When Will I Learn?

The answer is not anytime soon. Yesterday I went to a craft show and had a booth. I had a blast. I sold tons of my stuff and had a lot of fun at the same time. I might have even made a new friend.

But obviously I am not the best candidate to leave home at 620 AM to get to the show at 7 AM, set up my booth, sit and stand for hours, and break down my booth, and drive home to get home at 530 PM. I also lifted things, dragged things, set up folding tables and a canopy. I pulled things out of my car and then put them back in. I did all those things my doctors are telling me not to do - lift, carry, twist, push, pull, etc.

Today I am paying the price. I am sore and achy. I am sore in places that haven't hurt in recent years. My right knee, which has a partially torn ACL for the last 15 years, is now complaining. Significantly. I think I need ice and elevation for a while to make it feel better. Then I can tell you about the place in my back which had injections on Thursday. Its very unhappy.

So when will I learn? I need to learn that my body is not built for any of this any more. I need to learn to be a nice sedate quiet person. (I almost typed 'sedate little old lady' but I am definitely not ready for that classification. I want my tombstone to say something along the lines of 'that was one hell of a ride'. And I doubt I will ever be called sedate, unless it was in the context of being sedated, queue the Ramones song now.)

I may need to sedate myself to get through the next 24-48 hours. 

But I really need to learn to stop over doing things now so I stop needing to recover from them. 

Medical School

Although I was designated the office doctor last week, I am now going to medical school. It started yesterday and continues for the next 7 weeks. Someone referred me to it a while back and I registered at canvas.net and now it starts.

I was traveling yesterday so I haven't had a chance to start my first class on Anatomy and Physiology. It should take me an hour or so each week. I am looking forward to it. The other courses are a second week in Anatomy and Physiology, Cellular and Molecular Biology, Immune System, Infectious Disease, Neuroscience and (my favorite) Cancer Biology before finishing up.

Why am I adding to my busy schedule with mini-medical school? Because I hope it will help me understand my body and why it keeps on having so many issues. I figure I am a prime candidate to learn about medicine as I seem to have a lot of interaction with the medical profession.

What I really want is a cure for all that ails me but I doubt that will happen anytime soon. But in the meantime, I can be smarter.

Lessons in dying

I started this post shortly after Elizabeth Edward's passing in December 2010. I keep going back to this post periodically and added and deleting thoughts. Each time I am usually prompted by another friend's advancing health issues.

Elizabeth Edward's death provided us new lessons in death, cancer, dignity and cancer treatment. She was educating to the end when she announced that her treatment would no longer be productive. She joins a list of famous women who have helped make cancer more understandable and less fearsome.

Real people get cancer as do famous people. But often we don't understand what they are going through unless we have been there ourselves. But even then, its can be difficult to understand as the treatments vary as do reactions to them. Some people tolerate them better than others. Not all lose their hair. Some find they react to the treatments in bad ways. I have friends who could not complete treatment because they were allergic to chemotherapy drugs or could not tolerate them for other reasons.

I have numerous friends who have succumbed to cancer since I started writing this post. Last weekend I got together with a breast cancer friend and she said that all her friends with cancer were gone, including the too young ones. There are feelings of guilt when our friends are gone. Why them when, before cancer, they had so much life left for them?

But as each of friends go, we learn from how they lived their life and die. We may not agree with them - why didn't you get your affairs in order earlier? We may admire them for what they accomplished. But we always still miss them.

Some lessons to learn

We can learn some lessons here. In the US we are busy being annoyed with the new healthcare system or happy to use it. But we have it and have to learn to live with it or legislate it into something else.

I did not know this but Germany has a very similar health care system with the same issues - trying to reduce costs. We are busy thinking we are doing something new but we aren't. Except for a few differences, it already exists pretty much.

I am not saying the German system is perfect. But if you read about it, there are some key similarities.

My point is that while we are trying to reinvent the wheel we can learn from others who have already done so.