April 21, 2007
Saturday
El Milagro: A new girl tech comes up and says, “May I stick you?” “Sure”, I reply, “…as long as you do a good job. (a few seconds) …and I’ll tell you if you don’t”. <-- I said that! The strengths-based constructivist trainer of hundreds of family counselors across the land! Can you believe it? I didn’t even catch myself in that moment and correct my statement. It was ten to twenty minutes afterwards that I caught myself and then I scolded myself in my brain. Can you see, dear reader, how quickly and unconsciously we all can slip right back into a deficit-based reality? And then we scold ourselves for it internally in a deficit-based stern parent voice. So, I sighed and said in a softer, more accepting voice, “It’s okay Jack. Every slip-up is an opportunity for re-commitment to the way.” I had been able, at least, to say thanks to her as she computo-doc’d my cannulation. That was more of a habit. And it is a good habit, I maintain, to thank all people who serve us in any way at all.
I was able to climb out of my kiva of gloom. Internally I sometimes imagine the above kinds of thought-u-lations as some sort of internal gnashing and cleansing and visioning such as our native peoples did in their subterranean kivas*. I am taken down there into the lower middle region of my own personal self brain/heart and wrestle around with my critical self (critical parent, negativity, glass half emptyness) in the dark shadowland. And as the fire gets going in the middle I quit the fight, settle into a long sigh meditation, and let it all out. Then comes the part where I jump up and run around crazy in the firelight and the shadows dance accross the hierglphed wall. I get speared with visions of possibility, and then cleansed by sweating out the demons of deficit, and finally am encouraged by the great spirit. Then I climb back out into the sunlight of a crystal clear New Mexico desert.
I am one of the last people to get dialysized today because I’ve been working on Katie’s Graduation Announcement. It is a quiet Saturday: I listen to KUT Live Set, snooze-a-nopolis, and then watch the first hour of Roman Holiday. Boy! Those were the days!
Update Since Last Post: Since my last post things have been the same and different… kind of like life in general. I got a good blood work report; both Potassium and Phosphorus are GOOD! (Phosphorous was 4.7 [3.5 to 5.5 is normal] and Potassium was 4.9 [3.5 to 5.5 is normal]). A few staff have left the center (Diane said goodbye to me and ensured me she is going to a better job) and maybe there are some new ones, like the young woman who stuck me today. It’s hard to tell. I ask a nurse, “Are you new?” and they reply “Only today”. I think new staff should go around and introduce themselves to the patients.
A guy that started dialysis around the same time as me has left the planet (He was a kinda scroungy looking guy who had a old worn quilt he dragged in and out with him and he reminded me of Linus in Peanuts). According to the gossip, he had open heart surgery, started missing his dialysis, and was found dead on his living room floor. Another old person passed away too, but I don’t know much about that one. We are a group of patients who pass through the center as most of the staff stand around serving us in the moment. And then we are gone. Some of us die and move onward in that frame. And a few of us get a new kidney and go back out into the world, like we are running out to recess. So it goes.
My yearly report still rests in my old G3 sitting over at Mac Alliance waiting for someone to merge the hard drive into our new silver tower Mac OS 10.something. When I get it, you’ll get it.
Notes: In at 73.4 and out at 72. (Blood pressure is more normal low rather than low low.)
* “Kiva” retrieved online April 2007 from Wikepedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kiva
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