Things to Ponder While Yelling "Ouch"

(This is NOT the blog I promised you after losing the rant I wrote on Sunday.....that is yet to come.)

 I am sharing a hard won life lesson with y'all today on the off chance that my struggles may be helpful to someone out there.  If you are one of the lucky ones who never has a pain or an ache, for heaven's sake, don't waste your time plodding through this....just keep on smoking whatever it is you are smoking and move on to a more exciting blog.  However, if you have ever uttered an "ouch" or "oy vey" you might find a nugget of interest here.  I am not preaching anything, by the way, nor am I trying to entice you into my cult where magic is a daily ho-hum happening.  I offer my experiences with all humility and much gratitude.......it's a kind of take- it- or- leave- it thing.  I hope some crumb will resonate for you and make things better.
 
 As most of you know, I recently cancelled my plans to have a bum knee replaced when I realized that my suffering from the knee only accounted for about 30% of my total miseries and it did not seem worthwhile to incur the pain of surgery, recovery and the damned physical therapy to only feel perhaps 30% better.

I definitely feel like I made the right decision for me....(I encourage anyone who is facing replacement of parts to proceed like gangbusters if that surgery will eliminate most of your discomfort or give you mobility you are lacking).  The most interesting thing is, that in order to make that decision, I had to face, analyze and get on speaking terms with all of my various aches and pains and was reminded (once more) of a lesson I learned years ago but keep forgetting:

When there is no possibility of immediate relief from a pain the best thing to do is to stop fighting the pain.
Stop resenting, resisting, hating and trying to pull away from the pain or tear it out of yourself.  Relax and get neutral.   (Easy to say, I know, but it can be done).

Accept the pain.

Take a deep breath.  Look inside.  Examine it for shape, color, size, texture, general characteristics.  Start thinking of the pain as not your enemy but a sort of equal.......you are both stuck in this together.  As soon as you do this the pain becomes less intense and/or more manageable, I swear.  When you quietly accept the fact that there is no quick fix, you develop an odd respect for the pain and begin to learn to live with it rather than be at war with it.  Sounds crazy I know, but it has always worked for me.  And it has just worked again.

Now, before you all pelt me with camel dung I must state (I should probably have said this at the beginning),
I am not talking here about Grade #10 or even #8 or #9 pain.  This method did not work for me during the week on the ship when I was having the extreme sciatic attack and was incarcerated in my cabin unable to move and with excruciating, ceaseless agony for 7 days 24 hours a day.  No amount of accepting made that better or distracted me from its intensity for a moment.  I don't think it helped with an abcessed tooth I once had either.  But it has helped with a lot of the inbetweens and it is helping me a lot with my knee.  For one thing, my  unceasing spewing forth of streams of curses and naughty words has fallen to a trickle.  I am not nearly as exhausted by the end of the day or even when I get up in the morning.  I have stopped obsessing about the damned knee, screaming at every twinge and have actually noticed one or two pleasant things in between groans.  All in all, my condition is much improved without having undergone surgery, tenks gott.  Of, course, the day may come when I re-evaluate things and find the percentage has shifted, and I may very well reschedule the knee replacement.  But, for now I feel I made the right choice and I am content.

So when they find you seated in the lotus position with eyes crossed breathing heavily and they ask what the hell  you are doing, just tell them, like Lois said, you are making friends with your pain.

You Coulda Heard my Screams in Timbuktu...

Oh....all I can say is shit, piss, fuck.

Yesterday I had a brief moment of inspiration.....something goosed me to the laptop and I wrote at least 10,000 gazillion words, stopping every 500 or so to carefully  "save" them. After all, I am no novice at this computer stuff....I have been around the block a few times and know all too well how stuff can disappear into the the Computer Nowhere.   Still, when I had it all fine tuned to my liking I hit "publish" and ended up in some weird Bloggy swamp. 

With trembling fingers I made my way back to my site and my worst fears were confirmed.  Every gazillion of those words must be floating in oblivion because they sure as hell ain't in my Blog list....not even in draft status.  Sob, snivel, sniffle.  I was too disheartened to try to reconstruct it yesterday, but today I made a few notes and just maybe......

But, actually........the truth is.....

I wish I could say that you were all dreadfully deprived of a masterpiece, but I was in a really shitty mood and as I reflected on the whole situation I ended up thanking my lucky stars that the wretched thing did get lost.  You would have probably hated every word I uttered and me for being the utterer.  Most of it was a rabid rant against everyone (including a lot of bloggers whom I love) who had been moaning and crying for their lost youth.....no.....worse than that......for their lost youthful good looks, a complaint I simply have no time or tolerance for.

I will present my arguments tomorrow......meanwhile if you want to do any bitching and complaining about the fact that everything is drooping and you can't stand to look in the mirror anymore and  "why oh why, poor me", you had better do it before I expound on what a silly fool you are for feeling that way.

See.....I am NOT always Pollyanna!

Enuf said for today.

Just passing along someone else's gem

This is too good not to share.  Kristie, commenting on Ken's "Living the life in Saint-
Aignan" reported the following............a perfect description of our peculiar current dependence/addiction......

Kristi in the Western Reserve said...

I'm glad your family is no longer in harm's way, and don't want to downplay the dangers of extreme weather, but I laughed a lot yesterday reading this on facebook, "As Hurricane Irene batters the East Coast, federal disaster officials have warned that Internet outages could force people to interact with other people and neighbors for the first time in years. Residents are bracing themselves for the horror of awkward silences & unwanted eye contact. FEMA has advised: “Be prepared. Write down possible topics to talk about in advance. Sports, the weather. Remember, a conversation is basically a series of Facebook updates strung together.”

The Cats Have Spoken

The big day is here.......the Lottery drawing for the Erma Bombeck books has  been completed.  I must confess that the cats were not totally effective at the job so I did use the Random Number Picker and here are the lucky Winners:
                                 Blissed Out Grandma
                                Saranne
                                Anonymous - (Ida)

Now, if you really want the book you must be willing to email me your addresses.  (I know yours, Ida. )

                        lms52927@aol.com      (the first character is a lower case "L")

Congratulations to the lucky winners and I do hope you enjoy dear old Erma.

And so ends another breath-taking episode in the melodrama of "It's Always Something".

Thank you all for participating so enthusiastically......I really wish I had a book for each of you.

Now, I am going back to bed.....believe it or not I woke up at 5 AM with the urgent need to pee, let Baskin out and, as long as I was up, to rush these results to you.     

More later.

Lottery Closes Midnight Wednesday August 24 ....and Other Stuff

It just occurred to me that, at some point,  I had better close down the sale of lottery tickets for my old Erma Bombeck books.....so after midnight tonite, Wednesday, August 24 no more applicants please....it's no use begging.....I am preparing the tuna-scented scraps of paper with all the names and will put Gussie and Winnie to work tomorrow to choose the 3 lucky winners.  As soon as I know, I will make the big pronouncement.


By the way, to Linda, who worried excessively that my commenter, "Anonymous" might win the drawing......worry not, my dear.....I happen to have inside informtion that "anonymous" is actually my dear friend, "Ida"  who is having some problem getting Google to recognize her.

Incidentally.....to the potential winners....be advised that I will be sending the books at Book Rate so there is no telling what month or year they may arrive in your mail box....I have had to curtail my lavish sending of stuff via the USPS since their rates  became astronomical.   Be assured though that the book will be in the mail.

The only other bit of fluff I have for you is the decision I have made to NOT get my knee replaced at this time.  Yes, yes......I hear you all some booing and some applauding.....nothing is ever simple, you know

I have several sound reasons for what appears to be a cowardly decision.  When I discussed this with my guru Cardiologist he suggested that I carefully evaluate how much of my general discomfort (misery) can be blamed on my knee and that proved to be a brilliant idea.     See, the thing is, without getting too much into the whiny, poor-me department, I hurt in a number of places.........my mended Femur still reminds me that it was once broken in 3 places, both my hip joints are defiled with arthritis and a number of my lower (and a few middle and upper) vertebrae also are in the clutches of same, so when I say "Ouch" I am talking not just to my knee but to a number of other individual members of the team.  I figured it out that the knee pain is only about 20% of the package and that helped me decide that it wasn't worth surgery right now.  Also, my glutes (the gluteus maximux muscles in the cheeks of your fanny, for those who don't talk abs,  pecs and glutes.)  have become a quivering mass of jello from neglect and could not possibly get me thru the physical therapy until I can refurbish them with some exercises (which I started two weeks ago).

And, it isn't as though I have given up my only chance at knee replacement.  The surgeon and his staff eagerly await my next phone call wherein I yell, "Uncle" and beg for a fix.  And, since he has just performed the magic on a 95 year-old I have a few years of leeway left.  Meanwhile I am dutifully doing my series of exercises and hoping I can get in shape if I decide to proceed later.  They have already been a bit helpful and I am not yelling "ouch" nearly as much as I was.

So, all in all, everything is OK.   (Oops....italics all of  sudden and I can't seem to make them go away)
I am not sorry I went through the process ............I really feel better for having taken some action and if it got me back to doing my exercises it will have been worth it for sure.

That's all f-f-f-folks for today.   Tune in tomorrow for the lucky winners.

And to my beloved cousin, Loni, who really knows how to grab my attention ......as soon as I figure out the shelf life of my Blueberry Breakfast Bread I will consider another lottery.

Love 'ya all.

From the Shores of Lake Fahrdreyt or is it Lake Meshugina?

If it appears that I don't know where I am, I must tell you  that you are absolutely right.  And not just about whether or not I should try out for a new knee......Yesterday and today I wrote 2 different blogs trying to elucidate a particular situation and neither is publishable.....I still haven't got it right.  I will no doubt  try again later, but meanwhile I just had an idea of something I could write about without any debate or dithering around.

If you are a faithful reader you will remember something I blogged about a few weeks ago, and if you aren't I guess it is unkind of me not to remind everyone that I went to the half-off-books website recently and ordered a few Erma Bombeck books for old-times sake.  Re-reading them has not necessarily made me a better blogger or even a  better person, but fortunately it has also not discouraged me from ever blogging again as I feared it might.  However, here I am with three more books that I cannot possibly cram into any bookcase  and I just had the brilliant thought of giving them away.  But not to the Goodwill.

Is there anyone out there who would enjoy perusing an old copy of a book by the female Blogger's Idol, Erma Bombeck.?  If so let's make a big deal out of it and have a lottery.  Now, I am well aware that the last lottery I held in which I offered some ancient issues of the Saturday Evening Post was very badly executed.  As I recall, I gave them to the first person who commented that they wanted them .......completely unfair.....I was young and innocent, blogwise, at the time and didn't know any better.   So, this time, should anyone want this strange offering, I will write each of your names on a torn scrap of paper, dab them all liberally with tuna fish, blindfold Winnie or Gussie and have them fish three entries out of a  basket at random and with no cheating whatsoever.

Providing no one cares to comment or bid I will just have to give them to the Goodwill and if fewer than 3 of you show any interest, then someone in the 1 or 2 of you who do respond will get more than one prize.  Hmmmm.....this is turning out like that old W.C. Field's joke about the first prize being a week in Philadelphia and the 2nd prize being 2 weeks in Philadelphia....or something like that.

That just about does me in for today........now I have to go in and bake a Blueberry Fruit Bread.  "Why do you have to do  that",  you may ask, and I will respond like the Sarcastic Bastard Blogger person does and say, "Because I damn well feel like it !" ....or something like that.

Love ya' all.

A Biit of Cheer For a Change

After depressing the hell out of you with my vacillations about whether or not to have knee surgery, I feel like I owe you some bit of cheer so, peer below at what I consider a real work of art.

I must give credit to blogger Linda Medrano of
"The Good, The Bad and theWorse",
who led me to a site called, strangely enough, "TheFred Effect".

I simply love this charming creation......hope you will enjoy it too.