Beth the Dragon, Linda tames the beast: we rob banks!

After a few tough days, I decided to relax by going to boxing. A needed evil, healthwise which ended as a painful idea.

The class was small so we did ALL the time not doing sit-ups and push-ups on the heavy bag. This is not a good idea if, like me, you have muscles that tear like tissue paper. Somehow the idea that I access the muscle power, even when I am going ‘lightly’ to hit the heavy bag hard enough to tear the same muscles is odd. I did my 100+ sit-ups and 80 push-ups and several hundred combos on the bag (26 six punch combo's in a minute...ack, I am so slow!). Also I sweated a lot, whihc is sexy and good right? Sexy, like the commercials, and then I have a cold drink I slowly rub down my body or something. Only my care worker helping me with a shower was like, "My GOD did you sweat." and when I was trying to be sexy went, "Are you trying to drink that or drop it, I can't tell?"

Plus all that ripping up the muscles kinda hurts the next day, just to let you know (kind hurts that night, stops sleep and stuff).

So the next day (today), I move like a crab and I try to get sexy with a can of root beer and end up dropping it.

Also, where no nerves are has made some muscles atrophy so much that they are just covered with skin: the bone, sinew and blood vessels covered lightly over with skin, like a tent.

I have this compulsion to cut through the skin at a couple areas where I can feel the bone underneath, just to see it (is it always white?), and the blood pumping along. This I have been told by a couple people, care givers and those who care, is a BAD idea. All sorts of infections, sepsis and gangrene can follow – turns out curiosity can kill this kitty.

Linda was brill, she saved an extra pain patch though this morning it had NOT kicked in yet so I woke like a dragon, WHUMP, my fire breathing decimates a village, WHUMP, I burn down everything to the left. “AHHH, why are you making noise like the band section practicing?” I shriek. “T-A-L-K softly” I said with the intensity of my eyes bulging out of sockets as I seem to try to be strangling the care worker with my eyeballs. I had to send someone out of the room because the PENCIL was ‘too loud’ on the paper. WHUMP, the wild dragon girl has arrived.

Pain doesn’t make me pretty, makes me all want to eat the bitter, just to make it stop. Pain just makes everything loud and intense and I see myself being bitchy even when I don’t want to. And then, when the patch kicked in, which it did so noticeably that over 3 minutes, I went from, “AHHHH, why are you so confusing when you talk!” to “Ohh, this is really nice Linda, I really appreciate how you have put these tastes together, that was very thoughtful.”

Linda wanted to know what the patch was like.

I said, “Well, I still hurt and ache but……I can think complete sentences. Oh, and I now have control over the volumes at which I speak. I also don’t just howl at the computer screen when I can’t find a file. It is…nice.”

So, due to boxing, I have edema pushed back so much that I have a shapely leg again, and I can play with my boobies and feel more tingle than pain. Plus, I can be a tongue in cheek goth again and eat flowers and stare mysteriously (there is no fun being a ‘wanting to shriek all the time in agony goth’ because you’re not a goth, you just are...wanting to die). I am not sure where I can get the odd bonnet, or the amount of material – I guess I need sewing skills beyond mine. But I am good at eating flowers , which seems a requirement for all introspective angsty gals.

This is how Linda thinks of the patch and I think of the pain. Because Linda is about the ‘practical’ and ponders, and I just ‘ponder’. Which I am sure is good for something. Hold on while I eat some more odd stuff and get angsty while I ponder. Yes, look at Postcard Project post and how 'Nothing Matters': so deep, and gothy.

This is Linda and I to a T, as I am using waxing on mentally about how things connect and the the historical and human connections, how this feeling has universal meaning and Linda is looking up going, “Oh yeah, did I remember to bring the towels in from the dryer yet?” Hey, we all need people to care about towels being brought in from the dryer.

Meanwhile, I am high on a bit of hot sauce (the endorphins make me want to drink and either take my clothes off or kick some butt).

So thanks to Linda thinking about pain patches and laundry, I have a nice bed, and sanity, of a sort. I hope you have a good weekend. Linda and I are going to carve up the town, starting maybe with the banks, then onto robbing other things. But first off I want to find out exactly what kind of webbed panties she is wearing – I told someone yesterday, I would try anything once, twice really, except for some sexual positions (once is enough to know, ‘Yeah..um, no, that isn’t doing it at all!’). So you have a kicking weekend!

Wheelchair Boxing, purple flowers, lolita lounging and demonic plushies

I am off to go boxing now. I do not ‘feel’ like going boxing. I am still weak and ill but also because last Thursday, the Director of the Y said that ‘other players’ had complained at volleyball. The complaint (either not ‘competitive enough’ at Beginners RECREATIONAL volleyball, or just don’t like playing with a wheelchair) had lead the Director to decide that I was to not attend due to ‘safety’ reasons. I asked if he had contacted wheelchair sports associations, if he had statistics on wheelchair accidents, on accidents in volleyball at all, whether he had done safety assessment of the other sports aids people used/wore, or the other impairments players had. No on all. No integrated volleyball injuries with wheelchairs in his 25 years but ‘we are not waiting for an accident to occur’. So yes, you CAN do integrated volleyball as I showed…..if they ‘allow’ you to. Nothing like being a teen again, huh, or treated like one.

So, after boxing I will have to wheel past the volleyball I spent 8 months getting into and 1 week playing. I was called a few hours before I would have gone up to say, “You’re out.” Regardless that discrimination based on disability in a Y that’s credo is ‘Access for all” and “Participation of the entire community” is illegal, I abide while making an appeal. Of course, by then Volleyball will be over and is isn’t on this summer. SUCK!

Oh, I wrote a post on the postcard project yesterday, lovely postcards!

I went out today for pre-boxing wheeling and it was lovely for taking pictures, too bad the camera was at home, lots of flowers out, and shrubs in bloom. We pooled our on hand change and picked up these purple Mumm’s. They had blue ones too: I will try and take a picture tomorrow.

I got in the post two shitajiki I had wanted for framing, one is by Petite Sanctuary and it seems I have been looking over 2 years for it. At last! It is cute and I call it ‘Kitten in Snow’. The other is from EF, the series about the girl who has middle and long term memory problems like me. I think both are beautiful and would love to know what you think. I hope to hang them as I think anime can be art.

Down at the video store (for a DVD to dull the post boxing pain – I got ‘The Hurt Locker’ – name seemed right), I talked to Linda about how I would, for as long as I live, be ‘out of time’. For me, the year is wrong, what I know is wrong, and what I can remember gets less and less as the middle term memory and long term blanks from 2008 to now are a widening dark hole. What I miss most is being of value, some sort of value. But with my weakness, my bed days, and my inability to remember or know the people who I meet since 2008 unless reminded often, I am at lucky if pitied, at best accommodated but never ‘needed.’

Oh well, life is still worth living, just if I had known might not have gotten so much STUFF or so many degrees, right? And more tattoos. Who has some ink out there? I am contemplating a tattoo. “I love Linda’s Boobies” is something I think both subtle and classy. I have been spending bed days with my plushies. And trying to make new plushies (note to others having bed days, playing with grimoires and short term memory is a bad idea – like demonic sheep plushies bad).

Now with the flowers I can get dressed and lounge in Victorian lolita style splendor in the sitting room or perhaps the reading room, on this chair or perhaps in the window seat. Too bad I don’t have a Victorian Mansion but an apartment which seems to be a medical equipment depo! Off to boxing, more flower pics tomorrow I hope.

The mystery package, and a Sakura outing

I decided that today was the day to open the ‘mystery box’ I got from winning the Kodak picture competition (with Otto the plushie deciding to watch). But first, my beloved Canon Camera from our Trip to Japan had returned from being repaired. It kinda DIED, and Canon charges a set fee of $89. We sent it off as getting this Camera now would cost about $600 (for the fold away viewscreen and other features which are wheelchair friendly). It was back in a week and just in time for……a sunny day and us to see the Sakura Blossoms.

For those who are not obsessive Japanese culture and language types, Sakura means ‘Cherry Blossom’. And because in 800’s, the Emperor and nobility liked to go out and watch the cherry blossoms as they came into full bloom and fall from the tree, this has become a National Holiday in Japan. While in Japan,TV news reports the state of Sakura (the type of cherry tree blossoms) buds and blossoms and estimated dates of the festival for each city came before the weather. Each city declares its own Sakura Festival as the different tempatures cause the trees to blossom at different times. Hence ‘Sakura-Con’ here in Seattle in April also when a 2 day holiday has 16 million people come to Kyoto to view the Cherry Blossoms, or go to Nara to feed the deer.

In Sakura, everyone goes as quickly as possible (gigantic traffic jam) to where the main trees are. In Kanazawa, the ancient Japanese Capital, it is by the Castle and one of the ‘great’ gardens of Japan. So all roads leading there are packed with people looking to put a blanket on the ground near or under a cherry tree. Then, the blanket becomes a sort of ‘home’ and your friends come by (taking off their shoes before stepping on to the blanket) and they can bring food or buy it at the festival stalls. But there is a lot of drinking, and thus a lot of shouting, and bets and play ‘King’ games (you draw lots, and the ‘King’ gets to make the other numbers do thing like cross dress and sing the corporate anthem). Linda and I saw the Sakura Festival in Tokyo and in Kanazawa and the end of it in Kyoto.

Here in Victoria, in the 1930’s the emperor had his daughter stay here as the port of loading for the Empress of Japan transport Cruise liner. B.C., a seperate Colony had an embassy both in London but also in Japan in 1888. Canada had one several decades later, indeed the Emperor of Japan visited Canada in 2009 to celebrate 80 years of formal relations between the two countries, the first visit since 1953! This gave the Japanese who had moved to Canada a chance to do what they could not do in Japan: see or speak to the Emperor. As one Japanese immigrant said, “He represents 1,000 years of history.” The Empress of Japan built in 1930 sailed from 1930 to 1942, (when, due to war it was brought to Victoria and renamed, Empress of Scotland). Due to the hospitality, over 30 trees from Japan and the Emperor’s Garden were brought over and planted around the Empress Hotel (named after the series in the Canadian Pacific Cruise line, Empress of Australia, etc). Over the years many trees from Japan have been given to Vancouver (Stanley Park), Toronto (Hill Park) and the US in New York (Sakura Park in Manhattan, 3012 trees given in 1912 to celebrate friendship). Here are some of the trees on behind the empress, fronting a motel which, of course, is closed and being turned to condos!
Sakura is so important to Japan it is when the Calendar starts and ends, when both the fiscal and the school year starts, in April, also when coming of age ceremony occurs. So annually the first day of work or school is the start of the Sakura season – most schools have Sakura trees so that life events are all framed around the Cherry or Sakura blossom. It is also on the 100 yen coin (about $1). It was a sunny day yesterday so Linda pushed me out and about, into the van, and we went off to the library, after a stop to see the Sakura blossoms.

As you can see, I can now read print material, at about the same speed as before, however, as the day continues, my ability to read and what I can read decreases. Here is the advantage of having a wheelchair: a) being able to see the bottom row and b) being able to stack lots of books and manga on my lap!

I had not been to the library in a long time (a year, more?). One thing about memory problems is I only remember the ‘last memory’ regardless of whether I have visited or not, and if the ‘last memory’ is two years ago then people look kind of different and so did the library (there is now a free PC ‘gaming station’ with flatscreen monitors). But they seemed happy to see me again and I was off with all my booty back home.

Time to open the box, say I. ‘Not so fast’ says the bag it has been sent in. Arg, why are these always ‘puzzle boxes’ sent to defeat those with peripheral neuropathy! I am not sure if I should come back with ‘You are sly but so am I’ or just ‘HA! Try to stop me will you!” (I WILL use my teeth, I often do!)

I am not the most subtle when it comes to opening stuff, and if you think that your wrapping paper has been carefully folded out of sight, I am sorry to disappoint, or as people say, “Oh I see your cat got to the wrapping paper.”

My puzzled face, “No….er, I mean, yeah, that’s why it is all shredded like that.”

Ta da! I did it!
The prize was the RRP $169 Digital Picture Frame M820. It literally sings and dances. Or rather it has a touch screen for instructions, can store 1000 pictures without an external source (or use thumbdrives for more), can play movies and mp3’s. So with this handy Digital frame so you can have hundreds of pictures playing along with your favorite music. YES, do that and YOU CAN become the most annoying person at work. SCORE! I will use it in the bedroom I think where I can watch some of the videos we made and listen to music.

It was nice, but where were the shiny baubles? I have the brain which likes…. the pretty, where are the goth earrings, or art doujinshi, manga, um, gift certificates or a nice set of motorcycle leathers with a motorcycle to go with them! Um you know..more. Was there more, was there more? Seriously, you never did this as a child?

There wasn’t more.

I did however, roll up to boxing 30 minutes later. There I did way, way, way too many sit-ups (over 200) and push ups. I even had Linda put my legs up on my wheelchair seat while I was down on the mat and used weights in my hands and did even more sit ups. (I was um, 'trying to sweat' not 'trying to show the new class that I was as tough as those sleek girls in the yoga outfits'). I also did ‘transfer’ push ups (where you push on your fists to raise your butt off the ground and fist walk over to a new place). Then I brought in blocks and did even more transfer push-ups. Oh, I sweated, a lot. I really sweated. I drank over 2 liters of water before the nap and 4 liters after – and then I could finally pee out some junk from the muscles that were rebuilding. So I am sore in places I feel, and sore where I DON’T feel (Linda just says they are very hot) which is kinda weird. How can I rebuild or strengthen muscles I can’t feel? Anyway, a productive day I think. And a new toy to play with.

Wheelchair Boxing Round 3: is this tenacious?

Free from the ‘51’ (the 51 days of fever), and the fever and chills from Tuesday, I went to Boxing on Friday. I am thin...in places. I have ribs showing, am sitting on pure pelvic bones but have a pot and little tire and not quite sure how that happens (lying there for 51 days might have something to do with it).

It annoys me.

Things that annoy me get removed. Turn on the vacuum cleaners, and hand me the scissors: time for my home liposuction!

I have pushing myself hard since the fever, trying to get reserves, but working every hour. I have had some problems with high blood pressure and seizures, and the fever make things explode literally. Due to my camera being a ‘smart camera’ which tries to match skin tones, this bruise is about half as dark and just plain disturbing as the picture shows. There is another rupture showing up in the pinky, it starts in the crease and goes up half of the pinky. As you can see with this picture, I bleed every day, expanding territory of this particular bruise, and that is only the part you can see on the skin. When I overheat and blood comes to the surface, it gets gigantic. It seems like my body is playing a game of Risk, and slowly winning territory. This is called subcutaneous bleeding, I think. I did not hit anything, this bruise along with about 30 more visible ones, are just ruptures of my arteries from high, high blood pressure.

This is what dying looks like. I wasn’t going to take pictures of the things we now see, except that people who read the blog are so used to me ‘dying’ that the idea the ride is about over, and going to come to a complete stop, is alien. No, I am not an alien, or a sub-human that just keeps going regardless. I could die today, I already came close. My arms twitch constantly so it is hard to type. There is no ‘after Xmas’, or ‘Next year’ or ‘This Fall’ in the thoughts of Linda and I. Yeah, it might be wonderful, you think, to look worse than an infected junkie, and have the pain of having nails driven into your bones, and just go on like this. But human bodies don’t. They tend to generate what are known as ‘loopbacks’ which is the body saying “Help” but, for someone who can’t feel, only generates TIA inducing spontaneous high blood pressure.

I would love a long term gig but right now, no treatment, no doctor, and a hospital would likely kill me in short order (when they make ASSUMPTIONS, and my body works the opposite, that is a BAD thing), that isn’t happening. Sure, I have to live as if I keep on living, because I am not sitting here waiting to fall over. But I am fighting to get back each freedom in the same way I went to the fencing tournament AFTER I knew it might kill me: I want one more spin on the merry-go-round. I want one more 10K, one more Sakura-con (see Linda on how that is going), and with about 600 more postcards I get 5,000. That’s a good number, right? Yeah, the shop is shutting down, whether I want it to or not.

I am not a Goth, I AM GOTH. And no one is riding shotgun with me.

So, after seeing Sherlock Holmes and a few hours of sleep I went up to boxing. I went up because a) I need to lose that pot before Sakura-con (vanity, vanity!) b) I want to be as elite an athlete as I can be for my condition because I believe that will extend my life – even if that is 1/10 of what my condition was in August or Oct. last year. And c) I really want to go out of this life hitting and fighting DAMMIT! I want to be a wheelchair boxer again.

I managed to show up on ‘do sit ups, push ups and heavy bag until you vomit’ night. All right! We did 12 series of combo’s on the heavy bag before doing tight hitting as fast as you could and then strong blows are hard as you could. I couldn’t type afterward – I just needed to lie down and have body twitching.

When I started I felt FAT, but when I finished I felt better, not just because with eating only one meal a day, but I am on bone in my pelvis. But my arms still seem to work, and I was able to sweat, enough to maybe stop my hair from falling out. Enough to stop the skin peeling off of my face.

Linda said, of those there, I was putting the most into it, but then, I do. Ian held my heavy bag and surveyed the room while I worked on uppercuts, shovel hooks, overhead hooks, and power rights. I knew I would be in pain, since last time I was unable to sleep due to the pain from boxing. This time I managed to get four hours sleep (only to find out that due to working SLOWLY every day, the construction will now continue into Saturday – six days a week, starting TODAY until Xmas). I know that I will never be able to look out my window again. That is what is. I have wall scrolls to watch and DVD’s I play to cover up the construction noise.

The trick of making combination is to totally relax between the combinations, like letting your mind go into strategic mode, so you breath, relax. Then you take the power from the relaxed muscles and accelerate them to culminate into a point in time and space – WHAM, wham, WHAM, and relax with your guard up. It takes a half second to make three hits.

Ian is the right type of temperament for me. I told him, “You are doing 40lb jabs” while I was holding the heavy bag (throwing around boxes of books, the 80 pounds of books versus the 40 becomes memorized). He told me he could barely use his shoulders: jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, jab, cross, power hook. “I did two killer workouts yesterday.” He said, “Why do I hit so hard when I am so tired?” jab, jab, cross, jab, back step, step into hook, triple jab and a rocking cross. He laughs, “Because I like it.”

Afterward I apologized for not coming due to the fever. For Ian, who knows me, it is not a big deal, two of his students, new ones overheard me and one said, “Oh my God! Did you go to the hospital?” Ian and I looked at each other like, “Newbies!” He knows this rocket is pointed toward the sun.

He had parasites from a trip overseas, as is working them out. I told him I will be back regularly I hope as I get ready for Sakura-con and the 10K. “You are the most tenacious human being I have ever met.” He suddenly said to me. I wasn’t sure what to say.

Ian has had about 75 bouts with I think 5 defeats. He came out of retirement in his mid-30’s to do a boxing tournament that required FOUR back to back full on bouts, which means you had to win all four in a row. He was at the final bout when a ref called a holding, and a stop, he lowered his glove, while the other boxer put all his weight behind a hit to his cheek, crushing his cheekbone and pressing his eyeball out. Ian went on to knock out that man and win the tournament. But, he said, it taught him that he was too trusting, and it was time to retire. And he calls ME the most tenacious human being he has ever met? Of all the boxers? Of looking himself in the mirror?

I want to live up to that.
Someone recently sent me an email saying they wrote so that I won’t be lonely. I write because I am lonely.

I want so much for this blog to go back to jaunty and saucy and research and observation of BEFORE, and I hope it will. Because all of that is a part of who I am. But so are the things which no one talks about, that shadow which falls over everything I look at, over everything good in my life. I live because I need to live each day as if I were to keep on living. But I also need to have a part of each day in preparation for dying. Except there isn’t any way to teach me how to do that. Linda has 3 support meetings in the next 10 days. I will meet a therapist for the first time, a meet and greet – they are accessible, so they are only available every three weeks. And what do the living, who observe and writing ‘stages’ know of this. What do they know of having what limited support group die, one after the other.

One told me, “Just because they say you are going to die, doesn’t mean you will.” Dead.

“Morbid wit, I like it.” Dead.

Another taught me how to keep blogging. He was the most obvious, slurred, even on the blog, so we brushed by, as I was full of symptoms and possible conditions, and that he could be me soon, it terrified, and he died soon after.

So boxing and being in pain and watching blood pool from parts of me is easy. Wham, wham WHAM! THAT is nothing. Letting someone in, knowing I won’t be there for them, and seeing them watch me with terrified eyes, how do I do that?

Palliative uncovered: wheelchair boxing, being in the now, and what's left.

Palliative comes from the Latin meaning to cover, or cloaked. That isn’t me, hiding, cloaking things. Dying is like childbirth, it is hard to hide if people are really looking. But we have been taught not to.

We are born, thus we die, and there will suffering somewhere in between those two parts. But what details do I talk about, the two weeks of fevers alternated by going into cold shock day after day, having to be wrapped in blankets, the stopping of breathing during each day, and shallow and stopped breathing each night, and waking up with purple fingers. My systems are shutting down, and I sleep a lot. I am less HERE, where-ever here is. Breathing is more difficult as the diaphragm fails, no eating, little drinking, failure or irregular workings of internal organs, spontaneous bruising and hemorrhages, the general withdrawal. That is where I have been this week.

After getting back from boxing Linda said, seeing her caregivers guide to end-of-life in my hands, that I shouldn’t look at that.

“Why, how do you see me?”

She swallows and says, “Palliative. If asked a day or two ago I would have said you have a couple days.”

Yeah, that is kind of how I felt too.

She continued, “But now, with the exercise, longer.”

“Longer?”

She hesitated, and I waited to hear ‘months’ or ‘till fall’ or ‘summer’, Linda is the person who breathes for me, and helps me in everything from getting out of bed when too weak to do anything but wait for her to come home (as has been recently). She checks my breathing, she starts me up again if I stop, and this week cames home at lunch to make sure I haven’t died while she was at work. I was breathing so shallow she couldn’t hear me at all until she was right over my head.

Still, she is the optimist, she is the one who wants me to hang around no matter how bad it gets. She continued, “With the exercise....weeks.”

Well that sucks.

I have enough consciousness now with endorphins to remember that being okay with dying is not supposed to be fine, particularly when not that depressed. But that is where I am, and have been When I just sit and stare out trying to breath (yes, oxygen can be very demanding of attention), or cleaning up with help and putting post it notes with people’s name on things. This are the chores of dying.

I had an annoying worker. So I told her to leave. Dying takes all my energy, doing anything or being with Linda is more important. I don't have the time for her. I miscalculated and had a phone call and talked 45 minutes. I immediately passed out after that and stopped breathing. It took three hours for my body to recover from that 45 minutes, strong enough to speak (slurred) and eat a little.

No, this isn’t how it supposed to go, I’m the heroine of this film and how can the film go on if I am not onstage. Oh PLEASE don’t tell me now that I was just an ‘extra’ – a walk-on?

Today I fought hard against the desire to sleep or just lower my head and stop breathing (the irony is that my body, due to the nature of my disease will continue to look okay, and have ‘good skin’, right up to being dead), in order to get ready for boxing. No energy to put on foundation…ah, this stuff is a feminist plot against the fatigued!

Once more at spinning the revolver and pulling the trigger. Sweat or die, or die trying to sweat. Boxing is two-fold, to get back in shape as quickly as possible and to sweat as much as possible by exercising to and beyond the limits. If a phone call can make me unconscious, and I am living off endorphin fumes now, I wonder what I will like tomorrow? But I really gave it everything, starting off with sit ups (about 130 in total) and push ups (somewhere over 100). I went until I had nothing and I went on, one arm wouldn’t straighten, I tried to make one more push-up again, and again, and again, and screaming I got one arm straightened, and slowly straightened the other one. A collapse.
I didn’t care about tomorrow or tonight, only now and that I believe this was a way to extend my life. So I boxed the heavy bag as if my life depended on it. I used the swinging of the bag to throw a lot of fast punches, averaging three punches a second, to hit but not give full power and rip muscles. Sometimes it swung back and I let it hit me, building up my strength and resistance to attacks.
Linda said I boxed with a face that she had only seen on characters in movies before they are to run down a hill into battle and certain death, “AHHHHHHHHH!” I didn’t scream but I was, very, intense. I think I might have scared the other people there.

Boxing and Epee are sort of similar in that you need to be in a relaxed state with your arms, in the beta zone, but with instant focus and then action. I was rusty, and dropped my right hand a lot. The coach for the night said he would spar with me. He put in his mouth guard saying to Linda, “I know her.”

What?

Most of these moves occur in less than a second, the trick is to move your arms with enough strength to block a hit but to move your other arm with precision and force to the target. I tend to focus on gut/heart hits and head hits. So here you can see that he threw a hook to the side of my head, which I block. Meanwhile my left fist is already accelerating at the space it sees. He has pulled his arm back but my arm is extending and accelerating, and there is a gap of strength as he is just pulling his arm back and not quickly enough. Though I drop my right fist my lefts gets through to make a full face hit (minimal force). It all take less than a second.

Here you can see the coach planting a jab on my defense, it doesn’t break through but I follow his arm back and as his hand goes to cover his face, I lower my arm and extend into the abdomen (he retreats to lessen the power).

In this last exchange I have seen a chance at a hook, and extend, with my right, the left is covering the face. As I get to him, because I can’t step forward or twist for force, I lean forward to give it more OMPH! He blocks with his glove and shoulder.

But all of this happens very quickly (micro seconds to a second). Here is a video of a few seconds to show you how the better you get, the less you AND your opponent get hit, since you are always practicing defense, the relax and focus and looking for opportunities. There is practice but little violence here.

I continued on, for 90+ minutes and when they called break I shadow boxed, or worked on. What if I was too weak to come again? This was it.

I got back home and the workout had made me sweat and restarted my intestines, which along with my colon had stopped the start of the week. So I am back, EFM lite.

The thing is I don’t know what I want, what I am fighting for, I wish I did. I wish I had a vision, a giant vision and that I could take everyone along for the ride, for the joy of it. But I don’t. Maybe I can get to a place where I can. Right now, it is just trying to survive. We are going to hook up the large oxygen concentrator as a makeshift overnight oxygen provider while I sleep.

It seems I am supposed to relax, rest, and remember the good times, the seeing of fireflies, to try to recapture those memories. Yeah. Why don't you take that idea and file it where the sun don’t shine. I MAKE memories, I don't live off what used to be. I make miracles, and if there was one needed, it would be now, I wouldn’t mind a bit of outside help, if Miracle Inc. is reading blogs now.

See, I played double bass, which has exactly the same stringing as the bass, and yeah, I’m her, the girl in the picture, I’m sitting here with a body and a life where two of my four strings have broken. And that SHOULD be the end of it. Except that by doing all this math in your head when you play, you can actually play all the rest of the notes and avoid using a whole string while doing it. But TWO? Well that just makes it really hard, right? It means that it won’t work perfectly, no low bass, no super high, limited, but I can keep trying, can’t I? Till that miracle comes.

Linda’s co-worker mentioned something about how she should tell me not to ‘go to the light’ and Linda told her casually how it was green really. What!? Linda told her that sometimes there is a party I have to go to or I say, “Let me go, let me go, they are calling for me.” And how one time there was an ice skating party (I don’t remember this at all). This freaked out the worker. Guess Linda is beyond the veil what is typical too.

Maybe I will die, and yes, I am more withdrawn now, but I am going to try everything I can to figure out other ways to deal with that, and other ways to keep going, and processing nutrients. Linda put two of the new problems on the wish list. One is that her beater died (food beater?), and she found a half price one which has the speed and such she needs. The second is that my feet are back in pain, due to my body going cold, even with two blankets on my lap my feet hurt all the time from the cold (with two wool socks on as well!). We will try to deal with these as we can, if you want to help, I am grateful. But it is a choice. I don’t promise life, wish I could. I do promise that I am trying really hard to FIND a way to look forward, to fight. Because I need to fight to find a place where I can enjoy being in the HERE (many people think about what comes next, and they aren’t actually HERE), but still challenge myself and work hard to keep myself alive (Which takes about 50-60% of my time each day, now). And yeah, the pain all the time thing sucks.

Pain sucks, so does, knowing that I will be alone for a international holiday of getting together with friends and family. So I have another holiday, December 6th is Canada’s National Remembrance and day against violence against women. This year is the 20th anniversary. No more violence (odd code for someone just from boxing and who talks about fighting a lot). I want any meeting of people to be a meeting of equals, whether that is at a free clinic for street people or any medical or other meetings. I respect you, you respect me. Then maybe the emotional abuse that seems built into the medical system, the beating you down as an equal and competent in your field as the doctor is in theirs (or more competent) would be gone. No more women, no more people falling through the cracks. I believe in that. I guess that is what the gifting from me and the postcard project with Cheryl and Linda is about: that someone out there knows you and cares.

If I die now, or in the next days or week or two then let me found both doing and being: being with Linda, being where the joy is, being in the NOW. But still doing what needs to survive. Because if I/You don’t survive, then the story ends. I want to care about what happens next (I don’t really, not inside, but I WANT to care), the only thing I know is that I have two doctor’s appointments and a blood draw. But I would like a hair cut. And Linda saw a raccoon last night. I would like to see that. Or an owl. “It is a start” a fictional friend said, enough to start having a life maybe.