12/6/23

 Wednesday, December 6, 2023

In bed at 9, up at 4:11.  Let Lilly out.  32°, high of 38°, mostly cloudy, wind WNW at 9 mph, 7=16/32, WC is 24°.  Sunrise at 7:08. sunset at 4:16, 9+7.

Treadmill; pain.  I've been off the treadmill for the better part of a week now; is this really due ust to pain or also laziness or lassitude? Today as of 4:30 p.m., I've been w/o pain, probably because of the appointment with the VA Pain Clinic.  Spoke too fast: on my way downstairs to treadmill, PFP hit.  00:00 & 0.00  Breakfast: GrapeNuts w/ banana, berries; Lunch: salami & cheese sandwich; Dinner: chicken noodle casserole

I'm grateful for YouTube.  I know it's social media and is among the bad guys criticized for its use of addictive algorithms, but for me it's terrific.  Yesterday I watched and paid attention to a 2 hour lecture by Jon Kabat-Zinn on mindfulness and pain/stress/healing, the MBSR or Mindfulness-based Stress Relief program used in many hospitals and other settings now.  I'm not sure that I can reliably 'get into' a mindfulness habit or practice, whether I have the necessary discipline, but I'm pretty sure I may have my pelvic pain problem for the rest of my life.  Is it my long-diseased bladder, PF dysfuntion, rectal problems, pudendal nerve entrapment, some of them, or all of them, perhaps someting else?  I have no clear idea, but it may be that the only relief will come from outside a doctor's office, perhaps mindfulness/meditation, maybe even gummies.😎  In any event, I'm grateful for YouTube for the access it provides me to so so much that is of interest me, lectures, demonstrations, entertainment including ballets and symphonies.  it is mostly YouTube that let me get off my butt and  on the treadmill again.  Sometimes I'll watch a news show, like Dana Bash's at 11 a.m., but that depends on whether I am largely pain-free at 11.  If not, I will usually find something of interest on YouTube.  I watched a couple interesting lectures on Meister Eckhart last week and want to watch another on Nietzsche's Geneology of Morals.  And there are coutless "how to's" on painting.  Not all of the programs are high quality, but many of them are.  There are also many interesting documentary films on OVID and other interesting films on the Criterion Channel.  Sustained reading is a problem for me because of presbyopia so I'm dependent on my laptop with its ability to magnify print and image sizes, and on whatever is available through a television screen, like materials on YouTube.  I'm grateful for it.

No pain at the Pain Clinic.  I visited for about an hour and a half with nurse-practitioner Kate and Dr. Shankar.  As I expected, the doc did not find nerve-blocking injections to be called for.  He suggested perhaps acupuncture might be helpful and I'l get a call from the VA acupuncturist at sometime.  I had acupuncture many years ago at a facility on Mayfair Road during my suicide-ideation, Hunner's ulcer days and it didn't help.  The acupuncturist was a Chinese immigrant who took up acupuncture because heChinese medical licensure wasn't accepted in the U.S.  She had a significant hesitation about applying the needles in my groin because of her sense of modesty.  She finally did it with another therapist present, but it didn't help.

Another mass killing in Las Vegas where Sarah just finished working the LDI - Live Design Internatioal show and expo.