Tag Archives: health

Best Laid Plans

Photo greynomads.com.au

Tom and his mate Tahlia were spending 2021 traveling around Australia, taking the long route. They were moving clockwise, using the outside of the road. Tahlia had just celebrated her 21st birthday, as had Tom. By now they understood this a vast land. You can drive for a thousand kilometres in this land and the highlight of your day is the chance to fill the fuel tank of your vehicle at a service centre. Most of these serve very unappetising fried food and little else. As, a vegan traveller, Tahlia must have gagged every time she entered one of these outposts. 

Correctly, after crossing the Nullabour they turned left when they reached Norseman. And they drove their converted delivery van, now a smart camper wagon, to the beautiful city of Esperance. After days spent looking at scenery, that barely changed hours after hour crossing the continent, the water views of the seaside town are remarkably restful. Being more venturesome than this old fellow, they learned the islands offshore were easy to get to by ferry. As a result, they had a merry time at an off-shore bar where they could share travel stories with other young folk, and learned something about the mysterious road ahead.  

The trip from Esperance to the capital of Western Australia one need not hurry. So they took their time visiting the wine area of Margaret River and swimming at wild ocean beaches. The great Jarrah and Karri forests, and the distant remnants of the whaling industry of Albany are only some joys one finds south of Perth. The long seaward protrusion of the Busselton Jetty was another place they visited. But the distant voices from home reminded Tahlia others would like to celebrate the significance of her twenty-first birthday back in Melbourne. A day away on the other side of the continent if you fly. So they called in favours to park “Van Morrison” in Perth and headed back home by air.

What should have been a happy home-coming break held a COVID-19 twist. Their plane had barely landed when health authorities announced Victoria had a new virulent community outbreak of the virus after over three months of being infection free. The State authority announced it would again enter lockdown that evening.

Just home, the young couple drove immediately back to the airport with a view to escape the Lockdown and resume their circumnavigation of the continent. They made phone calls to Western Australia health officials to find out if they could avoid fourteen days of enforced quarantine, as they had not been near the areas known to be infected, they simply wanted to return to their mobile home. Officialdom, being what it is, deliberated to the point of the plane’s departure time and came down with a judgement. Their home had no fixed address and the only way they could reenter the state was to do as all other Victorians must. That is it required them to enter quarantine. They sat out the Lockdown.

The reality was hard, too few in the population had been inoculated, the seven-day lockdown was extended and interstate travel banned. The outcome for Tom and Tahlia? Viruses are true egotists and they infect whomever they can.

Canberra Bubble

Image John Tiedemann



A change in the air reminds me of twenty minutes lost, 

alert to the waltz a virtuous murmuration of starlings gave.

A fabulous swirling smoke of beating, iridescent wings, and assuring cries.

The ubiquitous birds hopping after insects, rising as one mass from the lawn

that evening became a swoosh, a concert, a dance rising and falling, a twisting

 and turning of synchronised swimming on the  fluid

broiling air. A smoke curling above the dark tree-line their flight of fancy.



Currently, a vicious parliament rings to a decade of got-you’s.

The debate, a pixilated landscape of noise  

swirling through digital platforms, flying upward

toward a vector of warbling publishers

to meet more misdirection and gaslighting.

Media gathers there, for debate curling over

 and through sensibility, yet loses nothing

of the awful, fascinating, and ceaseless filibuster

of truth lived by half the population denied a roost, 

swooping toward a light shining upon raw truth,

now a boisterous law of prevailing opinion circles Canberra .



A wrecking ball of justice might just smash the Canberra Bubble this term.

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Maxine Beneba Clarke and 3 others followRay Martin@Raymartin55This will be the first Australian Government brought down by women. Deservedly so. #auspol8:05 PM · Mar 10, 2021·Twitter for iPhone

Numbers/Ratios and the like.

Here we are in the State of of Disaster. It is one year since I began this blog. When I started I had no ambition but to record my reaction to the moments of the day in relation to my past lived experience. I thought twenty or thirty years from now my grandchildren might like to compare their experience of life with mine. (I realise this reads as a narcissistic reason but given they will have no way to communicate with me – it motivates me. They can read my “voice” and measure it with what influences them).

In these last 12 months the world has changed. Six months ago no one spoke of Covid 19. In these last few months nearly 18 million have been infected and nearly 700,000 have died. Businesses have collapsed. People are unemployed and our State has reached the nadir of disaster. The advice on how to stay safe seems simple: stay home, keep a social distance when outside, wear a mask, wash your hands, stay safe.

I am not an outgoing personality. Indeed I am shy until I get to know you, however this forced isolation is foreign. I like to embrace my friends and it is strange to nod instead. Now we enter a period of six weeks without any social contact save social media and the phone. It will be weird.

I keep typing away and I see trends where none previously existed. My drivel has attracted 600 different viewers. One out of every ten readers have decided to follow me. (Only you know why). You now inspire me to keep this going. I hope you do not stop. I have a request. If you like my words then pause and tell me why they interest you. Together we can expand our universe with simple asides. I would like to get to know you.

Please, if you “like” me make a comment.

Six months in

Ten meld with todays

State total

Of 140 Australians

Part of the 600,000 +

Who join the mournful dust

Six months in

Meanwhile

16 million ill attest health

Workers give careful attention

Despite the virus’ raging stealth

A vaccine worker

Examines slides of the culprit

In the hopeful chance

It leads to discovery

Meanwhile

Your health and mine

Demands we respect our distance

Wash our hands

Mask our face

Stay safe

Did you dream?

Ch4f.org

My partly remembered conversation started this way.

“What are you doing?”

“I am clapping . Nick has won the property auction.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I am . You. Me ? I was asleep.”

“What do you mean I woke you up, you were clapping weren’t you?”

“Yes. I was. But I was asleep.”

“That’s stupid you were clapping.”

“I was dreaming and you have woken me.”

“I am sorry. I though you must have nave been awake. No one claps in their sleep.”

“I do.”

Did you dream?

It is a condition of mine I do not fight. In my own words, I am a slow sleeper. My blonde haired partner is not. Within moments of her head hitting the pillow she is deeply asleep. I listen for her deep breathing to start and then I toss and turn . In the wee small hours I realise I have been asleep and rise from my bed and wander about the house.

If it is raining I will look out the windows and marvel at the rain. On another evening in broad moonlight I will wonder outside and be mesmerised by the simplicity of the sphere that is forever changing through its quarters. Having checked my surroundings I will hop back into bed and drift in and out of consciousness until the sleeping hours are almost exhausted and then I will sleep deeply, slowly, and innocently.

I welcome the final hour to sleep like a baby, and I dream. My dreams are times, according to Carl Jung – are the time the anima an the animus work their magic in the human spirit. These are times when the male unconsciously accepts the benefits of the feminine side of his nature. The opposite condition, according to Jung, manifests itself in the female.

Lately my unremembered dreams cause me to often wake in a sweat of anxiety caused by my reaction to a partly remembered event from years before. Just last week on waking like this I had to get out of bed and deliberately remind myself the events I thought I was reliving never happened at all, and even if it did, it was so long ago as to be irrelevant today. (Oddly fo those of you interested in analysing my behaviour, they were moments of anxiety for children I once had in my care in my classroom care. The reality is it was nearly half a century ago.)

How you sleep is important to your development. We need to dream because it motivates our development. I wish you good dreams. In doing so I am not alone with Jung. Here is what a few others say about dreams.

Dreams are necessary to life.

https://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/anais_nin_129793

Throw your dreams into space like a kite, and you do not know what it will bring back, a new life, a new friend, a new love, a new country. – Anais Nin

A dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.

Oscar Wilde

But I, being poor, have only my dreams; I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.

William Butler Yeats

Sonnet To Spring Creek

Author supplied

Like a silken white sheet on a king sized bed

The swell at three metres broke and those up to stuff

Rode boards sixty metres in the roaring surf

Just over the sand dune all lay still – instead

A father assessed if his rod carrying children

Were to eat fish he had better head to the chippery

So still was the air in the estuary it was watery

We stood on a jetty and snapped the formation

.

To remind ourselves winter has these days sanguine

Where all is unchallenged – unlike the links

On the opposite banks where golfers strike

Balls in their wish to defeat Covid 19

Hope is interesting at best me thinks

Ones aim is to defeat the dark ISO feelings like

Nonet

Author supplied

Lockdown and a certain age of folk

Ensues it is safer indoors.

The sun shines over the yard arm

The whisky bottle’s empty.

Get another one.

No luck. Humbug!

Pandemic

The trap.

Blah!

These are words. They do not represent my thoughts at this terrible time. The only way they do is it is hard to understand the mind set of the people rushing liquor outlets and gun shops now they have emptied grocery stores of food.

My thoughts are with those who have lost their jobs due to enforced business shut downs. They are also with the families grieving loved ones lost to Covid 19. I am grateful to all the responders and all those still turning the wheels of society. Thank you. Stay safe everyone.

Take a seat.

Image courtesy SMT

Living with good genes you visit your doctor only to replace the medications he has prescribed for daily use, when you have run out. You trust your GP – the pills prescribed; will reduce your cholesterol, replace the hormones your absent thyroid cannot produce, or lower your blood pressure. The proof all is well is revealed with a regular blood pressure check – 120/73 at 59 heart beats a minute. Excellent result. Even for a person a quarter of your age. It is all you need to hear before you exchange pleasantries and leave to go about your daily business.

With no comprehension of Greys Anatomy, or understanding of pharmacology, you trust the diagnosis your GP advises. Even he may not decide your the treatment for every ailment from a conversation. Most likely your GP will order blood tests to confirm the diagnosis gleaned from careful questioning. She may recommend you visit a specialist before ever a diagnosis is reached.

Not every visit is conducted with such routine rhythm – but you hear things.

Today your primary carer will reserve opinion until all channels are exhausted. This is as good – as it is bad. Specialisation can become misleading unless the specialist keeps a clear mind – the whole person needs treatment, and not just a specific disease found in part of the body.

The life of the doctor is most certainly fraught. This is especially so in this Internet age. Lots of people visit a doctor after first making inquiry of Dr Google. Your friends are often more knowing (not knowledgeable) than the doctor, and hypochondria is very common among those friends who make weekly visits with yet another complaint.

This is not to condemn them. How one feels can be misleading. Too often an acquaintance has died because they ignored symptoms other people acknowledged. One person says “I feel this,” The other says nothing. The first has a diagnosis, a treatment, a short, or a long painful – convalesce, and they are cured. The second, dies, or worse – is given a prognosis and dies shortly afterwards. The difference in their lives is sometimes a matter of how they think of the medical profession.

Currently the conversation is about pain. The press is full of the dangers of opioid and other drugs prescribed for pain. Codeine, Fentanyl, OxyContin form part of the list of products which pain sufferers are very familiar. Word has it that these drugs can be habit forming, just as morphine – first discovered in 1803, is known to be.

Tragically many lives have been lost by sufferers of long term pain. Their treatment caused them to become addicted to their treatment. In time the drug becomes more necessary to them than the pain it was prescribed to aid. It has reached a stage of alarm across the developed world.

The level of pain individuals can accommodate varies from person to person. The truth is few men would be able to live with the pain of child birth. It remains one life’s mysteries how women naturally live through confinement. But not all pain is equal.

From my own experience I have learned how easy it could be to slip into addiction. Many decades ago I visited Dr Bill Davies, (the doctor that was present at the birth of out children). On this occasion I had to wait for a long time outside his rooms. Every minute I waited the second hand of the clock scraped against its body on its journey and it screeched at the five o’clock mark. “Screech screech”.

I do not remember why I had made the appointment, just the noise the clock made every sixty seconds. perhaps I talked about to him about my jumpy legs. (My wife will tell of how I kick her nightly as I am going off to sleep. I have done this for years). Anyway, when I got to see him I said I couldn’t live with such an irritating clock. He looked quizzically at me and wrote out a prescription. This I took to the chemist, and in time I started taking Valium.

The prescription had five repeats. After about the third I mentioned I was taking diazepam, and the listener said it was addictive. Instead of taking pills I should read Dr Ainsley Meares 1968 book, Relief without drugs. I did. However I had a strong feeling of wanting something despite knowing the drowsiness I felt from was caused by the Valium. So I read it again and practiced what it said.

Fortunately I persevered with the techniques recommended by the book and I stopped taking Valium before I fell into its grip. The technique explained in the book is now recommended as Mindfulness training by professional groups. This is not news to Buddhists of course. It is just one of the practical parts of their practice.

Another aspect of the “Relief without drugs” book is the knowledge it is possible to retrain the brain to think differently. Interestingly this is now a recommended pain relief action. This has lead to whole new field of pain management. One I am convinced I must turn to with renewed energy and retrain my brain for practical reasons.

One grapples with pain. When, like now, I have remained in one position too long. One winches with the odd ache before moving freely. The relative influence of pain comes and goes. The arthritis that was causing pain in my finger knuckles a few months ago is now so bad my right hand constantly aches. The truth is I am losing the use of my right hand because of pain. To the point I try to avoid using it. Past experience has taught me not to rely on medication for things you can set aside with training. My brain is being retrained not to complain about an aching hand.

My message from all this? What happens next is up to me.

What is said today about opioids

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/medication-treatments-led-to-80-percent-lower-risk-of-fatal-overdose-for-patients-with-opioid-use-disorder-than-medication-free-treatments-301011220.html

Dr Ainsley Meares was a Melbourne psychiatrist. He learned about pain and how injured soldiers reacted to it in WW11. The photo is of a memorial to him. Co SMT

I don’t mind if you pause before you leave and read some more, or you make a comment. Thank you for reading this.