2007-02-19

The great thaw began today, with temperatures starting at 25 and rising handily to 52 by the afternoon. I awoke still in rocky shape. Jim and I planned that I would devote the afternoon to regaining solid contact with the two doctors involved in my case, since I needed to leave the house briefly in the morning and we are aware that there is a principle, following the “bread always falls butter-side down” rule, which states that if you call a doctor, she will return your call when you are in the bathroom or otherwise away from the telephone.

So after Morning Offering while Jim busied himself with all manner of good works, I napped. Actually I intended to work on e-mail, but as soon as I hit my Mama chair I was a goner. The sleep was very refreshing.

Jim woke me so that I could go to Mr. Cavalier, our tailor, with my new St. Luke’s choir robe. It fastens in a particularly uncomfortable manner for my arthritic hands to accommodate, and I wanted to exchange the buttons for snaps and shorten the sleeves. I also wanted him to install pockets where there were only holes in sides of the brand new robe, and to secure the buttons better on the garment, which were shoddily attached and with my clumsy attentions, would soon be torn away. It was great to get that done! Jim had taken the robe itself to our neighbor, Calvin, who also sings in the choir, so that it could be blessed when all the other robes were blessed this last Sunday.

So now I’ll have a robe both blessed and convenient. Then I will put my name in the robe! It’s mine, folks! That’s the hardest thing, in a choir – just to keep track of one’s robe. Whenever one is absent from choir for a Sunday, those who do not have a robe tend to steal away an absentee’s robe!

After lunch, I put in my calls to Drs. June (rheumatology) and Aboud (GP). Dr. Aboud called back right away, alarmed that I had experienced the acute spell of symptoms on Saturday and feeling that too much was going wrong for me to come to the office. She asked me to go to the emergency room, explain my symptoms and get a complete work-up there, since if she did the same tests in her office, it would take her a couple of weeks to be apprised of all the results of the tests. Jim and I talked and decided that we would spend tomorrow morning doing that.

While Jim took Stanley Outback for its pre-trip oil change and check-up, and then went back to the dentist to have them correct a poorly done filling which was impossible to floss, I did what e-mail I could and waited for Dr. June’s office to call. She was still ill and not taking calls, so I was stuck with the doctor on call.

It was now a different doctor from the one last week, but he also refused to medicate my pain, opining – obviously he had a crystal ball – that this pain was not arthritic. This was despite Dr. June’s having originally diagnosed my chest wall pain as arthritic and medicating me accordingly, and also despite that medication’s having worked up until the last couple of weeks to remove the nerve pain. He (and now you see why both of my doctors are women) – announced that I must go back to my primary care physician and get treated there. I informed him that this was already laid on and thanked him, tongue firmly in cheek. He did not catch the sarcasm.

Thank heavens for my very responsive doctors who do actually listen to me and who are crackerjack diagnosticians, being now thoroughly familiar with my situation. And they both genuinely care about me, the person, rare though that is these days. Kudos to you, dear doctors Aboud and June, and Dr. June, please, please get well soon!

As I was able, between further naps, I sleepily addressed some e-mail. I had sent a note to Gary and Mick about getting our beds earthed, as research shows that those who do so experience better sleep and Jim, Gary and I all have occasional sleeplessness. Gary had asked for more information, which I happened to be able to pass on.

Ian had written concerning choosing our printer for Book of Days. I eliminated one candidate, bringing our final considerations down to two – a POD Canadian printer called blitzprint.com and the printer here in Louisville who printed A Wanderer’s Handbook for us in 2001. We think we may discover that that printer, Beechmont, with its regular printing techniques, will deliver to us the same book for a considerably cheaper price to us per book that the $15 or so which the blitzprint people will probably render. We would like to keep the per-copy cost down if we can as a service both to us and to the seekers who ask for our books.

In that note I mentioned to Ian that I was ER-bound and so he called me right back to commiserate. What a good person and friend he is. We also talked further about the BOD project. He is as stoked about its being near completion as am I. He is glad of either choice of printers we make, once we get both blitzprint’s and Beechmont’s quotes on the print job, as blitzprint uses Nuvera to print its covers, a satisfactory procedure for the cover we want, and Beechmont is the very best and delivered to us a near-perfect job on AWH’s cover art.

I had written Jim to ask his advice about an Italian fan who felt that there was virtue in assembling a copy of all our material by year. Ian had looked at this fanzine site and discovered that he had eliminated all our formatting, erasing all paragraphs and other carefully placed corrections that make the work easier to read and also erased the informative footnotes. Jim and Ian agreed that such changes were unacceptable, and I reluctantly joined them in asking the fan to shut down his site and instead help with the translation work currently going on, on the Italian site, http://www.stazioneceleste.it/ll_research.htm. This site preserves all paragraphing and copyright notices and translates the sessions into Italian. It is a wonderful resource and hopefully he will like putting his considerable love of TLOO to work helping expand that effort.

It is interesting, feeling so poorly. I am soft as a kitten in energy. It is a kind of sweetness to be so weak, and although it is irritating not to be able to think clearly, there is a beauty to the intuitive and spiritually inspiring material that comes as I pray to Holly (my name for the Holy Spirit) and to Jesus the Christ for strength and serenity. Every seeming difficulty has a silver lining, and I was grateful to experience such sweetness in the midst of this time of fairly substantial is comfort.

Jim helped me bathe and we had a lovely, quiet evening, making love, which romantic tryst gave me a good jolt of vital energy, sharing a good supper and having a very low-energy TV night, mostly our favorite sci fi series, which were obligingly on all night. Gary joined us for the Gaia Meditation after a long, hard day at his admin helm, and offered the ending prayer most artistically, a very moving prayer indeed.

Knowing that we were going in to the ER early tomorrow morning, Jim and I snuggled with the cats and had an early bedtime.