently? Oh yes, I would not have lifted those two heavier than usual boxes in a shipment of about 80 boxes. That led to blowing out my back, which ultimately led to this time in my life in a wheelchair. I would not have lifted any of those boxes, without testing them first,  had I know there were two that weighed as much as those two did. Most of the boxes weighed thirty to forty pounds. No big deal. But two boxes out of that shipment weighed closer to sixty pounds. I heard and felt the first pop after the first of the heavy boxes. The second box had an accompanying pop as well as a strange sensation. I didn’t know what had happened, but I did know that it wasn’t good. The following weeks proved my hunch to be true as the popping sounds led to all kinds of numbness, tingling, and pain in my feet, legs, and back. After a couple of trips to traditional medical doctor’s yielded nothing, I turned to a chiropractor who took x-rays of my back and showed me what had happened. It wasn’t pretty. He also told me about an early in life neck injury that occurred when I flipped my brother’s bike and landed on my head, raising a big knot on my noggin and damaging my spine in the neck area. That was when I was nine. I lived with this injury without treatment or even notice until my chiropractor took and examined the x-rays. He ended up treating that injury as well as the low back ones since there were no further charges for treating the whole spine. It was a good idea anyway since healing one part of the spine and not the rest leaves the job incomplete and is likely to impact the newly injured area negatively.

So aside from wanting to change the part about getting injured in a way that left me vulnerable to further injury, I must say that the down time when I couldn’t return to work for several months was put to good use. I took a trip to the Oregon coast and picked up a small piece of tumbled driftwood. While riding back to our cabin at the KOA, I started turning the piece of wood over and over, stroking its smooth sides. I felt a story coming to me. It had to wait a couple of days for me to return home, but when I did, the words started pouring out. I did little else besides type and sleep for six days. 

From this burst of inspiration arose my first published novel, Driftwood. I had already written one work of fiction and was working on two others when Driftwood pushed its way to the fore and dropped in my lap at a absurd pace. I had to shape it and flesh it out for another few weeks. Then I edited and re-edited for several more months until one day I finally deposited it into the hands of my first publisher. The book not only was received with welcome arms, it was used to launch a new line of LGBT classics.

Later while nursing my back, I wrote another novel and finished one I was halfway finished writing. These were Higher Loveand Artemisian Artistrespectively. These two were also published by my first publisher, as was Gaia’s Guardian. Two and a half novels while I was out commission for four months was not  bad, considering. Would those books have been written and my career as an author been launched if I hadn’t injured my back and stayed out of work to come back from the injury? I honestly don’t think so. At least not when it happened. 

Another thing I wouldn’t have done is use scented Epsom salts when I didn’t know what was in them. That error in judgment nearly cost me my life from the huge allergic reaction and subsequent infection I had. This event has exacerbated my difficulty with standing and walking. If not for that horrific allergic reaction I might still be walking now. I certainly wouldn’t be on embarrassingly personal terms with dozens of Fire Rescue folks and EMTs in Polk County, Florida or hospital staff at two different hospitals in the area. I would gladly erase that lapse of judgment and its consequences in a heartbeat. I can’t really come up with any lasting benefits of this time in my life that couldn’t have found another way to unfold. Check back with me in five years and see if my mind has changed about that. 

Anyway, back to the trip down memory lane in regards to all the road trips across the US. In all the trips with cats, I had only four attempts to escape the confines of whatever vehicle we were driving. The first was Bingo’s successful escape at the hotel that could have turned out so differently but didn’t. I can’t even begin to express how devastated I would have been. Thankfully, we found the boy in the bushes next to the hotel office. Otherwise, I probably would have moved to Paducah, Kentucky at least until I found my adorable boy again. 

In his next incarnation as Bootsy, he escaped twice from the pickup I was driving. Once in Phoenix when we stopped to visit with my dear friend, Lynn Ames. She quickly donned her her superhero cape and collected Bootsy out from under the car parked next to us at our hotel. Then Pixie, my current youngest, decided to follow Bootsy’s lead and make a break for it. We had already been in the car for three days and she needed to stretch her legs. So she jumped out and took off at a fast walk, heading in the direction of a gas station. Perhaps she felt in need of a few catnip treats for the road. Lynn trotted after her and gathered Pixie in her arms to be returned to the fold. Lynn did this knowing that she was allergic to cats. That’s my kind of hero. I honestly don’t know how I would have hobbled that far behind Pixie. 

Bootsy was nearby and had an invisible leash tethering him to me his entire life. Pixie does now, but she sure didn’t then. Her tie to Little Grey might have brought her back, but I was still in my probationary period back then as far as Pixie was concerned. We were new to one another.

On the way back to Florida, six months later, Bootsy snuck out of the truck at the hotel in Fayetteville, North Carolina. It was late when we stopped for the night next to a soldier who was loading his car. I saw Bootsy and couldn’t believe it was him. He must have been ready to leap as soon as I opened the door. I asked the soldier if it was his cat and he assured me it wasn’t so I started trying to figure out how to get him from beneath the car next to me when I spied a cat toy that was brand new. I had just sent a mental smoke signal for angelic help a split second before and, lo and behold, there sat the perfect toy to get Boo’s attention. I unlocked the door to our room quickly and tossed the colorful fuzzy ball towards the door. Bootsy shot out from under the car towards the ball. I grabbed him and put him inside the room with the ball then went back to gather the rest of the furry children. I picked up Little and Pixie at carried them in at the same time since the truck was only about a yard from our room. Then I came back and put Anjolie in a carrier and got her and the other carriers in with me. After I got the rest of our stuff, i went inside to spend our last night on the road together. I had only one more long day of driving and we have not hit the road since. That was in October 2012. I don’t plan on any cross country trips in the immediate future, as least not in a car or truck. So far, I have made it to my destination with every cat cat I had when I started. I plan to make sure that always happens. I couldn’t have predicted that traveling with cats would be so great. It’s been a lot more work, especially with four of them, but it’s been a fun adventure and is worth a book full of stories by itself. I am grateful for the memories of the road trips, the cats, and the road trips with cats.

Facing Grief

I had a very long talk with a chaplain yesterday because I have been having a hard time emotionally lately. It has been difficult to maintain emotional equilibrium. I was surprised when our conversation came around to the fact that losing my nephew, David, was still bothering me so much. It has not been that long, and I have always been close to my nephews, so it shouldn’t have been surprising. However, the depth of emotion was a bit of a shock. My siblings’ children are as close as I will get to having children of my own. Of the four I have had the joy of knowing and loving, I have had to say goodbye to two of them already. Both were sudden and unexpected departures. 

As much as I want not to be hurting still from the loss of David, I had to realize and accept that the loss of this precious young man has been stalking me all year. I am angry that my current state of health robbed me of being able to see him more frequently at a time when I knew he was hurting and feeling a little lost himself because he went from having Ben’s two children in his and his father’s care to being an empty nester. I had talked to him about it at my house when he was there a few months prior to his passing. I wanted so much to be able to spend more time with him, but my lack of mobility has hindered me from going anywhere except the doctor.

After the loss of a loved one, life moves on, only a piece of the puzzle of our lives is missing. We can try to pretend that it isn’t missing, but it doesn’t change the fact that there is a gaping hole in our hearts where a person who once resided on this plane is no longer there. 

When we lost David’s twin, Ben, we were all forced to move on immediately. As soon as we got home from the family gathering after Ben’s funeral, we became aware that Hurricane Charley was barreling our way. We were jerked from grieving mode and thrown into survival mode instantly. 

When David died abruptly at the end of last year, it was like losing both of them all over again. The grief from the loss of Ben had been pushed aside in order to make sure my mom and my sister were going to be safe during and after the hurricane. I knew their hearts were broken and I tried to make sure that we were all going to be ready and as safe as possible when Charley came knocking at Mom’s door, where we were all three huddled together. I clearly recall standing next to my mom going through an emergency preparedness list that is permanently tattooed on my brain from spending so many years in earthquake country. After a careful inventory, Mom and I went off to buy bottled water since that was all we needed to be as ready as you can ever be for a hurricane. The quick shift from grief to survival mode grated on the heart, shredding it a bit because the shifting of gears was done without having time to use the clutch.

I am angry that my current state of health prevents me from driving to my mom’s house every other weekend to spend time with her. That is what I was doing from the moment I moved back to Florida in 2010 until I had to give up driving when I nearly crashed my buddy’s car because of back spasms that periodically rocked my body, forcing my right leg to go ramrod straight. That isn’t a big deal in normal situations, but it’s downright scary when you’re driving and the leg that loses control is the one pressing the gas pedal. 

I had to make a quick lane transfer to keep from ramming into a car that was stopped in front of me. I managed to make it safely back to Jan’s house with the help of a host of traffic angels. I went in, hung up the keys, and told Jan not to let me drive again until my back stopped causing my leg to do that. 

It’s been five years since the woman who drove across the continent a dozen times hung up her keys. When my Washington drivers license was nearing expiration, I got a Florida ID card instead. Thus ended my regular trips to visit my family. After moving 3500 miles back from Seattle so I could spend more time with my family, I had to ground myself. Since that time, my condition has made it nearly impossible for me to make the hour long trip even if someone else drives me.

Not being able to visit my mother at this time in her life is infuriating and another kind of loss and grief. Yet it isn’t something under my control right now. If will power and the desire to go were all I needed, I would be there with her already. I need my body to cooperate with me and heal so I can get around again on my own. 

The chaplain and I talked about how humbling it is to have to ask for help. Having to ask for the level of help I have needed for the past five years is downright humiliating. I know that I am a burden sometimes even though I’m told that I am not. I sense the anger and the frustration about having to worry that I am okay and not on the floor somewhere, and I understand it. It is difficult to have to be constantly aware of someone else’s safety. It’s stressful and I know it. It’s stressful and frustrating for me too. The loss of independence is yet another source of grief.

I have been very independent over the years. I moved across the country from central Florida to the Seattle area. Short of going on up to Alaska, something I considered doing when the Wasilla Waldenbooks store became available and was offered to me, I couldn’t have gotten farther away from the family nest. Ultimately I decided to stay in the more moderate Western Washington climate. Yes, i have had to ask for help at times in the past, but it has always been a last resort and an act of desperation after every other avenue had been explored. It has also been only for a short time rather than year after year of varying levels of dependence.

Yesterday I sought help from a chaplain because I knew I needed to talk to someone who was outside of the situation. I knew something was wrong and that I wasn’t figuring it out on my own. I’m so glad I did because it helped. Have my circumstances changed? No, but I think I can stop beating myself up for feeling so down. No matter how much we want grief to go away and leave us alone, it has its own time schedule. We may make ourselves busy and push through to survive the devastation, but that doesn’t mean that the waves of grief have washed us ashore to a new place in our lives, where we can stand and take those first faltering steps forward. Until that happens we can only try to keep the waves from overwhelming us. We must allow the waves of grief to wash over us until they subside into ripples in shallow water. Only then can we move on to a new place.