Getting stronger, moving forward.

Well friends... another long time between posts. Summer seemed to have whizzed by at lightning speeds. I've had a million things to say which got buried in the passage of time but here we are, the crisp crackle of fall creeping in. It is time to wrap up my story about my foot surgery so I can move on to other topics.

It has now been 4 months and 11 days since my left bunionectomy. The first couple months were really tough. I got the annoying medical boot off after 7 weeks and still had a solid limp at that point. Being that I could barely bend my toe to get any sort of shoe on, my surgeon recommended physical therapy, which was incredibly helpful. Oh yeah - and the wound wasn't healing. That was sort of fascinating because I know research-a-plenty shows that stress can inhibit wound healing (e.g. J.K. Kiecolt-Glaser et al., 1995). I wondered if the stress of my career contributed to the delay. I did find an interesting herbal remedy called Manuka honey that supposedly speeded healing if you put it directly on the cut, but I ended up having an allergic reaction to the stuff which just made things worse (note to self - always do a test patch on healthy skin first). Finally, by 3 months along I was doing well enough to still go on a planned hiking/backpacking trip to Crater Lake national park in Oregon. *phew*! Though a bit swollen and sore, my foot survived 3 days and about 15 miles of backwoods hiking. 

4 mo post-op left foot comparison

I wanted to think this meant I was fully healed but sadly that's not quite true yet. When we got back home to Mass. I slowly tried to start getting back to doing things like running but my progress is very slow. When I walk I often still get a strong crunch feeling in my toe and foot as though a knuckle is cracking which tends to startle me, though I admit its not terribly painful when it happens, save the 1 second scare. Nonetheless, I reached 1 full mile of running two days ago, which felt like a big milestone.


All in all I guess I'm doing pretty well. In this photo I just took my lefty is still a bit swollen (apparently it can take a year to get better) but you can see the huge difference between the left and right foot, and between the pic in my last post. Straight toe! There's also still a little scar from where the cast made a huge sore on top of my foot but hoping that gets better in time too. I've decided to spare you the gory "in between" photos of everything healing along the way. 
 
So... I've got a little less than three months until I go in for the right foot. In the mean time I'm hoping to get as much exercise as possible - my wedding countdown clock tells me there are fewer than 248 days left until that big event and I want to be ready for some dancin'! :)
   
I'll also try to enjoy the last bits of sunlight as summer fade away into the glorious coziness of fall. On the right is a picture of my backyard at sunset this evening. The iphone couldn't handle low lighting very well but in addition to the amazing sky the leaves are showing some beautiful hues too.

Foot Surgery

Guess who's back? Bionic girl! Including a new and improved foot. Completely reorganized and comes with metal bolt!

Left foot before

on the way home

Ok I'm being cheeky. I decided to talk a little about my surgery here in the hopes that it will help me cope, maybe help someone else prepare in the future and mostly because for once I've got nothing but time (and painkillers) on my hands.

One of the worst parts of having a surgical procedure done (by choice - not due to an accident) is the anticipation. I've been waiting on this puppy for a good 20 years. I thought about doing it in highschool but never felt ready (it was always track season or the fall play season or "too hot" in the summer). Thinking back I feel dumb and hope I had a better reason for not getting it over with then. Later in life I hit periods where my health insurance wouldn't cover much and I couldn't afford the excessive out of pocket expenses (hello grad school!). But now I had no excuse - I've got my super duper fiance to look out for me, and magical health insurance from my job. (Seriously - $10 co pay for a 4 to 5K surgery is amazing!).

So on Tuesday May 8th, which was coincidentally the third anniversary of me meeting my fiance, we headed down to Danbury Hospital's Duracell Center for Ambulatory Surgery, which sounds like a science fiction plot already. I was getting the first bunionectomy of two - left foot now, and hopefully right foot in December. In the shortest of explanations I can give this means cutting of some excess bone around the ball of one's foot and then breaking and realigning the big toe so that it sits straight and not crooked. Yeah, ouch.  Instead of giving you the gory play-by-play I'll mention a few likes, dislikes and "hmm, that's odd"s about my experience.

The funny thing about medical records is they never disappear or change until something goes wrong and you update them. One time I went to an emergency clinic near the town I was born in and they still had my address listed as the one given the day my mother gave birth to me. Yes, it's been 30 years lets update that! So this time I'm in Danbury hospital where I spent the majority of my childhood and the nurse confirmed a few demographics on me. Emergency contact: pretty much the same as when I was 7, plus throw on my fiance's #. Religion: Episcopalian?! LOL... My mother must have put that down when I was four and she changed denominations every few months. I just asked them to leave that one blank. God fordbid I did die from anethesia - it would be pretty hard to explain to a pastor about my half-Jew, Catholic upbringing and Buddhist philosophies.

Other good things: although they make you strip down and put on a stupid hospital gown (is it really necessary to lose my underwear for foot surgery?) at least the hospital gown could connect to a neat-o warming machine that was like a backwards vacuum with hot air. The anesthesiology nurse was probably the nicest person to me. She always gave me a quick heads up on what was coming next and once we reached the operating room I don't remember a darn thing. Next time I woke up Mike was walking in the door of the recovery room and it felt like 5 minutes went by. They gave me ginger-ale for the ride home and I even got wheel chaired to the car.

One thing that super creeped me out was that aside from talking to me for 3 or 4 minutes before the surgery in my waiting room, my surgeon didn't give me much info on what to expect nor did he stop by and check on me after the surgery. He asked if I had any questions and I was able to think of a few. Should I ice? "Sure if it helps". I've decided he's so nonchalant that I'm going to call him Dr. Ice.  He did tell my fiance everything "went well and there were no unexpected complications". Well thanks but when I wake up with a huge orange band of color around my leg where it looks like someone stuck on a lot of gauze it would be nice to know why! A little "by the way we'll be putting a tourniquet on you and cleaning with iodine, so don't be alarmed that you look like a space alien (or snooki)" would have been nice. At least that's what I assume the orange and gauze was for...

So I survived my day in the hospital and then it was on to recovering at home. I had never really utilized pain killers before, aside from the half an oxycodone I took the day I had my wisdom teeth removed and then had the trippiest dreams of my life and stuck to advil thereafter.  So, this was going to be interesting. For the first several hours I still couldn't really feel my foot but once the feeling started to come back - whoa nelly! Thankfully I tolerated the Percoset better than expected because otherwise I might have lost my mind. Yes, this hurt much more than the time I dropped a lap top on my foot and almost passed out.

Thankfully my Dr. was pretty accurate when he said the first two or three days were the worst. Now it's Friday and I don't feel like crying every time I need to go to the bathroom because any circulation in my foot would mean unbearable stabbing pain. I'm hoping to taper off the pain meds soon and start utilizing the foot a little more since I don't think I'm really supposed to be using crutches at all. I also learned not to spend too much time sitting on the futon as it hurt my back and exacerbated the whole ordeal.

Hopefully next time I'll be hobbling around a little better!

Well I'll tell you...

Mindfulness is certainly NOT taking nearly two months to complete a blog post. Or maybe it is? I'm not sure I've been successful in practicing mindfulness during this time but at least I'm getting closer to doing things that make me feel human and whole... but I digress...

The concept of mindfulness has its origins in Buddhist practice. Right Mindfulness is seventh among The Noble Eightfold Path, i.e. a path toward achieving Nirvana. The Nirvana I'm referring to is not the beloved 90s band, but a cessation of desire and attachment which are thought to be the roots of suffering. (World of the Buddha; Styrk, 1968). In this sense, Mindfulness has been translated to mean the constant awareness of the truth of the doctrine (the Eightfold Path).

The modern proliferation of interest in mindfulness stems in part from the work of Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn who founded the Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program at the University of Massachusetts in 1979. The idea behind the psychological interpretation of mindfulness is that one engages in a present-centered awareness such that thoughts and feelings that arise are acknowledged and accepted as they are in a non-judgmental manner. This powerful concept is intended to help with issues ranging from anxiety and depression to addiction.

In some ways it is hard to describe mindfulness since it is in part a way of being. A few years ago I took a shortened summer version of the MBSR class and we began with something called a bodyscan meditation where you focus on individual parts of your body in succession until you really bring a full awareness of your whole physical presence to the forefront. This was a transformative experience in my life because it really got me to realize how much time I spend on "auto-pilot". When I am mindful I find myself fully present, through good and bad experiences, and in turn it makes me feel more alive.

The problem is, it is incredibly difficult to be mindful when you have SO much to do. I know the benefits are enormousness but every time I tell myself to put aside a few minutes each day to meditate, or just sit quietly and focus on the present - I never even stop long enough to try!

Instead of true mindfulness I've been doing the next most peaceful thing I can think of which is in Taoist tradition known as Wu Wei (acting without acting). In the U.S. we generally call it "going with the flow". Sometimes I get so anxious about all the goals I can't realistically achieve that I get stuck in a circle of negative thinking and procrastination. Often Wu Wei helps get me out of the cycle. Part of this is self-forgiveness or allowance. It doesn't mean not to have high expectations of yourself but it is not very productive if you're so crushed under the weight of those expectations that you can't move forward.

So I haven't made it to the three miles every few days I hoped to be running by February, and I have been working so much I've barely had time to finish my day-to-day tasks at work, never mind brushing up on foreign languages and statistics. However, I've been hiking, nearly every weekend since we moved to Mass. and in those moments I try hard to not ruminate about the past, or worry about the future. In those deliciously quiet fleeting moments I get once a week I am doing my best to simply enjoy the present.

How do you make time to enjoy the simple things in life despite the constant pull of busyness and things that make us run on autopilot? Any suggestions for how to be more mindful in little ways, every day?

Mindfulness

Well hello there! I am back from the long hibernation from the real world that was “writing my dissertation”. Anyone that has been through the 5 to 7 year experience of pursuing his or her Ph.D. (I’m not including those rare lucky bastards that finished in 4) can sympathize with the high and lows, the joys and sorrows of the long journey. Now I have reached the crossroads and what a strange strange place it is.

I just so happened to finish in the depths of winter, as we turn the page to a new year and what feels like a new era in my life. Michael and I have moved 1200+ miles from our previous home in Columbia, MO now closer to my family in New England. We got engaged. We graduated. Yet, as any student that has worked tirelessly from 8AM to 10PM during the school year knows – when you reach the end you inevitably feel a little lost. It’s hard to put the brakes on from the momentum of a grueling daily routine. Many people say to me “You must feel so relaxed now!” or something to the effect of  “Wow, what will you do with all the extra time you have?” I usually can’t help but laugh sarcastically and then feel slightly guilty at my rebuff of their enthusiams – but I don’t feel relaxed, and with 2 hours of commuting each day I don’t feel like I have a great deal free time either. Part of the immediate time-depletion is because of my commitment to get back to exercising. At the end of a few months of doing nothing but sitting in front of a computer 80 hours per week, I felt about ready to keel over and have a heart attack – so immediately back to the gym it was.

Excited as I am about getting back to my “normal” exercise routine I felt a little awkward about this change in behavior taking place in January. I’ve never been a big fan of New Year’s resolutions because the stakes seem so high, and the word failure seems so easy to toss around. It seems to make the most sense to tackle one resolution at a time (exercising, eating better, learning something new…) but I have SO much I want to do at this juncture in my life. I want to reconnect with friends and family I’ve missed for years now. I want to volunteer in my community. I want to take photographs of nature with good-old-fashioned film. I want to learn to play the guitar. I want to be nicer to my fiancé, regardless of whether he does the dishes. I want to read for pleasure, and finish the two books I’ve been muddling through for the past 4 years. I want to polish up on my Spanish speaking skills, and my knowledge of statistics. I still want to teach. I want to cook better, and learn to bake the kind of fancy cupcakes you see in magazines. Maybe most importantly, I want to feel more relaxed because I know it is the only way I can be better at everything else. So this New Year – I’m only going to make one resolution : to practice Mindfulness.

 What is mindfulness?