The Countdown

 

Some of my pain 'meds' sitting beside The Golden Thread and the Jack Lenor Larson biography.  Hopefully I'll begin feeling well enough to read more than just posts on Facebook.

I have been battling peripheral neuropathy for years, on top of the damage to my back.  For over a year I had been trying various nerve blockers as nothing 'usual' was dealing with the level of pain I had been living with.  

The back damage shoots nerve pain down my right leg and into my right foot; the PN causes nerve pain of a different sort, in both feet.  I have been getting injections every 4 months or so for the sciatic pain, but nothing much was helping the PN.

Various people gave suggestions.  The first pain doctor I saw suggested lidocaine cream.  That white and red tube is 30 grams and costs about $50.  But lidocaine is short acting.  It helps in the moment, but not long enough to sleep through the night.  And it gets expensive.

From there I learned about alpha lipoic and tried that.  It takes about an hour to kick in (if it will) and then if it helps, I can usually get back to sleep for a few hours.  

The nerve blockers were helping but at the cost of adverse effects - muscle pain in my thighs to the point I could barely walk.  Finally I was convinced to try ketamine.  Before I went that far, though, I started red light laser therapy after the recommendation from my local pain doctor.

All of those non-drug (so to speak) treatments worked for a while, but the past few months things were getting 'worse'.

Once I had stopped the nerve blockers my massage therapist suggested magnesium chloride (I think) in gel form.  That seemed to reduce the nerve damage (if that is what had happened on that nearly 1.5 years of trying various nerve blockers).  But the slight improvement in my thighs was being wiped out by the increasing PN in my feet, which seemed to be crawling up my calves.

I read.  I read as much as I could find.  But PN is one of those 'weird' conditions which is tough to nail down, and a huge number of patients are 'idiopathic' - or, cause unknown.

I had a list of risk factors, some maybe nothing, some definitely something.  As a child I had planters warts on the soles of both feet.  Another kid in my class had his 'burned' off with chemicals and wound up barely able to walk until the burned tissue healed.  My family doctor suggested having mine burned off with x-rays.  Risk factor?  No one knows.  But I had massive amounts of x-rays aimed at my feet for about 20 minutes a treatment.  Which continued for weeks and ate up that summer.

I also danced ballet.  Including toe shoes.  I experienced blisters, bruises under my toe-nails, pain in my feet.  Risk factor?  No one really knows.

My body has multiple allergies and lack of some vitamins seem to encourage PN.  Since so many different foods are allergens, I have experienced deficiencies in both vitamins and micro-minerals several times in my life.  All I know was that for a time in my 40s I had horrible pain in my feet, plus my shoe size grew from the swelling such that I had to buy new shoes.  Interestingly when I started a new one-a-day vitamin, about 3 weeks after, the pain in my feet disappeared.  Plus I have had 3 shingles outbreaks.  The virus continues to hide in the body, living on the the nerve endings (I think.)  Is that a factor in all the nerve pain I'm having?  No idea.

Then in 2011 I was diagnosed with cancer, requiring chemotherapy.  One of the ingredients was Vincristine - a *known* cause of PN.  Sure enough I developed a 'weird' sensation in my feet and then in my hands.  I was assured when treatment stopped that should disappear.  And it did.  Until a few years ago.

Reading as much as I could about PN, it is one of those 'it depends' kind of thing.  So I read, and read, searching for answers, finding very little.

More common in diabetics, but a huge number of cases have no 'cause'.  The person just...learns, as best as they can...to live with it.

But constant pain with little to treat or manage it, is horrible, whatever the cause.  With so little actually known about the condition, and such a complexity of issues, the market is rife for 'miracle' cures.

A friend sent me a link to one.  The ones I had seen previously were based on a couple of 'spices'.  Given my track record with 'spices', I was not going to go there.  (Some spices make me seriously ill, no matter how medically helpful they can be for others.)  But this one was different.

So I ordered some and today the shipment arrived.  I have tried a dab of the cream on one foot and there appeared to be some lessening of the pain in that foot.  Nor do they claim it is a 'miracle' drug - if you read the small print, they say to use 3 times a day, or more if needed, for at least two weeks to see if it is going to be beneficial.

I'm not going to call it on the basis of one cautious dab, but I'm willing to give it a go.

In the photo the 'new' cream is the little 'pot'.  It's 4 ounces and the pot was filled right up to the brim.  And it was on sale for the same price as the lidocaine cream.  It's not made in Canada, but comes from the Netherlands.

Oh, and that tiny little vial sitting on top of the new 'pot'?  That's my crop of hope.  I'm sitting it on top of the pot in hopes that some of my hope will sink into the pot and encourage some relief.

When doing web searches, remember to ignore the AI 'recommendations'.  Look for actual medical websites and keep looking.  The last one I tried didn't *look* obviously 'medical' but when I opened the site, I found the most information I'd found to date.  

I'm now on light duty tasks for a few days, until I get the next ketamine infusion.  I'm hoping to get this warp off the loom and the next one beamed so that when I can begin weaving after the infusion it will be ready.  Or at least beamed.  Because I found 8 spools of the singles 6 and now I am back to 3 large cones of that yarn when I thought I was about to start on one of those cones.  

Oh well.  Onwards.

Hanging On

 

People of a certain age will be totally familiar with this meme (or versions of it).  The one I remember was a ginger and the 'rope' it was hanging from was a single strand of rope with a big knot tied at the end.

I wasn't actually doing 'well' when I fell last year and experienced the brain bleed.  And then things got way 'worse'.  It has been 14 months of me trying to scrape my life back together and it is like trying to put jello back into the mould.  

But I keep trying.  And 'failing'.  But every time I lose heart, I remind myself I did not die that day in 2024.  What is it I'm meant to do?  Can I?  I must be able to if I must do it before I can shuffle off this mortal coil?  

I keep seeking answers.  Solutions.  

Tomorrow begins two weeks of dealing with a multitude of health issues.  I don't know why they all wound up bunched up all together, but here I am.

I had every intention of getting to the loom at least once today, hopefully twice, because I will be on 'light' duties for the next 3 weeks.  Giving my body time to recover from the procedures, and the stress of getting test results, then either putting those out of my mind for another 6 months, and to start using the 'new' topical cream that promises me...my life back.

I hope they are right.  Because if there is something I need to do, I also need a functioning body.  Or at least, one that is functioning better than mine currently is.

One of the nice things about having friends around your own age, they remember things that you do.  So when I talk about hanging on by a thread, she immediately sent me kitty hanging.  When I said I felt like I should post The Desiderata somewhere I could read it daily, she said she had it on her current playlist.

While I love my younger friends deeply, there is nothing like having your social cues understood.

In the meantime, I have some 'light' duty tasks that should provide some distraction over the coming weeks.  And I still have books in my TBR pile.  Maybe I will finally get to them?

Anyone who wants to send light and love for the next 3 weeks?  Will be welcomed.  A friend uses 'gold dust' as a way to send best wishes, comfort, whatever.  I send out a cloud of gold dust to anyone who needs it.

Teaching

 

wet finished

loom state

Since it appears to be the season in my life where I reflect on my life, I have been thinking a lot about teaching.

I started teaching almost as soon as I started weaving.  Teaching spinning, which might surprise, but I knew two cents worth of spinning and was willing to share what I knew.  And I wasn't alone - I had a co-teacher, who knew maybe 5 cents worth about spinning and together we tried to help people get their wheels turning in the 'correct' direction and how to draft and twist their fibres.

It seems I was a fairly 'natural' teacher - I have no credentials saying that I know a thing or two about teaching.  But I loved learning, had some really excellent (and some not so) teachers and had taken 'note' of those I felt were good and why, and those who were not, and why.  I learned about how to teach as well as the subject being taught.

It was not a dream or desire of mine to teach.  I really wasn't interested in teaching people who didn't want to learn, so teaching as a paid instructor in a school was of little interest to me.  But if you were interested in what I wanted to teach?  I would pull out all the stops.  

As per usual, when I wanted to learn more about something, I read about that something, and so I read books on how to teach.

It was only a few years ago I saw the quote:  A good teacher shows you where to look, not what to see.

So it is with a great deal of satisfaction I now see some of my Olds students beginning to teach - writing, speaking.  

And I think about the really hard task they will have going forward, when so many people are putting their trust/confidence in...LLM/AI. 

The thing that irritates me (one of them) is that the LLM/AI has been 'trained' by having the companies literally steal the written materials from the legal copyright holders.  And then instead of quoting them honestly, they 're-write' the stolen materials, even to the point of inventing citations for books that were never written by the authors that are listed.  (The negative environmental impacts are another thing, which I won't go into here.)

The information is a word salad of 'plausible' information that only needs to 'appear' accurate, not to *be* accurate.

So when I set out to create Magic in the Water, I did not have to 'fight' for space in the market going up against a plagiarism machine.  I had an 'honest' relationship with the people who bought my book.  I shared what I *knew* after extensive experimentation and documentation.  I continued that approach with The Intentional Weaver, and have always followed in any magazine articles I have submitted.

I'm very nervous about the next issue of WEFT.  Given I wrote most of it in the aftermath of the brain bleed, I struggled to get my words lined up in a way that made sense.  I had enormous assistance from Sheila, and I know that Jacey and Lisa worked - *hard* - to go through my text and try to present the documentation and words in a way that explains what I did.  The topic turned out to be complex enough that I over ran my assigned word count - by a lot.   And still did not cover the topic in as great a detail that I would have liked.  Subtlety is like that.  

The topic is only one of the more subtle aspects of building a textile and most people make certain assumptions - which do not hold in practice.

There are weavers currently studying varying aspects of weaving, one topic at a time.  If you are interested in such a thing, Complex Weavers has a number of study groups.  Being part of a collective search of the topic of textiles means that each person takes one aspect, researches it, then shares with the rest of the group.  And everyone learns more than they knew before and exchanges that information.

While the fallout of LLM/AI continues, this is one way for us, as practitioners who want to keep learning, can do that - with integrity.

And that is why Magic has an extensive range of samples (samples above created just for Magic). Because everything depends.  Change one thing and everything can change.

If you, like me, don't trust LLM/AI to provide accurate information, buy a book.  Or several.  Hell, acquire your own personal library!  

I am old enough now that I tend to hear about projects that are being considered.  Now, creating a book can take years.  Quite literally years.  Some of them may only ever have limited numbers published as the book industry takes hit after hit by AI produced word salad.  But I do know, for a fact, that several people are working on books and may have something ready to present in 2026.  Or it might take longer!  I spent years of my life creating Magic in the Water, using a local printer (are there any of those anymore????) and self-publishing, then marketing it.  The official publication date was July of 2002.  In 2008, when my brother died, we were *still* assembling books and it took years after that before I sold the last 'major' book, in 2011, and created the pdf version.  The Intentional Weaver took 4+ years.

It is not my place to announce things that others are doing.  But when they let me know I can do that, I will share the news.

In the meantime, I'm anxiously awaiting the appearance of the last issue of WEFT, which due to the Canada Post rotating work stoppages still hasn't appeared, and more especially the next issue. 

As usual, three of my books are available here in either pdf or print versions, and in my ko-fi shop in pdf download.

I know budgets are incredibly tight right now, but now is exactly the time society needs to recognize expertise and support it happening.  If you want to do your own research, please ignore LLM/AI and research actual knowledge, be that in books, or blogs like this where I try to explain the craft, honestly, magazines written by people who actually know stuff, don't just repeat myths that don't actually contain the 'whole' truth.

Because change one thing, everything can change...