Despite the popular misconception that geese, and ganders in particular, are jerks, I am here to report that of my veritable menagerie of animals this guy is the only one that wasn’t causing problems today.
Of course if you have a bath to yourself under beautiful blue skies on an unseasonably warm day, what do you have to be grumpy about?
Gratitude prompt #7: “A friend or something that reminds you of a friend.”
Of course I don’t plan these days ahead of time. That’s never how I work and, as most days mid-pandemic, actual in-person photographable/selfieable friends were in short supply.
“No problem” says I to myself. I’ll just find something interesting in the house that reminds me of a friend to photograph. I started looking around.
Now, it’s completely possible that the fact that I:
A) don’t really “decorate” my house per say and
B) am terrible at buying non-functional things for myself.
And this has something to do with the fact that nearly everything I looked at reminded me of a friend.
I have art from friends on some walls and art gifted by friends on others. There are plants by the windows that were given by friends and plants that were delivered by friends. The capoeira instruments in the corner were made with friends and are played with friends. The mugs on the shelves are gifted from friends, the piano was my best friend’s grandma’s. The light in the corner is connected to another friend’s light in another state. There is a stuffed bee from a blogger I’ve never met in real life and a necklace hangs by the mirror from another that I have…
And on my bed is a stuffed bunny. One of those ridiculously round and unbelievably soft squishmallo types. It came to me early in covid on my birthday with a note “Since I can’t give you hugs.”
I hugged my bunny. I took its picture and I looked around my house filled to the brim with “hugs” from friends whichever way I looked.
Maybe its that I’m a terrible interior decorator but I like to think it’s just that I have excellent taste in friends.
When the pigs started playing “squash fox” I was sold.
Would I recommend it? This is a book worth putting on the reading glasses for. The girls (and I) laughed so hard we cried.
There is nothing that feels more decadent than shuffling about my plants to fit them all in the greenhouse for the winter.
I could pretend these nasturtiums are to go with my salad greens or the herbs I overwinter or the other mildly responsible plants that allow me to feel justified in keeping the heat on.
But in truth, it is that their bright blooms from seeds worth pennies make me feel like the luckiest woman in the world on a dreary January day.
Just doing my physical therapy…
…Why yes, handstands are a part of my physical therapy program. Lucky me!
After my concussion I listened to a book called The Ghost In My Brain by Dr Clark Elliott. I absolutely remember it being a fascinating listen into the Dr.’s own recovery from his concussion and it’s prolonged symptoms.
I absolutely remember that there was the perfect analogy and explanation of what low energy reserves and neuro-fatigue are like.
But currently, having spent the last week and a half bouncing from one energy reserve crash to another, I have absolutely no idea what that analogy was.
Tonight I have herbal tea and the fuzziest blanket it the world helping restore my world. Perhaps tomorrow will be a day for remembering.
The cold air through the window at night smells of winter and frost has taken all the unprotected flowers.
Mornings are delightfully chilly and so long as I drain them well, the hoses still run during the day.
I love the winter but I’ll miss these in-between days of frosted leaves, rubber boots and running water.
Yes my cousin and I, normally the family gathering planners, canceled our family’s 50 person Thanksgiving and Christmas in one fell swoop of a grinchy e-mail.
But also, due to the same e-mail, 35 of us showed up on zoom today to say hello and talk online as best a family of Finns can.
And that’s not nothing.
It’s Cheer Pepper time and that insane month of November where I post everyday, even days like today when my brain is tired and my computer is off at the shop!
It’s a rough start to things but I’m using Digital Photography for Moms’ gratitude project as a prompt guide and I think it’s going to be just fine.
Part 1: The Cow
Part 2: The Omelettes
Part 3: The Concussion
I needed help but I was unable to read and research anything on my own. We had already learned that most doctors don’t know what to do with concussions and had no idea where to turn for advice. Fortunately, a friend let us know that physical therapists can have concussion training and, even better, my current physical therapist was one of them.
Within the first two weeks I was working with him doing things that should have been painfully easy but were next to impossible for me.
Can you hold your arm out in front of you, look at your thumb, close your eyes, turn your head, open your eyes and still be looking at your thumb? I couldn’t. It’s depressing not to be able to find one of your own body parts and also vindicating. Something really was wrong with me.
From my therapist I learned that my sprained neck muscles were messing with my positional awareness and my inner ear or vestibular system was also out of whack… and my eyes… well they didn’t track quite like they were supposed to either.
I diligently did my therapy. I tracked post it notes with my eyes and worked on word searches that had no words. Everything spiked nausea, dizziness or headaches. I’d wait for symptoms to subside and do it again.
If you’ve been to physical therapy you know how they give you small, evil exercises that are hard and exhaust your muscles. Working my brain was just like that. Instead of burning muscles I had nausea and instead of wobbly fatigue I had headaches. But I kept on. Working until the symptoms would spike. Letting them come back down and doing it again and again until I could find my thumb and track the post it notes. Then of course in true PT fashion no gold stars were awarded. (If you are a physical therapist you really need to consider giving out stickers. I’m telling you a sticker chart would make even adults feel accomplishment.) Instead I was congratulated with another small but deceptively evil task. Eventually I graduated to word searches with words and tracking medicine balls as I moved them around my body.
And slowly.
So slowly.
My brain started getting better.
It’s November and National Blog Writing Month! My team, the Tiny Peppers, is doing things a little differently this year. Instead of posting every single day we are all aiming for: 10 days of posts, 10 days of reading/commenting, and 10 days of sharing posts through any other platform. Happy Blogging!
Part 1: The Cow
Part 2: The Omelettes
It’s hard to explain what happens when your own brain is injured.
To begin with it’s hard to do a lot of things when your brain is injured, like think straight, much less do all that goes into writing down thoughts in a way others can read. In addition, our brains seem to hide their worst symptoms from us. “I’m fine” has never been so unintentionally and obviously false!
At the same time there is a very real sense that everything wrong with you is just in your head. With the added twist that everything wrong with you is, quite literally, “all in your head”. Even now thinking about that makes my head spin and brings out a reluctance to talk about any of it. But, despite all that, I’d like to try to explain what my concussion has been like.
I’m going to indulge in all the gory and pathetic details in these next few posts in a way I usually never would on this blog. I’m going to lay it all out there because I (and those around me) had so little idea of what a concussion can actually be like and we were unprepared for what was in store for me. Hopefully these will help someone, sometime, be a bit more prepared than we were.
In those first days and weeks after the accident when things were at their worst they looked like this:
I couldn’t stay awake for more than an hour or two at a time for the first days. After a few days I had about four hours in me before I fell asleep. And not like normal “I think I’m kind of tired,” but stumbling, unable to function, I’m just going to pass out on the floor if I don’t make it to a bed, tired that comes from a brain that is truly out of energy.
When I tried to read, the letters and words swam around instead of holding still like good little words should. This was particularly bad in the middle of a sentence or paragraph where they swam into different lines and became all jumbled up.
I couldn’t visually focus on anything. I could see everything but bringing anything into sharp focus was hard to impossible depending on how tired I was.
Essentially everything made me motion sick. Riding in the car gave me a headache and made me dizzy, driving was out of the question for many reasons, and even walking made me nauseous.
I was light sensitive. Hiding like a vampire on bad days and venturing out in hat and sunglasses on good days.
Anything that provoked symptoms started out by giving me cotton mouth and I was the most hydrated human ever trying to combat it.
Headaches were constant and I started classifying and categorizing them. That’s the one from trying to use a screen. That’s where it hurts if I try to read. That one is from staying awake too long…
My balance was terribly bad, at times I needed to hold on to John’s arm to navigate. And standing on one foot (something I am normally quite good at) was next to impossible.
What I didn’t know at the time is that I spoke slowly and lost the thread of conversation. I knew that sometimes I couldn’t find the right words. I knew I was tired. But it wasn’t until a few weeks later when people told me things like “you sound so much better now that you aren’t all drugged up” (I never took anything but ibuprofen) and “you finally sound like yourself again” that I realized that I hadn’t been sounding like myself.
A week after the accident my main activity, other than sleeping, was coloring while listening to audio books.
I, clearly, needed more medical help.
It’s November and National Blog Writing Month! My team, the Tiny Peppers, is doing things a little differently this year. Instead of posting every single day we are all aiming for: 10 days of posts, 10 days of reading/commenting, and 10 days of sharing posts through any other platform. Happy Blogging!
Behind the Willows 