The Drifts of Days Gone By

 

I keep looking at the calendar, wondering where the past weeks have disappeared to.  

I am still dealing with whip lash issues in my jaw and neck.  I still have less energy than I had before I fell, and while I was thought I was tired then, I'm even more tired now.

And yet.  I have been told by more than a few medical professionals how 'well' I am doing.  If this is 'well', well...

At this point in time I 'work' (if I could call it 'work') about 30 minutes a day, spread over two sessions.  In between I tend to sit in the recliner feeling tired, or if I can't stand it, I can make my way to the dining room table and poke at the jigsaw puzzle.

My massage therapist keeps me sane by recognizing how much it irks me to have to sit and sit and sit.

I did manage to do a little extra 'work' today.  I measured and labelled 5 shawls and put prices on them.  A guild member said that she would come by and bring my box and hanging bag up to the guild room.

Right now - and for the next few months - I will not be driving.  There is swelling in my skull, still, and part of the whiplash has caused my eye glasses to not fit properly, nor my hearing aids.  Seems like a good idea that I not start driving, maybe not until winter lets go of us.

That said, just going from 15 minutes a day to two 15 minute weaving sessions finally begins to feel like 'work'.  Or at least, a level of productivity.

I've emailed a short article to the weaving magazine - now to find out if it fits their criteria.  I have no judgement if my writing is decent or...not.

I think the most discombulating of all of this is...losing my judgement.  I could usually tell if my writing was ok - or at least - acceptable.  Now I have no idea of grammar or...whatever is needed.  The first 3 or 4 times I read through it I'm not even sure all the words there, or how many duplicates are in the sentences.

It's very frustrating.  

But I am not the only person dealing with difficult things.  Which doesn't make what I'm going through less frustrating, but at least, nearly 8 weeks on this part of my journey, seems like there are small increments of progress beginning to happen.

Patience, Grasshopper...

I 

Small Steps

 

Yesterday I started to weave.  The physiotherapist wants me to cut waaaaaay back - it has been 7 weeks, after all - and given I was doing two 45 minute sessions (most) days, I was instructed to dial way back in order to build my muscles back up, again.

Mostly, I am so woefully 'weak', that it is going to take time to build back up again.  

Previously, when I had an injury, I could plan ahead and gently begin again when I could.  This injury was a sharp, sudden, and potentially much more serious.  I had weeks to plan what I could/would do and have strategies in place, unlike now.

However, if I just keep in mind my slow start up, I should be fairly quickly get back to what I had been doing.  The weaving did not do this, those muscles are not particularly injured, and I just need to remember that slow and steady is what is need right now.

Demonstrated for the physiotherapist very quickly showed that my speed wasn't too 'off' and mostly I was needing to corral my skills again.

So what was I able to accomplish in the 2 15 minutes over two days?  I accomplished a tiny bit more on day 2 than day 1.  Now to keep to the plan, and keep going...

Begin Agin...

 

Tomorrow is week 7 since the brain bleed.  I took the holiday weekend off and made myself take a couple more days before I tried to do anything until after I had a good chat with the physiotherapist.

However, I explained how the loom worked, what I had been doing just prior to doing the face plant etc.

Then I showed how I worked on the loom and showed how I wove on it.

In the end, we discussed what I had been doing with the massage therapist, and how I had been working on it before this, the most recent injury.

We had a good talk and in the end I was given the green light to slowly and start weaving.  With the advice to start at 15 minutes, then finish with the instructions I had been doing, graduating to 30, then 45 minutes.

I'm mulling over if it would seem more adventitious and ultimately, beneficial if I spread the time out - maybe do 2 twenty, for example.  Since I will see the massage person, I might get him and see what he thinks.

There is a many slip between lip and cup.  Now to pay attention and see how it goes.

 

Canadian Thanksgiving

 

Yes, we 'celebrate' thanksgiving.  We do it on a different day, in part because living so much further north.  But we largely use the same sort of foods that our US 'cousins' do.

Practicing my attitude of gratitude, I made sure to look at both Sunday and the Monday holiday in order to 'celebrate'.

Tomorrow I see the physiotherapist and hope I can pick up some better ways to weave in order to bring myself back to working 'well'.  I mentioned to the physiotherapist that I have spent the better part of the past 50 years doing this, plus mentioned I am the 27th weaver to achieve the award of 'master' weaver, and have written 3 books  (plus a pdf book as a memoir on my ko-fi shop) with multiple magazine articles.  I don't know if they were impressed (or not!) but I spent the 50 years and passing what I know on to others.

I figured it was noteworthy.

And, if I was going to get some help in order to keep weaving in a 'healthy' way, I might as well learn as much as possible as they could pass on to me.

Since no one of us has any idea how much I could weave on this early, I would like to keep weaving for as long as I can.

In the meantime, I contacted the weaving magazine, and said I would like to write the short article for them.  It's due in December, but it's a topic I've written about before, so I figured I could maybe manage it.  If it doesn't pass muster, that will be up to them to decide.  I have zero way to judge.

Up until August 27 I had a pretty good idea of how well I could communicate.  From now on, I will constantly be working on how well I can make myself understood.  

So be it...

One Way

 

While waiting for the physiotherapist to come on Tuesday, I am being very cautious.  It is Thanksgiving weekend this weekend and I am focusing on trying to work on an 'attitude of gratitude'.  Given it could have all gone very badly less than 7 weeks ago.

Since I am not in a position to be clear on how more 'wrong' things could have gone, I have to spend more time on being how whole lot more than it could have gone.

If I am going to - at the very least - continue to write for this blog, then I need to get back into the possibility of once again writing.  

Even if I don't write well.  Even if I don't know how I can express myself to others.  If I don't get back into the 'harness', I may never back into this place.  

This place of expressing myself through the written word.

So, today I grab my little book of small expressions of a grateful heart.  It was a small book I picked up from Costco (!) lo, these many years ago.  I nearly always pick it up and where ever I flip through the book I nearly always find something to find my heart to be grateful for.

Let's see if I find something today.

There were three on the two pages today.  Out of the three on the pages, I decided I wanted to go with the following:  

Give me a sense of humor,

Give me the grace to see a joke,

To get some pleasure out of life

And pass it on to other folk.

Unreal

 

Autumn scarves - painted warps

The past 6+ weeks have been...an experience.

There were days when I could NOT find the words I needed to say what I wanted to say.  It was a lack of expression that I found discombobulating.  I've never expected being told I would lose my speech, and I was practically unable to say what I wanted to say.  I took it for granted that I would have control over my words.

This inability to express myself in speech was frustrating, and truth to tell - it hasn't entirely gone away.  If I'm tired my ability to express myself in language can go away entirely.  Still.

I have *some* ability to write, but there are whole parts of sentences that wink out of existence.  Words double up, or disappear entirely.

And this is why I feel I have to stop teaching, even remotely, probably for the rest of my life.  When left alone with my desktop where I can take hours to write a sentence that actually says what I want it to say...well, that is just my time being 'wasted'.

I am still dealing with a level of 'amnesia' from the time I crawled into bed after lunch, to waking up in Vancouver.  It is very strange for several days to disappear with zero memory of them.

I have requested the physiotherapist to come and confirm I am still able to weave.  I hope that the body remembers what the brain forgets.  With nearly 50 years of fine tuning my weaving, I hope I will be able to continue to weave.

A number of medical professionals are telling me I will recover.  They tell me I'm doing well (really???) and they foresee my making a good recovery.

But will that 'good' recovery allow me to teach?  Somehow I don't want to teach in person.  Because I never know when my brain will close up shop. 

As far as the blog goes, I can spend hours - if I have to - to write a post, while my brain recovers what I can to know and write down.  Instead of 20-30 minutes.

People assume that I spend hours to write a post.  Once I started writing blog posts I got quite practiced at writing them.  Oh, it wasn't 'perfect', it was just me, jotting down thoughts that filled my brain.  But neither did I spend much time writing what I was thinking about it.

Sort of like weaving - so many weavers just assumed that I lacked efficiency when I'd spent the majority of my time as a weaver to become as efficient as I could.  

With the future really and truly unknown to me, I have no idea how far my recovery will go and how my future years (?) will go.  

Six Weeks, 1 Day

 

I woke up Monday morning with a *very* swollen left eye.  My thought was that there was something wrong with my left eye - either the shingles or the surgery on that side of that hemisphere of my brain.

I panicked.

Neither was a 'good' situation, but I could not get through to my family doctor, or my eye doctor.  A friend recommended I call the optometrist, and fortunately she was able to see me.

I explained the brain bleed and my concern about the surgery or the shingles.  They did pressure tests, took photos, and when all the tests had been done...there was nothing to blame for either thing.  I had gotten a doctor's office visit with the locum with my doctor on Wednesday and he read her report and pronounced himself as perplexed as she was, what was wrong.  

But it was 3 days of worrying about what was going wrong.  On the safe side, he wrote me an eye ointment Rx just in case there was something 'wrong' that neither of them had thought about.  (The swelling is gradually reducing, but still no answer as to why.)

There is nothing quite like a body that appears to about collapse.

I have had to spend a great deal of time, thinking about what to do now.

I had a physiotherapist's assessment, and he will come back next Tuesday to give me feedback about how to proceed to continue to weave.  I have massage bookings to help with the mild whiplash injury.  I will be picking up other therapists as the time goes ahead.  Hopefully speech therapy will be scheduled - it is the 'worst' thing happening.  (IMHO)

I have a contract to write an article for a magazine, and now I need to decide if it is possible.  The article for the summer is still a possibility - but I will need to redo what I had planned.

But I have had medical professionals tell me I am doing 'well' (while I bite my tongue explaining it doesn't *feel* as though I am).  Teaching in person (by Zoom) seems like a step too far.  I have a couple people ready to help me do alpha reading - and whom I trust to tell me I'm not making a fool out of myself.

But at the 6 week and 1 day after the surgery, I now have to prepare myself to proceed - at some level.

Why?  

Because I'm not dead yet.

When my younger brother died in February 2008, I had to think long and hard how to continue.  In the end, I decided he was dead, and I was not.  If I were to honour his memory, then I was going to live well for both of us.

And here I am.  I've experienced a brain bleed.  I'm 74 years old.  If I am going to continue to honour Don's memory, I need to pick up what I do 'next', and do what I can do.

So.

Forward.  

Where the road leads from here on, I have zero idea.  If the weaving magazine wants me to keep reading, I guess I keep writing.  If not, there is this blog.